German–Jewish dialogue – In a reflection that returns to Gershom Scholem’s guarded hope and Jürgen Habermas’s lifelong language of “dialogue,” the story turns on a single fault line: whether universal law and public truth can survive the pressure of Israel and the shadow of the Holoca
Gershom Scholem is often remembered as the man who shut the door on the idea of German–Jewish friendship. But the note he left behind is smaller, and harder to dismiss: a crack.
“I do not know whether there can once again be a productive dialogue between Germans and Jews,” Scholem wrote. “I would see in that a significant event. an important new beginning. ” but only if it presupposed “the will on both sides to recognize the truth about what has happened.” He added that hope would have to be generated by “remembering a past that we will never fully master.”.
The crack mattered to Jürgen Habermas, even when it wasn’t named in the conversation. When the author last spoke with Habermas in December, he did not remember that Scholem had left such an opening. Still. Habermas’s “colossal life’s project” was shaped by the hope one finds in that gap—dialogue as something to be argued for. not wished for.
Habermas never flattered himself that he had “re-established friendship.” Yet he understood what it takes to put a foot in the door. In postwar Germany. his universalist-cosmopolitan project built around discourse would have been worse than empty—violence in the shape of philosophy—if it had not faced the fraught possibility of dialogue between Germans and Jews.
That link between belief and condition became clear in Habermas’s role in the Historikerstreit. described here as one of his foremost achievements. His insistence that Germany’s cosmopolitical commitment grew from Germans recognizing their singular crime is presented as inseparable from Scholem’s condition for dialogue: confronting “a past that we will never fully master.” In this telling. Habermas’s universalism—grounded in discourse ethics—was not treated as abstraction. It was framed as a moral-political strategy for keeping open the possibility of conversation after catastrophe. precisely because Habermas’s “ideal speech situations” never actually arrive in the world.
The young Habermas is recalled as someone with “temperament. courage and vision” to fight for rational discussion when it was unclear whether the conditions for it existed. The comparison offered here comes from Hannah Arendt’s phrase “a man in a dark time”—a “flickering light when public life itself had gone dark.”.
Critics who dismiss Habermas’s idea of “ideal speech situations” as privilege and naivety are answered directly in the piece: the assertion, as it is framed, was born of courage and a sense of necessity from someone who knew what the absence of those conditions looks like “first-hand.”
Then comes the pressure point—where silence does not stay quiet.
In a 2012 interview with Haaretz. when Habermas was asked about “the political situation in Israel. ” he replied that “even if the current situation and the policies of the current Israeli government” demand political assessment. “it is not the role of a private German citizen of my generation to give [one].” The author argues that. however understandable. the answer “effectively pulled the ground” from under Habermas’s universalism.
The argument turns on Habermas’s own framework: strict German commitment to international law and “constitutional patriotism” rather than a rehabilitated national identity. derived from recognition of the crimes of the Holocaust. The piece contends that “silence on Israel”—a close ally of Germany—flipped the original logic. It made room for the demand that Germany. “in the name of the Holocaust. ” turn its back on international law and rehabilitate national identity.
In 2015. the author wrote: “By failing to speak out against Israel’s violations. Germany will not only fail to meet its own responsibilities; it will undermine the Holocaust as a politically significant past.” The author continues that Habermas’s “return to Kant” would not be achieved without addressing this challenge. calling it “Historically speaking this may be nothing less than the ultimate test of enlightenment thinking itself.”.
After the December meeting, Habermas wrote back.
The response begins with his biography, and with a room that is permanently lit. “I was born in 1929 and grew up during the Nazi period,” he wrote. He describes how the “inconceivable crimes were revealed to me in the spring of 1945. in complete surprise. ” through “the first images—literally inconceivable—of a weekly newsreel.” He recalls “images of a concentration camp that had just been liberated. ” with “piles of corpses – that suddenly still moved!”.
Habermas adds that “we young people grew up in that same country – in complete normality. so we thought – while that horror was taking place.” The “rupture with apparent normality. ” he says. was made clear through a “routine newsreel. screened regularly before a feature film you had come to the cinema to see.” That proximity. he writes. created “a proximity to mass crimes that the mind is incapable of grasping.”.
From that experience, Habermas concludes that “we were so close, and for so long, to that horror that we have no right, whatever our thoughts may be, to express ourselves publicly and critically about the actions of an Israeli government.”
After Habermas’s death. the author returned to the old 2012 Haaretz interview and realized. the piece says. that he “had not done justice to Habermas.” Habermas. it is recalled. had avoided entering into Israeli politics. When the interviewer then asked about resolving national conflicts by dividing a state into two—so each nation has its own state—the intention. the author writes. was to extract a condemnation of the occupation or a call for two states. Instead, the answer Habermas gave was different.
“The ‘right’ of a nation to its own state is quite contested,” Habermas said. He linked the principle to American President Wilson and to the peace agreements of Versailles at the end of the First World War. “The historical result was devastating. ” he continued. because “the invention of new states or new borders in accordance with this national principle meant creating more minorities and conflicts over minorities.” He added that “Borders always arise from historical contingency.”.
Therefore. he argued. “in the abstract and for normative reasons alone. the preservation of a multinational or multi-ethnic state appears to be a better solution. ” as long as “appropriate minority rights are scrupulously guaranteed—or more generally. cultural rights in addition to civil rights.” Habermas acknowledged that “There were also Zionist political groups before ’48 with similar views in this country.” He noted that “Most leading members. of which Martin Buber was one. came from Germany before and after 1933.” Yet he insisted that “from this line of thinking one cannot conclude that there were no compelling reasons for the founding of the State of Israel in ’48.” In his view. “today the political right to the existence of the State of Israel is anchored beyond any doubt in the best normative reasons.”.
The piece then states that Habermas “knew perfectly well” that there is no contradiction between bi-national federal thinking and recognizing Israel’s right to exist.
What remains central here is that Habermas understood the “narrow crack open for German–Jewish dialogue depends on uncompromising commitment to universal law.” Abandoning the unfinished project of modernity—retreating “from cosmopolitan aspiration toward peace to a particularist political position”—would “slam the door” on conversation by returning to the worldview that created the “abyss between Jews and Germans in the first place.”.
Just before his death. Habermas sent a note that alluded to a painting by Paul Klee—“the same painting that Benjamin bequeathed to Gershom Scholem. and that hung in Scholem’s office in Jerusalem.” The author quotes Benjamin on “Angelus Novus.” Benjamin wrote of an angel “about to move away from something he is staring at fixedly. ” with his face turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events. Benjamin wrote. the angel “sees one single catastrophe. ” piling “wreckage upon wreckage” and hurling it at his feet. Benjamin also wrote that the angel wishes “to stay. ” but “a storm is blowing and drives him into the future: this is what we call progress.”.
The piece contrasts this with Habermas’s inversion of Benjamin’s pessimism. “Because the normative core of modernity is the product of learning processes—however tortuous they may be—it cannot simply vanish like other events. ” Habermas wrote. “Cognitive achievements of this kind. when repressed. leave traces of regression.” Those traces. Habermas said. “do not simply disappear. but pulse and work their way forward. ” so that “perhaps one day. in a different form. they can be taken up again.”.
What that position demanded “in the current crisis,” the author says, remained unresolved in the conversation. The author was “not persuaded” Habermas’s position was sufficient to protect the traces of the cosmopolitan project and the German–Jewish dialogue within it. In the author’s view. “The search for German–Jewish dialogue itself becomes hollow. indeed violent. ” without “a clear place for truths that need to be said—publicly—in the name of the friendship between Jews and Palestinians.”.
Even the obituary for Scholem from 1982 is brought in. The piece notes that in that obituary. Habermas had noted painfully that German was Scholem’s mother tongue. but that Germans could not complain “that in the talks on Scholem’s grave there was no word spoken in German.” In his existence. Habermas added. Scholem “taught us without compromise how deeply the separation of the German and the Jewish fate is rooted in German history.” Habermas then wrote that they were “therefore all the more thankful when Scholem. above this abyss. started paving ways for friendship.”.
The closing claim is not an argument for optimism so much as an act of insistence: Habermas’s courage to say the modern project can be pursued even amid rupture. “Traces remain. A crack is open.” The piece ends with a blessing—“יהי זכרו ברוך”—for memory as something more than personal grief.
Gershom Scholem Jürgen Habermas German–Jewish dialogue Historikerstreit discourse ethics ideal speech situations international law constitutional patriotism Holocaust memory Israel Paul Klee Angelus Novus Walter Benjamin Martin Buber cultural dialogue