Berlin — Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a prominent intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He is 96 years old.
Habermas’ publisher Suhrkamp said he died on Saturday in Starnberg, near Munich.
Habermas often weighed in on political issues over several decades. His extensive writing crosses the boundaries of academic and philosophical disciplines, providing a perspective on modern society and social interaction. His most famous works include the two-volume “Theory of Communicative Action”.
Habermas, who was 15 years old at the time of the defeat of Nazi Germany, later recalled the dawn of a new era in 1945 and his coming to terms with the reality of Nazi crimes, without which he would not have found his way into philosophy and social theory. “You suddenly saw that the political system you lived in was a criminal system,” he recalled.
He had an ambivalent relationship with the left-wing student movement in Germany and beyond in the late 1960s, engaging with it but warning against the danger of what he called “left-wing fascism” – in response to firebrand speeches by student leaders he said were “a bit out of place”. He later identified the movement as carrying out a “fundamental liberalization” of German society.
In the 1980s, Berlin historian Ernst Nolte and others were a leading figure in the so-called Historians’ Controversy, in which they called for a new perspective on the Third Reich and German identity. He tended to compare what happened under Adolf Hitler to atrocities committed by other governments, such as the deaths of millions in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Habermas and other opponents argued that conservative historians were trying to minimize the scale of Nazi crimes through such comparisons.
Habermas supported the rise to power of centre-left Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 1998. He criticized the “technological” approach and perceived a lack of political vision by Schröder’s conservative successor, Angela Merkel, in 2016 about Merck’s policy paralysis that “sent public opinion. People to sleep.”
He was particularly critical of the “limited interest” shown by German politicians, business leaders and the media in “creating a politically effective Europe”. In 2017, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron praised him for setting out plans for European reform, saying “there is a difference in the way he talks about Europe”.
Habermas was born in Düsseldorf on June 18, 1929, and grew up in nearby Gummersbach, where his father headed the local chamber of commerce. At the age of 10 he became a member of the Deutsche Jungvolk, a wing of the Hitler Youth for younger boys.
He was born with a cleft palate that required repeated operations as a child, an experience that helped inform his later thinking about language.
Habermas experienced the importance of spoken language as “a layer of normality without which we cannot exist as individuals” and recalled struggling to understand himself. He spoke of the “superiority of the written word” and said that “the written form conceals the faults of the oral.”
His wife Ute Habermas-Wesselhoft died last year. The couple had three children: Tillman; Rebecca, who died in 2023; and Judith.
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