Civil Disobedience and Modernity, 1978–1987 149
Kohl’s Bitburg visit as a symbolic staging of the Western Alliance
for the purpose of defanging the German neutralism that had sur-
faced during the Euromissile debate:
The mise en scène had the intention that a Federal Republic firmly
anchored in the Atlantic community of values should regain national
self-confidence through an identification with a past which can be
agreed upon, without getting on to the false track of the neutral
nation-state.^56
A statement from historian Michael Stürmer, an advisor to Kohl,
and Habermas’s reaction to it illustrate the subterranean connec-
tion between the ostensibly separate Historikerstreit and Euromissile
debates. Both concerned the problematic of We s t bi n d u ng: “Our
European neighbors want to know where are we headed,” wrote
Stürmer:
The Federal Republic... is the centerpiece in the European arc of
defense in the Atlantic system. However there are signs that every
generation living in Germany has... opposing pictures of the past
and future... The search for one’s lost history is [not abstract]... it
is a question of the inner continuity of the Federal Republic and of
its foreign policy predictability.^57
Habermas’s response to Stürmer in July 1986 repeats an impor-
tant figure of speech he had used in 1982: the “unreserved opening
to the West”^58 :
The unreserved opening of the Federal Republic to the political
culture of the West is the great intellectual achievement of the
postwar period, of which my generation in particular can be proud.
The result will not be stabilized by a NATO philosophy colored
by German nationalism. That opening has been achieved by over-
coming precisely that ideology of the center which our revision-
ists are warming up to again with their geopolitical palaver of the
“old central position of the Germans in Europe” [Stürmer] and “the
reconstruction of the destroyed center of Europe” [Hillgruber].^59(^56) Habermas, “Apologetische Tendenzen,” 123 (emphasis added).
(^57) Michael Stürmer, “Geschichte in geschichtslosem Land,” [History in a Land
without History], Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (April 25, 1986). Cited by
Habermas in EAS, 133.
(^58) The German expression is “vorbehaltlose Öffnung.”
(^59) Habermas, “Apologetische Tendenzen,” in EAS, 135.