That was one of the problems with the Germany to which he and Horkheimer returned: there were no Nazis any more. The returning exiles found their homeland in a state of mass denial. When Horkheimer visited Frankfurt in 1948 to discuss with the university authorities the possibility of re-establishing the Institute for Social Research, he found his former colleagues ‘as sweet as pie, smooth as eels and hypocritical … I attended a faculty meeting yesterday and found it too friendly by half and enough to make you want to throw up. All these people sit there as they did before the Third Reich … just as if nothing had happened … they are acting out a Ghost Sonata that leaves Strindberg standing.'

After the war, Habermas enrolled at the University of Bonn, later also studying philosophy at Göttingen and Zurich. Between 1949 and 1953, he spent four years studying Heidegger, so his letter to the philosopher was freighted with symbolic resonances. A young intellectual was calling out his older mentor, demanding that he not hide in silence but rather explain how he could have eulogised a politically criminal system. A new German generation was calling on an older one to account for itself, and perhaps atone for its sins

For Habermas, the inherent aim or telos of language was to reach understanding and bring about consensus

as though love were a full comprehensive insurance policy that could protect both parties from the vicissitudes of the real world of loss and disappointment

Habermas argued that the protests were against ‘the statesmen ruling in our name’ and called for a plebiscite on the army being equipped with nuclear weapons