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Concerning the Public Use of History Author(S): Jürgen Habermas and Jeremy Leaman Reviewed Work(S): Source: New German Critique, No Concerning the Public Use of History Author(s): Jürgen Habermas and Jeremy Leaman Reviewed work(s): Source: New German Critique, No. 44, Special Issue on the Historikerstreit (Spring - Summer, 1988), pp. 40-50 Published by: New German Critique Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488145 . Accessed: 03/03/2012 19:52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. New German Critique and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New German Critique. http://www.jstor.org Concerningthe Public Use of History by Jiurgen Habermas Whoever has read Ernst Nolte's level-headed contribution in the last issue of Die Zeitand has not been following the emotional discussion in the FrankfurterAllgemeine 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 has emerged in modern historiography and which has been impatiently demanded 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 shifts the controversy into the context of a "realignment of historico-political thinking." 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 deliberations stands the question: In whichway is the Nazi period to be processed in public 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 assume the burden of personal guilt at the end of the Second World War are growing 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 own life histories,entwined with sensibilitiesand reactionswhich, admittedly, * This article appeared in Die Zeit, 7 November 1986. It has been republished in Jiirgen Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987) and appears here with permission of the author. 40 JiirgenHabermas 41 are 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 the 1980s 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 anniversariesof the failed coupd'etat of July 20th, 1944, and the capitulation of May 8th, 1945. And yet today barriers are breaking down which until yesterday had stood fast. TheMemory of the Victimsand 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 the things they had suffered: Cornelia Edvardson, the daughter of the Langgissers, or Lisa Fittkocome to mind. Likewise,through the scenes in 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 the barber, the horror which had become rigid and mute is expressed in words 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 side as well, words have been pouring out once again from mouths that had long been kept shut, words which for good reason had not been used since 1945, not at least in public. The collective memory on the side of the culprits unflinchingly produces different phenomena than on the side of the victims. Saul Friedlknderhas described how, in re- cent years, a dichotomy has opened up between the desire on the part of the Germans to normalize the past and the increasingly intensive preoccupation with the Holocaust on the part of the Jews. As far as we are concerned, a glance at the West German press from recent weeks can only confirm this diagnosis. In the Frankfurttrial against two doctors actively involved in the AktionGnadentod (the Nazi euthanasia campaign against mentally and physically handicapped people - trans.), the defense lawyer justified his claim of prejudice against a G6ttingen 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: 42 Public Use of History We 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 not be able to survive. Whoever misuses the so-called "overcoming of the past" ("Vergangenheitsbewdltigung")- which was certainly nec- essary - in order to make our people incapable of a future, must meet with our opposition. The lawyer introduces a racist argument into a criminal trial; the chairman 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 more widespread in our Republic? Then there is the spectacular demand by the well-known art patron to stop applying "censorship" to the art of the 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 cemetery was supposed to awaken national senti- ment and thereby "historical consciousness"; the juxtaposition of the mass-grave mounds in the concentration camp and the SS-graves in the memorial cemetery, Bergen-Belsen in the morning and Bitburg in the afternoon, implicitly denied the singularity of Nazi crimes; and the handshake 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 the right side in the struggle against Bolshevism. In the meantime, we have experienced torturous discussions, which have had a festering rather than 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 need as much as a hole in the head. Despite this, Ernst Nolte complains that Bitburg has not yet opened up the flood gates wide enough and has not sufficiently de-inhibited the dynamic process of squaring accounts: The fear of being accused of a "settlement of accounts" and the fear of any comparisons did not allow the simple question of what it would have meant if, in 1953, the then Federal Chancellor had refused to visit the Arlington military cemetery and had justified this decision with the argument that men were also buried there who had taken part in the terror bombing raids against the Ger- man population. (FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986). JiirgenHabermas 43 Whoever 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 against Dresden. This mixing of the still mentionable with the unspeakable reflects a clear reaction to a need which grows stronger with the growing interval of time. The authors of the series on TheGermans in the SecondWorld War,produced by BavarianTelevision, detected a need in their older viewers which is certainly unmistakable: the desire to release the sub- jective experience of wartime from that frame of reference which in retrospect had to provide everything with another meaning. This de- sire from the veterans' point of view for unframed memories can now be satisfied by reading Andreas Hillgruber's account of events at the Eastern front in 1944/45. The author is confronted with the "problem of identification," which is unusual for an historian, only because he wishes to include the perspective of the experience of the fighting troops and the civilian population affected. It may be that Hillgruber's overall work leaves a different impression. But the little book pub- lished by Siedler (ZweierleiUntergang [Two Kinds of Collapse])is not meant for readers who have specialist knowledge of the subject, which might enable them to shift a contrasting consideration of the "smashing of the German Reich" and the "end of European Jewry" into the right context. These examples show that, despite everything, history does not stand still. The natural order of dying makes no exceptions, even of damaged lives. Our situation has changed fundamentally compared to forty years ago, when KarlJaspers wrote his famous tract on TheGuilt Question.Then it was a question of differentiatingbetween the personal guilt of the perpetrators and the collective liability of those who, for whatever understandable reasons, had failed to do anything.
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