Jürgen Habermas obituary

Philosopher and social theorist who advocated a new direction for German thought after the horrors of Nazi rule

The philosopher, social theorist and defender of humane Enlightenment values Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, spent the last months of the second world war helping to protect the Third Reich. He was 15 and a member of the Hitler Youth. Too young to fight and too old to be exempted from war service, he was sent to the western front to man anti-aircraft defences.

He later described his father, the director of the local seminary, as a “passive sympathiser” with the Nazis and young Habermas shared that mindset. But he was soon shaken out of his and his family’s complacency by the Nuremberg trials and documentaries of Nazi concentration camps. “All at once we saw that we had been living in a politically criminal system,” he later wrote. His horrified reaction to what he called his fellow Germans’ “collectively realised inhumanity” constituted what he described as “that first rupture, which still gapes”.