Dialogue and silence

Gershom Scholem is remembered as the man who closed the door on the possibility of German–Jewish friendship. Less remembered is that he actually left a crack in the door. ‘I do not know whether there can once again be a productive dialogue between Germans and Jews,’ he wrote. ‘I would see in that a significant event, an important new beginning’, but it would presuppose ‘the will on both sides to recognize the truth about what has happened’. Only by ‘remembering a past that we will never fully master,’ Scholem added, ‘can we generate hope in the resumption of communication between Germans and Jews’.

When I last spoke with Habermas, in December, he did not remember that Scholem had left such an opening. But his colossal life’s project was nothing if not a dialogue with the hope one finds in that crack. Habermas never flattered himself that he had re-established friendship. But he understood the conditions necessary for putting a foot in the door. As a postwar German philosopher, his universalist-cosmopolitan project based on discourse would have been worse than empty – it would have been violent – had it not addressed the fraught possibility of dialogue between Germans and Jews.

Habermas’s role in the Historikerstreit, rightly remembered as one of his foremost achievements, was a striking demonstration of how the two go hand in hand. His insistence that Germany’s cosmopolitical commitment followed from Germans’ recognition of their singular crime emerged, in turn, from what Scholem had posited as a condition of German-Jewish dialogue – confronting a ‘past that we will never fully master’. In this light, Habermas’s universalism, grounded in discourse ethics, was no abstract philosophy. On the contrary: it was a moral-political strategy for keeping open the possibility of post-catastrophic dialogue, precisely because what he called ‘ideal speech situations’ do not take place in the world.

The young Habermas had the temperament, courage and vision to fight for rational discussion when it was unclear that the conditions for its possibility existed. Before he was a public intellectual in Germany he was what Arendt called a man in a dark time – a flickering light when public life itself had gone dark. The example he set remains a lesson to this day. Younger critics sometimes dismiss his assertion of ‘ideal speech situations’ as an expression of privilege and naivety. This is wrong. The assertion was born of courage and the sense of necessity of someone who knew first-hand what the absence of such conditions looked like.

When asked, in a 2012 interview with Haaretz, about the political situation in Israel, Habermas replied: ‘even if the current situation and the policies of the current Israeli government’ demand political assessment, ‘it is not the role of a private German citizen of my generation to give [one]’. While understandable, his answer effectively pulled the ground out from under his universalist position.

According to Habermas, strict German commitment to international law and the assertion of ‘constitutional patriotism’ in lieu of rehabilitated national identity derived from the recognition of the crimes of the Holocaust. Silence on Israel – a close ally of Germany – invited the inversion of that argument. It enabled the demand that Germany, in the name of the Holocaust, turn its back on international law and rehabilitate its national identity.

‘By failing to speak out against Israel’s violations, Germany will not only fail to meet its own responsibilities; it will undermine the Holocaust as a politically significant past,’ I wrote in 2015. Habermas’s ‘return to Kant’ would not be achieved before addressing this challenge: ‘Historically speaking this may be nothing less than the ultimate test of enlightenment thinking itself.’

After our meeting in December,  he wrote to me, in response to this dispute:

I was born in 1929 and grew up during the Nazi period in a country whose inconceivable crimes were revealed to me in the spring of 1945, in complete surprise, through the first images – literally inconceivable – of a weekly newsreel: images of a concentration camp that had just been liberated. There were piles of corpses – that suddenly still moved! Please understand: we young people grew up in that same country – in complete normality, so we thought – while that horror was taking place. That rupture with apparent normality – in a routine newsreel, screened regularly before a feature film you had come to the cinema to see – made clear to me, made clear to us then, a proximity to mass crimes that the mind is incapable of grasping. From that experience – which you are now recalling to me – there follows a conclusion that was formulated later, but has not been doubted from that day to this: we were so close, and for so long, to that horror that we have no right, whatever our thoughts may be, to express ourselves publicly and critically about the actions of an Israeli government.

After his death I returned to that old interview in Haaretz. I found that I had not done justice to Habermas – which he never turned into a reproach. After he had avoided entering into Israeli politics, the interviewer asked: ‘In general, what is your view on resolving national conflicts by dividing one state into two, so that each nation has its own state?’ The intention was clearly to extract, if not a condemnation of the occupation and an explicit call for two states, then a general statement to the same affect. The answer Habermas gave was different, and intriguing:

The “right” of a nation to its own state is quite contested. This principle was declared by the American President Wilson, and it more or less determined the peace agreements of Versailles at the end of the First World War. The historical result was devastating, because the invention of new states or new borders in accordance with this national principle meant creating more minorities and conflicts over minorities. Borders always arise from historical contingency. Therefore, in the abstract and for normative reasons alone, the preservation of a multinational or multi-ethnic state appears to be a better solution, as long as alongside this, appropriate minority rights are scrupulously guaranteed – or more generally, cultural rights in addition to civil rights. There were also Zionist political groups before ’48 with similar views in this country. Most leading members, of which Martin Buber was one, came from Germany before and after 1933 … But from this line of thinking one cannot conclude that there were no compelling reasons for the founding of the State of Israel in ’48, and today the political right to the existence of the State of Israel is anchored beyond any doubt in the best normative reasons.

Of course, Habermas knew perfectly well that there is no contradiction between bi-national federal thinking and recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that Habermas understood that the narrow crack open for German–Jewish dialogue depends on uncompromising commitment to universal law. To abandon the unfinished project of modernity – to retreat from cosmopolitan aspiration toward peace to a particularist political position – would slam the door on the conversation, by returning to precisely the worldview that created the abyss between Jews and Germans in the first place.

Just before his death he sent me a note that alluded to a painting by Paul Klee – the same painting that Benjamin bequeathed to Gershom Scholem, and that hung in Scholem’s office in Jerusalem. Benjamin wrote of the painting: ‘There is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who appears to be about to move away from something he is staring at fixedly … This is how one imagines the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet.’ The angel wishes ‘to stay’, Benjamin wrote, but a storm is blowing and ‘drives him into the future: this is what we call progress’.

The quotation is familiar, but Habermas gave Benjamin’s pessimism an inversion of hope: ‘Because the normative core of modernity is the product of learning processes – however tortuous they may be – it cannot simply vanish like other events … Cognitive achievements of this kind, when repressed, leave traces of regression. And these traces do not simply disappear, but pulse and work their way forward, so that perhaps one day, in a different form, they can be taken up again.’

What does such a position demand in the current crisis? In the end this question remained unresolved in the conversation between us. I was not persuaded that the position Habermas took was sufficient to protect the traces of the cosmopolitan project, and of the German–Jewish dialogue within it. The search for German–Jewish dialogue itself becomes hollow, indeed violent, without a clear place for truths that need to be said – publicly – in the name of the friendship between Jews and Palestinians.

In his obituary for Scholem from 1982, Habermas noted painfully that German was Scholem’s mother tongue, but that Germans could not complain ‘that in the talks on Scholem’s grave there was no word spoken in German’. ‘ In his existence’, he added, Scholem ‘taught us without compromise how deeply the separation of the German and the Jewish fate is rooted in German history. We were therefore all the more thankful when Scholem, above this abyss, started paving ways for friendship.’

In the end, what remains is Habermas’s courage to insist that the modern project can be pursued, even amid rupture. Traces remain. A crack is open. May his memory be a blessing. יהי זכרו ברוך