Twenty Years Later: 1968 and the West German Republic
Habermas, Jürgen
Jurgen Habermas, one of Germany's most important political and philosophical thinkers, gave an interview—conducted by Rainer Erd—to the Frankfurter Rundschau last March. Though it deals with...
...Discussions began about our policy on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...If this is correct .. . Habermas: May I interrupt you...
...Can we, and do we want to, give up the comforts and the dangers of a conventional identity that is incompatible with a critical * An impassioned debate among German historians regarding the meaning of the Nazi past and the uses of anticommunism, which Habermas described as "a debate over the self-understanding of the Federal Republic...
...Can we, then, look ahead—with vigilance, of course—but nevertheless without getting worked up...
...I read the papers like everyone else...
...Habermas: And in Mutlangen younger lawyers are even engaging in civil disobedience [protesting the stationing of missiles...
...Then, under Adenauer, a very long latency period characterized by an aggressive, constructive will that was channeled into the private sphere—with a division of labor between "No experiments" and the opposition of the literati...
...In those years between 1960 and 1968 noninstitutionalized public opinion was becoming increasingly important...
...Habermas: Anybody who enters the sphere of public politics and criticizes other people cannot be a crybaby himself...
...Siissmuth [Rita Siissmuth, minister of family affairs in the Kohl government...
...In my contact with my children, and with younger people in general, I notice how my own responses have become dulled...
...We are now feeling the effects of an educational revolution, of the women's movement, which is finally making progress, and of the electronic media...
...They should be a more forceful presence within the public sphere and function as a catalyst, clarifying and concentrating opinions rather than creating them...
...That too is a long-term consequence of 1968...
...The utopias of a society of work are out of date...
...Or is it specific to the political culture of the Federal Republic that intellectual opponents are categorized as political enemies regardless of the reality...
...It is precisely in these subinstitutional domains that there are now signs of a liberalizing thrust...
...This include the Free Democratic party, which had initially regressed to a purely economic party of the Weimar type...
...Erd: We keep hearing it said that up this 254 • DISSENT Haberman point the "historians' debate" has produced one conspicuous result: It has made public the weakness of the conservative argument and thereby has hindered conservative groups in the Federal Republic more than it has helped them...
...Every day postmodernism is gaining ground...
...Ens...
...But when we talk about 1968 and what came after, we should also take a step back and look at the incubation period —Adenauer's last years, the Erhard interim, the Grand Coalition...
...Then the student movement came as a one- to two-year explosion that no one had foreseen...
...this fact indicates something...
...My critique of a specific form of student action in 1968-69 had more of an internal character—and that is also how it was taken...
...Nabermas right-wing radicalism results of the structural problems of the left-liberal era of the 1970s...
...They want democracy in the ready cash of the active utilization of individual liberties, more political participation, individualized mass consumption...
...If distrust of one generation for the other and distrust within the same generation ever become unnecessary, we will be able to look into the future without getting worked up...
...Even in 1953, when I criticized Heidegger, people saw me as a spokesman for Adorno,* although at the time, as a naive student in Bonn, I had had no contact with the Frankfurt people...
...Right-wing political leaders...
...I notice a certain fin-de-siècle mood, a feeling that time is running out...
...The more mass civilization prevails and comes to be taken for granted, the more it loses the aura of a "revolt of the masses" against civilization, and the more the romanticism of mass action, which has dazzled the left long enough, fades away...
...The definition of what is political has changed since 1968...
...But the more things are normalized here, forty years later, the more the integrative power of a strong center makes for concealment as well...
...Here, though, we are under the suspicion of being not only political opponents but "domestic enemies" —about that you're right...
...It is only in terms of this 252 • DISSENT very German ideology that I can explain the reproach leveled against me by these and other historians...
...When one tried to explain to them that in the sphere of public politics comparisons between what happened in the concentration camps and what happened on the Eastern Front, or comparisons between Auschwitz and Dresden, lose their alleged scholarly innocence and necessarily turn into a settling of accounts, they took it as a "ban on thought and inquiry...
...The student movement not only advocated institutional changes, like university reform...
...And the syndrome of violence is deeply entrenched in all of us...
...Clearly this is how the historians Hillgruber and Nolte emerged from the university to disseminate ideas whose target was our selfunderstanding as citizens of the Federal Republic...
...Habermas: The fact that Hans-Ulrich Wehler, one of the German historians most highly regarded here and abroad, has expressed himself so clearly, unambiguously, and convincingly in his book on the historians' debate may confirm your impression...
...which Oscar Lafontaine [a Social Democratic leader] has now taken up—in other words, a relative decoupling of income and employment...
...For they should do more than just select leadership personnel for the next government, be a component of the political system, and extract mass loyalty from the public...
...At any rate our juste-milieu doesn't arouse the kind of anxiety one hears in every line of Max Horkheimer's [posthumously published] journals from the 1950s and 1960s...
...Erd, a little differently...
...Changes in interpersonal relations in families, schools, universities, and even the courtroom do not affect deeply rooted social inequalities, but still, they are not nothing...
...How can we strengthen the solidarity of those who remain inside with those on the outside, those who are excluded or marginalized— at least all that is out in the open and is being discussed...
...Today there are majorities in Germany that we don't have to be afraid of...
...Furthermore, the mandarin consciousness, recently examined by Hauke Brunkhorst in a notable book, is specific to the German university tradition...
...Theodore Adorno, theorist of the "Frankfurt school," a figure of the left...
...Obviously, much of what was demanded at that time has not become reality...
...But on the other hand the reactions to these crises are also becoming more subjective, more governed by mood, more eccentric...
...it also advocated individual emancipation in a comprehensive sense...
...Intellectual controversies are characterized as political battles elsewhere as well...
...I explained it immediately, and in 1977 I retracted it altogether—much to Rudi Dutschke's satisfaction...
...Habermas: Mrs...
...What has the student movement left us...
...Sussmuth has extended her province to include women's issues and has given some remarkable twists to traditional family and youth policies, at least in their outward appearance, is symptomatic of a shift in boundaries...
...Erd: My question is, are conservatism and the peace movement as well as left-wing and * Weikersheim is a town in which there occurred a gathering of the radical right...
...These phases, I think, are now discernible from a contemporary perspective and not only from that of the historian...
...See Anson Rabinbach, "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past," Dissent, Spring 1988...
...They did not think of themselves as intellectuals who were bringing their technical expertise into the discourse of the public appropriation of tradition...
...256 • DISSENT...
...It declared war on classical institutions of bourgeois society such as marriage and the nuclear family as much as on the structural division between manual and mental labor...
...another is a distorted understanding of politics...
...There are things I get upset about—a sentence, for instance, by the New York correspondent to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's feuilleton section in the February 13 supplement: "Dozens of cosmetic surgeons made their living from the fact that many Jews tried to assimilate their noses to the AngloSaxon ideal of beauty...
...But a process of fundamental liberalization set in motion by the cultural revolution of that period—you can see something of that...
...Sensitivity to what SPRING • 1989 . 255 Habermas society has produced in the form of suffering and injustice that could be avoided would be normal...
...Private needs have been politicized...
...These are normal swings of the pendulum...
...For instance, the status of gainful employment has become problemSPRING • 1989 • 253 Habermas atic, there is the idea of a minimum income for everyone...
...In a country that has never experienced a revolution, the right-wing intelligentsia—from Carl Schmitt to Ernst Nolte—stirs up the citizens' fear of civil war and constructs theories on the basis of it...
...To be held responsible, first by the left and now by the conservatives, for things with which you really have had noting to do—is that the price an intellectual who is critical and politically committed has to pay...
...It is now taken for granted that much of what was once implicitly considered part of the private sphere is a matter of politics—the relations between the sexes, for example ("marital violence"), or the status of housework and childrearing, etc...
...We have reached a point from which it is easy to divide postwar history into phases: First, the years up to the currency reform, the restoration phase, which was important both symbolically and economically— the majority of the population was still dazed by the collapse of the Nazi regime...
...It simply displays a lack of sensitivity...
...Not only were the political institutions of parliamentary democracy (and the three fundamental domains of parliament, law, and administration) subjected to a fundamental critique...
...It is becoming possible to survey its life cycle...
...Perhaps, and I say this as a university teacher, contact with younger generations is the most reassuring thing there is in our country...
...Nationalism is as virulent as ever...
...appropriation of traditions...
...The spectrum of demands made by the student movement extended from individual emancipation to new 250 • DISSENT forms of life and living arrangements, to changes in the economy, society, and the state, and the abolition of the division between the First, Second, and Third Worlds...
...And finally, the two very contrary pulses of thirteen years of a social-liberal coalition, which made more changes in the soft flesh of motivations and mentalities under the surface of institutions than in the hard stone of the bureaucracy...
...And it is only from this distance, with the awareness of a regained normality, that that past, the pluperfect past that will not pass away, acquires tremendous contemporary relevance...
...Habermas: To speak to that only briefly: I made this reproach in the form of a hypothetical question in Hanover in 1967, very spontaneously and in a very specific context...
...Since the beginning of the 1980s conservatism has been dominant in the Federal Republic, modified to a certain extent by the Greens...
...I don't want to underestimate the political culture's powers of self-purification—think of the Barschel incident [Uwe Barschel, Christian Democratic minister-president of Schleswig Holstein, resigned following allegations of unethical electioneering against the Social Democrats and was later found dead in a hotel room...
...Later the first debate on the statute of limitations [for Nazi crimes] was successful...
...But if it were not for the larger picture, the détente between the superpowers or the waning of neoconservatism, the Christian Democratic leadership might not have hesitated to leap onto the bandwagon that Dregger and Strauss** were piloting to an "entsorgte Vergangenheit," a past that no longer causes concern...
...MUT is a magazine of the radical right, which published in February 1988 a letter from Chancellor Helmut Kohl saying he was a "regular reader" of it...
...On these "issues" opinions diverge very quickly...
...In the legal domain, for instance, especially in the socially sensitive areas of labor and constitutional law, there are now judges whose positions cut across prevailing arguments...
...After you spoke of the "left fascism" of the student movement, the theoreticians of the left attacked you and reproached you with supporting the conservative cause...
...Or the national theme, the old standby of reunification...
...They were willing to participate in the public discourse of this country only with the privileges accorded experts and under the cover of scholarship...
...Erd: If everyone is looking for alternative orientations, what do you consider the most important political problems of the immediate future...
...Perhaps this is the kind of normality that is possible for us after Auschwitz...
...We haven't got that far yet...
...It now seems indisputable that the left's traditional idea of relativizing positions of economic authority and leveling social inequality through state intervention is no longer applicable...
...The fluid boundaries between neoconservatism and the radical right, as at Weikersheim or in MUT, are obscured.* The lines are becoming blurred on the left too, if we think of the neutralist nationalism of some Berlin subcultures...
...The new perspective is that of a society in which autonomous public spheres multiply and can form subversive counterbalances to the highly organized public sphere that was bequeathed us...
...But I don't feel cozy and settled...
...In spring 1968 a movement that demanded more than social movements traditionally demand made its worldwide debut...
...But the spectrum of legal politics has also been extended on both left and right...
...Erd: Still, the conservatives' tone has become sharper...
...There are groups in the Christian Democratic party that represent much more emancipatory ideas than the orthodox cadres of the Social Democratic party, although of course the converse is also true...
...Habermas: In that I still hear an echo of Max Weber's complaint about the "sterile excitation" of the intellectuals—Arnold Gehien used it to put together his critique of intellectuals...
...We thank Professor Habermas for permission to use this text, as well as the MIT Press...
...The electoral strategists and the electoral sociologists are most aware of it...
...The march through the institutions has reached even the Christian Democratic party—not just social work, the schools, the kindergarten, or the media...
...And further: Beneath the debate on the question in what sense the Nazi mass crimes were unique lies the deeper question of what attitude we want to take toward the continuities of German history—whether we can affirm our political existence while maintaining a clear awareness of a break with our more sinister traditions...
...Erd: Professor Habermas, this spring members of my generation, now reaching forty, are looking back on a date that seemed to make relevant social change possible...
...Earlier, one would have had valid grounds for naming the Social Democrats and the unions as the institutions of social change, but the situation is now fundamentally different...
...Today left-wing terrorism, which after the Red Army Faction was taken over in part by groups like the Autonomen, is as much a part of everyday politics as radical-right groups...
...This mood is double-edged: it makes some people subdued and causes others to flip out...
...In a few instances we have added explanatory footnotes...
...One feels it here in the Frankfurt area: the cultural orientations of broad strata of the population are being transformed...
...The political landscape of the Federal Republic can no longer be divided into "conservative" and "emancipatory" organizations...
...Of course you are correct in saying that all the parties—and the Greens set the pace—are involved in a reorientation...
...It would be a normality that managed not to be apathetic toward the unbearable...
...Then, a period of incubation, the first stirrings of unrest, the economic crisis of 1967, and the [student] revolt...
...Mandarins always speak in the exalted name of science and scholarship...
...And it stood the test well...
...Election results are clearly increasingly dependent on a perception of individual political problems that is theme-dependent, well informed, and thus culturally mediated...
...Erd: I believe that now, in contrast to earlier phases in German history, we can look to the political future of the Federal Republic with a certain composure...
...We see on the one hand a habituation to crises that are becoming widespread and diffuse...
...Especially in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and with Joachim Fest [one of the editors] and Konrad Adam taking * Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, whose membership in the Nazi party has recently occasioned wide debate among European intellectuals...
...He was in fact responding to a subliminal change in attitudes among segments of the population...
...And today we have the ambiguous justemilieu, the right environment, of the cheerful Yuppies atop a base of the silent unemployed...
...Jurgen Habermas, one of Germany's most important political and philosophical thinkers, gave an interview—conducted by Rainer Erd—to the Frankfurter Rundschau last March...
...Bauer, the Hessian state attorney general, had set in motion the first Auschwitz trial...
...Marcuse's contrast between "counterrevolution and revolt" fits the German scene in the 1970s quite well—as though emotions discredited under the shadow of Nazi crimes were only waiting for an occasion to rise again...
...SPRING • 1989 251 Illabermas the lead, they are even making you jointly responsible for acts of political terrorism...
...Habermas: The agreement on missile deployment that Helmut Schmidt [former Social Democratic prime minister] pushed through, a climate in which efforts at reform had failed, and other things drove many people in the Social Democratic party to the left, while at the same time, in a climate of ressentiment, the unabashed pressure of capital, unemployment, and the weakness of the unions helped the right...
...Habermas: For obvious reasons neither a classical left nor a classical right has been able to develop in the Federal Republic...
...And then we have to ask what Heiner Geissler [general secretary of the Christian Democratic party], who is so cool and calculating, was responding to when he Habermas decided to appoint this kind of a woman...
...Looser party ties may be symptomatic of the fact that more and more people are demanding the use-value of democracy and the constitutional state...
...The problems of armaments and arms export, the problem of the ecological reconstruction of industrial society and the Third World, and especially our number one problem: With the labor unions on the defensive, how can we stop the Social Darwinism of the "two-thirds society" [with two-thirds of the population affluent and one-third permanently marginalized...
...The procedural utopia focuses on the structures and presuppositions for a radical-pluralistic, largely decentralized process that produces complexity and is certainly costly, a process the content and outcomes of which no one can—or should want to—anticipate...
...For in public opinion in the Federal Republic there seems quite obviously to be a consensus that nazism was a unique historical phenomenon and can certainly not be understood as a reaction to bolshevism...
...How do you see this...
...This may also be connected with our greater distance from 1945...
...Bracketed explanatory remarks are by the translator...
...Though it deals with specific events in West Germany, this interview should be of much interest to American readers, who will notice both parallels and divergences from our own situation...
...And thus counterpolitical spheres arise that are close to the base, not only in the metropolitan subcultures, around the Greens, but also in disadvantaged marginal groups that we have always said could not be organized and were incapable of action...
...The catch-phrase "postmaterial values" is not completely inaccurate...
...A liberal minister of family affairs of this type would scarcely have been thinkable in a Christian Democratic government prior to 1968...
...They actually thought—at least that is what they said—they were engaged in scholarship, nothing but pure scholarship...
...You ask why the pendulum is swinging again now...
...Completely apart from its context—a complaint that had been stirred up about the Jews having too much influence in Washington—a formulation like that is offensive in any context when one reads it not in MUT but in a leading German daily...
...Karl Mannheim once spoke of a fundamental democratization...
...A juste-milieu can have clay feet too...
...Socialism will survive only if it takes seriously the utopian element within democratic procedures themselves...
...The new constellation of culture and politics interests me...
...Apart from stagnation in the international economy, structural changes in the economy at home, technical and demographic developments, and especially the social consequences of unemployment—apart from these obvious problems, there has also been a change in the way the public perceives problems...
...Looked at this way, the "historians' debate" was the test of the political culture that arose in the Federal Republic after 1968...
...When we see how such symbolic figures of 1968 as Daniel CohnBendit are now defending the market and parliamentary democracy, we get the impression that the portion of the student movement that is today politically influential has implicitly accepted the critique you made then...
...Karl Jaspers became radicalized...
...Erd: If we compare the current political situation with that of twenty years ago, two things are especially striking...
...We have neither a strong Communist party nor a Le Pen [the French neofascist leader] and the neofascists...
...The political spectrum has been extended, on both left and right...
...Habermas: I see that, my dear Dr...
...Only after Barbra Streisand created a furor with her characteristic nose did the 'nose-job' lose its attraction...
...On the other hand, I agree with you: I too breathe a little easier when I see how the government has to take into consideration the more liberal portion of its clientele, that it has to direct itself toward what I have somewhat optimistically called fundamental liberalization...
...This question, I am afraid, has not yet come to the fore...
...Erd: It is characteristic of our period that the question of who champions an emancipatory concept of society is no longer necessarily to be answered in terms of organizations...
...A neoconservatism that in our country is particularly full of ressentiment soon concocted a kind of counterrevolution...
...Yet to think that the conservatism of the past years has revoked the changes of the 1970s is fundamentally to misjudge the political situation at the end of the 1980s...
...Erd: Your criticism that the student movement overestimated the real possibilities for action has been confirmed by the history of the past twenty years...
...Even when they enter the sphere of public politics, they do not accept the rules of the game and the presuppositions of communication in that sphere...
...One part of it is hatred of the intellectual...
...I am not being altogether ironic...
...Another theme has become interesting, one which, as you know, I have been concerned with for thirty years: the structural transformation of the public sphere and the prospects for radical democracy...
...And the more extreme swings of the pendulum that you mentioned are part of this...
...Erd: Professor Habermas, at the end of the 1960s one had the impression that you were one of the student movement's chief oppo nents...
...When it comes to "right" and "left" I am oldfashioned...
...the international division of labor was subjected to the same critique...
...There is always something comical in the picture of the innocent prosecutor...
...And furthermore, the fact that Mrs...
...Perhaps at some point even the political parties will be compelled to reorganize, or at least to differentiate clearly between two opposing functions...
...Habermas: On that I have nothing original to say...
...It will be included in Jurgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate, edited and translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson (MIT Press, 1989...
...Take only the most important themes in social policy...
...Instead, one finds both positions throughout the whole spectrum of parties...
...Or in legal policy—the key words there are internal security, the right to asylum, civil disobedience, a communal right to vote for foreign workers, etc...
...I have always been a red flag for the conservatives...
...I had already spoken out in May 1968 against the dubious distinction between "violence against things" and "violence against persons...
...I tried at that time to explain why left-wing intellectuals in the Federal Republic reacted to the first signs of a rhetoric of violence and the use of violence in a way that was touchier, more fastidious, more irritable than their friends in other countries...
...The social studies curriculum was reformed...
...Erd: There is no publicly relevant domain in the Federal Republic where one does not find traces of 1968...
...the voices of an antifascist coalition that would soon disintegrate were still muffled by suspicious Allies...
...And in the realm of journalism the once liberal Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has developed into a conservative and sometimes radical-right paper, while the left has found an organ in the "taz" (Tageszeitung, daily paper...
...In the past twenty years a political culture has developed that has enough stability to set limits to fundamental conservative revisions...
...What would a nonoppressive normality be like...
...For the first time, the Federal Republic is acquiring historical contours of its own...
...On the other hand, you are now criticized by the conservatives...
...These appear in a form in which accelerated change stabilizes itself...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
