A Berlin Republic E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 258

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A Berlin Republic brings together writings on the new, united Germany by one of their most original and trenchant commentators, Jürgen Habermas. Among other topics, he addresses the consequences of German history, the challenges and perils of the post-Wall era, and Germany's place in contemporary Europe. Here, as in his earlier The Past as Future, Habermas emerges as an inspired analyst of contemporary German political and intellectual life. He repeatedly criticizes recent efforts by historical and political commentators to 'normalize' and, in part, to understate the horrors of modern German history. He insists that 1945 - not 1989 - was the crucial turning point in German history, since it was then that West Germany decisively repudiated certain aspects of its cultural and political past (nationalism and antisemitism in particular) and turned towards Western Traditions of democracy: free and open discussion, and respect for the civil rights of all individuals. Similarly, Habermas deplores the renewal of nationalist sentiment in Germany and throughout Europe. Drawing upon his vast historical knowledge and contemporary insight, Habermas argues for heightened emphasis on trans-European and global democratic institutions - institutions far better suited to meet the challenges (and dangers) of the next century.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction by Peter Uwe Hohendahl

Preface

1 Can We Learn from History?

2 A Double Past

What Does ‘Working Off the Past’ Mean Today?

Replies to Questions from a Bundestag Investigative Commission

3 German Uncertainties

French Views, French Anxieties: An Interview with Le Monde

The Germans’ ‘Sense of Being Special’ Is Regenerating Hour by Hour: An Interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau

The Adenauer Restoration’s Debts: An Interview with the Kölner Stadtanzeiger

4 The Need for German Continuities

A Letter to Christa Wolf

Carl Schmitt in the Political Intellectual History of the Federal Republic

Das Falsche im Eigenen: On Benjamin and Adorno

5 Between Facts and Norms

A Conversation about Questions of Political Theory

6 Which History Can We Learn From?

1989 in the Shadow of 1945: On the Normality of a Future Berlin Republic

Index

English translation and introduction © University of Nebraska Press

1997. First published as Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik,

© Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1995.

First published in England 1998 by Polity Press in association with

Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Published with the assistance of Inter Nationes, Bonn.

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Polity Press

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Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0-7456-2044-2

ISBN 0-7456-2045-0 (pbk)

Introduction by Peter Uwe Hohendahl

THE SERIES OF ESSAYS, articles, and interviews collected in this volume reflects a side of Jürgen Habermas’s work that is less known in the United States than his major theoretical texts, beginning with Knowledge and Human Interest (1971) and leading up to The Theory of Communicative Action (1984). They demonstrate the author’s ongoing involvement in the German and European public sphere. More specifically, they are the interventions of a passionate public intellectual, who has always felt that his academic appointment at the University of Frankfurt could not be the only platform from which to respond to the questions of the day. The recent discovery of Habermas’s early work in the English-speaking world, in particular the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989 (the first German edition appeared in 1962), provides perhaps a more suitable frame for an appreciation of the rhetoric of these essays than his theoretically more abstract later writings, as much as they exhibit, although in different forms, their author’s strong commitment to the idea of political praxis.1 Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, a space where private persons come together to develop a critical discourse that aims at a rational consensus in matters of culture and politics, still guides the thrust of Habermas’s essays from the early 1990s. Although he moved away from the specific historical arguments of Structural Transformation during the 1970s and later completely abandoned the theoretical framework of his first major book, Habermas holds on to the conception of the public sphere as a realm that is not occupied by symbolic media; a realm, in other words, where citizens through the form of rational discussion find the resources to resist the pressure and the intrusion of the state and the economy. In the terminology of Habermas’s later work, the public sphere is an essential part of the lifeworld in which people interact and make sense of their lives.