Civil Disobedience and Modernity, 1978–1987 147
to the West, which could counter the visions of both the neocon-
servatives and the neutralist left. In sum, Habermas tried to rein-
vent the Social Democratic language of We s t bi n d u ng in a way that
transcended the formulations of Adenauer, Schumacher, and Kohl
alike.
“CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTISM” AS REBUKE TO BOTH THE
NEOCONSERVATIVE RIGHT AND THE NEUTRALIST LEFT
Within two years of die Wende, Habermas was at the center of a dif-
ferent, acrimonious public debate. Kohl’s commemorations of the
fortieth anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany prompted
a firestorm of controversy about how the Federal Republic should
remember Nazism and the Holocaust. On May 8, 1985, President
Reagan joined Kohl in a memorial service held at the Bitburg
Cemetery, which housed the graves of former SS officers. The scan-
dal of Bitburg gave new impetus to an existing debate over public
memory and West German national identity. Kohl’s push to estab-
lish museums of German history in Bonn and Berlin indicated that
a struggle was underway concerning the right way to remember the
Nazi past.
The Historikerstreit that unfolded in the feuilleton pages and in
public symposia from 1985–7 centered on whether the Holocaust
could be viewed as a singular event given the scale of mass murder
that occurred under Soviet Communism. Was not “totalitarian-
ism” the major foe of the twentieth century? Conservative histori-
ans Andreas Hillgruber and Ernst Nolte argued that Nazi crimes
needed to be viewed in the context of Bolshevist and Stalinist mass
murder.^51 As Habermas decoded the Bitburg affair:
Whoever does Bergen-Belsen in the morning and in the after-
noon arranges a meeting of war veterans in Bitburg has a different
conception of things... The juxtaposition... of SS graves and the
mass graves in a concentration camp took away the singularity of(^51) See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Den rationalen Argumenten standhalten,”
Das Parlament (May 17–24, 1986); cited in Habermas, “Eine Art
Schadensabwicklung,” (EAS hereafter) Die Zeit ( July 11, 1986)], 134.
Reprinted as “A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies),”
New German Critique 44 (Spring-Summer 1988), trans. Jeremy Leaman,
25–39.