Düsseldorf

A Rhineland commercial city where Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929, three years before Hitler rose to power: a timing that shaped a life spent arguing that reason, not force, is the only legitimate ground for authority.

Dusseldorf is a Rhineland commercial city, and Habermas grew up just outside it in Gummersbach, where his father ran the chamber of commerce. He was born with a cleft palate and had operations as a small child, and has said that not being easily understood shaped his interest in what communication requires. He was fifteen when the war ended and the trials made public what the adults around him had accommodated. His life's argument, that legitimacy rests on reasons people can accept, starts there.