Prof. Felsch: Certainly, an era is coming to an end with Habermas’s death. But we have been talking about a turning point for some time now, and the historical constellation of the old Federal Republic and its political mindset, which Habermas embodied, has been drawing to a close for years. In that sense, his death is the symbolic culmination of a longer process.
Prof. Felsch: Habermas’s era is German post-war history, a society whose self-image and domestic and foreign policy orientation were strongly shaped by the catastrophe of the Second World War and National Socialism. More precisely: West German post-war history, for he took little interest in the GDR and was critical of reunification. Due to recent political events, but also simply through the passage of time and the changing of generations, we are now emerging from this era.
Prof. Felsch: First of all, I would like to mention that this book, published in 1962, was highly significant in that Habermas opened up a new field of research. Namely, the study of the public sphere from the perspectives of social sciences, communication studies and history. The book *The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere* is, not least, a book about the media upheaval in post-war societies, the introduction of television, and the tabloid press. Habermas was the first to examine the connection between the media and public discourse. In this respect, our thinking about social media, about the new structural transformation of the public sphere that we are experiencing as a result of the digital revolution, is at least indirectly shaped by Habermas. In his work on the “New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere”, he sought to analyse this media upheaval as well. He essentially formulates two theses there: Firstly, he argues that the boundary between public and private – which was crucial to the functioning of a bourgeois public sphere – is being blurred by social media. And secondly, he argues that we find ourselves in a situation similar to that of Europeans in the 16th century following the introduction of the printing press, in which users of the new medium first had to learn how to deal with it. We too, according to Habermas, face an epoch-making learning process. In this phase, in which the new medium must first be tried out and understood, crises are likely inevitable.
Prof. Felsch: What distinguished him above all was the dual role he played. Namely, on the one hand, being a philosopher who operates – including on the international stage – at the highest level of academic philosophical discourse, and on the other hand, acting as a political intellectual who has intervened in almost all major public debates in both the old and the new Federal Republic. He seems to have had two souls within him: as a philosopher, he writes in a sober, dry, notoriously inaccessible style, but as a public intellectual, as the author of newspaper articles, he writes elegantly and with a polemical edge. He once said that all his public interventions stemmed from a sense of anger. There seemed to be two distinct temperaments in Habermas, each associated with these two roles. And then there is a third role that impressed me when I met him in person: as a conversation partner, Habermas was astonishingly engaging, curious, quick-witted and charismatic. A charisma that he was less able to display as a public speaker, partly due to his speech impediment.
Prof. Felsch: Habermas’s most recent interventions on the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East, which provoked great controversy among the German public. This had recently made him, who had always been a great optimist, feel very fatalistic. Habermas had the feeling that he no longer understood the reaction of the German public. Even before his death, he had the feeling that his time was coming to an end.