Jürgen Habermas remains an indispensable guide to the unfinished project of democratic consciousness and enlightenment.

Not far from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate lies the Holocaust Memorial, a vast grid of nearly 3,000 concrete blocks that span a field of 19,000 square meters and vary in height. Some rise only to the knees; others loom above the head as one descends the sloping plain to its center. The memorial was built only after a protracted debate as to whether such a sobering reminder of the darkest chapter in Germany’s past should stand at the heart of the nation’s newly refounded capital.