Concerning the Public Use of History Author(S): Jürgen Habermas and Jeremy Leaman Reviewed Work(S): Source: New German Critique, No

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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. 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

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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 argument we are involved in is about historical details. In fact, it is concerned 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 government 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 contribution 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 remembering. The focus of modern history remains fixed upon the period 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 political attitudes, but which all have the same point of departure: the images 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 national 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, written 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 victims 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 supposed 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 recent 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 argument that the expert had a Jewish grandfather and was possibly emo- tionally biased. In the same week in the Bundestag, Alfred Dregger expressed similar worries: 42 Public Use of History

We are concerned about the lack of history and the lack of consideration 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 necessary - 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 intellectual 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 president 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 desire 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 published 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. This dis- tinction no longer applies to the problem of those born later who cannot be charged with their parents' and grandparents' failure to act. Does this generation indeed have a problem of shared liability in any way?

Jaspers'sQuestions Today Now as before, the simple fact remains that even those born later have grown up in a form of existence in which thosethings were possible. Our own life is linked inwardly, and not just by accidental circum- stances, with that context of life in which Auschwitz was possible. Our 44 Public Use of History form of existence is connected with the form of existence of our parents and grandparentsby a mesh of family, local, political and intellectual traditions which is difficult to untangle - by an historical milieu, therefore, which in the first instance has made us what we are and who we are today. No one among us can escape unnoticed from this milieu, because our identity both as individuals and as Germans is inextricably interwoven with it. This extends from mimicry and physical gestures through language right up to the subtle capillary ramifications of our intellectual habitus. As if I could, for example, when teaching at foreign universities ever deny the mentality in which the traces of the very German tradition of thought from Kant to Marx and Max Weber are deeply embedded. We thus have to stand by our traditions if we do not want to disavow ourselves. I even agree with Herr Dregger that there is no reason for such evasive maneuvers. What follows, however, from this existential link with traditions and forms of existence which have been poisoned by inexpressible crimes? At one time, it was possible to hold a whole civilized people, proud of its constitutional state and humanistic culture, responsible for these crimes - in Jaspers' sense of collective co-responsibility. Is something of this co-responsibility even now transferred to the next and the next-but-one generation? There are two reasonswhy I think we should answerthis question affirmatively. Firstly,there is the obligation we in Germany have - even if no one else is prepared to take it upon themselves any longer - to keep alive the memory of the suffering of those murdered at the hands of Ger- mans, and we must keep this memory alive quite openly and not just in our own minds. These dead have above all a claim to the weak anamnestic power of a solidarity which those born later can now only practice through the medium of the memory which is alwaysbeing re- newed, which may often be desperate, but which is at any rate active and circulating. If we disregard this Benjaminian legacy, Jewish fellow citizens and certainly the sons, the daughters and the grandchildren of the murdered victims would no longer be able to breathe in our country. This also has political implications. At any rate, I do not see how the relations between the Federal Republic and Israel, for example, could be "normalized" in the foreseeable future. Admittedly, some now only use the "indebted memory" in their titles, while the text de- nounces the public manifestations of a corresponding feeling as rituals of false submission and as gestures of feigned humility. I am amazed that these gentlemen - if we have to talk in Christian terms - cannot even distinguish between humility and repentance. Jiirgen Habermas 45

However, the current dispute is not concerned with the "indebted memory," but with the more narcissisticquestion of how we are to re- late to our own traditions for our own sake. If that does not succeed without recourse to illusions, then the memorial to the victims also becomes 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) Weizsaickeras it was for Heinemann and Heuss: after Auschwitz, we can only create national self-consciousness from the better traditions of our history, traditions which we must appropriate criticallyand not blindly. We can only continue to shape a national context of existence, which once allowed a unique injury to the substance of human commonality, in the light of such traditions which stand up to the suspicious gaze made wise by the moral catastrophe. Otherwise we will not be able to respect ourselves or expect respect from others. These premises have been the basis up to now of the officialself-image of the FederalRepublic. And it is this consensus that the right renounces today. They are afraid of one consequence: A critical appropriation of tradition does not in fact encourage the naive faith in the morality of relationships to which one has merely become accustomed; it does not help towards identification with models which have not been subject to prior examination. It is here that Martin Broszat, quite correctly, sees the point where minds must differ. The Nazi period will be much less of an obstacle to us, the more calmly we are able to consider it as the 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-image of the Federal Republic. As far as I can see, their uneasiness derives from three sources.

ThreeSources of Unease Firstly,neo-conservative interpretationsof the present situation play an important role. In this reading, the moralizing resistance to our most recent pre-history obstructs the free view of Germany's thousand year history before 1933. Accordingly, without a memory of national history, which has been subjected to a "thought ban," we cannot create a positive image of ourselves. Without a collective identity, the argument continues, the forces of social integration would disappear. The bemoaned "loss of history" is held accountable for the political system's problems of self-legitimation and purportedly endangers both domestic 46 Public Use of History peace and the country's reliability in foreign relations. This argument then supplies the reasons for the compensatory "provisionof meaning" ("Sinnstiftung")with which historiography is supposed to serve those who have been uprooted by the process of modernization. However, the identificatory grab at national history requires a relativization of the 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 in parentheses. Its significance has to be levelled out. Secondly, there is a more profound motive for a revisionism which renders the period harmless, a motive which is quite independent of functionalist considerations Atla Stiirmer. Because I am not a social psychologist, I can only make tentative observations about this motive. EdithJacobson once developed, in a very penetratingway, 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 experiences deriving from the relationship with the mother who denies her- self to, and withdrawsfrom, the child. Obviously it is a long and pain- ful process during which we learn to combine the at first competing images of the good and the bad parent to make complex images of the sameperson. The weak egogains strength only from its non-selective as- sociation with an ambivalent environment. Among adults as well, the need to defuse appropriate cognitive dissonances is still strong. It is all the more understandable, the further apart the two extremes become: for example, on the one hand, the positive impressions of one's own father or brother, which are saturatedwith experience, and on the other, the disquieting information which is provided by abstract reports about the contexts of these persons' actions and their entanglements, persons so intimately connected with oneself. Thus it is in no way those who are morally insensitive who feel forced to liberate that collective fate, in which close relations were involved, from the blemish of extraordinary moral legacies. The third motive operates on a different level - the struggle to re- claim encumberedtraditions. As long as the appropriatingeye of the late-bornobserver is directedtowards the ambivalenceswhich reveal themselvesto him throughthe course of a historywithout personal merit,it will be impossibleto makeeven outstandingfigures immune to the retroactivepower of corruptedhistorical reception. After 1945, we read Carl Schmitt, Heidegger, Hans Freyer and even ErnstJiinger in a different way than before 1933. This is sometimes difficult to toler- ate, especially for my generation, which - after the war, in the long JiirgenHabermas 47 period of latent development up to the end of the 1950s - was under the intellectual influence of towering figures of this kind. This may, in- cidentally, explain those persistent and ardent attempts to rehabilitate the neo-conservativeheritage - and not just in the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung. Forty years on, therefore, the dispute which Jaspers for his part was able to settle, albeit laboriously, has broken out again in another form. Can one assume the legal succession of the German Reich, can one continue the traditions of German culture without also assuming historical liability for the form of existence in which Auschwitz was possible? Is it possible to remain liable for the context in which such crimes had their origins and with which one's own existence is interwoven, in any way other than through the solidarity of the memory of that which cannot be made good, in any way other than through a reflective and keenly scrutinizing attitude towards one's own identity-creatingtradi- tions? Is it not possible to say in general terms: the less communality such a collective life-context allowed internally and the more it maintained itself by usurping and destroying the lives of others, the greater then is the burden of reconciliation, task of mourning, and the self-critical scrutinyof subsequent generations.Moreover, doesn't this very sentence forbid us to use levelling comparisons to minimize the non- transferabilityof the shared responsibility imposed on us? This is the question concerning the singularityof Nazi crimes. What can be going on 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 perspective of the first person. One should not confuse this arena, in which it is not possible to be a disinterested party, with discussions between scientists who, in the course of their work, must adopt the perspective of the third person. The political culture of the Federal Re- public is without doubt affected by the comparative work of historians and other academics within the humanities; but it was only through the sluice gates of publishers and the mass media that the results of aca- demic work, with its return to the perspective of the participants, reached the public channels for the appropriation of traditions. Only in this context can accounts be squared by using comparisons. The pompous outrage over an alleged mixing of politics and science shunts the issue onto a completely wrong track. Nipperdey and Hildebrand either get the wrong message from the wrong pigeon-hole or they get the address wrong. They obviously live in an ideologicallyself-contained 48 Public Use of History milieu that is no longer accessible from the real world. It is not an issue of 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 about the public use of history.

Out of ComparisonsCome Settlements of Accounts If I judge it correctlyas a non-historian,three basic historiographical positions have developed with regard to the Nazi period: one de- scribesthe period from the point of view of the theoryof totalitarian- ism; one focuseson the figureand world-viewof Hitler;and the third concentrateson the structuresof the powersystem and the socialsys- tem. To be sure,each positionis more or less appropriatefor external- ly inspiredintentions to relativizeand level out the significanceof the period. But even the view which concentrateson the figureof Hitler and his militantracism only becomes effective- in the sense of a trivializingrevisionism, which in particularexculpates Germany's con- servativeelites - if it is presentedfrom an appropriatelyone-sided perspectiveand with a particularrhetoric. The same applies to the comparisonof Nazi crimeswith the Bolshevistliquidation campaigns, even to the abstrusethesis that the GulagArchipelago was "moreorigi- nal" than Auschwitz.It is only when a daily newspaperpublishes an articleon the subjectthat the questionof the singularityof Nazi crimes assumesthe significancefor us whichmakes it so explosivein the given context,for us who appropriatetraditions from the perspectiveof participants.In public,as an issue of politicaleducation, as an issue of rel- evance to historicalmuseums or to the teachingof history,the question of the apologeticproduction of imagesof historyis an unequivo- cally politicalquestion. Are we to undertakemacabre settlements of accountsby means of historicalcomparisons in order to escape sur- reptitiouslyfrom liability,from that hazardouscommunity which the Germans appear to represent? In the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung of August 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 article can 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 to now had been exclusive to radical right-wing circles? This, God knows, has absolutely nothing to do with forbidding certain questions in academia. If the dispute - which has now gotten underway with ripostes from Eberhard Jackel, Jiurgen Kocka (in the JiirgenHabermas 49

FrankfurterRundschau of September 23, 1986) and Hans Mommsen (in - the Bldtterfiirdeutsche und internationalePolitik of October 1986) had taken 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 mere publication of the Nolte article by the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung is no sin, as Nipperdey states mockingly, but it nevertheless marks a turning-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 Fest makes the moral significance of Auschwitz dependent for us on prefer- ences for more pessimistic or more optimistic interpretations of history. 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 socially determined - Gehlen versus Adorno. The so-called optimistic interpretations of history are also by no means always fixed on the image of the "new human being"; it is acknowledged that American culture cannot be understood at all without reference to its meliorism. There are ultimately less one-sided intuitions. If historical advances consist in alleviating, eliminating or preventing the suffering of vulnerable crea- tures, and if historical experience teaches us that finite advances are only followed by new catastrophes, then it is fair to presume that the balance of tolerability is only maintained if we try our utmost to achieve any advances possible. In the first two weeks of this dispute, my opponents evaded a debate about substantive issues with the attempt to render me academically untrustworthy. I don't need to return to the incredible accusations in this context, since in the meantime the discussion has turned towards the facts. However, in order to acquaint readers of Die Zeitwith a diver- sionary technique which one might expect from politicians in close combat, rather than from academics and serious journalists, I will cite one example. Joachim Fest claims that in the central issue I impute a completely false proposition to Nolte. According to Fest, Nolte does not deny "the singularityof National Socialist acts of destruction in any way whatsoever." Nolte had indeed written that Nazi mass crimes had been 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 any way that the so-called destruction of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy, but not a first act or an original." Their benevolent 50 Public Use of History colleague Klaus Hildebrand also praises this very same essay of Nolte's in the HistorischeZeitschrift as pioneering, because it "attempts to explain away the seemingly unique character of the history of the Third Reich." My reading of Nolte's arguments, which reads all assurances to the contrary as mere escape clauses, has been reinforced all the more by the fact that in the meantime Nolte had written that very sentence in the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung which got the controversy going in the first place; Nolte had reduced the uniqueness of Nazi crimes to the "technical procedure of gassing." Fest, in question form, does not even let this difference rest there. Referring expressly to the gas chambers he asks:

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

I accept the comment that "destruction" rather than "expulsion" of the Kulaks is the appropriate description for this barbaric event; enlightenment is a reciprocal enterprise after all. However, the balancing of accounts, like that which Nolte and Fest have conducted in full public view does not serve the purpose of enlightenment. They touch on. the political morality of a community which - having been liberated by Allied troops without any German assistance - was established in the spirit of the Western understanding of freedom, responsibility and self-determination.

- Translatedby Jeremy Leaman