For Jürgen Habermas, “Europe” has long been an expression of hope. The German philosopher of the century, born in 1929, considers himself to be one of the “sons of a barbaric nationalism,” as he said in a speech in 1998. This German fate, which he shares with millions and millions, not only of his generation, has public intellectual characterized in such a way that “with all his interventions he responded to the specific historical situation that was given by the afterlife of National Socialism in Germany”. This is what Philipp Felsch writes in his biographical study “The Philosopher”, published in 2024.