Vol. 19 No. 9 · 8 May 1997
pages 14-15 | 3647 words
Gassing and Bungling
Glen Newey
- Between Facts and Norms by Jürgen Habermas, translated by William Rehg
Polity, 631 pp, £45.00, July 1996, ISBN 0 7456 1229 6
Atrip to Berlin last year offered a chance to take stock of the once and future capital of Europe, and the none too stealthy ascent of the Fourth Reich. Its monuments, largely built by foreign coolies, are rising from the ashes of the Potsdamer Platz, while, down the road, Unter den Linden retains its old Prussic astringency, as if the last fifty years had been but a waking dream. In deference to the BSE brouhaha, posters in every public eatery in town vouchsafed that the dead quadruped on offer was rein deutscher Herkunft – of pure German origin; grim photos in Der Spiegel showed British bovines being shoved into Topf-style incinerators. Irony, or even memory, was at a discount.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 11 · 5 June 1997
From Gerard Holden
Glen Newey’s review of Jürgen Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms (LRB, 8 May) manages to combine an informative discussion of Habermas’s recent work with some classic Germanophobe sneers. We are witnessing ‘the none too stealthy ascent of the Fourth Reich’, claims Newey, and since Habermas’s intellectual progress has ‘in some measure … mimicked that of Germany itself’, we are invited to conclude that Habermas bears some of the responsibility for this development. Newey’s rather bizarre views suggest he has not read many of Habermas’s more directly political interventions over the past few years. But more to the point: why is it considered acceptable for liberal (?) British (?) academics and journals to use terms like ‘Fourth Reich’ in relation to contemporary Germany when the equivalent terms applied to other countries or political cultures would, one hopes, be considered merely abusive?
Gerard Holden
Frankfurt
Vol. 19 No. 12 · 19 June 1997
From Glen Newey
Gerard Holden, writing in response to my review (LRB, 8 May) of Jürgen Habermas’s Fact and Norms, accuses me of ‘some classic Germanophobe sneers’ and betrays some doubt as to my own origins. In fact I am from the Channel Islands, which endured five years of German occupation during World War Two. Like their fellow islanders, my father and his parents were subject to enemy rule for the duration of the conflict, and narrowly escaped deportation to internment camp in Germany. Mr Holden deprecates my use of the term ‘Fourth Reich’ when (he says) the equivalent terms, applied to other countries, would be thought abusive. But among prospective empires, the second British or the fourth French somehow fail to conjure the same nightmare as a re-run of the Reich which gave us Operation Barbarossa and Treblinka. The fact is that there is no equivalent term for other countries. Despite this, I’m happy to make with the smoking calumet. I count Germans among my closest friends, some of whom I stay with when in Berlin. My Significant Other herself hails from the tribe – indeed, her mother is a proud alumna of the Hitler Youth’s female branch, with memorabilia which she showed off to me when I was first presented for her approval. And, on my visits to the Reichshaupstadt, there’s nothing I like better than sitting on the top floor of Berlin’s famous (and once Jewish-owned) KaDeWe department store, with a glass of the local brew in one hand and a bulging Bockwurst in the other.
I am indebted to Mr Holden for his kind words about the substance of my review. However, I disagree that my assertion that Habermas’s intellectual progress has mimicked that of Germany invites the reader to conclude that he is responsible for the German state’s actions. I extended no such invitation. Responsibility is a causal notion, and since a mimic necessarily follows that which he imitates, anyone who sanctioned the inference to which Mr Holden alludes would presumably be committed to a belief in reverse causation.
Glen Newey
University of Sussex
