Postwar German re-education shaped Habermas’s political disillusionment
Evidence
Born in Düsseldorf in 1929, Jürgen Habermas grew up in Gummersbach, where his father was director of the Chamber of Commerce. The German surrender in May 1945 was an experience of liberation for him. He greedily read not only the long-banned Western and German literature that was being published by Rowohlt, but also pamphlets by Marx and Engels published in East Berlin and distributed by his local communist bookshop. He was hoping for an intellectual and moral renewal in Germany, and was disappointed to see how little renewal was noticeable during the elections to the first Bundestag, and how soon the question of rearmament returned to the agenda. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2292
Categorization
- SHARE: The detail that young Habermas read Marxist pamphlets from an East Berlin communist bookshop while also devouring Rowohlt’s Western publications is a nice biographical micro-detail for someone interested in FRG intellectual history.
- XREF: connects to: Habermas was shaped by post-war re-education rather than Nazi experience — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2292; Nazi rule and restoration alienated postwar Germans from utopian-social criticism; Heidegger’s uncommented 1935 lecture shattered Habermas’s separation of politics from philosophy (+1 more)