Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity

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

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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 consciousness 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 civilization, 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.

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 discontinuities 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 continuation of historical life - and not only in Germany. Perhaps you are familiar with that strangely archaic feeling of shame in the face

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?

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. Nationalism, as it has developed in Europe since the end of the eighteenth century, is a specifically modern form of appearance of collective identity. After the break with the ancien regime and the dissolution of the traditional orders of early bourgeois society, individuals became emancipated within a framework of abstract civil liberties. In that situation, nationalism satisfied the need for new identifications. It differed from previous identity formations in several aspects.5 First, the ideas establishing this identity were drawn from a secular heritage that was prepared and mediated by the emerging Geisteswissenschaften. This explains something of the simultaneously penetrating and conscious character of the new ideas. They caught hold of all strata of the population in a similar manner and were dependent upon a self-activating, reflexive form of appropriating tradition. Secondly, nationalism brought the shared cultural inheritance of language, literature and history into coincidence with the organizational form of the state. The democratic nation state which issued from the French Revolution remained the

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 model to which all nationalistic movements were oriented. Thirdly, in national consciousness there was a tension between two elements which remained more or less in balance in the classical nation states. I am referring here to the tension between the universalistic value orientations of democracy and the rule of law, on the one hand, and the particularism of a national demarcating itself off from the outside world, on the other. In the context of nationalsim, freedom and political self-determination mean both the popular sovereignty of citizens with equal rights and the political self- assertion of a new sovereign nation. The former element is reflected in international solidarity with the oppressed, from the enthusiasm for the Greek and Polish causes in the early nineteenth century to the hero cults and revolutionary tourism of our times (China, Vietnam, Cuba, Portugal, Nicaragua). The latter element is manifested in the stereotypical images of the enemy that have lined the paths of all national movements. (Between 1806 and 1914 the Germans had such images of the French, the Danes, and the English.) The tension between the two elements is exhibited not only in such antithetical tendencies, but in the state and the historical consciousness through which nationalism took shape. The form of national identity makes it necessary for every nation to organize itself into a state, if it is to be independent. In historical reality, however, the state with a homogeneous national population was always a fiction. The nation state itself generated those movements for autonomy in which oppressed national minorities struggled for their rights. In subjecting minorities to its central administration, the modern state places itself in opposition to the very premises of self-determination on which it rests. A similar contradiction runs through the historical consciousness of the public spheres in which the self-consciousness of a nation takes shape. To form and maintain a collective identity, the linguistic-cultural complex has to be made present in such a way as to produce meaningful orientations. But the very medium of making affirmative pasts present, the Geisteswissenschaften, work against this. Their claim to truth obliges them to be critical; it stands opposed to the integrative functions in whose service the nation state wanted to make public use of historical scholarship. The usual compromise was a historiography that raised emphathetic identification with what existed as a methodological ideal and rejected the idea of 'combing history against the grain' (Benjamin). The classical nation states and those that emerged from the Risorgimento movements lived with such contradictions more or less inconspicuously. It was the integral nationalism embodied in such figures as Hitler and Mussolini that destroyed that precarious balance and set national egoism completely free from its ties to the universalistic origins of the democratic constitutional state. In Nazi Germany, the particularistic element was finally blown up into the idea of the racial supremacy of the German people. This lent support to a mentality without which the wide- scale, organized extermination of internal and external enemies could not have been possible. In the shock that followed exaltation in Germany, the narratively established continuities of national history were broken, even though at first only by denying and bracketing out the negatively cathectic period. There is some question whether we ought to see this as only the continuation of a national pathology, with the signs reversed (Nolte), or whether under the particular conditions of the Federal Republic a change of form has set in which is also taking

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 place in the classical nation states. What I have in mind is a change in the form of national identity such that there is a shift in the relative weights of the two elements mentioned above. If this conjecture is correct, the constellation of the two elements has changed in such a way that the imperatives of self-assertion through power politics no longer simply dominate the actions of the constitutional state but also find their limits in postulates of universalizing democracy and human rights.

111

In one official version, the two successor states to the German Reich are transitorial formations whose unity in a single nation state is being temporarily delayed. The hypothesis of a general change in the form of national identity calls, however, for an altogether different version. On this reading, 1945 meant the end of an unfortunate seventy-five-year episode of German unity as a nation state, a unity that was never complete in any case. Since that time, the cultural identity of Germans has been cut loose from the organisational form of a single state, as happened earlier in Austria. The historian Rudolf von Thadden remarked, without resentment, that Kant remains a part of German intellectual history, even though today Konigsberg is called Kaliningrad, that is to say, even though it lies neither in West nor in East Germany. With this uncoupling of a common cultural identity from the forms of society and state, the nationality leaves room for political identification with that which the populations of the two states find worthy of preserving in their respective post-war development. Dolf Sternberger has observed.a certain constitutional patriotism in the Federal Republic, that is, a readiness to identify with the political order and the principles of the Grundgesetz. This sobered political identity has detached itself from the background of a past centred on national history. The universalistic content of a form of patriotism crystallized around the constitutional state is no longer sworn to triumphal continuities. In any case, the beginnings of a post-national identity tied to the constitutional state could be developed and stabilized only with the backing of general tendencies that reach beyond the Federal Republic. What are these general tendencies?

(a) In section 324 of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel, who kept rather distant from the national movements of his time, could still offer, quite ingenuously, a justification for 'the ethical element in war' and the duty of the individual to expose himself in war to the risk 'of sacrificing his property and his life'. In the name of a sovereignty conceived in modern terms, the nation state inherited the ancient duty of dying for one's fatherland and thus sealed the primacy of the nation over every other earthly good. This core of nationalism, which stamped its mentality, has not been able to withstand the development of military technology. We know today that to use the weapons with which one country threatens another is at the same time to destroy one's own. So in the meantime it has become easier, from a moral point of view, to justify a refusal to serve in the military than to justify a now paradoxical military service itself.

(b) Hannah Arendt saw the camps a symbolization of the deepest characteristic of our century. She was referring not only to the extermination camps, but generally

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 to detention and refugee camps, as well as to reception and transit camps for political emigrants, for those expelled from their native lands and those seeking economic asylum, for foreign workers, and so on. The huge population shifts brought about by war, political oppression, poverty, and the international labour market have scarcely left a single one of the developed societies unchanged in its ethnic composition. Contact with people deprived of their rights, the close-up confrontation of indigenous populations with foreign ways of life, religions, and races has, assuredly, unleashed defensive reactions. But these experiences are also a spur to learning processes, to the perception of one's own privileged situation. They represent a pressure to revitalize one's own form of life and a challenge to take the universalistic bases of our own tradition seriously.

(c) Mass communication and mass tourism exert their influence less dramatically, almost beneath the surface. Both work to change a group morality tailored to what is nearby. They accustom our eyes to the heterogeneity of forms of life and to the reality of the differentials between living conditions here and elsewhere. This habituation is, of course, ambivalent: it opens our eyes and makes them insensitive at the same time. We could not live with the everyday sight of those images from the Sahara. But even this fact, that we need to repress to survive, reveals the unsettling presence of a society, expanded to include the entire world. In this world, images of the enemy and stereotypes which are meant to screen off what is one's own from the alien are challenged more and more.

(d) Finally, the scholarly disciplines that serve to uphold the cultural heritage of a nation have undergone change. During the 19th century the Geisteswissenschaften were, within their national boundaries, straightforwardly connected to the flow of communication among the educated public and its public appropriation of tradition. With the disintegration of the strata of educated bourgeoisie, this band was loosened. Moreover, the international integration of science and scholarship has affected the Geisteswissenschaften as well, and has rendered the national traditions of scholarship more permeable to one another. The distance between the historical disciplines and the public process of cultural transmission has, in general, grown larger. The fallibility of knowledge and the conflict of interpretations do not so much promote identity formation and meaning creation as the problematization of historical consciousness.

Let us assume for the moment that these and similar tendencies do in fact suggest a change in the form of national identity, at least in the domain of Western industrial societies. How should we then think of the relation between a problematic historical consciousness and a post-national state identity? The identity that bases our mem- bership on a collectivity and circumscribes the set of situations in which members can say 'we' in an emphatic sense seems to belong to that taken-for-granted background that must forever excape reflection.

IV The religious writer and philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, who has inspired our thinking beyond all bounds of existentialism, was a contemporary of the national movements. But he spoke of the identity of the individual persons and not of

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 collective identity. In Either/Or he concentrates on that lonely decision by which the moral individual assumes responsibility for his life history and 'makes himself into what he is'.8 This practical act of self-transformation has its cognitive side as well; with it the individual converts to an 'ethical view of life': 'He now discovers that the self that he chooses contains in itself an infinite multiplicity, inasmuch as it has a history in which he professes his identity with himself (774). Anyone who has read the Confessions of Saint Augustine will recognize in this authentic life- project an old Christian motif, the experience of conversion. The 'absolute choice' changes the individual in the same way as conversion does the Christian. 'He becomes himself, precisely the same self he was before, down to the most insig- nificant pecularity; and yet he becomes another, for the choice permeates and transforms everything' (782 f.). From this perspective, a life taken over with responsibility reveals itself to be at the same time an irreversible chain of offences. The Danish Protestant insists on the interlocking of existential authenticity and consciousness of sin: 'But one can choose oneself ethically only if one repents of oneself; and only if one repents of oneself does one become concrete' (812). This concept of an ego identity established through reconstructing one's own life history, in the light of an absolute responsibility for oneself, can also be read in a more secularized way. In this view, Kierkegaard, in the middle of the nineteenth century, had to think under the presuppositions of Kantian ethics and wanted to offer an alternative to Hegel's questionable attempt to 'concretize' Kant's ethics. Hegel wanted to provide support for subjective freedom and moral conscience in the reasonable institutions of the nation state. Kierkegaard, who was just as mistrustful of this objective spirit as Marx, anchored them instead in a radicalized interiority. In this way he arrived at a concept of personal identity that is evidently more suited to our post-traditional - but not yet in itself rational - world. At the same time, Kierkegaard clearly saw that the personal self was also a social and bourgeois self - Robinson Crusoe remained for him just an adventurer. His idea is that personal life 'translates' itself into bourgeois life and then returns from there into the sphere of interiority (830). But then we might ask how intersubjectively shared life-contexts have to be structured if they are not only to leave room for the development of strong personal identities but also to establish and support them. What do group identities have to be like if they are to be capable of complementing and stabilizing the improbable and endangered type of ego identity proposed by Kierkegaard? It would be a mistake to think of group identities as large-scale ego identities. Between the two there is no analogy, but rather a complementary relationship. It is easy to see that nationalism could not serve as such a complement to Kierkegaard's ethical view of life. It did mark a first step toward reflexive appropriation of the traditions to which we belong; for national identity was already a post-traditional identity. But this form of consciousness develops constraints and prejudices that can be seen in the limiting case in which it realizes its essence - at the moment of mobilizing to go to war for the fatherland. This situation of voluntarily falling into line is the sheer opposite of the existential 'either/or' with which Kierkegaard confronted the individual. The situation is somewhat different with the constitutional patriotism that first arose after culture and politics had been differentiated from one another more

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 strongly than they were in the nation states of the old stamp. In this process, identification with one's own form of life and tradition was overlaid with an abstract patriotism that no longer referred to the concrete whole of a nation but to abstract procedures and principles. What the latter have in view are the conditions of common life and communication among different, coexisting forms of life with equal rights - externally as well as internally. Of course, the ties to these principles have to be nourished by a consonant cultural heritage. National traditions still stamp a form of life with a privileged status, even though it is only one in a hierarchy of several life forms of varying scope. The overlapping collective identities no longer need a centre where they come together and are integrated within a single national identity. Instead, the abstract idea of universalizing democracy and human rights forms a brittle material in which the rays of national tradition - the language, literature and history of a particular nation - are refracted. In considering this public process of appropriating tradition, we must be careful not to overextend the analogies with Kierkegaard's model of responsibility taking over one's own life history. Even with regard to an individual life, the decisionism of his 'either/or' is strongly stylized. The force of the 'decision' here is meant above all to stress the autonomous and conscious character of taking-hold-of-oneself. At the level of appropriating intersubjectively shared traditions, which are not at the disposition of any individual, the only thing corresponding to this is the autonomous and conscious character of disputes carried out in public. For example, we Germans are today debating the question of how we want to understand ourselves as citizens of the Federal Republic. It is in the mode of such conflicts of interpretation that the public process of tradition is carried on. There is another equally important difference. Kierkegaard places the act of choosing oneself wholly under the viewpoint of moral justification. But it is only what we can attribute to an individual person that is subject to moral evaluation. We cannot feel responsible for historical processes in the same sense. From the historical bond of the forms of life propagated from generation to generation, there arises only a kind of intersubjective liability. It is here that the moment of repentance which follows in the wake of an individual's taking-hold of his life has its pendant - a melancholy on account of the victims whose suffering cannot be made good, a melancholy that places us under an obligation. Whether or not we view this historical liability as broadly as Benjamin, we bear a greater responsibility than ever today for properly proportioning the continuities and discontinuities in the life forms we carry on. In one revealing passage, Kierkegaard uses the image of the editor: The individual who lives ethically is the editor of his own life history; but he has to be aware 'that he is the editor who bears the responsibility' (827). Once the individual has decided who he wants to be, he assumes responsibility for what he henceforth counts as essential in the life history that he has morally taken over - and for what he doesn't count as essential, as well: 'One who lives ethically cancels to a certain extent the distinction between what is accidental and what is essential, for he takes himself over totally, as equally essential. But the distinction returns again; for once he has done this, he goes on to distinguish in such a way that he assumes an essential responsibility for that which he excludes as accidental, in view of the fact that he has excluded it' (827). We can see today that there is a pendant to this in the life

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 people. Which of our traditions we want to carry on and which we do not, is decided in the public process of transmitting a culture. The disputes concerning this will flare up all the more intensely, the less we are able to rely on a triumphal national history, on the seamless normality of what has come to prevail, and the more clearly we are conscious of the ambivalence in every tradition.

So, on the personal level Kierkegaard talks about a 'distinction' we make when returning from distraction and collecting ourselves in the focus of responsible self- being. Then we know who we want to be and who we would rather not be, what essentially should belong to us and what should not. The existential concept of authenticity cannot as a matter of course be transferred to the mentality of a population. But also on this point historic decisions of political/cultural importance leave their distinguishing marks - as is the case with the West orientation of the German Federal Republic. This may very well raise the question how such a decision is reflected in the political self-understanding of the population, whether it justifies a distinction - a wanting-to-be-different. Does the West integration, to us today, also mean a rupture with the context of that particular German 'Sonderbewisstsein', or do we just conceive it as some kind of expediency-decision which according to circumstances comes closest to permitting as far as possible the preservation of the life-household of the nation? The West integration of the German Federal Republic has taken place step by step: Economically through the Currency Reform and the European Community, politically through the splitting up of the nation and the consolidation of independent states, militarily through rearmament and Nato alliance, and culturally through a slow internationalization of science, literature and art that was not finalized until the late 1950s. These processes took place in the power context of the constellations brought about in Yalta and Potsdam, and later on through the interactions of the super-powers. But from the very beginning, they met with 'an extensive pro- Western opinion among the West German population, an opinion nourished by the radical failure of the NS-politics and the repulsive appearance of Communism'.9 Up until the 1960s a double antitotalitarian consensus has determined the mentality background of our political culture. Not until now has the breaking up of this compromise explicitly confronted us with the question of what that orientation toward the West actually means to us: the mere adaptation to a constellation, or a new intellectual orientation guided by principles and rooted in convictions? Naturally, the silent power of conviction emerging from economic success and gradually also the achievements of the social state were the best guarantees for approval of processes which were on their way in any case. Another aspect was the rejection of the Soviet Union - the anticommunism of the refugees who had gathered their own experiences, the anticommunism of the SPD which had not been able to prevent the establishment of the SED in the other part of Germany, and the anticommunism of those who had always been against communism, first of all the kind of anticommunism under which the government parties managed to

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 implement rearmament. At the time of Adenauer, these parties were unyielding and in set phrases they connected the internal opponent with the outer enemy. While the early economic achievements primarily were restorations of temporarily suspended conditions, and while the new constitutional order could be seen, after all, as a reform of the Weimar State, there were new beginnings only in foreign politics and internally in political culture. And on the topics of these two areas the great, mentality-shaping controversies were set on fire. On the politics of rearmaments and later on the politics towards the East there were controversial questions between government and opposition, sometimes backed by movements outside parliament. Controversial questions of political culture were ignited on what the intellectuals, and later also the students in revolt and the new social movements conceived as authoritarian trends - as insensibilities towards the moral foundations of a democratic and constitutional welfare state taken at its words. Naturally, it is impossible to pin down the mental history of the German Federal Republic in a few sentences. I just wish to emphasize one thing: Those two lasting controversies took place, except in marginal groups, within the framework of a not seriously questioned option for the West. 10 It is true that the second range of topics touched the antitotalitarian consensus, the composition of which had characteristically changed soon after the war: Anti- communism - conceived as a rejection of Soviet communism - was self-evident, even for the anti-authoritarian students of 1968. But antifascism - the very word sounded suspicious - was soon modified. It did not imply much more than an overall rejection of a totally outdistanced period of time allocated to the 'Era of Tyrants'. The antitotalitarian consensus, as far as it united the whole population, was based on a silent asymmetry; it only continued to be a consensus on the condition that antifascism was not allowed to become a matter of principles. These very conditions, however, have been problematized by liberals and left-wing minorities again and again, viz.

* when they made an issue in public and detail about the negative but somehow bracketed period of National Socialism; * when they played off the principles of the constitutional State and the fundamental rules of social justice against questionable decisions and practices; * or when they criticized the politics of allied USA - the counter model to totalitarianism.

The historical debate, too, goes on in this context. The political objectives, unmis- takably connected with a normalizing historicalization of the NS era, need no research of motives. If the condition of the antitotalitanan consensus of the 1950s, i.e. the discretion towards our own recent history, can be fulfilled less and less as time goes by, then there is still another alternative: A quick deproblematization of a no longer bracketed period and perhaps a somewhat stubborn acknowledgement of the continuities reading through the NS era. So, not until today is it really discussed how we want to perceive the orientation towards the West - just pragmatically as a matter of alliances, or intellectually too,

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 as a new beginning of a political culture. Kierkegaard's 'Either-Or' refers to the mode of conscious takeover of a piece of history. Neither should our postwar history at this crucial point, the tumaway from its fatal traditions, be left to dull lipservice.

Notes 1 Th. W. Adorno, 'Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangen-heit?' Eingriffe (Engl.: What does Restoration of the Past Mean? Interventions), Frankfurt/Main 1963, p. 137. 2 H. U. Thamer, Verfiihrung und Gewalt (Engl.: Seduction and Force), Berlin 1986, p. 707. 3 K. Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage (Engl.: The Question of Guilt), Heidelberg 1946. 4 W. Benjamin, 'Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen', Schriften Bd. I (Engl.: Histonco-philo- sophical Theses, Publications, Vol. I), Frankfurt/Main 1951, p. 498. 5 To the following: P. Alter, Nationalsozialismus (Eng.: National Socialism), Frankfurt/ Main 1985. 6 R. v. Thadden, 'Das verschobene Vaterlund' (Engl.: The Displaced Fatherland), in SZ, April 11/12, 1987. 7 J. Habermas, 'Konnen komplexe Geselleschaften eine vernunftige Identitat ausbilden?' Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (Engl.: Can Complex Societies Develop a Reasonable Identity? To the Reconstruction of Historical Materialism), Frankfurt/Main 1976, pp. 144 f. 8 S. Kierkegaard, Entweder-Oder (Engl.: Either-Or). Koln and Olten 1960, p. 773. 9 D. Thranhardt, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Engl.: Hisiory of the German Federal Republic). Frankfurt/Main 1986, p. 34. 10 This refers to the common prejudice in Germany that an option in favour of the West is identical with an option in favour of Adenauer's politics or in favour of the prevailing Nato doctrine. I1 This is an aspect of the historical debate emphasized by R. Dahrendorf: 'Under the benevolent protection of the broad shadow cast by the Federal Chancellor, a search of identity has begun, above all connected with the desire for unbroken continuity. A search, confusingly to many, especially carried out by those who in current politics put their stakes on the United States, or rather President Reagan, whereas left-wing critics of American politics swear to Western elucidation. Thus there seem to be contradictory combinations: Those who are in favour of the SDI and rearmament, are also prepared to compare Auschwitz with Asian models and to recite the cruelties of history against each other. And vice versa.' (From: 'To the Political Culture of the German Federal Republic', in: Merkur, January 1987, p. 71.)

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