Habermas - Concerning the Public Use of History

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Concerning the Public Use of History

Jrgen Habermas; Jeremy Leaman

New German Critique, No. 44, Special Issue on the Historikerstreit. (Spring - Summer, 1988), pp.40-50.

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Concerning the Public Useo f History *

by Jiirgen HabermasWhoever has read Ernst Nolte's level-headed contribution in the last

issue of Die Zeit and has not been following the emotional discussion inthe Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung must have the impression that the ar-gument we are involved in is about historical details. In fact, it is con-cerned with a political conversion of the revisionism which hasemerged in modern historiography and which has been impatientlydemanded by politicians of the "Wende" government (the Kohl govern-ment which in 1983 presented itself as the government of "change"/"reversal" - trans.). It is for this reason that Hans Mommsen shiftsthe controversy into the context of a "realignment of historico-politicalthinking." With his essay in the September/October issue of Merkur,Mommsen has supplied the most thorough and most substantial con-tribution to the dispute to date. In the center of his deliberationsstands the question: In which way is the Nazi period to be processed inpublic consciousness? The increasing distance in time, he asserts,makes a "historicization" necessary - one way or another.Today, the grandchildren of those who were too young to assumethe burden of personal guilt at the end of the Second World War aregrowing up. This, however, does not amount to a distanced form of re-membering. The focus of modern history remains fixed upon the peri-od from 1933 to 1945. It remains firmly within the horizon of our ownlife histories, entwined with sensibilities and reactions which, admittedly,

* This article appeared in Die Zeit, 7 November 1986. I t has been republished inJiirgen Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1987)and appears here with permission of the author.


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41iirgen Habermasare spread over a broad spectrum according to generation and politi-cal attitudes, but which all have the same point of departure: the im-ages of that unloading ramp at Auschwitz. It has only been in the1980s that a wider public has become conscious of this traumatic re-fusal of an ethical imperfection, which has been branded into our na-tional history, to disappear: on the 50th anniversary of the Nazi sei-zure of power on January 30th, 1933, on the 40th anniversaries of thefailed coup d'ktat of July 20th, 1944, and the capitulation of May 8th,1945. And yet today barriers are breaking down which until yesterdayhad stood fast.The Memory of the Victims and the Culprits

In the last few years, a steady stream of memoirs has appeared, writ-ten by those who for decades had been unable to speak about thethings they had suffered: Cornelia Edvardson, the daughter of theLanggihsers, or Lisa Fittko come to mind. Likewise, through the scenesin which Claude Lanzmann relentlessly loosens the tongues of the vic-tims of Auschwitz and Maidanek, we have been able to share the al-most physical process of the work of remembering. In the case of thebarber, the horror which had become rigid and mute is expressed inwords for the first time - and one is not sure whether one is still sup-posed to believe in the liberating power of words. From the other sideas well, words have been pouring out once again from mouths thathad long been kept shut, words which for good reason had not beenused since 1945, not at least in public. The collective memory o n theside of the culprits unflinchingly produces different phenomena thanon the side of the victims. Saul Friedliinder has described how, in re-cent years, a dichotomy has opened up between the desire on the partof the Germans to normalize the past and the increasingly intensivepreoccupation with the Holocaust on the part of the Jews. As far as weare concerned, a glance at the West German press from recent weekscan only confirm this diagnosis.

In the Frankfurt trial against two doctors actively involved in theAktion Gnadentod (the Nazi euthanasia campaign against mentally andphysically handicapped people - trans.), the defense lawyer justifiedhis claim of prejudice against a Gijttingen psychiatrist with the argu-ment that the expert had a Jewish grandfather and was possibly emo-tionally biased. In the same week in the Bundestag, Alfred Dregger ex-pressed similar worries:


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42 Public Use of HistoryWe are concerned about the lack of history and the lack of consid-eration towards our own nation. Without an elementary patriot-ism, which is quite natural to other people, our people too will notbe able to survive. Whoever misuses the so-called "overcoming ofthe past" ("Vergangenhitsbewaltigung") - which was certainly nec-essary- in order to make our people incapable of a future, mustmeet with our opposition.

The lawyer introduces a racist argument into a criminal trial; thechairman of the parliamentary party (of the Christian Democrats -trans.) demands the crude relativization of the encumbered Nazi past.Is the coincidence of both utterances mere chance? Or is an intellectu-al climate into which they quite simply fit gradually becoming morewidespread in our Republic? Then there is the spectacular demand bythe well-known art patron to stop applying "censorship" to the art ofthe Nazi period. And the Federal Chancellor with his sensitive appre-ciation of history draws parallels between Gorbachev and Goebbels.

In the scenario of Bitburg, three motives had already come into play:the aura of the military cemeterywas supposed to awaken national senti-ment and thereby "historical consciousness"; the juxtaposition of themass-grave mounds in the concentration camp and the SS-graves in thememorial cemetery, Bergen-Belsen in the morning and Bitburg in theafternoon, implicitly denied the singularity of Nazi crimes; and thehandshake of the veteran generals in the presence of the American presi-dent was finally a confirmation of the fact that we had always been on theright side in the struggle against Bolshevism. In the meantime, we haveexperienced torturous discussions, which have had a festering ratherthan enlightening effect, in relation to the planned historical museums,the staging of the Fassbinder play (criticized for its apparently anti-Semit-ic features - trans.) or concerning a national memorial which we needas much as a hole in the head. Despite this, Ernst Nolte complains thatBitburg has not yet opened up the flood gates wide enough &d has notsufficiently de-inhibited the dynamic process of squaring accounts:

The fear of being accused of a "settlement of accounts" and thefear of any comparisons did not allow the simple question of whatit would have meant if, in 1953, the then Federal Chancellor hadrefused to visit the Arlington military cemetery and had justifiedthis decision with the argument that men were also buried therewho had taken part in the terror bombing raids against the Ger-man population. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986).


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4 3iirgen HabermasWhoever thinks through the presuppositions of this curiously con-

strued example will marvel at the ingenuousness with which an inter-nationally acclaimed German historian sets off Auschwitz againstDresden.

This mixing of the still mentionable with the unspeakable reflects aclear reaction to a need which grows stronger with the growing intervalof time. The authors of the series on The Germans in the Second WorldWar, produced by Bavarian Television, detected a need in their olderviewers which is certainly unmistakable: the desire to release the sub-jective experience of wartime from that frame of reference which inretrospect had to provide everything with another meaning. This de-sire from the veterans' point of view for unframed memories can nowbe satisfied by reading Andreas Hillgruber's account of events at theEastern front in 1944145. The author is confronted with the "problemof identification," which is unusual for an historian, only because hewishes to include the perspective of the experience of the fightingtroops and the civilian population affected. It may be that Hillgruber'soverall work leaves a different impression. But the little book pub-lished by Siedler (Zweierlei Untergang [Two Kinds of Collapse])is not meantfor readers who have specialist knowledge of the subject, which mightenable them to shift a contrasting consideration of the "smashing ofthe German Reich" and the "end of European Jewry" into the rightcontext.

These examples show that, despite everything, history does notstand still. The natural order of dying makes no exceptions, even ofdamaged lives. Our situation has changed fundamentally compared toforty years ago, when Karl Jaspers wrote his famous tract on The GuiltQuestion. Then it was a question of differentiating between the personalguilt of the perpetrators and the collective liability of those who, forwhatever understandable reasons, had failed to do anything. This dis-tinction no longer applies to the problem of those born later who can-not be charged with their parents' and grandparents' failure to act.Does this generation indeed have a problem of shared liability in anyway?Jaspers's Qyestwns lbahy

Now as before, the simple fact remains that even those born laterhave grown up in a form of existence in which those things were possi-ble. Our own life is linked inwardly, and not just by accidental circum-stances, with that context of life in which Auschwitz was possible. Our


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4 4 Public Use of Historyform of existence is connected with the form of existence of our par-ents and grandparents by a mesh of family, local, political and intellec-tual traditions which is difficult to untangle - by an historical milieu,therefore, which in the first instance has made us what we are and whowe are today. No one among us can escape unnoticed from this milieu,because our identity both as individuals and as Germans is inextricablyinterwoven with it. This extends from mimicry and physical gesturesthrough language right up to the subtle capillary ramifications of ourintellectual habitus. As if I could, for example, when teaching at for-eign universities ever deny the mentality in which the traces of the veryGerman tradition of thought from Kant to Marx and Max Weber aredeeply embedded. We thus have to stand by our traditions if we do notwant to disavow ourselves. I even agree with Herr Dregger that there isno reason for such evasive maneuvers. What follows, however, fromthis existential link with traditions and forms of existence which havebeen poisoned by inexpressible crimes? At one time, it was possible tohold a whole civilized people, proud of its constitutional state andhumanistic culture, responsible for these crimes- in Jaspers' sense ofcollective co-responsibility. Is something of this co-responsibility evennow transferred to the next and the next-but-one generation? Thereare two reasons why I think we should answer this question affirmatively.

Firstly, there is the obligation we in Germany have- even if no oneelse is prepared to take it upon themselves any longer - to keep alivethe memory of the suffering of those murdered at the hands of Ger-mans, and we must keep this memory alive quite openly and not justin our own minds. These dead have above all a claim to the weakanamnestic power of a solidarity which those born later can now onlypractice through the medium of the memory which is always being re-newed, which may often be desperate, but which is at any rate activeand circulating. If we disregard this Benjaminian legacy, Jewish fellowcitizens and certainly the sons, the daughters and the grandchildren ofthe murdered victims would no longer be able to breathe in our coun-try. This also has political implications. At any rate, I do not see howthe relations between the Federal Republic and Israel, for example,could be "normalized" in the foreseeable future. Admittedly, somenow only use the "indebted memory" in their titles, while the text de-nounces the public manifestations of a corresponding feeling as ritualsof false submission and as gestures of feigned humility. I am amazedthat these gentlemen - if we have to talk in Christian terms - cannoteven distinguish between humility and repentance.


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45iirgen HaberrnasHowever, the current dispute is not concerned with the "indebted

memory," but with the more narcissistic question of how we are to re-late to our own traditions for our own sake. If that does not succeedwithout recourse to illusions, then the memorial to the victims also be-comes a farce. In the officially presented self-image of the Federal Re-public, there was hitherto a clear and simple answer. It is the same for(the present Federal president) Weizsacker as it was for Heinemannand Heuss: after Auschwitz, we can only create national self-conscious-ness from the better traditions of our history, traditions which we mustappropriate critically and not blindly. We can only continue to shape anational context of existence, which once allowed a unique injury tothe substance of human commonality, in the light of such traditionswhich stand up to the suspicious gaze made wise by the moral catas-trophe. Otherwise we will not be able to respect ourselves or expect re-spect from others.

These premises have been the basis up to now of the official self-imageof the Federal Republic. And it is this consensus that the right renouncestoday. They are afraid of one consequence: A critical appropriation oftradition does not in fact encourage the naive faith in the morality ofrelationships to which one has merely become accustomed; it does nothelp towards identification with models which have not been subjectto prior examination. It is here that Martin Broszat, quite correctly,sees the point where minds must differ. The Nazi period will be muchless of an obstacle to us, the more calmly we are able to consider it asthe filter through which the substance of our culture must be passed,insofar as this substance is adopted voluntarily and consciously.

Dregger and his ideological allies resist this continuity in the self-im-age of the Federal Republic. As far as I can see, their uneasiness derivesfrom three sources.Three Sources of Unease

Firstly, neo-conservative interpretations of the present situation playan important role. In this reading, the moralizing resistance to ourmost recent pre-history obstructs the free view of Germany's thousandyear history before 1933. Accordingly, without a memory of nationalhistory, which has been subjected to a "thought ban," we cannot createa positive image of ourselves. Without a collective identity, the argu-ment continues, the forces of social integration would disappear. Thebemoaned "loss of history" is held accountable for the political system'sproblems of self-legitimation and purportedly endangers both domestic


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46 Public Use of Historypeace and the country's reliability in foreign relations. This argumentthen supplies the reasons for the compensatory "provision of meaning"("Sinnstzftung") with which historiography is supposed to serve thosewho have been uprooted by the process of modernization. However,the identificatory grab at national history requires a relativization ofthe importance of the Nazi period, filled as it is with negative associa-tions. For this purpose, it is no longer sufficient to place this period inparentheses. Its significance has to be levelled out.

Secondly, there is a more profound motive for a revisionism whichrenders thk period harmless; a motive which is quite independent offunctionalist considerations a la Stiirmer. Because I am not a socialpsychologist, I can only make tentative observations about this motive.Edith Jacobson once developed, in a very penetrating way, the psycho-analytic insight that the developing child has to learn gradually to con-nect its experiences of the loving and giving mother with other experi-ences deriving from the relationship with the mother who denies her-self to, and withdraws from, the child. Obviously it is a long and pain-ful process during which we learn to combine the at first competingimages of the good and the bad parent to make complex images of thesame person. The weak ego gains strength only from its non-selective as-sociation with an ambivalent environment. Among adults as well, theneed to defuse appropriate cognitive dissonances is still strong. It is allthe more understandable, the further apart the two extremes become:for example, on the one hand, the positive impressions of one's ownfather or brother, which are saturated with experience, and on the oth-er, the disquieting information which is provided by abstract reportsabout the contexts of these persons' actions and their entanglements,-persons so intimately connected with oneself. Thus it is in no waythose who are morally insensitive who feel forced to liberate that col-lective fate, in which close relations were involved, from the blemish ofextraordinary moral legacies.

The third motive operates on a different level - the struggle to re-claim encumbered traditions. As long as the appropriating eye of thelate-born observer is directed towards the ambivalences which revealthemselves to him through the course of a history without personalmerit, it will be impossible to make even outstanding figures immuneto the retroactive power of corrupted historical reception. After 1945,we read Carl Schmitt, Heidegger, Hans Freyer and even Ernst Jiingerin a different way than before 1933. This is sometimes difficult to toler-ate, especially for my generation, which - after the war, in the long


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Jurgen Habemas 4 7period of latent development up to the end of the 1950s- was underthe intellectual influence of towering figures of this kind. This may, in-cidentally, explain those persistent and ardent attempts to rehabilitatethe neo-conservative heritage- and not just in the Frankfirter AllgemeineZeitung.

Forty years on, therefore, the dispute which Jaspers for his part wasable to settle, albeit laboriously, has broken out again in another form.Can one assume the legal succession of the German Reich, can onecontinue the traditions of German culture without also assuming his-torical liability for the form of existence in which Auschwitz was possi-ble? Is it possible to remain liable for the context in which such crimeshad their origins and with which one's own existence is interwoven, inany way other than through the solidarity of the memory of that whichcannot be made good, in any way other than through a reflective andkeenly scrutinizing attitude towards one's own identity-creating tradi-tions? Is it not possible to say in general terms: the less communalitysuch a collective life-context allowed internally and the more it main-tained itself by usurping and destroying the lives of others, the greaterthen is the burden of reconciliation, task of mourning, and the self-criti-cal scrutiny of subsequent generations. Moreover, doesn't this very sen-tence forbid us to use levelling comparisons to minimize the non-transferability of the shared responsibility imposed on us? This is thequestion concerning the singularity of Nazi crimes. What can be goingon in the mind of an historian who claims that I had somehow "in-vented" this question?

We are conducting the dispute about the right answer from the per-spective of the first person. One should not confuse this arena, inwhich it is not possible to be a disinterested party, with discussions be-tween scientists who, in the course of their work, must adopt the per-spective of the third person. The political culture of the Federal Re-public is without doubt affected by the comparative work of historiansand other academics within the humanities; but it was only throughthe sluice gates of publishers and the mass media that the results of a&-demic work, with its return to the perspective of the participants,reached the public channels for the appropriation of traditions. Onlyin this context can accounts be squared by using comparisons. Thepompous outrage over an alleged mixing of politics and science shuntsthe issue onto a completely wrong track. Nipperdey and Hildebrandeither get the wrong message from the wrong pigeon-hole or they getthe address wrong. They obviously live in an ideologically self-contained


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4 8 Public Use o f Historymilieu that is no longer accessible from the real world. It is not an issueof Popper versus Adorno, it is not a question of disputes about scientif-ic theory, it is not about questions of value-free analysis - it is aboutthe public use of history.Out of Comparisons Come Settlements of Accounts

If I judge it correctly as a non-historian, three basic historiographicalpositions have developed with regard to the Nazi period: one de-scribes the period from the point of view of the theory of totalitarian-ism; one focuses on the figure and world-view of Hitler; and the thirdconcentrates on the structures of the power system and the social sys-tem. To be sure, each position is more or less appropriate for external-ly inspired intentions to relativize and level out the significance of theperiod. But even the view which concentrates on the figure of Hitlerand his militant racism only becomes effective - in the sense of atrivializing revisionism, which in particular exculpates Germany's con-servative elites - if it is presented from an appropriately one-sidedperspective and with a particular rhetoric. The same applies to thecomparison of Nazi crimes with the Bolshevist liquidation campaigns,even to the abstruse thesis that the Gulag Archipelago was "more origi-nal" than Auschwitz. It is only when a daily newspaper publishes anarticle on the subject that the question of the singularity of Nazi crimesassumes the significance for us which makes it so explosive in the givencontext, for us who appropriate traditions from the perspective of par-ticipants. In public, as an issue of political education, as an issue of rel-evance to historical museums or to the teaching of history, the ques-tion of the apologetic production of images of history is an unequivo-cally political question. Are we to undertake macabre settlements ofaccounts by means of historical comparisons in order to escape sur-reptitiously from liability, from that hazardous community which theGermans appear to represent? In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ofAugust 29th, 1986, Joachim Fest complains about the insensitivity"with which certain incumbents of professorial chairs go about select-ing victims." This most appalling sentence from an appalling articlecan only rebound onto Fest himself. Why, in the full public gaze, con-fer an official gloss on that kind of squaring of accounts which up tonow had been exclusive to radical right-wing circles?This, God knows, has absolutely nothing to do with forbidding cer-tain questions in academia. If the dispute - which has now gottenunderway with ripostes from Eberhard Jackel, Jiirgen Kocka (in the


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Jurgen Habermas 4 9Frankfurter Rundschau of September 23 , 1986) and Hans Mommsen (inthe Blatter fur deutsche und internationale Politik of October 1 9 8 6 ) - hadtaken place in a professional journal, I would not have been able to ob-ject to it; I would never even have laid eyes on it. Admittedly, the merepublication of the Nolte article by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is nosin, as Nipperdey states mockingly, but it nevertheless marks a turn-ing-point in the political culture and self-image of the Federal Repub-lic. Abroad, the same article is also perceived as such a signal.

This turning point is not rendered harmless by the fact that Festmakes the moral significance of Auschwitz dependent for us on prefer-ences for more pessimistic or more optimistic interpretations of histo-ry. Pessimistic interpretations of history suggest other practical conse-quences according to whether the constants of catastrophe are as-cribed to the evil in human nature or are understood as being sociallydetermined - Gehlen versus Adorno. The so-called optimistic inter-pretations of history are also by no means always fixed on the image ofthe "new human being"; it is acknowledged that American culturecannot be understood at all without reference to its meliorism. Thereare ultimately less one-sided intuitions. If historical advances consist inalleviating, eliminating or preventing the suffering of vulnerable crea-tures, and if historical experience teaches us that finite advances areonly followed by new catastrophes, then it is fair to presume that thebalance of tolerability is only maintained if we try our utmost toachieve any advances possible.

In the first two weeks of this dispute, my opponents evaded a debateabout substantive issues with the attempt to render me academicallyuntrustworthy. I don't need to return to the incredible accusations inthis context, since in the meantime the discussion has turned towardsthe facts. However, in order to acquaint readers of Die Zeit with a diver-sionary technique which one might expect from politicians in closecombat, rather than from academics and serious journalists, I will citeone example. Joachim Fest claims that in the central issue I impute acompletely false proposition to Nolte. According to Fest, Nolte doesnot deny "the singularity of National Socialist acts of destruction in anyway whatsoever." Nolte had indeed written that Nazi mass crimes hadbeen far more irrational than their Soviet-Russian models. "All this,"Nolte writes, summarizing his reasons, "constitutes their uniqueness,"only to continue: "but this does not alter the fact in a n y way that theso-called destruction of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reactionor a distorted copy, but not a first act or an original." Their benevolent


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5 0 Public Use of Histo9colleague Klaus Hildebrand also praises this very same essay of Nolte'sin the Historische Zeitschnj as pioneering, because it "attempts to ex-plain away the seemingly unique character of the histow of the ThirdReich." My reading of Nolte's arguments, which reads -all assurancesto the contrary as mere escape clauses, has been reinforced all themore by the fact that in the meantime Nolte had written that very sen-tence in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung which got the controversy go-ing in the first place; Nolte had reduced the uniqueness of Nazi crimesto the "technical procedure of gassing." Fest, in question form, doesnot even let this difference rest there. Referring expressly to the gaschambers he asks:

Can it really be said that those mass liquidations with bullets inthe back of the neck, such as were common for years during theRed Terror, are something qualitatively different? Is not the com-parable element, for all the differences, in fact stronger?

I accept the comment that "destruction" rather than "expulsion" ofthe Kulaks is the appropriate description for this barbaric event; en-lightenment is a reciprocal enterprise after all. However, the balancingof accounts, like that which Nolte and Fest have conducted in full pub-lic view does not serve the purpose of enlightenment. They touch onthe political morality of a community which - having been liberatedby Allied troops without any German assistance - was established inthe spirit of the Western understanding of freedom, responsibility andself-determination. - Translated by Jmmy Leaman

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Habermas - Concerning the Public Use of History