Belated Reckoning with the Past – Germany 1968
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Confronting the Fathers’ Fascism
For Germany, 1968 has an additional dimension: the belated confrontation with National Socialism. The parents’ generation had remained silent—out of shame, out of repression, out of guilt complexes. The children ask: what did you do?[1]
This is not only political but philosophically explosive. For the fathers’ generation also had philosophical complicities: Heidegger (NSDAP member, rector under Nazi rule), Carl Schmitt (crown jurist of the Third Reich), Arnold Gehlen (SA member). The question is: is German philosophy structurally susceptible to fascism?
Habermas’s intervention: in Philosophical-Political Profiles (1971, but essays from 1967 onward), Habermas argues that Hegel is not the problem, but the irrationalists—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jünger. They glorify violence, myth, decision—against reason, argumentation, deliberation. The task is not to overcome Hegel but to defend Hegel against the irrationalists.[2]
The generational question: the '68ers discover the continuities: the same professors who taught under Hitler are teaching again. The same judges who handed down Nazi injustice are now dispensing justice. The same industrialists who profited from forced labor now run corporations. This produces radical skepticism: is the Federal Republic a restoration—or a new beginning?[3]
The philosophical consequence: distrust of authority. No longer blindly following teachers, but questioning critically. No longer affirming systems, but exposing their contradictions. This is Hegelian spirit—but turned anti-authoritarian: it is not the professor who teaches the truth, but the students who work it out together.