HABERMAS AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 55 The historians' debate was sparked off by a political event. In May 1985 German and American generals shook hands at the Bitburg military cemetery which included among the interred fortynine members of the dreaded SS. This was meant to symbolise the laying to rest of past enmity between Germany and the United States and of German responsibility for Nazi crimes. Habermas saw the event as representative of the Tendenzwende', the rightward shift in German politics in the eighties. It is in the context of this very Tendenzwende that Habermas sees the impact of postmodernist thinking in German intellectual circles. Two aspects of the German response evidently disturb him: the assault on Enlightenment reason and the cultural relativism threatening the universalist ideals of the German philosophical tradition. It is well worth noting here that the critique of Enlightenment reason and its universalising approach need not be seen as speaking for unreason or for cultural relativism; it could be far more useful and radical when seen as an analysis of a historical phenomenon which sought to usurp the exclusive right to speak in the name of reason and universalism. The former interpretive scheme remains caught in a framework of binary oppositions, of epistemological dependence. Unfortunately, both Habermas and the trends he sought to counter remain limited by such a framework in their perceptions and arguments. Habermas perhaps represents one of the most influential articulations of the defence of the Enlightenment and the 'project of modernity'. Though emerging as the most prominent descendant of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, he significantly reversed the analysis of the Enlightenment's failure offered by the previous generation in Adomo and Horkheimer's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' which saw fascism as the logical consequence of the development of Enlightenment reason. Beginning with a speech delivered in 1980 while accepting the Adorno Prize entitled 'Die Moderne—ein unvollendetes Projekt* (subsequently published as 'Modernity versus Postmodernity'),4 Habermas followed with a series of lectures published as a collection with the title 'The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity'. This collection of lectures, of which the first four were originally delivered in March 1983 at the College de France in Paris, were aimed in particular at French poststructuralist thought. As Habermas says in the Preface: 'The challenge from the neostructuralist critique of reason defines the perspective from which I seek to reconstruct here, step by step, the philosophical discourse of modernity.'5 Habermas argues that the various theories of postmoder-nity had their ideological origins in a venerated tradition of irra-tionalist counter-Enlightenment coming down to its contemporary conservative equivalents; Nietzsche and Heidegger were the forefathers of this tradition and fascism was one of its outgrowths.