Jürgen Habermas: The Departure of the Last of the Great German Philosophers of the Twentieth Century

The death of Jürgen Habermas this week marks the end of an intellectual era in Europe. With him, a unique cycle of German philosophy that began in the 1930s comes to a close, when it was still possible to believe that reason and public debate could build a better democracy. Habermas, who died at age 96 in the Bavarian town of Starnberg, was the last living guardian of that tradition.

The thinker who was a compass for democratic Germany

For nearly seven decades, Habermas served as what many called the “moral seismograph” of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was not an ivory tower philosopher but a public intellectual who dared to intervene in every major debate of his time: from the historical memory of Nazism to how Europe should relate to Russia, and the future of continental integration.

His contemporaries recognized him as the last representative of a generation of German thinkers who achieved the impossible: reconstructing critical thought from the ruins of fascism. Chancellor Friedrich Merz highlighted in his statement that Habermas “acted as a lighthouse in a stormy sea,” especially emphasizing “the analytical sharpness that marked democratic discourse far beyond Germany’s borders.”

A vast philosophical work that shaped generations of German thinkers

Habermas’s academic legacy is difficult to summarize in a few lines. His books The Theory of Communicative Action, History and Critique of Public Opinion, Knowledge and Interest, and The Public Sphere became fundamental pillars for understanding how democracy and public debate function in modern societies. These works were not strictly academic but conceptual tools that generations of German researchers and intellectuals used to think about the world.

What made his production unique was his insistence that reason and communication were not intellectual luxuries but essential weapons for democratic life. In his last article published in El País on November 30, 2025, he wrote almost as a testament: “Never has greater political integration in the European Union been more vital, and never has it seemed more unlikely.”

Heir of the Frankfurt School, last guardian of critical theory

Habermas was the last survivor of what is known as critical theory, a school of thought that emerged in 1930s Germany as a response to the irrationality of totalitarianism. In the 1950s, he was a student of Theodor W. Adorno, one of the great intellectuals who resisted Nazism through theoretical reflection.

This affiliation connected him to a very specific tradition of German thought: one that radically rejected metaphysical, romantic, and irrational currents that, in their most perverted form, had led to catastrophe. In other words, Habermas represented the opposite of Heidegger’s Germany and his followers. His thinking was rooted in Marxism but not in its authoritarian versions—in democracy and what he called the Enlightenment project: the idea that human reason could improve the world.

The shadow of Nazism and the construction of democratic German identity

Habermas was born in 1929 in Düsseldorf, in the heart of the Rhineland, into a family familiar with National Socialism circles. His father was director of the Chamber of Commerce in a town near Cologne. Like many of his generation, young Jürgen was a member of the Hitler Youth, just as future Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) and writer Günter Grass, both slightly older, and later Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

He belonged to the cohort that Kohl would later describe as blessed for “being born late”: old enough not to have actively participated in Nazi crimes with full awareness but too early to prevent the weight of that era from shaping his intellectual identity forever.

In fact, Habermas’s biography reveals a little-known trait: during childhood, he suffered a cleft palate and lip, which required painful surgeries. Willi Winkler, author of a lengthy obituary in Süddeutsche Zeitung, suggests that this experience, along with the school teasing it entailed, profoundly shaped his obsession with communication as the foundation of democratic life. His conviction in the superiority of written words paradoxically stemmed from his initial difficulties speaking fluently.

From Marxism to social democracy

After discovering Marxism in the postwar years, Habermas never succumbed to the illusions some European intellectuals held about the Soviet Union. He would later recall that “what was an authoritarian regime, we learned about in the first checks at Friedrichstrasse,” referring to the border crossing between West and East Berlin.

This clarity led him to evolve toward social democracy, reflecting the consensus of the Bonn Republic but without abandoning radical critique. In 1968, during a famous debate with student leader Rudi Dutschke, he challenged revolutionary movements of the time, denouncing what he called “left-wing fascism.” Later, in the 1980s, he was involved in the “historians’ quarrel,” a fierce debate with conservative historian Ernst Nolte over the historical meaning of Nazism.

Until the last moment: a pessimistic European reflecting on war

What was most surprising about Habermas in his later years was his ability to maintain intellectual lucidity until the end. He continued writing articles, participating in public debates, unafraid of controversy. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shook Europe, Habermas defended the need to support Ukraine but also expressed concern about what he saw as European rearmament and what he considered German militarism.

This dual stance, characteristic of his thinking: neither naive optimism nor paralyzing pessimism. He knew Europe faced existential challenges but trusted that deliberative reason could still find solutions. In that column published a few weeks before his death in El País, he revealed both his concern and his persistent faith in political integration as a solution to conflicts.

The legacy: a generation of German intellectuals seeking reason

With Habermas’s passing, Europe loses one of the last public intellectuals of the Enlightenment tradition. He was not merely a producer of academic theories but someone who taught how to think and how to think about the Federal Republic, transforming it into a pluralist democracy governed by the rule of law.

His influence extended beyond the German sphere. Generations of researchers and thinkers across continents used his concepts to analyze how politics, communication, and democracy truly function. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, two decades younger but also one of the great living German intellectuals, often described Habermas’s generation as “hyper-moral children of National Socialist parents”: those who dedicated their lives to rebuilding from reason what others had destroyed from madness.

With Jürgen Habermas, a singular chapter of German thought concludes—one that turned historical trauma into intellectual rigor, personal vulnerability into communication theory, and hope in reason into a compass to guide entire societies.