158 Habermas: An intellectual biography
Huber, for example, for “... [taking] cover under the weighty obli-
gation of the church to ‘resistance at the right time.’”^98 In context,
therefore, Habermas’s position represented a clear dissent from the
invocation of the right of resistance by many other important fig-
ures in the Green Party and the peace movement, raising the ques-
tion: Why would Habermas distance himself from a right anchored
in the constitution itself?
At an SPD-sponsored event in the Frankfurt Paulskirche convened
on January 30 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of
power, novelist Günter Grass drew a direct analogy between the
impending danger represented by the missiles and the failure to
resist Hitler’s assumption of power:
If against all reason, the middle range rockets come on German
soil, resistance is the only recourse.... We are falling under a dicta-
torship of technocracy and becoming a surveillance state. The two
trends reinforce each other. With the stationing of the missiles, the
internal security needs of the state increase.^99
In parliamentary debate in June, Green Party delegate Otto Schilly
claimed the German antifascist resistance as “... our historical refer-
ence point, to which we have oriented ourselves politically.”^100 W h i le
another Germany could have arisen from its antifascist resistance,
instead, the two states had become vassals of the Cold War. Schilly
thus reproduced a long-established narrative about Adenauer’s
role in foreclosing the option of a neutral, unified, demilitarized
Germany. On July 6, the Bremen SPD fraction invoked the consti-
tutional right of resistance, arguing that “... parliamentary majori-
ties do not legitimate NATO governments to raise the danger of a
nuclear war which would make their own peoples victims.”^101 Grass,
Schilly, and the Bremen SPD spoke the language of resistance with
pathos.
While Habermas conceded that the notion of resistance was a
powerful mobilizing tool, he concluded that by using the language98 Habermas, “Recht und Gewalt,” 106.
99 Günter Grass, “Vom Recht auf Widerstand,” Rede bei der Gedenkvera-
nstaltung der SPD zum 50. Jahrestag von Hitlers Machtergreifung am 30.
Januar 1983 in Frankfurt, in idem, Widerstand Lernen. Politische Gegenreden,
1980 – 83 (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1984 ), 65–6.(^100) Herf, War by Other Means, 189; Habermas, “Testfall,” 51.
(^101) Herf, War by Other Means, 193.