“Anyone who replies to the signals of desolidarization with an appeal to the ‘self-confident nation’ or by calling for a return to the ‘normality’ of the reestablished national state, is using the devil to drive out Satan. For these unsolved global problems reveal precisely the limits of the nation-state. From the somber drumroll of national history emerge war memorials with limited vision. Only as a critical authority does history serve as a teacher. At best it tells us how we ought not to do it. It is from experiences of a negative kind that we learn. That is why 1989 will remain a fortunate date only so long as we respect 1945 as the genuinely instructive one.”
— Jürgen Habermas, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

Annotation

From Jürgen Habermas, “Die Moderne: Ein unvollendetes Projekt,” in Kleine Politische Schriften, I– IV (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 444– 464. The essay originated as a lecture delivered by Habermas on the occasion of his receipt of the Adorno prize awarded by the city of Frankfurt on September 11, 1980. It has appeared in English in New German Critique 22. 

Tagged: Berlin Wall, National History, The Political, World War II
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The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

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