German philosopher Jurgen Habermas dies age 96
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The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has died, a spokesperson for his publishing house, Suhrkamp Verlag, told AFP on Saturday.
He died at the age of 96 in Starnberg, in southern Germany, she said, citing information from the family of the politically engaged theorist.
Habermas was considered the most influential German philosopher of his generation, involved in all the major postwar debates and seeing a united Europe, in his view, as the only remedy for the rise of nationalism.
In his later years, he devoted himself to promoting a federal European project and prevent the continent from falling, as it did in the 20th century, into nationalist rivalries.
Throughout his life, Habermas linked philosophy and politics, thought and action.
After serving as the voice of German student protest in the 1960s, he became its target thirty years later while warning of the risks of “left-wing fascism”.
In 1989, he criticised the terms of German reunification, guided essentially by the demands of the market, and which made “the Deutsche mark its standard.”
Born on June 18, 1929 in Duesseldorf, Habermas had been enrolled in the Hitler Youth, but he was too young to have taken an active part in the war. As a teenager, he was deeply marked by the collapse of Nazism.
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