Habermas

44 Habermas: An intellectual biography

THE MEMORY OF THE THIRD REICH IN WEST GERMAN

CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY

To understand why Habermas found Abendroth’s legal theory

appealing requires some understanding of the rival positions in

the field – those of the Schmitt, Smend, and Abendroth schools.

Part of Habermas’s attraction to Abendroth’s theoretical posi-

tions was that Abendroth was a true outsider in the West German

academy – an uncompromising and uncompromised symbol of anti-

fascist resistance to all conservative restoration tendencies in soci-

et y.^74 Abendroth belonged to a small group of Social Democratic

professors within the Association of Professors of Constitutional

Law who sought explicitly to renew the legal theory of Hermann

Heller.^75 Martin Drath (1902–76),^76 Helmut Ridder (1919–2007),

and Hermann L. Brill (1895–1959)^77 also belonged to this left

grouping.^78 A professor of public law in the juristic faculty of the

Free University, Berlin, Drath was the only student of Hermann

Heller to obtain a chair in Germany. In 1951, he was elected to the

Federal Constitutional Court as a representative of the SPD, a posi-

tion he held for two six-year terms. Abendroth remembered him as

“one of the few real democrats” in Germany in the 1950s.^79 Drath

invited Abendroth to Berlin, but Abendroth believed that he had

more intellectual freedom in Marburg. Drath was a product of the

Frankfurt Akademie der Arbeit milieu around labor lawyer Hugo

Sinzheimer (1875–1945) and became Dozent in the Hochschule für

Politik during the last years of the Weimar Republic, eventually ris-

ing to a position on the bench of the Federal Constitutional Court.

Habermas became interested in Heller after reading Abendroth’s

(^74) See, most recently, Richard Heigl, Oppositionspolitik. Wolfgang Abendroth und
die Entstehung der Neuen Linken, 1950–1968 (Hamburg: Argumentations-
Verlag, 2008 ).
(^75) Author’s private correspondence with Habermas, June 7, 2005. See Ingeborg
Maus,“Hermann Heller und die Staatsrechtslehre der Bundesrepublik,” in
Der soziale Rechtsstaat. Gedächtnisschrift für Hermann Heller 1891–1933, eds.
Ilse Staff and Christoph Müller. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1984), 126.
(^76) See Michael Henkel and Oliver Lembcke, “Der Staat als Lebensaufgabe:
Martin Drath (1902–76),” Kritische Justiz 36 (2003), 445–61.
(^77) Brill was honorary professor in Frankfurt after 1947 and from 1953 in
Speyer.
(^78) Günther, Denken, 94.
(^79) Dietrich, Leben, 207.