A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies)

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Jurgen Habermas; Jeremy Leaman

New German Critique, No. 44, Special Issue on the Historikerstreit (Spring - Summer, 1988),25-39.

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A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies) ~:;

by J iirgen Habermas

It is a notable deficiency of the literature on National Socialism that it does not know or does not wish to ascertain to what extent all that the National Socialists did - with the single exception of the technical procedure of gassing - had already been described in the extensive literature of the 1920s .... Did not the National Socialists, did not Hitler perhaps commit an "Asiatic" deed only because they regarded themselves and those like them as potential or real victims of an "Asiatic" deed? (Ernst Nolte, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986)

I

"To the Victims of Wars and the Rule of Violence" - this inscription on the memorial stone of Bonn's N orth Cemetery requires an enormous abstraction on the part of the observer. On the Day of Judgment, as our Christian upbringing has taught us, each of us will step into the presence of God as judge, alone and without proxy, without the protection of worldly honors and goods; and we are dependent on the mercy of this god precisely because we do not doubt the justice of his judgment. In the face of a life history which cannot be confused with another and which must be accounted for personally, all may expect equal treatment, one after the other. From this abstraction of the Day of Judgment has emerged that conceptual connection of individuality and

* This essay first appeared in Die Zeit, 11 July 1986. It has been republished with some deletions restored, in Jiirgen Habennas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987) and appears here with permission of the author.

25

26 Settlement of Damages

equality upon which the universalistic principles of our constitution are still based, even if these same principles are tailored to fit the fallibility of the human power of judgment. Alfred Dregger was therefore appealing to deep-seated moral intuitions when, in his speech to the Bundestag on April 25th, 1986, during the discussion about the erection of a new Bonn memorial, he adamantly rejected the view that one should distinguish between the culprits and the victims of the Nazi regime. The controversy over the question of whether one should be able to erect a public memorial regardless of culprits and victims, whether one could honor culprits and victims in the same context, at the same time and in the same place, is a controversy about the admissibility of an abstraction. In other contexts this is quite justifiable. If it was really a question of simply remembering the individual dead, no one would be so presumptuous as to try and sort out the unspeakable pain of children, women and men, or to divide up their - for mortal eyes - impenetrable suffering according to characteristics of culprits and victims.

After the spectacle of May 8th, 1985, on the other hand, no one can be blamed for pricking up his ears on hearing the demand for a central national memorial. The isolated nature of the present "provisional" site in Bonn's North Cemetery is only seen as deficient by those who do not subsume the memory of the victims of war and tyranny under the individualizing abstraction of the Day of Judgment, but rather wish to celebrate the memory of collective fates. This became an established perspective of the memorial culture of the 19th century; the ritualizing recollection of the mutual experience of the nation's triumph and the nation's defeat was then supposed to help stabilize the unity and identity of the community. There are still good reasons for maintaining this view of things today. Death at the front or in a prisoner-of-war camp, death at the side of the road or in the air-raid shelter was both an individual and a shared fate; injury, deportation and rape, hunger, privation and the desperate loneliness of individuals are representative of what many had to live through under similar circumstances - soldiers, war widows, bombed-out evacuees, refugees. Suffering is always concrete suffering; it cannot be separated from its context. And it is from this context of mutual experiences of suffering that traditions are formed. Mourning and recollection secure these traditions.

A memory which gives expression to this legitimate need presupposes an existential context which is shared in both good and evil. There again, everything depends on the kind of form of existence. The less communality such a collective life-context allowed internally and the

Jilrgen Haberrnas 27

more it maintained itself by usurping and destroying the lives of others, the greater then is the ambivalence of the burden of reconciliation which is loaded onto subsequent generations' allotted task of mourning. In such a case, would not the forced integration of those who during their lifetime were oppressed and outcast into an undifferentiated form of remembrance, be no more than a continuation of this usurpation - an enforced reconciliation? Dregger and his friends cannot have it both ways: on the one hand a memory which creates traditions, which only retains its power of social integration as long as it is directed at a collective fate, and on the other, the abstraction from this very fate in which, regardless of their individual differences, many are included as culprits and colluders in crime and yet others as resistance fighters and victims. And here Herr Dregger's curious calculations are of little help, calculations namely which produce the result "that almost ten million members of our people were violendy consigned to death izum rode befordert) since 1914"1 - that is presumably supposed to mean double the number of Jews, Gypsies, Russians and Poles murdered by the Nazis.

One cannot employ a moral abstraction and at the same time seriously insist on concrete historical analysis. Whoever still insists on mourning collective fates, without distinguishing between culprits and victims, obviously has something else up his sleeve. Whoever does Bergen- Belsen in the morning and in the afternoon arranges a meeting of war veterans in Bitburg has a different conception of things - one which did not simply form the background to the eighth of May events yesterday, but is also the inspiration today for the planning of new memorials and new museum buildings: the intention is that a Federal Republic firmly anchored in the Adantic community of values should regain national self-confidence through an identification with a past which can be agreed upon, without getting onto the false track of the neutral nation state. Nevertheless, this identificatory grab at national history still requires some flanking support from two protective operations.s To start with, the memory of recent periods of history which is a predominandy negative one and which inhibits identification has to be bulldozed clear; then, under the sign of freedom or totalitarianism, the always virulent fear of Bolshevism must be used to keep alive the correct image of the enemy. The scenario of Bitburg contained precisely these three elements. The aura of the military cemetery in Bitburg

1. Alfred Dregger, "Nicht in Opferund Tarer einteilen," Das Rlrlarnen117-24 May 1986: 21.

2. K.E. Jeismann, "Idenritar starr Emanzipation: Zum GeschichtsbewuRtsein in der Bundesrepublik," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 20/21 (1986): 3.

28 Settlement of Damages

served to mobilize historical consciousness through national sentiment. The juxtaposition of Bitburg and Bergen- Belsen, of SS-graves and the mass graves in a concentration camp took away the singularity of Nazi crimes. And finally the handshake of the veteran generals in the presence of the American president could confirm that we Germans had always been on the right side in the struggle against the Bolshevist enemy. Dregger and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also did their bit in the weeks before Bitburg by explaining these elements for our benefit."

This said, there are severe limitations to the bureaucratic production of meaning; as a result, there is a need for the services of historians. The latter are given their fixed role in the process of ideological planning. They are supposed to treat historical consciousness as a maneuverable mass in order to provide suitably positive pasts for the legitimation requirements of the present political system. Where do established contemporary historians stand with regard to this arrogant presumption?

II

The Erlangen historian Michael Sturmer prefers a functional interpretation of historical consciousness: "in a country without history, he who fills the memory, defines the concepts and interprets the past, wins the future."! In the spirit of Joachim Ritter's neoconservative view of the world, brought up to date by his former students in the 1970s, Sturmer conceives of modernization processes as a kind of settlement of damages. The individual has to be compensated for the unavoidable alienation which he experiences as a "social molecule" within the environment of a reified industrial society with the kind of meaning which provides identification. Naturally Sturmer is less concerned about the identity of the individual than about the integration of the community. Pluralism of values and interests leads "sooner or later to social civil war, if it is no longer capable of finding any common ground."! What is needed is "that higher provision of meaning ("Sinnstiftung") which only nation and patriotism - after religion - have hitherto been capable of achieving."6

3. See jurgen Habermas, "Entsorgung der Vergangenheit," Die neue UniibersichiIichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985) 261.

4. Michael Sturmer, "Suche nach der verlorenen Erinnerung," Das Parlament 17- 24 May 1986: 1.

5. Michael Sturmer, "Kein Eigentum der Deutschen: die deutsche Frage," Die Identitat der Deutschen, ed. Werner Weidenfeld (Bonn: Goldmann, 1983) 84.

6. Sturmer, "Kein Eigentum" 86.

Jilrgen Habermas 29

A tradition of historiography which is politically conscious of its responsibility will not resist the call to produce and disseminate a historical world-view which helps to foster a national consensus. Specialist history is in any case "driven forward by a collective and largely unconscious desire for the provision of inner-worldly meaning but" - and this is what Sturmer clearly feels to be a dilemma - "it has to derive (abarbeiten) this according to scientific methods." It thus embarks upon the "narrow path between the provision of meaning and demythologizing."?

Let us observe the Cologne historian Andreas Hillgruber as he negotiates this narrow path. As someone without specialist qualifications, I only dare to approach the recent work of this celebrated modem historian because the study entitled Zweierlei Untergang (Two Kinds of Collapse) which appeared in a bibliophile edition in the lists of Wolf Jobst Siedler, is obviously aimed at the layman. I am thus making the self-observations of a patient who undergoes a revisionist operation on his historical consciousness.s

In the first part of his study, Hillgruber describes the collapse of the German Eastern front during the last year of the war, 1944-45. At the beginning, he mentions "the problem of identification," namely the question as to which of the parties involved at the time the author should identify with in his account. Since he already dismissed the evaluation of the situation by the 20 July conspirators as merely "the ethics of abstract conviction," which he contrasts with the "ethics of responsibility" embodied in the behavior of the commanders, the district council leaders and mayors on the spot, three possible perspectives remain. Hitler's perspective of holding out to the last is rejected by Hillgruber as social-darwinist, There is also no question of an identification with the victors. This liberation perspective is only appropriate for the victims of the concentration camps, not for the German nation as a whole. The historian only has one choice:

He must identify with the concrete fate of the German population in the east and with the desperate and cosdy snuggle of the German eastern army and of the German navy in the Baltic area who sought to protect the population of the German east from the Red Army's orgy of revenge, from mass rape, arbitrary murder and indiscriminate deportation ... and to keep the escape routes to the west open. (24f.)

7. Michael Sturmer, Dissonanzen des Fortschritts: Essays iiber Geschichte und Politik in Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1986) 128.

8. Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europdischen Judentums (Berlin: Siedler, 1986). The page references in the text refer to this edition.

JO Settlement of Damages

Rather perplexed, one asks oneself why the historian of 1986 should not attempt a retrospective view, i.e., employ his own perspective from forty years' distance - a distance from which he cannot escape in any case. This at least offers the hermeneutic advantage of setting the selective perceptions of those parties directly involved into some relation with each other, assessing them contrastingly and supplementing these with the knowledge of those born afterwards. However, Hillgruber does not wish to write his account from this, one might say "normal" vantage point, since this would unavoidably bring questions of the "morality of wars of destruction" into play. Yet surely these considerations must be excluded. In this context, Hillgruber refers to Norbert Blum's comment that every day the Eastern front held the extermination work could continue in the death camps. This fact would necessarily cast a long shadow over that "ghastly picture of raped and murdered women and children," for example, which German soldiers witnessed after the recapture of Nemmersdorf. For Hillgruber, it is a question of portraying events from the point of view of the courageous soldier, of the desperate civilian population and also of the "tried and tested" leading Nazi functionaries; he wishes to put himself in the position of the fighters of the period who are not yet framed and devalued by our retrospective knowledge. This intention explains the principle of the division of the study into the two parts - "Collapse in the East" and "Destruction of the Jews" - two processes which Hillgruber in fact does not wish to show "in their dark interrelatedness," as the dustjacket announces.

III

After this operation, which one must ascribe to the dilemma mentioned by Sturmer of a history which is supposed to provide meaning, Hillgruber of course does not hesitate to make use of the knowledge of the historian born later, in order to prove the thesis, introduced in the preface, that the expulsion of the Germans from the east cannot be understood as an "answer to the crimes in the concentration camps." With reference to the Allies' war aims, he demonstrates that "in the case of a German defeat there was no prospect at any time during the war of saving the larger part of the Prusso-German eastern provinces" (61); in this context he explains the disinterest of the Western powers, with their apparently "cliche-ridden image of Prussia." It does not occur to Hillgruber that the power structure of the Reich could have had

fiirgen H abermas 31

something to do with the social structure preserved most particularly in Prussia. He makes no use of social scientific information - otherwise he would hardly have been able to trace back the fact that Red Army excesses occurred not only when it entered Germany but also earlier in Poland, Rumania and Hungary, to the barbaric "war notions" of the Stalinist era. However that may be, the Western powers were blinded by their war aim of destroying Prussia and the illusions underpinning this aim. They recognized too late how "the whole of Europe (became) the loser in the catastrophe of 1945" through the Russian advance.

Against this background, Hillgruber can now shift the "battling" of the German Eastern Army into the right light - the "desperate defensive struggle for the preservation of the independence of the great power position of the German Reich which, according to the will of the Allies, was to be shattered. The German Eastern Army offered a protective shield to a centuries-old German settlement, to the homeland of millions, who lived in one of the heardands of the German Reich"(63). The dramatic account then ends with a wishful interpretation of the eighth of May, 1945. Forty years after the event, the question of a "reconstruction of the destroyed center of Europe is ... as open as it was then, when contemporaries became witnesses to the catastrophe of the German east as participants or as victims"(74). The moral of the story is obvious: today at least the alliance is right.

In the second part Hillgruber devotes twenty-two pages to that aspect of events which up until then he had cut out of the heroic "tragedy." The subtide of the book already signals a modified perspective. "The Smashing of the German Reich" (which seemingly only took place on the "Eastern front") with its rhetoric derived from war magazines is counterposed to the sober registering of the "End of European Jewry." "Smashing" requires an aggressive opponent, an "end" occurs quite of its own accord. Whereas in the former "the destruction of whole armies lay alongside the brave self-sacrifice of individuals," in the latter, the talk is of the "stationary successor organizations" of the Einsatzgruppen (German murder squads deployed in the occupied Eastern territories - trans.). While in the former "many an unknown individual exceeded himself in the developing catastrophe," in the latter, the gas chambers are circumscribed as a "more effective means" of liquidation; in the former the unrevised, unadulterated cliches of a jargon carried around since youth, in the latter a bureaucratically frozen language. The historian does not simply change the perspective of the account. He is now at pains to prove that "the murder of the Jews (was)

32 Settlement of Damages

exclusively a consequence of the radical doctrine of race" (9).

Sturmer was interested in the question "to what extent it was Hitler's war and to what extent the Germans' war."? Hillgruber poses the analogous question in relation to the destruction of the Jews. Following Christoph Dipper, he presents hypothetical reflections on how the life of the Jews would have looked if it had not been the Nazis but the German Nationalist People's Party or the Stahl helm that had come to power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws would have been enacted injust the same way as all the other measures, which in 1938 "forced a special consciousness" onJews, because these measures corresponded "to the feelings of a large section of society"(87). However, Hillgruber doubts whether between 1938 and 1941, all functionaries would already have regarded a policy of forced expatriation as the best solution of the Jewish question. Nevertheless, up until this time two thirds of German Jews had ostensibly "reached foreign territory." From 1941 onwards, as far as the final solution is concerned, it was Hitler alone who had envisaged it right from the start. Hitler wanted the physical destruction of all Jews, "because only through such a 'racial revolution' could the sought-for 'world-power status' of his Reich be given real permanence"(89). The ambivalence of the word "could" makes it unclear whether here again the historian is not adopting the perspective of a participant.

Hillgruber certainly makes a sharp distinction between the euthanasia action, to which 100,000 mentally ill people had fallen victim, and the destruction of the Jews. Against the background of a social-darwinist ideology of human genetics, the taking of "worthless lives" had, according to Hillgruber, found extensive approval among the population. In contrast, Hitler was supposedly isolated even within the confines of the leading clique "including GOring, Himmler and Heydrich" in relation to the idea of the "final solution." Thus, after Hitler has been identified as the solely responsible originator of both the idea and the ultimate decision, there remains only the task of explanation; what also remains, however, is the horrifying fact that the mass of the population - as Hillgruber clearly assumes - remained silent in the face of it all.

To be sure, the aim of a painstaking revision would be jeopardized, if at the end this phenomenon were nevertheless to be exposed to moral judgment. At this point, therefore, the narrating historian, who does not think much of social-scientific attempts at explanation, breaks into anthropological generalities. In his opinion "the toleration of the

9. Sturmer, Dissonanzen 190

Jilrgen Habermas JJ

ghastly events by the mass of the population, who at least had dark suspicions of them, . . . points beyond the historical uniqueness of the process"(98). Incidentally, true to the tradition of Gennan mandarins, Hillgruber is most appalled by the high proportion of university educated people involved - as if there were not completely plausible explanations for this. In short, the fact that a civilized people could allow the monstrous to occur is a phenomenon which Hillgruber dismisses from the special competence of the overtaxed historian and shoves away uncommitedly into the dimension of the human condition.

IV

Hillgruber's Bonn colleague, Klaus Hildebrand, writing in the Historische ZeitschriJt (242 [1986]: 465fl), recommends a work by Ernst Nolte as "pioneering," because it has the merit of removing the "seemingly unique character" from the history of the "Third Reich" and of classifying historically "the destructive capacity of the worldview and the regime" within the overall development of totalitarianism. Nolte, who had already found broad recognition with his book Fascism in its Epoch (1963) is indeed made of different mettle than Hillgruber.

In his essay "Between Myth and Revisionism.Y'? Nolte defends the need today for a revision of the history of the "Third Reich" with the assertion that it has been largely written by the victors and thus made into a "negative myth." In order to illustrate this, Nolte invites us to perform a tasteful experiment in thinking, namely to imagine the picture of Israel painted by a victorious PLO aJter the complete destruction of Israel: "For decades, possibly a century, no one would dare to trace the motivating origins of Zionism back to the spirit of resistance against European anti-Semitism"(21). For Nolte, even the theory of totalitarianism of the 1950s did not offer an altered perspective, but only led to the Soviet Union being included in the negative image as well. A concept which exists to such a large degree from the contrast with the democratic constitutional state does not yet satisfy Nolte; he is concerned with the dialectics of mutual threats of annihililation. Long before Auschwitz, Hider, he claims, had good reasons for his conviction that the enemy also wanted to "annihilate" (sic) him. As proof, he cites

10. Ernst Nolte "Between Myth and Revisionism: The Third Reich in the Perspective of the 1980s," Aspects of the Third Reich, ed. H. W. Koch (London: Macmillan, 1985) 16ff. The page references in the text refer to this contribution.

34 Settlement of Damages

the "declaration of war" which Chaim Weizmann delivered at the World Jewish Congress in September 1939, which Nolte argues gave Hitler the right to treat the German Jews like prisoners of war and to deport them (27~. In Die Zeit, there had already been an (albeit anonymous) report that Nolte had served up this fanciful argument to a Jewish guest, his fellow historian Saul Friedlander of Tel Aviv, at dinner one evening, and now I read it in black and white.

Nolte is not the condescending conservative narrator who gets worked up about the "problem of identification." He solves Sturmer's dilemma about the provision of meaning and science by blunt decisions, and as a reference for his account he chooses the terror of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. From this point he reconstructs a prehistory which stretches back via the "Gulag," the expulsion of the Kulaks by Stalin and the Bolshevik revolution to Babeuf, the early socialists and the English agrarian reformers of the early 19th century - a line of uprisings against cultural and social modernization, driven by the illusory longing for the restoration of a self-contained, self-sufficient world. In this context of terror the destruction of the Jews appears then to be only the regrettable result of a nevertheless understandable reaction to that which Hitler must have perceived as a threat of destruction: "The so-called annihilation of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act, or an original."

In another essay Nolte endeavors to clarify the philosophical background to his "Trilogy of the History of Modern Ideologies."!' This work is not the object of the present discussion; I am only interested in the "philosophical" aspect of what Nolte, the former student of Heidegger, calls his "philosophical historiography." In the early 1950s there was a controversy within philosophical anthropology about the intertwining of the "world openness" of man and his "imprisonment within his environment" - a discussion which was conducted by Arnold Gehlen, Helmuth Plessner, Konrad Lorenz and E. Rothacker. Nolte's curious use of Heidegger's concept of "transcendence" is reminiscent of this discussion. For it is with this very concept that since 1963 he has diverted the great change (that historical process where in the transition to modernity a traditional world of existence is broken up) into the realm of the anthropological-original. In this dimension of profundity in which all cats are grey, he then solicits understanding for

II. Ernst Nolte, "Philosophische Geschichtsschreibung heute?" Historische Zeitschrift 242 (1986): 265.

Jurgen H aberrnas J 5

the anti-modernistic impulses which are directed against an "unreserved affirmation of practical transcendence." What Nolte means by this is the supposedly ontologically based "unity of the world economy, technology, science and emancipation." This all fits perfectly into the current dominant climate of opinion and into the colorful array of Californian images of the world which sprout forth from them. More annoying is the reversed differentiation which in this view makes "Marx and Maurras, Engels and Hitler for all the stress on their differences nevertheless into related figures." Only when Marxism and fascism have been understood as attempts to give an answer "to the frightening realities of modernity" will it be possible to separate nicely and cleanly the true intention of National Socialism from its unholy practice.

The "outrage" was not contained in the final intention but rather in the attribution of guilt which was directed against a group that itself had been so hard hit by the emancipation process of liberal society that it declared its significant representatives to be in mortal danger. (281)

Now one could just ignore the scurrilous philosophy behind the working of a markedly eccentric mind, if it were not for the faa that neoconservative modem historians felt obliged to make use of this variant of revisionism.

As a contribution to the 1986 Romerberg discussions, which included talks by Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen on the theme of the "past that will not go away," the literary supplement of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 6th, 1986, dished up a militant article by Ernst Nolte - incidentally under a hypocritical pretext. (I say this being acquainted with the correspondence that Nolte conducted with the Romerberg organizers, after he apparently had his invitation withdrawn). On this occasion, Sturmer also declared his solidarity with the newspaper article, in which Nolte reduces the singularity of the destruction of the Jews to "the technical procedure of gassing," and proves his thesis that the Gulag Archipelago was more "original" than Auschwitz with a rather abstruse example from the Russian civil war.

From Lanzmann's film Shoah, the author is only able to glean "that the SS personnel in the death camps might also have been victims of a kind and that on the other hand there was virulent anti-Semitism among the Polish victims of National Socialism." These unappetizing samples show that Nolte puts Fassbinder in the shade by a long way. If the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung quite rightly campaigned against the

36 Settlement of Damages

planned production of Fassbinder's play in Frankfurt, why then did it publish Nolte's article?

I can only explain this by the fact that Nolte does not simply get around the dilemma of the provision of meaning and science more elegantly than others, but has a solution prepared for a further dilemma. Sturmer describes this dilemma with the sentence: "In the reality of a divided Germany, the Germans must find their identity, an identity which can no longer be found in the nation state but can also not be found without a nation."12 The ideology planners want to construct a consensus about the revitalization of national consciousness, but at the same time, they have to banish the enemy images of the nation state from the sphere of NATO. Nolte's theory offers a great advantage to this strategy of manipulation by killing two birds with one stone: the Nazi crimes lose their singularity by being made at least comprehensible as an answer to Bolshevist threats of destruction which persist today. Auschwitz shrinks to the level of a technical innovation and is explained by reference to the "Asiatic" threat of an enemy who is still standing at our gates.

v

If one looks at the composition of the commissions of experts that have elaborated the concepts for the museums planned by the Federal Government - the German Historical Museum in Berlin and the House of the History of the Federal Republic in Bonn - it is difficult to resist the impression that the New Revisionism's ideas are also intended to be translated into the shape of exhibits, of display objects with the appropriate effect of a national pedagogics. The commissions' reports have, albeit, a pluralistic face. And yet new museums are hardly likely to be any different than new Max Planck Institutes: the programmatic statements which regularly precede a new foundation have in any event little to do with what subsequently appointed directors then make of it. This kind of presentiment was expressed by Kocka, the token liberal member of the Berlin Commission of Experts: "In the end it will be decisive which people take control of the thing ... here too the devil is lurking in the detail.t'P

Who would wish to resist seriously meant endeavors to strengthen the historical consciousness of the population in the Federal Republic? There are, furthermore, good reasons for creating an historical distance from a past which does not want to go away. Martin Broszat has convincingly

12. Stiinner, "Kein Eigentum" 98; d. Dissonanzen 328.

13. Jiirgen Kocka, "Ein jahrhundertunternehrnen," Das Parlameni 17-24 May 1986: 18.

Jilrgen Habermas 37

presented such reasons. Those complex interrelations between criminality and the deceptive everyday normality of Nazism, between destruction and vital productive strength, between the appalling perspective of the system and the inconspicuously ambivalent confined view at the 10- cal level - all these would deserve a healing and objectifying representation. The pseudo instructive breathless pocketing of the past of fathers and grandfathers which has been moralized in a short-circuited fashion could then make way for an understanding based on a distanced analysis. The careful differentiation of understanding and condemning a shocking past could also help to loosen the hypnotic paralysis. This kind of historicizing would actually not be driven by the impulse to shake off the debts of a successfully de-moralized past, like the revisionism of a Hillgruber or Nolte, or as is recommended by Hildebrand and Sturmer, I do not wish to impute evil intentions to anyone. There is a simple criterion according to which minds differ; some minds proceed from the view that the task of understanding based on a distanced analysis liberates the power of a reflective memory and thus extends the latitude for an autonomous treatment of ambivalent traditions; others would like to place a revisionist history at the service of a national-historical refurbishment of a conventional identity.

Perhaps this formulation is still not unequivocal enough. Whoever aims to revive an identity which is unreflectedly anchored in national consciousness, whoever allows himself to be guided by functional imperatives of calculability, consensus formation and social integration by means of the provision of meaning, must shun the enlightening effect of historiography and reject a widely effective pluralism of historical interpretations. One hardly does Michael Sturmer an injustice, if one understands his articles in this sense.

When our neighbors observe Germans in relation to their history, they are confronted with the question: Where is this all leading? The Federal Republic ... is the centerpiece in the European arc of defense in the Atlantic system. However, there are signs that every generation now living in Germany has differing, indeed opposing pictures of the past and of the future ... The search for one's lost history is not an abstract striving after education: it is morally legitimate and politically necessary. For it is a question of the inner continuity of the German Republic and of its foreign-political predictabiliry.!"

14. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 25 April 1986.

38 Settlement of Damages

Sturmer pleads for a unified picture of history, which can secure both identity and social integration in place of the religious powers of belief which have drifted off into the private sphere.

Historical consciousness as a substitute for religion - isn't this old dream of historicism really asking too much of historiography? Certainly, German historians can look back at their guild's unequivocal tradition of legitimating the state. Recendy Hans-Ulrich Wehler reminded us again of the ideological contribution to the stabilization of the PrussoGerman Reich (1871-1918) and to the ostracizing of the "Reich's enemies." Up until the late fifties of our century, there dominated that mentality which had emerged since the failure of the 1848 revolution and after the defeat ofliberal historiography ala Gervinus: "From then on for a hundred years, liberal, enlightened historians could only be found as isolated individuals or in small marginal groups. The majority of the guild thought and argued in terms of Reich nationalism, statist consciousness and power politics." 15 However, the fact that after 1945 - at least within the generation of younger historians educated after the war - not just a new spirit but a pluralism of interpretations and of methodological approaches established themselves, is in no way simply a breakdown which can be easily repaired. Rather the old mentality was only the expression of a mandarin consciousness which for good reasons did not survive the Nazi period; through their proven impotence against or even complicity with the Nazi regime, it was convicted of its lack of substance for all to see. This historically enforced transition to a higher reflective level has not simply affected the ideological premises of German historiography; it has also intensified the methodological awareness of the dependence of every historiography on its (historical) context.

However, it would be a misunderstanding of this hermeneutic insight, if the revisionists of today were to proceed from the view that they could illuminate the present with the searchlight of arbitrarily reconstructed prehistories and choose a particularly appropriate image of history from among these options. The sharpened methodological consciousness of recent years means the end of every image of history which is closed or indeed ordained by government historians. The pluralism of interpretations - which is unavoidable though in no way uncontrolled, but rather rendered transparent - only reflects the structure of open societies. For the first time, it offers the chance to expose

15. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "Den rationalen Argumenten standhalten," Das Parlamerd 17-24 May 1986: 2; d. Wehler, "Geschichtswissenschaft heute," Stiduoorte zur 'Geistigen Situation der Zeit,' ed. Jurgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979) 709.

Jilrgen Habermas 39

our own identity-forming traditions in all their ambivalence. It is precisely this which is necessary for a critical appropriation of ambiguous traditions, that is, for the cultivation of an historical consciousness which is as incompatible with closed and second-hand, unreflective images of his tory as with any form of conventional identity, namely one which is unanimous and shared prior to any reflection.

The "loss of history" which is bemoaned today does not simply have the feature of setting aside and of repression, nor simply that of being fixed to a past which is encumbered and has hence come to a standstill. If among the younger generations national symbols have lost their power to impress, if the naive identifications with their own origins have yielded to a rather tentative approach to history, if discontinuities are felt more strongly and continuities are not celebrated at any price, if national pride and collective self-estimation are forced through the filter of universalistic value orientations - to the degree that this is really so, the signs for the development of a post-conventional identity increase. These signs are recorded by the Allensbach (opinion poll) Institute with Cassandra-like cries; if the signs do not deceive, then they reveal one simple thing: that we have not completely wasted the opportunity afforded by the moral catastrophe.

The unreserved opening of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West is the great intellectual achievement of the postwar period, of which my generation in particular could be proud. The result will not be stabilized by a NATO philosophy colored by Gennan nationalism. That opening has been achieved by overcoming precisely the ideology of the center which our revisionists are warming up again with their geopolitical palaver of "the old central position of the Germans in Europe" (Stunner) and "the reconstruction of the destroyed center of Europe" (Hillgruber). The only patriotism which does not alienate us from the West is a constitutional patriotism. A commitment to universalistic constitutional principles which is anchored by conviction has unfortunately only been able to develop in the Gennan Kultumation since - and because of - Auschwitz. Whoever wishes to exorcise the shame surrounding this fact with such phrases as the "obsession with guilt" (Stunner and Oppenheimer), whoever wishes to call Gennans back to a conventional form of national identity, is destroying the only reliable basis for our link with the West.

- Translated by Jeremy Leaman