Post-Nazi Germany needed fifty years of resocialization to acquire liberal political culture

Evidence

The time span of half a century that was required, for example, for the political resocialization of the population of the (old) Federal Republic of Germany after the end of the Nazi dictatorship – despite the preceding 150 years of constitutional development – is an indicator of the obstacles that generally have to be overcome by any acclimatization to a liberal political culture. For the moral core of such a culture consists in the willingness of citizens to reciprocally recognize others as fellow citizens and democratic co-legislators endowed with equal rights. This begins with regarding political adversaries in a spirit open to compromise as opponents and no longer as enemies – and it continues, beyond the limits of different ethnic, linguistic and religious forms of life, with the reciprocal inclusion of strangers, who wish to remain strangers to one another, in a shared political culture. … This political culture must have differentiated itself from the respective majority culture to such an extent that every citizen in a pluralistic society can recognize himself or herself as a member. The social bond of a society, however heterogeneous it may be, will remain intact only if political integration as a general rule ensures a form of civic solidarity that, far from demanding unconditional altruism, calls for a limited reciprocal willingness to assist. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 24

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete historical grounding for Habermas’s realism about democratic culture — a useful counterpoint to Adorno’s more pessimistic account of authoritarian personality. — connects to: Jaspers demanded genuine communication as Germany’s post-war moral reckoning — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 611; Nazism and Stalinism, not better theory, revived liberal natural rights — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 285; Nazi rule and restoration alienated postwar Germans from utopian-social criticism (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Nazism and Stalinism, not better theory, revived liberal natural rights #corroborates (0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 285