148 Habermas: An intellectual biography
Nazi crimes. And finally the handshakes of the veteran generals
in the presence of the American President could confirm that we
Germans had always been on the right side in the struggle against
the Bolshevist enemy.^52
The impulse to relativize Nazi crimes seriously disturbed
Habermas the ‘58er, eliciting several widely read critical essays
between May 1985 and May 1987.^53 The Bitburg affair and the
Historikerstreit drew Habermas in because they illustrated the threat-
ening neoconservative impulses he had diagnosed in West German
domestic and foreign policy since 1980. On the domestic front,
Habermas rejected the morally relativizing implications of the com-
parison, treating it as part of a neoconservative cultural project, the
roots of which he traced back to the early 1970s. Habermas’s friend,
the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, wrote that the Historikerstreit
revealed “... symptoms of a minor ‘cultural revolution’ from the
Right. The Historikerstreit doggedly continues the long conceptual
and political struggle for hegemony which the neoconservatives
have so zealously pursued.”^54 The question of the correct histori-
cal understanding of the Nazi past was not merely an academic one
but one with broad cultural-political stakes. Habermas believed that
Kohl’s domestic and foreign policy goals were of a piece. If German
identity could be “normalized” through revisionist history-writing
and museum work, German nationalism would be strengthened; a
stronger national identity would enable excessive German assertive-
ness in Mitteleuropa.
Habermas’s deployment of the concept of constitutional patrio-
tism (Verfassungspatriotismus) was clearly designed as a discursive
countermove to the conservative historians around Chancellor
Kohl.^55 But less obvious is that his concept of constitutional patri-
otism also aimed to stem the threat of German neutralism and
nationalist tendencies on the German left. Habermas interpreted(^52) Habermas, “Apologetische Tendenzen,” in EAS, 122–3.
(^53) “Entsorgung der Vergangenheit” [orig. Die Zeit (May 17, 1985)]; “Keine
Normalisierung der Vergangenheit” [orig. “Der Intellektuelle ist mit
seinem Gewissen nicht allein,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (November 18, 1985)];
“Geschichtsbewusstein und posttraditionale Identitat,” Sonning Prize
Lecture, Copenhagen, May 14, 1987.
(^54) Torpey, “Habermas and the Historians,” 18. In his reading of the historians,
Habermas was influenced by his friend, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, with whom
he had attended Gymnasium in Gummersbach.
(^55) Ibid.