He was the conscience of contemporary Germany, the “moral seismograph of the Federal Republic”, who in life received all these adjectives, died this Saturday in the Bavarian municipality of Starnberg. He was 96 years old. With the author of Theory of communicative action and, a capital figure disappears in the debates that have gone through his country and Europe since the post-world war. Habermas, marked like so many of his generation by his childhood and youth under Nazism, was a public intellectual in an era of discredit for intellectuals, a pessimistic Europeanist in his last days about the European project.
Habermas continued until his last breath reflecting on the world and intervening in public discussion, without avoiding controversy, as happened with the texts in which he defended the need to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, but also expressed his concern about European rearmament and what he considered German warmongering. : “At the end of a political life rather favored by circumstances, it is not easy for me to reach this imploring conclusion, but the truth is that greater political integration, at least in the core of the European Union, has never been so vital for us as it is today. And it has never been so improbable.”
Author of an extensive sociological and philosophical work that includes titles such as History and criticism of public opinion, Knowledge and interest, The public space y Philosophical discourse of modernitywas the last survivor of what is known as critical theory and the Frankfurt School, where in the 1950s he was a student of Theodor W. Adorno. Habermas embodies a singular, but fundamental tradition in the “country of poets and thinkers.” It is theirs, which in its most degenerate version led to the catastrophe. And his is a tradition connected to Marxism, democracy and what he called “the Enlightenment project.” Habermas was one of those intellectuals who, with others, taught the Federal Republic to think and think, half of Germany anchored in Europe and the West, with a solid rule of law and a plural and democratic society for the first time.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in a statement, underlined the European dimension of the deceased: “Germany and Europe have lost one of the most significant thinkers of our time.” “Jürgen Habermas has accompanied political and social events with farsightedness and historical greatness,” adds the Christian Democratic chancellor of the Social Democratic philosopher. “His analytical acuity marked the democratic discourse far beyond the borders of our country and acted as a lighthouse in a raging sea. His sociological and philosophical works influenced generations of researchers and thinkers. Habermas’s intellectual strength and liberality were irreplaceable for the community, and his word was both a reference and a challenge.”
Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929 in Düsseldorf, next to the Rhine, although, according to Willi Winkler, author of an extensive obituary in the Munich newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, his childhood was not exactly marked by proverbial Rhenish joy. Due to a birth defect in the form of a cleft palate and cleft lip, “he had to undergo painful operations [y] The experience of feeling dependent and vulnerable was not at all alleviated by the ridicule of his classmates.” It was this difficulty that . His speech disability, Winkler writes, “was the reason why throughout his life he was convinced of the superiority of the written word.” His need to launch into debate – he combined arduous philosophical treatises with his opinions and controversies on historical memory, contemporary wars, or bioethics – is thus explained “for biographical reasons.”
Habermas was the son of the director of the town’s Chamber of Commerce near Cologne and close to the local wing of the NSDAP, the Nazi party. He himself was a member of the Hitler Youth, something common in that generation, which is that of Joseph Ratzinger and Günter Grass, two years older, or that of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, one year younger. Kohl would later say that they had enjoyed “the blessing of being born late.” But it was a mixed blessing, because they were born late enough to have avoided being Nazis in full consciousness and to have participated in the crimes, but too early to prevent the slab of Hitler and the Holocaust from weighing forever on all of them and determining their destiny and the identity of the country refounded on the ruins of World War II. Habermas often avoided criticism of Israel’s policies, for example: “This is not the task of a German citizen of my generation.” Remember the South German newspaper than Peter Sloterdijk, born two decades later and the other great living German philosopher (and with some rival nietzscheano of Habermas), he used to say, in reference to that generation, that they were “hypermoral children of National Socialist parents.”
After discovering Marxism in the postwar period, although he never harbored any illusions about Soviet communism (“what an authoritarian regime was, we learned at the first checkpoints on Friedrichstrasse, at the crossing point between West Berlin and East Berlin,” he said years later), . It is the position that, in a famous discussion in 1968 with the student leader Rudi Dutschke, led him to attack what he called “left-wing fascism.” In the 1980s, the conservative historian (and disciple of Martin Heidegger, the giant of the German irrational tradition), Ernst Nolte, was confronted in the “historians’ quarrel,” a bitter debate in newspapers and books about the historical and present meaning of the twelve years of Nazism. Habermas also defended, in the years of the Bonn Republic, prior to reunification and the transfer of the capital to Berlin, “constitutional patriotism”, which years later would be misunderstood – or manipulated, or manipulated – in the internal Spanish political discussion.
