No book about Jürgen Habermas has ever started like this. In the style of a large American magazine portrait, like the one in new Yorker Berlin cultural historian Philipp Felsch begins his work on the most famous living German-speaking philosopher and sociologist. Script-like, vivid – and the portrayer is immediately in the game himself: “In the forty minutes that the journey from Munich Central Station took, I seem to have reached Long Island. The modernist bungalow, which overlooks a wooded hillside, would be better in the Hamptons than in Upper Bavaria; in his chinos and brand-new Reeboks, the owner of the house seems like an American to me. Despite his age, Jürgen Habermas makes a slim, agile impression. I cannot hide the fact that I approach him with awe.”
Philipp Felsch: “The Philosopher – Habermas and Us” – Culture
