136 Habermas: An intellectual biography
SPD. The conservative policies of Free Democratic Party (FDP)
Economics Minister Lambsdorff had strained the alliance with
traditional Social Democrats, but the FDP made significant par-
liamentary gains in 1980.^1 A rift developed within the SPD over
strategy for the future. Brandt thought the party should move to the
left to outflank the Greens, whereas Schmidt pressed forward with
the nuclear missile decision.
A month after the election, Petra Kelly joined with aged
Protestant Pastor Martin NiemÖller (1892–1984) and others in for-
mulating the Kreffeld Appeal rejecting the missiles. On November
15–16, a thousand participants attended the first Kreffeld Appeal
forum. By mid-1983, 4 million signatures had been obtained. After
threatening to resign in May 1981, Schmidt ultimately secured the
Bundestag’s support for the missile decision by a narrow margin: 254
to 234.^2 The SPD now faced a dynamic similar to that which it
had faced in 1967, when those who had felt betrayed by the Great
Coalition’s support for the Vietnam War had joined the extrapar-
liamentary opposition (Äusserparlamentarische Opposition, or APO).
Schmidt’s narrow victory similarly was felt as a betrayal that gener-
ated mass protest – ultimately in the hundreds of thousands.
In August, a beleaguered Schmidt retreated to an academic
congress on “Kant in Our Time” to deliver a speech in which his
decision was stylized as an example of what Max Weber famously
had described as the “ethic of responsibility”; the peace protes-
tors were framed as the politically irresponsible Gesinnungsethiker.^3
Schmidt’s opponents in turn derided him as a technocrat and the
SPD, in the words of Green Rudolf Bahro, as “the party of mod-
erate exterminism.”^4 On September 13, the visit by U.S. Secretary
of State Alexander Haig to West Berlin was greeted by 30,000 to
40,000 protestors. Violence ensued, with several hundred injured
(including fifty policemen) in battles with police. Protests ranging
from 50,000 to 300,000 occurred in other major European cities.^5(^1) See Anthony Nicholls, The Bonn Republic: West German Democracy, 1945–90
(New York: Longman, 1997 ), 273.
(^2) Jeffrey Herf, War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and
the Battle of the Euromissiles (New York: The Free Press, 1984 ), 126.
(^3) Gesinnungsethiker can be translated as “those who adhere to a morally pure
‘ethic of conviction.’ ” Herf, War by Other Means, 131.
(^4) Herf, War by Other Means, 151.
(^5) Ibid., 135–7.