One of Germany’s most influential intellectuals, the philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas, died on Saturday, March 14, in Starnberg at the age of 96, the Suhrkamp publishing house reported, AP News reports.

Habermas was born on June 18, 1929, in Düsseldorf and grew up in nearby Gummersbach, where his father ran the local chamber of commerce. He became a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk, the Hitler Youth section for younger boys, at the age of 10.

He was born with a cleft palate that required repeated operations as a child, an experience that later helped shape his thinking about language.

Habermas said he experienced the importance of spoken language as “a layer of community without which we as individuals cannot exist” and recalled the struggle to express oneself. He also spoke of the “superiority of the written word” and said that “the written form hides the shortcomings of the spoken”.

He had an ambivalent attitude to the left-wing student movement of the late 1960s in Germany and beyond, engaging with it but also warning at the time of the danger of what he called “left-wing fascism” – a reaction to a fiery speech by a student leader he later said it was “somewhat inappropriate”. He would later admit that the movement initiated a “fundamental liberalization” of German society.

In the 1980s, Habermas was a prominent figure in the so-called Historians’ Disputes, in which the Berlin historian Ernst Nolte and others sought a new perspective on the Third Reich and German identity. The tendency to compare what happened under Adolf Hitler to crimes committed by other governments, such as the deaths of millions of people in the Soviet Union under Stalin, Habermas and other opponents have argued that conservative historians are trying to downplay the scale of Nazi crimes through such comparisons.

Habermas supported the rise to power of center-left Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 1998. He criticized the “technocratic” approach and perceived the lack of political vision of Schröder’s conservative successor, Angela Merkel, complaining in 2016 of the paralyzing effects on public opinion of “Merkel’s policy blanket to put people to sleep”.

He was particularly critical of the “limited interest” shown by German politicians, business leaders and the media in “shaping a politically effective Europe”. In 2017, he praised newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron for his plans for European reform, saying “the way he talks about Europe makes a difference”.

His wife, Ute Habermas-Wesselhoeft, died last year. The couple had three children: Tilmann, Rebecca (who died in 2023) and Judith. /tesheshi.com/

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Source: prizrenpost