Habermas: Getting rid of the Holocaust, embracing colonialism

Following Jürgen Habermas’s passing, faz republished the article he wrote as a student in 1953, titled “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger,” which made him “famous overnight.”

How could a thinker like Martin Heidegger (whose Being and Time, according to Habermas, was the most significant philosophical event since Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit) stoop to Nazism and fall prey to such blatant primitivism?

In essence, Habermas posited that Heidegger aligned himself with Nazism because he unburdened himself of “rational” and Christian counterweights, rather than viewing his own philosophy—anti-decadent, an escape from the mass man, an “elegy to the forgetting of being”—as the continuation of a specific trajectory. The concepts that the “last modern philosopher” appropriated from Heidegger’s toolkit (the resemblance between the Husserl-inspired concept of Lebenswelt—lifeworld—and Dasein is evident) indicate, in my view, that his dialogue with this Nazi-existentialist was profoundly more positive and deeply rooted. But let us set that aside: according to Habermas, the fundamental flaw in Heidegger—which culminated in the Holocaust—was his lack of “reason” as a counterweight; for the issues he highlighted (the dominion of “technique,” the impending re-emergence of “being” in Europe, etc.) were not entirely misplaced. Heidegger’s ultimate failing was his antipathy toward the Enlightenment and the West.

Over time, these dichotomies in Habermas’s thought, inherited from liberalism, would calcify into a closed system where no alternative to liberalism could even be conceived. On one side stood the “system” dominated by money and power, and on the other, the lifeworld forming the bedrock of communicative action; on one side lay law and institutions as “fact,” and on the other, the “norms” that determined them—this was the truth of the modern world.

Tellingly: Habermas also formulaicized Marx’s discussion of value in Capital at this juncture, resorting to the oversimplification of presenting use-value as “essence” and exchange-value as “appearance.” However, just as the separation of politics and economics in bourgeois society was not a mere essence-appearance duality, the value examined by Marx actually manifests itself through necessary forms of appearance as the analysis deepens. In other words, Habermas grasps the theory of value rather perfunctorily and, truthfully, puts forth a model concerning the separation between state and civil society that is even more regressive and impermeable than Hegel’s, thereby imprisoning truth itself within a nonexistent dichotomy. He loses the necessary forms of appearance of the essence in bourgeois society (for instance, exchange-value as the necessary form of appearance of value, money as its necessary form of appearance, price as its necessary form of appearance, …) within the analytical chasm between essence and appearance.

While the ostensible distance between facts and norms is severed in thought, in reality, this is accompanied by the total alienation of the “people” from, say, economic decision-making processes. The mammoth bureaucratic machinery of the European Union and the surging power of technocracy and modern central banks, where economic policy is “depoliticized,” correspond exactly to this process.

The “post-national consensus” embodied the European “lifeworld” within the EU against both the march of finance and waves of migration, echoing (as Perry Anderson noted) Karl Polanyi’s narrative in The Great Transformation. In his book Eurowhiteness, Hans Kundnani points out that the EU is less a post-national endeavor than a post-imperial construct, and that nationalism, rather than being transcended, is reproduced as a pan-European regionalism.(1) Conceding the impossibility of Kant’s world federation and perpetual peace, Habermas thus assumed the mantle of elevating Europe’s “domestic policy” into a set of “global values.”

This frantic defense of bourgeois society against fascism, and particularly against Carl Schmitt, was ultimately a middle path arrayed against “all extremes” (even against the “fascism” of the extra-parliamentary left during the ’68 protests!). Habermas, who in 1953 was somehow capable of tracing the imprints of Nazism within Western thought, eventually ended up reproducing the very colonial mindset that had filtered down from the era of liberal imperialism to culminate in Nazism, all in an effort to “exonerate” that same Western thought from Nazism. By now, Holocaust memorials were being erected across Germany and Europe, and the fight against antisemitism was morphing into a (belated) European value; yet, the vibrant spirit of the anti-fascist struggle and the heroes of the war against the final iteration of German colonialism within Europe were being relegated to oblivion.

While “German responsibility” had long mandated silence regarding the annihilation of the Jews after the war, the tables suddenly turned, and the anti-fascist resistance across Germany, Europe, and the Soviet Union became equatable with Nazism through the sleight of equating hands. Tell me, wasn’t Habermas objecting to the “relativization” of Nazism while simultaneously trading away the Holocaust to acquire colonialism? Ernst Nolte’s narrative, which framed Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism, was staging a grand comeback, planting itself right at the epicenter of the German psyche.

We heralded its arrival above; now let us fast-forward the tape and arrive at Habermas’s most monumental political intervention: the renowned Historikerstreit, or the “historians’ dispute,” which defined the latter half of the 1980s.

In short, according to the historian Ernst Nolte—known to be quite close to CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl—the Holocaust was, in fact, a response to the “massacres” perpetrated by the Bolsheviks following the October Revolution: race extermination countering class extermination. The annihilation of the Jews was essentially the byproduct of a broader, (ideological) world war spread across vast fronts, with Germany on one side and the Soviet Union on the other.

Habermas vehemently contested this thesis. By relativizing the Holocaust as “just another one of the 20th century’s massacres,” Nolte was downplaying Germany’s role in the genocide, emboldening German nationalism, and derailing the country from its goal of European integration. This, in turn, would pave the way for the resurgence of the “German question.”

Yet, during that very same period, Ronald Reagan, visiting West Germany at Kohl’s behest, toured the Waffen-SS cemetery in Bitburg, audacious enough to declare that it was no different from visiting Auschwitz and that those German soldiers were as much victims of Hitler as the Jews themselves!

Today, the Historikerstreit and Habermas’s intervention remain of critical importance in the formation of various laws and formal or informal codes regarding this issue. Under Section 130 of the German Criminal Code, which regulates the crime of inciting hatred against a segment of the population (Volksverhetzung), it is currently a criminal offense not merely to deny the Holocaust, but also to “trivialize” (verharmlosen) it. Beyond the juridical realm, this stricture has effectively circumscribed nearly the entirety of the German intellectual sphere and public opinion. As officially formulated by Christoph Heusgen, once an advisor to Angela Merkel, Israel’s security is deemed Staatsräson—that is, “reason of state”—for Germany. The existence and security of Israel occupy a highly exceptional position on the roster of Germany’s “national interests.”

In the infamous text he signed in 2023, Habermas(2)—who could never fathom affixing the label of “genocide” to Israel’s actions—spoke from within the very dungeon he had imprisoned himself in, asserting: “When genocidal intent is attributed to Israel’s actions, standards of judgment are completely lost.” Confronted with the reality in Gaza, the prisoner of liberalism, Habermas, uttered not a single word of protest as norms devoured facts.(3)

Under normal circumstances, the resistance of the Palestinian “lifeworld” against the “system” embodied by Israel ought to have been hailed by Habermas, ought it not? But Marx’s words on the critique of religion draw us a little closer to the truth: The purpose of criticism plucking the imaginary flowers from the chain is not so that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or religious consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. So long as/because Habermas—rightly dubbed the “last modern philosopher” by Le Grand Continent—did not wield his “critique” to shatter the chains, he ultimately began preaching a religious and mystified liberalism solely to defend the very chains forged by Israel (and the EU).(4)

One cannot help but view Perry Anderson’s assessment of Habermas, made back in 2013, as profoundly prophetic: “The result is a theory that discharges the responsibility neither of accurately describing the real world nor of offering critical proposals for a better one.”

(1) Kundnani further writes that the founding nations of the European Economic Community (EEC) possessed colonies even then, exerted every conceivable effort not to lose them, and viewed and utilized the EEC as an anchor for their own post-imperial states. Consequently, from its very inception, the EU has consciously chosen to remain at least “blind” to colonialism (and the decolonization process).

(2) Even more intriguing for our purposes is the ambiguous reference to the Palestinian people as a “Palestinian population” within the text signed by Habermas. Because Palestinians are not deemed a people, they cannot avail themselves of Habermas’s normative rights in the way Israelis can. Refusing to recognize the Indigenous inhabitants as a people endowed with legal rights is quintessential colonial behavior.

(3) In a more recent article, after stating that Trump flouts “international law” and seeks to marginalize domestic opponents through slander, Habermas—evidently unforgetful of the backlash to the aforementioned declaration—cannot resist taking a jab at American university campuses: “The most astonishing and hitherto inexplicably plausible aspect of this insidious yet resolutely pursued power grab is the cowardice of a broadly unresisting civil society; not to mention the propensity for conformity among students and professors who had previously maximized cost-free resistance on their campuses against Israel, the so-called colonial power.” In the same article, he also critiques the German government’s pledge to build Europe’s most powerful military. To his mind, this is a hypocrisy that is merely “rhetorically pro-European”: to avoid hypocrisy, one must accept France’s blueprint for “deeper integration.” The fact that France’s push for this is an attempt to position Europe militarily and economically against the US and China is of no consequence to him. Indeed, immediately following this, he chides the German government for opposing Eurobonds, declaring that “there is no concrete sign that it is taking serious steps to realize a European Union effective in world politics.” Ultimately, Habermas does nothing more than advocate for an even greater concentration of power in Brussels so that the EU might “break away” from the US and amplify its global clout.

(4) I am firmly convinced that Habermas increasingly shares the backward(-looking) reaction that Heidegger and Schmitt harbored toward technique, science, mass culture—in a word, toward “bourgeois civilization.” I believe that Habermas’s scheme to “democratize” Heidegger culminated in a fiasco precisely because both thinkers leveled their critiques of bourgeois society not to break its chains, but to forge them ever stronger.