Gershom Scholem is remembered as the man who closed the door on the possibility of friendship between Germans and Jews. I don’t really remember him actually leaving a crack in the door. “We do not know whether there will ever be productive dialogue between Germans and Jews again,” he wrote. “I see it as an important event and an important new beginning,” but that would be predicated on “the will of both parties to recognize the truth about what happened.” Scholem added: “Only by remembering a past that can never be completely mastered can we create hope for the resumption of communication between Germans and Jews.”
When I last spoke to Habermas in December, he could not remember Scholem ever giving such an opening. However, his grand life project was nothing more than a dialogue with the hope found within the cracks. Habermas never flattered that he had re-established friendships. But he understood what it took to get his foot in the door. As a postwar German philosopher, if he had not grappled with the dangerous possibilities of dialogue between Germans and Jews, his universalist and cosmopolitan project based on discourse would not only have been empty but violent.
Habermas’ role Historian StreetRightly remembered as one of his most important achievements, it was an impressive demonstration of how the two worked together. His insistence that Germany’s involvement in world politics follows from recognition of the unique crimes of the German people, in turn stems from what Scholem postulated as the condition for German-Jewish dialogue: confronting “a past that we will never fully overcome.” From this perspective, Habermas’s universalism, based on discourse ethics, was not an abstract philosophy. On the contrary, it was a moral and political strategy to preserve the possibility of dialogue after a catastrophe precisely because the “ideal speech situation” he described would not occur in the world.
The young Habermas had the temperament, courage, and foresight to fight for rational debate when it was unclear whether the conditions for rational debate existed. Before he became a public intellectual in Germany, he was what Arendt called “a man of the dark ages,” a flickering light when public life itself turned dark. The example he set remains a lesson to this day. Younger critics sometimes dismiss his claims of an “ideal speaking situation” as a sign of privilege and naivety. This is wrong. This claim was born out of the courage and sense of necessity of someone who knew firsthand what it was like for such conditions not to exist.
When asked, in 2012 Interview with HaaretzRegarding the political situation in Israel, Habermas replied, “Even if the current situation and the policies of the current Israeli government require political evaluation, it is not the role of German civilians of my generation to provide it.” [one]’. Although understandable, his answer effectively lifted the ground from his universalist position.
According to Habermas, Germany’s strict obligations to international law and its insistence on “constitutional patriotism” in place of a restoration of national identity derive from recognition of the crimes of the Holocaust. Germany’s silence on Israel, a close ally, led to a reversal of that debate. This enabled demands that Germany turn its back on international law in the name of the Holocaust and restore its national identity.
“By not speaking out against Israel’s violations,” I said, “not only will Germany fail to fulfill its responsibilities, but Germany will not be able to fulfill its own responsibilities. It will undermine the Holocaust as a politically significant past.” I wrote Habermas’s “return to Kant” would not have been achieved before he took up this task. “Historically speaking, this may be nothing short of the ultimate test of the Enlightenment itself.”
After our December meeting, he wrote to me in response to this controversy:
I was born in 1929 and grew up during the Nazi era. In that country, in the spring of 1945, an unimaginable crime was exposed, with utter surprise, through the first footage of a weekly newsreel (literally unimaginable): footage of a newly liberated concentration camp. There was a pile of corpses, but it was suddenly still moving! Please understand: we young people thought so because we had been growing up in the same country perfectly normal while the horrors were happening. The break with the seemingly ordinary – in the daily newsreels regularly shown before the feature films I came to see at the theater – revealed to me, and to us at the time, a nearness of mass crime that the mind could not comprehend. From that experience, as you now recall, a conclusion was later drawn that was never questioned from that day to the present. In short, we have been so close to that horror for too long that we have no right to express ourselves publicly and critically about the actions of the Israeli government, no matter what our thoughts are.
After his death, I went back to those old interviews. Haaretz. I realized that I had not done Habermas justice, but he never took it as an accusation. After he avoided getting involved in Israeli politics, the interviewer asked, “In general, what do you think about resolving national conflicts by splitting one country into two and each country having its own state?” The intention was clearly to elicit a general statement of similar effect, if not a condemnation of occupation and a clear call for two states. Habermas’s answer was different and interesting.
There is considerable controversy over the “rights” that states have over their own state. This principle was proclaimed by President Wilson of the United States and more or less determined the Versailles peace agreement at the end of World War I. The historical consequences were disastrous, as the invention of new states and new borders according to this national principle meant creating more minorities and conflicts over minorities. Borders always arise from historical contingency. Therefore, on abstract and normative grounds only, maintaining a multinational or multiethnic state appears to be a better solution, as long as appropriate minority rights are strictly guaranteed alongside this, that is, more generally, cultural rights in addition to civil rights. Zionist political groups with similar views existed in this country before 1948. Martin Buber was one of them, but most of the key members came from Germany around 1933…However, this line of thinking does not allow us to conclude that there were no compelling reasons for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and today the political right to the existence of the state of Israel is unquestionably established by the best normative reasons.
Of course, Habermas was well aware that there was no contradiction between the idea of a bilateral federation and the recognition of Israel’s right to exist.
Be that as it may, there is no doubt that Habermas understood that the narrow rift in German-Jewish dialogue depended on an uncompromising commitment to universal law. Abandoning the unfinished project of modernization, a retreat from an international aspiration for peace to a particularistic political position, would close the door to dialogue by returning precisely to the worldview that created the abyss between Jews and Germans in the first place.
Shortly before his death, he sent me a note alluding to Paul Klee’s paintings. The painting was the same one that Benjamin had bequeathed to Gershom Scholem and that hung in Scholem’s office in Jerusalem. Benjamin wrote about this painting: “There is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novas. It shows an angel who seems to be moving away from what he is staring at…This is how we imagine the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. It shows us a series of events. He sees a single catastrophe that piles wreckage upon wreckage and throws it at his feet.” The angel wishes to “stay,” but a storm is brewing that “propels him into the future. This is what we call progress.”
In this well-known quote, Habermas gave Benjamin’s pessimism a hopeful inversion. “The normative core of modernity is the product of a learning process, so it cannot simply disappear like any other event, no matter how tortuous. … Cognitive achievements of this kind, when suppressed, leave traces of regression.” And rather than simply disappearing, these traces pulsate forward, and perhaps one day will be picked up again in another form. ”
What does such a position require in the current crisis?In the end, this question remained unresolved in our conversation. I was not convinced that the position taken by Habermas was sufficient to protect this international project and the traces of German-Jewish dialogue within it. Without a clear place for the truths that must be told publicly in the name of Jewish-Palestinian friendship, the very quest for German-Jewish dialogue becomes empty and downright violent.
in him Obituary Regarding Scholem in 1982, Habermas poignantly pointed out that although German was Scholem’s native language, Germans could not complain “that not a single word of German was spoken at the meeting at Scholem’s tomb.” Scholem added: “His presence showed us, without compromise, how deeply rooted in German history is the division in the fate of Germans and Jews.” So we were all the more grateful when Scholem began carving out a path to friendship over this abyss. ”
In the end, all that remains is Habermas’s courage in insisting that modern projects can be pushed forward even in times of rupture. Traces remain. The crack is open. May his memory be a blessing. और देखें
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
