152 Habermas: An intellectual biography
In the parliamentary debate on the missiles in June, Joschka
Fischer of the Greens said: “I am not making an analogy with
Auschwitz, but I say that Auschwitz warns us to denounce this logic
[of preparing means of mass annihilation].” Using the language of
the technocracy debate, Fischer stated that the “atomic holocaust”
will be the result of “objective-technical necessities [Sachzwängen].”^69
In other words, atomic technology would compromise democratic
decision-making. Geissler responded with the claim that it was paci-
fism (the British pacifism of the 1930s) that made Auschwitz pos-
sible – an argument that led to a storm of SPD and Green protest
and calls for Geissler’s dismissal.^70 Kohl defended Geissler, saying
that “the so-called peace movement” tries to put the West “on the
moral defensive” by “morally equating the policy” of the United
States and the USSR. The “Geissler affair” of June 1983 illustrates
how the missile debate was acutely intertwined with the politics of
memory of the Nazi past.
Habermas was concerned that the peace movement might invoke
the right of resistance codified in Article 20 (Section 4) of the Basic
Law. It reads: “All Germans shall have the right to resist any per-
son seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy
is available.” On September 26, 1983, Habermas participated in a
forum of the SPD devoted to rebuttal of the arguments made that
summer in Bad Godesburg at a conference entitled, “The Right to
Resistance” (Recht auf Widerstand).^71 On t he right, civ il disobedience
was being treated as an ordinary crime, and even peaceful resistance
was being interpreted as a violent act. Habermas’s contribution to
the debate, “Civil Disobedience: Test-Case for the Democratic
Constitutional State,” is a little-noted but extremely important
essay.^72 At that forum, SPD Secretary General Peter Glotz worried
that if anybody died in the course of the protests, he or she could
become “the Benno Ohnesorg of the eighties.”^73 In other words, the(^69) Herf, War by Other Means, 189–90.
(^70) Ibid., 185–92.
(^71) Conference of the Cultural Forum of the SPD. Papers collected in Peter
Glotz, ed., Ziviler Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1983 ).
(^72) Habermas, “Ziviler Ungehorsam – Testfall für den demokratischen
Rechtsstaat. Wider den autoritären Legalismus in der Bundesrepublik,” in
DNU, 79–99.
(^73) Peter Glotz, “Nachwort,” in Ziviler Ungehorsam Ziviler Ungehorsam im
Rechtsstaat, ed. Peter Glotz (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1983 ), 150.