A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies) Jurgen Habermas; Jeremy Leaman New German Critique, No. 44, Special Issue on the Historikerstreit. (Spring - Summer, 1988), pp. 25-39. Stable URL: hitp://links.jstor.org/sieisici=0094-033X%28 19882 1%2F22%290%3A44%3C25%3AAKOSOD%3E2.0,CO%3B2-U ‘New German Critique is currently published by New German Critique. ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hhup:/www.jstororg/about/terms.huml. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hup:/www jstor-org/journals/nge hum Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Tue Aug 8 08:11:43 2006A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies)* by Jiirgen Habermas Itis a notable deficiency of the literature on National Socialism that it does not know or does not wish to ascenain to what extentall 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 Hier perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed only because they regarded themselves and those like them as potential or real victims of an “Asi- atic" deed? (Emst Nolte, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986) “To the Victims of Wars and the Rule of Violence” — this inscrip- tion on the memorial stone of Bonn’s North Cemetery requires an enormous abstraction on the part of the observer. On the Day of Judg- ‘ment, 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 pro- tection of worldly honors and goods; and we are dependent on the mer- y of this god precisely because we do not doubt the justice of his judg- ment. In the face of a lie history which cannot be confused with another and which must be accounted for personally, all may expect equal treat- ment, one after the other. From this abstraction of the Day of Judg- ment has emerged that conceptual connection of individuality and This essay first appeared in Die Zeit, 11 July 1986. 1thas been republished with some deletions restored, in Jorgen Habermas, Eine Art Scladensabwiclung (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 fall bility 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 erec- tion of a new Bonn memorial, he adamantly rejected the view that one should distinguish between the culprits and the victims of the Nazi re- ‘gime, 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 — impenetra- ble 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 indi- vidualizing abstraction of the Day of Judgment, but rather wish to cele- brate the memory of collective fates. This became an established. per- spective 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 identi- ty 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 indi vidual and a shared fate; injury, deportation and rape, hunger, priva- tion 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 con- crete suffering; it cannot be separated from its context. And itis 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Jargen Habermas 27 ‘more it maintained itself by usurping and destroying the lives of oth- ers, 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 re- tains 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, re- gardless 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 litle help, calcula- tions namely which produce the result “thar almost ten million mem- bers of our people were violently consigned to death (zum Tade befirdert) since 1914” — 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 seri- ously insist on concrete historical analysis. Whoever still insists on ‘mourning collective fates, without distinguishing between culprits and vicims, 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 me- morials and new museum buildings: the intention is that a Federal Re- public firmly anchored in the Atlantic community of values should re- gain 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 opera- tions To start with, the memory of recent periods of history which is a predominantly 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 cor- rect image of the enemy. The scenario of Bitburg contained precisely these three elements. The aura of the military cemetery in Bitburg 1. Alfred Dreger, “Nicht in Oper und Tater einen,” Das Planet 17-24 May 1986: 21. lentitat stat Emanzipation: Zum GeschichesbewuBiscin in der Bundesrepublik,” Aus Plitk und Zetgechckte 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 pres- ence of the American president could confirm that we Germans had al- ways been on the right side in the struggle against the Bolshevist enemy. Dreger and the Frankfter Algemeine 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; asa 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 re- quirements of the present political system. Where do established con- temporary historians stand with regard to this arrogant presumption? 0 ‘The Erlangen historian Michael Stirmer prefers a functional interpre- tation 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, Stiirmer conceives of modernization processes as a kind of settlement of dam- ‘ages. 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 idet fication. Naturally Stirmer is less concerned about the identity of the in- dividual than about the integration of the community. Pluralism of val- ues and interests leads “sooner or later to social civil war, ifitis no longer capable of finding any common ground.” What is needed is “that higher provision of meaning (“Sinnstitung”) which only nation and patri otism — afier religion — have hitherto been capable of achieving.”* 3. See Jurgen Habermas, “Entsorgung der Vergangenbieit," Die nee Unihrsiht- ‘ich (Frankfurt am Main: Subrkamp, 1985) 261 4 Michael Stirmer, “Suche nach der verlorenen Erinnerung,” Das Parlament 17. 24 May 1986: 1. 5. Michael Stirmer, “Kein Figentum der Deutschen: die deutsche Frage,” Die Identiti der Deutschen, ed. Werner Weidenfeld (Bonn: Goldmann, 1988) 84 6. Sturmer, "Kein Eigentum” 86.Jiirgen Habermas 29 A tradition of historiography which is politically conscious of its respon- sibility 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 de- sire for the provision of inner-worldly meaning but” — and this is what Stiirmer 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 negoti- ates this narrow path. As someone without specialist qualifications, 1 only dare to approach the recent work of this celebrated modern historian because the study entitled Zwveiere Untergang (Io Kinds of Collapse) which ap- peared 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 undengoes a revisionist operation on his historical consciousness 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 re- sponsibility” embodied in the behavior of the commanders, the district, council leaders and mayors on the spot, three possible perspectives re- main. Hitler’s perspective of holding out to the last is rejected by Hill- gruber 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: Hee must identify with the concrete fate of the German population in the east and with the desperate and costly struggle of the German east em army and of the German navy in the Bal area who sought to protect the population of the German eas from the Red Army's orgy of revenge, from mass rape, arbitrary murder and indiscriminate de- portation ... and to keep the escape routes to the west open. (24f) 7, Michael Stdrmer, Dissonanzen der Fortshritus Essays ter Geschichte und Paitin Deutseand (Munich: Piper, 1986) 128 8. Andreas Hillgruber, Zeer Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reichs und das Ende des eurpischen Judentums (Berlin: Siedler, 1986). The page references in the text refer to this edition.40 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 seting the selec- tive perceptions of those panies 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 Blim’s comment that every day the Eastern front held the extermination work could con- tinue in the death camps. This fact would necessarily cast a long shadow over that “ghastly picture of raped and murdered wornen and children,” for example, which German soldiers witnessed after the recapture of Nemmersdort. For Hillgruber, itis a question of portraying events from the point of view of the courageous soldier, of the desperate civilian pop- ulation 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 inten- tion 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. mm Afier this operation, which one must ascribe to the dilemma men- tioned by Stiirmer 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 “cliché-ridden image of Prussia.” It does not oc- cur to Hillgruber that the power structure of the Reich could have hadJitrgen Habermas 31 something to do with the social structure preserved most particularly in Prussia. He makes no use of socal 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 defen- sive 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 protec- tive shield to a centuries-old German settlement, to the homeland of millions, who lived in one of the heartlands 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 “re- construction 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 as- pect of events which up until then he had cut out of the heroic “trage- dy.” 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 thetoric derived from war maga- zines 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 East- ern territories — trans.). While in the former “many an unknown indi- vidual 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 jar- gon carried around since youth, in the latter a bureaucratically frozen Tanguage. 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). ‘Stirmer was interested in the question “to what extent it was Hitler's war and to what extent the Germans’ war.” Hillgruber poses the anal- ‘ogous 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 Ger- man Nationalist People’s Party or the Stahlhelm that had come to power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws would have been enacted in just the same way asall the other measures, which in 1938 “forced a special consciousness” on Jews, 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, accord- ing 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 identi- fied as the solely responsible originator of both the idea and the ulti- mate decision, there remains only the task of explanation; what also re- mains, however, is the horrifying fact that the mass of the population — as Hillgruber clearly assumes — remained silent in the face of ital. 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Jirgen Habermas 33 ghastly events by the mass of the population, who at least had dark sus- picions of them, . . . points beyond the historical uniqueness of the process”(98). Incidentally, true to the tradition of German mandarins, Hillgruber is most appalled by the high proportion of university edu- cated people involved — as if there were not completely plausible ex- planations 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. Vv Hillgruber’s Bonn colleague, Klaus Hildebrand, writing in the Hist- orische Zeitschrift (242 (1986): 465ff), 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 classi- fying historically “the destructive capacity of the worldview and the re- gime” within the overall development of totalitarianism. Nolte, who had already found broad recognition with his book Fascism in its Epoch (1968) is indeed made of different mete than Hillgruber. In his essay “Between Myth and Revisionism,”!® 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 pic- ture of Israel painted by a victorious PLO after the complete destruc- tion 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 to- talitarianism 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 con- cerned with the dialectics of mutual threats of annihililation. Long be- fore Auschwitz, Hitler, he claims, had good reasons for his conviction that the enemy also wanted to “annihilate” (sic) him. As proof, he cites 10. Emst Nolte “Berween Myth and Revisionism: The Third Reich in the Perspec- tive ofthe 1980s," Aspect ofthe Third Rech, ed. H.W. Koch (London: Macmillan, 1985) 16M. 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 1989, which Nolte argues gave Hitler the right co treat the German Jews like prisoners of war and to deport them (27f). 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 Stiirmer’s dilemma about the provision of meaning and science by blunt deci- sions, and as a reference for his account he chooses the terror of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. From this point he reconstructs a prehis- tory 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 il lusory 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 reac- tion to that which Hitler must have perceived as a threat of destruc- tion: “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 back- ground 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 Amold Gehlen, Helmuth Plessner, Konrad Lorenz and E. Rothacker. Nolte’s curious use of Heidegger's concept of “transcendence” is rem- iniscent 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 11. Emst Nolte, “Philosophische Geschichischreibung heute?" Historische Zeit: sci 242 (1986) 265Sirgen Habermas 35 the anti-modemistic impulses which are directed against an “unreserv- ed affirmation of practical transcendence.” What Nolte means by this is the supposedly ontologically based “unity of the world economy, tech- nology, science and emancipation.” This all fits perfectly into the cur- rent 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 direced 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 moral danger. (281) Now one could just ignore the scurrilous philosophy behind the working of a markedly eccentric mind, if it were not for the fact that neo- conservative modern historians felt obliged to make use of this variant of revisionism. As a contribution to the 1986 Rémerberg discussions, which in- cluded talks by Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen on the theme of the “past that will not go away,” the literary supplement of the Frankfarter, Allgemeine Zeitung on June 6th, 1986, dished up a militant article by Emst Nolte — incidentally under a hypocritical pretext. (I say this be- ing acquainted with the correspondence that Nolte conducted with the Rémerberg organizers, after he apparently had his invitation with- drawn). On this occasion, Sttirmer also declared his solidarity with the newspaper article, in which Nolte reduces the singularity of the de- struction 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 Nokte’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 ele- gantly than others, but has a solution prepared for a further dilemma Starmer describes this dilemma with the sentence: “In the reality of a d- vided Germany, the Germans must find their identity, an identity which ‘aan no longer be found in the nation stare but can also not be found without a nation.” The ideology planners want to construct a consen- sus 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 Ifone looks at the composition of the commissions of experts that have elaborated the concepts for the museums planned by the Federal Gov- ‘emment — the German Historical Museum in Berlin and the House of the History of the Federal Republic in Bonn — itis dificult 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 appropri- ate effect of a national pedagogics. The commissions’ reports have, albeit, a pluralistic face. And yet new museums are hardly likely to be any differ- cent than new Max Planck Institutes: the programmatic statements which regularly precede a new foundation have in any event litle to do with ‘what subsequently appointed directors then make of it. This kind of pre- sentiment was expressed by Kocka, the token liberal member of the Ber- Jin 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.” ‘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, Selmer, “Kein Eigennum” 98; cf Disonansen 328. 13, Jurgen Koda, “Ein ahehundertuntemehmen,” Dat Priament 17-24 May 1986: 18.Sirgen Habermas 37 presented such reasons. Those complex interrelations between crimi- nality and the deceptive everyday normality of Nazism, between destruc- tion and vital productive strength, between the appalling perspective of the system and the inconspicuousty ambivalent confined view at the lo- cal level — all these would deserve a healing and objectifying representa- tion, The pseudoinstructive 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 analy- sis. 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 of the debts of a successfully de-moralized past, like the revisionism of a Hillgruber or Nolte, or as is recommended by Hildebrand and Stirmer. 1 do not wish to impute evil intentions to anyone. There is a simple crite- rion according to which minds differ; some minds proceed from the view that the task of understanding based on a distanced analysis liber- ates 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 re- furbishment 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 im- peratives of calculability, consensus formation and social integration by means of the provision of meaning, must shun the enlightening ef fect of historiography and reject a widely effective pluralism of histori- cal interpretations. One hardly does Michael Stiirmer 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... i 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: itis morally legit- imate and politically necessary. For it is a question of the inner continuity of the German Republic and of its foreign-political pre- diciability."* 14. FranifirterAllgeeine Zeitung 25 April 198638 Settlement of Damages Stiirmer 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? Certain- ly, German historians can look back at their guild’s unequivocal tradition of legitimating the state. Recently Hans-Ulrich Wehler reminded us again of the ideological contribution to the stabilization of the Prusso- German 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 of liberal historiography a la 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.”!* However, the fact that afer 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 Ger- man 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 in- sight, if the revisionists of today were to proceed from the view that they could illuminate the present with the searchlight of arbitrarily re- constructed 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 plur- alism of interpretations — which is unavoidable though in no way un- controlled, 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 Angumenten standhalten,” Das Polament 17-24 May 1986: 2; cf Wehler, " Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” Schoorte zur ‘Geisigen Si uation der Zi, ed. Jorgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Subrkamp, 1979) 709,Jingen Habermas 39 our own identity-forming traditions in all their ambivalence. Itis precise- ly this which is necessary for a critical appropriation of ambiguous tradi tions, that is, for the cultivation of an historical consciousness which is as incompatible with closed and second-hand, unreflective images of histo- ryas with any form of conventional identity, namely one which is unani- mous 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 pow- er 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 selfestimation are forced through the filter of Lniversalistic 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) Institure with Cas- sandra-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 cul- ture of the West is the great intellectual achievernent of the postwar pe- riod, of which my generation in particular could be proud. The result will not be stabilized by a NATO philosophy colored by German 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 Ger- mans in Europe” (Stirmer) 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 ‘o universalistic constitutional principles which is anchored by convic- tion has unfortunately only been able to develop in the German Kultwrnation since — and because of — Auschwitz. Whoever wishes to exorcise the shame surrounding this fact with such phrases as the “ob- session with guilt” (Stiirmer and Oppenheimer), whoever wishes to call Germans back to a conventional form of national identity, is de~ stroying the only reliable basis for our link with the West. — Translated by Jeremy Leaman