German novelist Peter Schneider, who passed away on March 3, was one of the most prominent literary voices of the “1968 generation” of the Vietnam-era protest movement. More quickly than many of his contemporaries, he grew critical of the dogmatic tendencies that emerged within that movement, as parts of the anti-authoritarian left developed their own forms of authoritarianism. By 1970, the New Left was decomposing in divergent directions. Some adherents turned to terrorism—the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, like the Weathermen in the United States. Others reverted to variants of orthodox Marxism, the “Old Left,” and found themselves defending the Soviet Union through formal or informal ties to Communist parties. Still others—among them Schneider—confronted the shortcomings of dogmatic leftism and, over subsequent decades, articulated a politics of freedom and dignity, often worked out through literary form.
He entered the literary scene with his 1973 novel Lenz, exploring the disappointments of the protest generation. His Mauerspringer (1982; English translation: The Wall Jumper, 1983) presents the surreal fantasy of a figure moving back and forth across the Berlin Wall. Alongside his fiction, Schneider was a prolific essayist on cultural and political questions, including contributing to Telos. In lieu of offering a full retrospective of his literary career, it is instructive to return to one example, his 1999 Telos essay “Intervention in Kosovo.” That text can serve as a litmus test for Schneider’s mature political thinking. It condenses the trajectory from the anti-authoritarian critique of the 1968 generation, through the turn to subjective experience, to a defense of intervention grounded in human dignity rather than ideology. It also speaks with renewed urgency today, as questions of intervention—Kosovo then, Ukraine and Iran now—remain unresolved.
Schneider’s intellectual development can be understood as a movement through three phases: from the critique of the dogmatic left, through the emergence of “new subjectivity,” to a position that combines moral affect with a willingness to endorse force under certain conditions. In the Germany of the early 1970s, the turn to “new subjectivity” marked a rejection of authoritarian politics, accompanied by skepticism toward any rigid theorization and an affirmation of individual experience. Emotion was granted priority over abstraction; Schneider was a central figure in this development. It is therefore not surprising that, three decades later, in the Kosovo essay, he begins not with doctrine but with affect:
The war in Kosovo is heartbreaking for everyone whose feelings are not limited by their convictions. Watching the daily television images of refugees and the NATO bombings, only dogmatists could be satisfied by their arguments for or against the war. Opponents and advocates of the intervention alike should concede their mixed emotions, and there is no reason to deny similar scruples to the political leadership of the Western alliance.
This opening establishes a fundamental premise: before questions of morality, legality, or strategic aims, one must acknowledge suffering and respond to it. War is hell, and the suffering of victims demands recognition. Schneider’s insistence on the primacy of affect reflects a consistent ethical stance: suffering is never to be endorsed or dismissed, regardless of political alignment. In this regard, his position stands in sharp contrast to contemporary responses to violence that have, at times, such as after the October 7 attacks, included both open celebration of violence against civilian victims or cold denial of the reality of the atrocities.
From his initial moment of solidarity with victims, Schneider proceeds in his Kosovo essay to the central conceptual claim: respecting sovereignty is not a blank check for violence. Against anti-interventionist arguments that point to ulterior motives—strategic, economic, or geopolitical—he focuses on the normative core of the issue:
So far, no one has come up with a minimally convincing argument for the claim that the NATO intervention concerns natural resources, strategic positions, territorial expansion, etc. On the contrary, this war is about the establishment of an elementary principle: legitimate sovereignty and the domestic concerns of a state do not include the systematic expulsion, rape, and murder of a segment of the population.
Here Schneider articulates what would later be codified in the language of a “responsibility to protect”: sovereignty is conditional upon the protection of a population. States may claim autonomy, but they do not therefore have the right to commit mass violence against their own citizens. Read today, however, this argument appears to belong to a different historical moment. What has changed is not only policy but the moral vocabulary itself. The language of human rights and protection has receded in favor of deterrence, stability, and strategic interest. In the case of Ukraine, the dominant justification concerns the defense of state sovereignty rather than the protection of populations. With regard to Iran, concerns focus on nuclear proliferation and regional destabilization, while the suffering of the Iranian population, though acknowledged, does not serve as the primary rationale for policy. Schneider’s Kosovo essay thus marks a moment when European intellectual discourse still entertained the possibility that military force could be justified in explicitly moral terms.
A third dimension of Schneider’s argument concerns his critique of pacifism, particularly in the German context. In the decades after World War II, a strong anti-military reflex developed in West Germany, a salutary reaction against the legacy of Nazi crimes. Yet this was not a universal pacifism; it was only a historically specific and limited claim: because of its past, Germany should abstain from military involvement. Schneider exposed the paradox at the heart of this position:
In the discussion of whether Germany should participate in the Bosnia intervention, it was bizarre and, frankly, ghoulish to hear how a recognition of the history of German guilt was turned into a privilege. Thus, some were prepared to accept the possibility that young Swedes, Danes, French, and Dutch might risk their lives for human rights; yet, given the Nazi past, Germans, so it was claimed, should be spared.
Here the guilt of the past ceases to be a burden and turns instead into a justification for nonparticipation, effectively outsourcing the labor of moral responsibility to others. With modest modifications, this logic persists in contemporary Europe, not only in Germany. There is an expectation that others, the United States and sometimes Israel, do what the German chancellor called the “dirty work,” which Europe avoids. In response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, European states have provided financial and military support, yet direct participation remains unthinkable. Similarly, in the context of the conflict involving Iran, European leaders condemn destabilizing actions by Iran and Hezbollah—they do know what is wrong—while nonetheless criticizing U.S. policy and limiting themselves to, at best, defensive or indirect measures. Schneider’s critique exposes the moral asymmetry of such positions: abstention may preserve safety and the psychological advantage of ethical purity, but it does not confer innocence.
This leads to Schneider’s most forceful claim: the rejection of intervention does not constitute a higher moral stance. On the contrary, it may entail complicity through passivity:
Well before the massacres in Bosnia, it was clear that one does not remain innocent if one refrains from offering timely opposition to dictators and tyrants, if necessary with force….The opponents of intervention cannot lay claim to some higher morality. They should face up to the fact that they passively stand by and watch the expulsion and massacre of civilians, while they almost automatically minimize or relativize their suffering…
Schneider does not reject diplomacy as such, but he warns against its misuse as a delaying tactic that allows violence to continue. This insight leads him to a reconsideration of timing in the use of force. Rather than treating military action as a “last resort,” he suggests that earlier intervention may prevent greater harm:
The only way the current bombing war in Kosovo might have been prevented would have been through war, a much earlier military intervention….It is, therefore, time to rethink the notion that military force should only be used as a “last resort.”
This argument challenges a deeply ingrained moral intuition. The idea that force must always come last may, paradoxically, increase the scale of violence by allowing dictators to rampage and conflicts to escalate unchecked. Schneider’s position thus combines moral seriousness with a realpolitical willingness to confront tragic choices: the refusal to act may itself be a form of moral failure.
Read today, Schneider’s Kosovo essay appears less as a policy prescription than as a reminder of a lost moral vocabulary. It reflects a moment when European intellectual life still grappled with the possibility that force could serve the ends of human dignity. Its distance from current debates is precisely what makes it illuminating. In an era increasingly defined by strategic calculation and geopolitical realism, Schneider’s insistence on the ethical stakes of intervention challenges us. He understood the importance that individuals take part in the civic project, even including through the projection of military force. He himself stood out as a perceptive citizen, an astute observer of the political scene, and a consistent critic of public hypocrisy, the best legacy of 1968. We were fortunate to be able to publish him in Telos.
Topics: Reflections & Dialogues
Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former editor of Telos. He is now President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.