Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity
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Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: Remarks on the Federal Republic's Orientation to the West Author(s): Jürgen Habermas Source: Acta Sociologica , 1988, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1988), pp. 3-13 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4200681 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]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Acta Sociologica This content downloaded from 193.121.16.4 on Wed, 10 Mar 2021 14:17:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Acta Sociologica 1988 (31), 1:3-13 Historical Consciousness and Post- Traditional Identity: Remarks on the Federal Republic's Orientation to the West* Jurgen Habermas Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt am Main In its reference to European culture, the formal announcement of the Sonning Prize is a reminder of the milieu that unites us today. By that I mean 'we Western Europeans', who are not only nourished by the heritage of European cultural history but also share democratic forms of govemment and Western forms of life. This idea of the 'West' was defined by the first generation of citizens of early modern Europe; it included Englishmen and Frenchmen as self-evidently as it did Danes and Swedes. Only since the end of World War II have Germans this side of the Elbe and the Werra considered themselves, as a matter of course, to belong to Western Europe. In the midst of World War I, Friedrich Naumann, a liberal, could publish a book with the title Mitteleuropa, and one year before the National Socialists came to power, Giselher Wirsing, who belonged to the circle around Die Tat, could still write about 'Zwischeneuropa and the German Future'. What is reflected therein is that dream of a hegemony of the central powers and that ideology of 'the middle', both of which were deeply rooted in the 'anti-civilization, anti-Western under- current in the German tradition' from the Romantics to Heidegger.' The con- sciousness of having taken a separate path that set Germany apart from Europe and gave it its special privilege was finally discredited by Auschwitz. At any rate, after Auschwitz it lost its power to generate myths. That by which we Germans dissociated ourselves from Westem civilization, indeed from any and every civi- lization, ended in a shock; and though many citizens of the Federal Republic may have denied this shock at first, they remained under its influence as they gradually overcame their reservations concerning the political culture and social pattems of the West. A mentality had changed. At least, this is the way it seemed to me, and still does. Doubts about this diagnosis arise when one views - with all due mistrust - the debate among historians * Speech delivered on being presented with the Sonning Prize, University of Copenhagen, May 14th, 1987. 3 This content downloaded from 193.121.16.4 on Wed, 10 Mar 2021 14:17:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms that has been going on for about one year now; it is in reality a debate about the self-understanding of the Federal Republic. Assuredly, both sides emphatically defend the Federal Republic's orientation to the West. However, whereas the one side stresses the ties to the West's culture of enlightenment, the other conceives of these ties more in terms of power politics and thinks in the first instance of military alliance and foreign policy. What is in dispute is not whether the Federal Republic belongs to Western Europe, but whether or not the option for the West has to be broadly anchored in a renewed national self-consciousness. The view on the one side is that the allegedly endangered identity of the Germans has to be firmed up by making the positive elements of our past historically present. For this side, what is needed is a neohistoricist illumination of continuities in our national history that runs on even through the 1930s and 1940s. The critics on the other side argue that the historical truth could get lost in this kind of historiographical politics. They have other reasons as well to fear this historical levelling-down of what was exceptional, of those processes and relations that made Auschwitz possible. Shifting the moral weight in this way, and treating as banal what was extraordinary, could defuse our consciousness of the dis- continuities in our recent history. For it is only in the unclouded consciousness of a break with our more fateful traditions that the Federal Republic's unreserved opening to the political culture of the West can mean more than an economically attractive opportunity and politically almost unavoidable choice. I would hardly presume to trouble a Danish audience with an intimately German problem if I did not believe that there were also some more general lessons to be learned. On the other hand, I want to avoid any precipitous generalizations. In Denmark 'only' one percent of the Jewish population fell into the hands of the SS.2 This is no reason to triumph, for every single one who was deported leaves behind traces of suffering that can never be made good. Nevertheless, you can be proud of what many of your compatriots did at a time when the great mass of our population had let something monstrous happen of which they must have had at least a presentiment. Among us are the heirs of the victims and those who helped or resisted. Among us are also the heirs of the perpetrators and of those who kept quiet. For those of us born later, this divided heritage is reason neither for personal merit nor for personal guilt. Beyond individual guilt, however, different contexts can mean different historical burdens. With the form of life into which we are born and which stamps our identity, we take on very different kinds of historical liability (in Jasper's sense),3 for it is up to ourselves how we shall carry on the traditions in which we find ourselves. No precipitous generalizations then, and yet on another level Auschwitz has become the signature of an entire epoch - and thus concerns all of us. Something happened there that no one could previously have thought possible. It touched a deep layer of solidarity among all who wear a human face. Until then - despite the monstrosities of world history - we had simply taken the integrity of this deep layer for granted. A band of naivete was torn to shreds at Auschwitz - a naivet6 from which unquestioning traditions had drawn their authority, from which historical continuities in general had lived. Auschwitz altered the conditions for the con- tinuation of historical life - and not only in Germany. Perhaps you are familiar with that strangely archaic feeling of shame in the face 4 This content downloaded from 193.121.16.4 on Wed, 10 Mar 2021 14:17:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms of a catastrophe which one has survived not through one's own merit, but by chance. I first noticed this reaction in others - in those who survived the concentration camps or escaped from them otherwise; they could practise solidarity with those who did not survive the annihilation only in a strange self-tormenting way. By the standards of personal guilt, this feeling is unfounded. And yet those who get drawn into the wake of this kind of melancholy, act as if they could somehow render the pastness of an irreparable catastrophe less definitive through their own empathetic remembrance. I do not want to deny to this phenomenon its own specificity. And yet, since that moral catastrophe, doesn't the survival of all of us in some less pronounced way, stand under the curse of merely having got away? And doesn't the accident of unmerited escape bring with it an intersubjective liability, a liability for distorted forms of life that grant happiness, or even mere existence to the one but only at the cost of destroying the happiness, denying the life, or causing the suffering of the other? II Walter Benjamin anticipated and conceptualized this intuition in his Theses on the Philosophy of History: 'There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as no such document is free of barbarism, neither is the process of cultural transmission by which it is passed on from one to the other.'4 This sentence appears in the context of Benjamin's critique of a way of viewing history that neohistoricism needs to revive today - and precisely with regard to the Nazi period. When he wrote it, historiography marched under the banner of a historicism that identified with the victors without thinking of the victims - except in the form of the triumphantly transfigured sacrifices of its own heroes. What Benjamin had in mind was the public use that national movements and nation states had made of history in the nineteenth century - the kind of broadly influential historical writing that could serve as a medium for the self-reassurance of a nation, of a people becoming conscious of its own identity. I would like to recall some of the connections between historicism and nationalism, and then to explain why we are today debarred, at least in Western societies, from having recourse to this kind of national-historical identity formation.