A Berlin Republic

A Berlin Republic

The German edition
Author	Jürgen Habermas
Country	Germany
Language	German
Published	1997
Media type	Print

A Berlin Republic (German: Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik. Kleine Politische Schriften VIII) is a 1997 book composed of a collection of of interviews with the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas conducted by various European media in the mid-1990s. The common thread of the interviews is Habermas's disagreement with resurgent German nationalism after the reunification with the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Habermas's theoretical works are in the background of the interviews. At the time of the interviews, in the early 1990s, Habermas was publishing Between Facts and Norms, his philosophy of law and politics, and writing the political-philosophical essays which would later be collected in the volumes published in English as Justification and Application and The Inclusion of the Other.

In A Berlin Republic, Habermas wages an intellectual campaign in Germany's political public sphere against what he sees as the backward-looking influence of German political theorist and proponent of Nazism, Carl Schmitt, and the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Schmitt advocated a "normalizing" view of German history, whereby Communism and Nazism would be equated, and the continuity of a reunified Germany with her pre-1945 past would be affirmed. Habermas encourages Germans to think differently about 1945 and 1989. In Habermas's view, Germany must reject any thought of basing her reunified future on a continuation of notions such as German ethnic identity as a foundation for the German state, Germany as a potential political and military power in central Europe, an "eastern-oriented" foreign policy, and the notion of a "special path" (Sonderweg) for Germany separate from that of other Western democracies.

The rationale Habermas gives is initially historical—if Germans face squarely their past, they cannot wish for any continuity with it that does not own it as tragic and catastrophic. This harks back to his earliest writings of the 1950s, collected in Philosophical-Political Profiles, in which he sees the only way forward for a German philosophy is to remember the German-Jewish philosophy that was obliterated in the Holocaust.