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216-644: The position taken by conservative intellectuals, most prominently Ernst Nolte , was that the Holocaust was not unique and therefore Germans should not bear any special burden of guilt for the " Final Solution to the Jewish Question ". Nolte argued that there was no moral difference between the crimes of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany, and that the Nazis acted as they did out of fear of what

432-620: A Hegelian dialectic , Nolte argued that the Action Française was the thesis, Italian Fascism was the antithesis, and German National Socialism the synthesis of the two earlier fascist movements. Nolte argued that fascism functioned at three levels, namely in the world of politics as a form of opposition to Marxism , at the sociological level in opposition to bourgeois values, and in the "metapolitical" world as "resistance to transcendence" ("transcendence" in German can be translated as

648-495: A revanchist France and an aggressive Russia , and as the "country in the middle" - could not afford the luxury of democracy. He regards Imperial Germany as more democratic and less "Bonapartist" than historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler have claimed, and that these democratic tendencies came to the fore during the Revolution of 1918–1919 . In Stürmer's view, it was too much democracy rather than too little that led to

864-525: A social historical approach with the emphasis on society was a better way of understanding the German past. In his 1989 book about the Historikerstreit , In Hitler's Shadow , Evans stated that he believed that the exchanges during the Historikerstreit had destroyed Stürmer's reputation as a serious historian. Much of Stürmer's work since the Historikerstreit has been concerned with creating

1080-525: A "...kind of NATO philosophy colored with German nationalism ". In response to Habermas’s essay, Stürmer in a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on August 16, 1986, wrote that Habermas was confusing the “national question” with the “German question”, and argued that the German predicament was due to Germany’s geographical situation in the heart of Europe. He denied seeking to “endow” history with

1296-592: A "United States of Europe". The British historian Richard J. Evans accused Nolte of engaging in a geopolitical fantasy. These views ignited a firestorm of controversy. Most historians in West Germany and virtually all historians outside Germany condemned Nolte's interpretation as factually incorrect, and as coming dangerously close to justifying the Holocaust. Many historians, such as Steven T. Katz , claimed that Nolte's “Age of Genocide” concept “trivialized”

1512-413: A "higher meaning" to create the proper national consciousness in the individual, who otherwise would lack this national consciousness. Habermas accused Stürmer on marching to a " geopolitical drumbeat" with his depiction of German history determined by geographical factors requiring authoritarian government. He wrote Stürmer was trying to create a "vicarious religion" in German history intended to serve as

1728-427: A "higher meaning", accusing Habermas of seeking to do that. Stürmer charged that Habermas had created an "indictment that even fabricates its own sources", and ended his letter with the remark about Habermas "It's a shame about this man who once had something to say". Replying to Stürmer, Habermas in his "Note" of February 23, 1987, accused Stürmer of having the " chutzpah " to deny his own views when he wrote that he

1944-452: A "line under the German past". Nolte argued that the memory of the Nazi era was "a bugaboo, as a past that in the process of establishing itself in the present or that is suspended above the present like an executioner's sword". Nolte complained that excessive present-day interest in the Nazi period had the effect of drawing "attention away from the pressing questions of the present—for example,

2160-404: A "metapolitical" force comprising two types of change. The first type, "practical transcendence", manifesting in material progress, technological change, political equality, and social advancement, comprises the process by which humanity liberates itself from traditional, hierarchical societies in favor of societies where all men and women are equal. The second type is "theoretical transcendence",

2376-439: A "permanent status of privilege". Nolte argued that Germans had an unhealthy obsession with guilt for Nazi crimes, and called for an end to this "obsession". Nolte's opinion was that there was no moral difference between German self-guilt over the Holocaust, and Nazi claims of Jewish collective guilt for all the world's problems. He called for an end to the maintaining of the memory of the Nazi past as fresh and current, and suggested

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2592-556: A Nazi, and that the reasons for Habermas's attack on him were to help the SPD in the election. Stürmer charged that Habermas was guilty of misquotation, and of making confusing statements such as his claim that he was working to create a "NATO philosophy" while seeking to bring Germany closer to the West. Many of Stürmer's critics in the Historikerstreit such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka , accused Stürmer of attempting to white-wash

2808-425: A contested discussion that continues today. Two of the more hotly debated questions were whether Nazism was in some way part of the "German national character" and how much responsibility, if any, the German people bore for the crimes of Nazism. Various non-German historians in the immediate post-war era, such as A. J. P. Taylor and Sir Lewis Namier , argued that Nazism was the culmination of German history and that

3024-474: A geopolitical fantasy. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas in an article entitled "A Kind of Damage Control: On Apologetic Tendencies In German History Writing" in the Die Zeit of 11 July 1986 strongly criticized Nolte, along with Andreas Hillgruber and Michael Stürmer , for engaging in what Habermas called “apologetic” history writing in regards to the Nazi era, and for seeking to “close Germany's opening to

3240-562: A hostile biography of Gustav Noske . During the late 1980s, Stürmer played a prominent role in the Historikerstreit . Left-wing historians criticized him for an essay he wrote entitled "Land Without History" published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on April 25, 1986, in which he had claimed that Germans lacked a history to be proud of, and called for a positive evaluation of German history as

3456-707: A key role in limiting the options of German governments; and that given the Cold War , the ideas of neutrality for the Federal Republic or reunification with East Germany were not realistic. Stürmer is arguably best known for his advocacy of a geographical interpretation of German history . In a geographical variant of the Sonderweg theory, he has argued that what he regards as Germany's precarious geographical situation in Central Europe has played

3672-439: A major role in campaigning for the defeat of the SPD government in the 1974 elections. Starting in the early 1980s Stürmer became a well-known figure in the Federal Republic, with frequent contributions to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, his editorship of a number of popular book series entitled "The Germans and their Nation" and holding a series of lectures for the general public. Stürmer argues that "the future

3888-488: A meaning that would allow for a positive national identity. At the colloquia, Stürmer stated: "We cannot live by making our past...into a permanent source of endless guilt feelings". At the same gathering, he spoke of "the deadly idiocies of the victors of 1918", which led to a loss of a German national identity, and to the collapse of the Weimar Republic as Germans, confronted with the crises of modernity without

4104-487: A memorial wreath honoring those SS men who died fighting for Hitler. Kohl insisted that if Reagan snubbed the Bitburg ceremony that it would be the end of his chancellorship, saying the majority of Germans would find it offensive. Reagan, arguing that placing a memorial wreath at Bitburg was no different from doing so at Auschwitz, stated that Waffen-SS men who died fighting for Hitler were just as much victims of Hitler as

4320-466: A militant article by Ernst Nolte. It was published, by the way, under a hypocritical pretext with the heading “the talk that could not be delivered”. (I say this with knowledge of the exchange of letters between the presumably disinvited Nolte and the organizers of the conference). When the Nolte article was published Stürmer also expressed solidarity. In it Nolte reduces the singularity of the annihilation of

4536-512: A moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge genocide. In Habermas's opinion, since Cambodia was a backward, Third World agrarian state and Germany a modern, First World industrial state, there was no comparison between the two genocides. Habermas then linked what he called the revisionism of Nolte, Hillgruber and Stürmer with the planned German Historical Museum in Berlin and

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4752-415: A new way of viewing the Nazi past that would allow Germans to be free of the "past that will not pass". In his feuilleton , Nolte offered a new way of understanding German history which sought to break free of the "past that will not pass", by contending that Nazi crimes were only the consequence of a defensive reaction against Soviet crimes. In Nolte's view, National Socialism had only arisen in response to

4968-752: A normal nation again", saying "German history cannot be presented as an endless chain of mistakes and crimes", and that Germans should be proud to be German. Strauss's reference to the Germans "kneeling" in his "walk tall" speech was to the Kniefall von Warschau when in 1970 the West German chancellor Willy Brandt had knelt before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto, saying as a German he felt ashamed of what had happened. Strauss's "walk tall" speech, with its implicit criticism of Brandt kneeling in guilt before

5184-449: A place for Hitler ideas as a cruder and more recent expression of this schema. Maurras' and Hitler's real enemy was seen to be ‘freedom towards the infinite’ which, intrinsic in the individual and a reality in evolution, threatens to destroy the familiar and beloved. From all this it begins to be apparent what is meant by ‘transcendence’. In regard to the Holocaust , Nolte contended that because Adolf Hitler identified Jews with modernity,

5400-532: A positive national identity, opted for the Nazi solution. At the same time he complained that the Allies had made the same mistake after 1945 as they had in 1918, laying a burden of guilt on Germans that prevented them from having positive feelings about their past. He complained that, "as Stalin's men sat in judgment in Nuremberg" proved, that what he regards as the self-destructive German obsession with Nazi guilt

5616-414: A positive view of the German past, and what was needed was a focus on the broad sweep of German history as opposed to the 12 years of Nazi Germany as a way of creating a national identity that all Germans could take pride in. He wrote that the "loss of orientation" caused by the absence of a German national identity led to a "search for identity". In his opinion this search was crucial because West Germany

5832-772: A public letter published on 20 April 1985 and written to a group of 53 U.S. senators opposed to the Bitburg service, stated for Reagan to not attend the Bitburg service would be an insult both to himself and to his brother who had been killed fighting the Red Army in 1945. Dregger stated that he was proud to have served in the Wehrmacht and to have fought the Red Army in Silesia in 1945, insisting he and his brother had fought in World War II in an effort to save Europe from Communism. Finally, Dregger linked Nazi Germany's war against

6048-586: A public letter to Reagan saying: "That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS". After Wiesel's letter, which helped to crystallize opposition in the United States to the Bitburg service, Reagan and Kohl very reluctantly agreed to visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to honor the memory of who died there, though both Reagan and Kohl went out their way to insist

6264-478: A review which appeared in the Historische Zeitschrift journal on 2 April 1986 Klaus Hildebrand called Nolte's essay "Between Myth and Revisionism" "trailblazing". In the same review Hildebrand argued Nolte had in a praiseworthy way sought: "to incorporate in historicizing fashion that central element for the history of National Socialism and of the "Third Reich" of the annihilatory capacity of

6480-485: A son, Georg Nolte , now a professor of international law at Humboldt University of Berlin . Nolte came to notice with his 1963 book Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche ( Fascism in Its Epoch ; translated into English in 1965 as The Three Faces of Fascism ), in which he argued that fascism arose as a form of resistance to and a reaction against modernity . Nolte's basic hypothesis and methodology were deeply rooted in

6696-517: A speech before the Frankfurt Römerberg Conversations (an annual gathering of intellectuals), but he had claimed that the organizers of the event withdrew their invitation. In response, an editor and co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Joachim Fest , allowed Nolte to have his speech printed as a feuilleton in his newspaper. One of Nolte's leading critics, British historian Richard J. Evans , claims that

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6912-514: A speech in Bonn which was an "implicit rebuke" to the Bitburg ceremony where he stated the Jews exterminated in the Holocaust were much more victims of Hitler than those Germans who died fighting for Hitler. In the same speech, Weizsäcker also stated the memory of the Nazi past could not be "normalized" and the memory of the Nazi era would always be a source of shame for Germans. The contrasting reactions to

7128-402: A stable, peaceful power, as it was under Bismarck, on the basis of an authoritarian political system allied to a strong and unified national consciousness. If the logic of geopolitics holds good, then the same must be true today. Stürmer argues repeatedly that too much pluralism of values and interests, unchecked by a unifying national consensus, destabilized Wilhelmine Germany and helped overthrow

7344-471: A tape-recorded record at the Colloquia, and not from the edited version provided by Stürmer Jürgen Habermas began his article "A Kind of Settlement of Damages" in the Die Zeit newspaper on July 11, 1986, with an attack on Stürmer. He took Stürmer to task for his statement that history served the purpose of integrating the individual into the wider community, and as such history had the need to provide

7560-464: A voluminous literature of the early 1920s: mass deportations and shootings, torture, death camps, extermination of entire groups using strictly objective selection criteria, and public demands for the annihilation of millions of guiltless people who were thought to be "enemies". It is probable that many of these reports were exaggerated. It is certain that the “ White Terror ” also committed terrible deeds, even though its program contained no analogy to

7776-478: A way of building national pride. He argued that Germans were suffering from a "loss of orientation" caused by the lack of a positive view of their history. In his view, the fall of the Weimar Republic was caused by "loss of orientation" due to the secularization of a previously religious country. Stürmer argued that West Germany had an important role in the world to play, could not play that role because

7992-517: A wreath to honor all the Germans buried at Bitburg who died fighting for Hitler, including the SS men, and his initial refusal to visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp under the grounds that the SS men buried at Bitburg were just as much victims of Hitler as the Jews murdered by the SS and that "They [the Germans] just have a guilt feeling that's been imposed on them and I just think it's unnecessary". The ceremony at Bitburg and Reagan's remarks about

8208-659: Is one that Hillguber removes from the technical competence of the overburdened historian and blithely pushes off into the dimension of the generally human". Habermas called Nolte the "officious-conservative narrator" who presented a version of history in which the "annihilation of the Jews appears as a regrettable, but perfectly understandable result". Habermas criticized Nolte for claiming that Chaim Weizmann declared war on Germany in 1939 which "was supposed to justify Hitler in treating German Jews as prisoners of war-and then in deporting them". Habermas wrote: “The culture section of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 6, 1986 included

8424-496: Is probable that many of these reports were exaggerated. It is certain that the “ White Terror ” also committed terrible deeds, even though its program contained no analogy to the “extermination of the bourgeoisie”. Nonetheless, the following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be

8640-466: Is the greatest intellectual achievement of our postwar period; my generation should be especially proud of this. This event cannot and should not be stabilized by a kind of NATO philosophy colored with German nationalism. The opening of the Federal Republic has been achieved precisely by overcoming the ideology of Central Europe that our revisionists are trying to warm up for us with their geopolitical drumbeat about `"the old geographically central position of

8856-450: Is won by those who coin concepts and interpret the past". In a series of his essays published in book form in 1986 as Dissonanzen des Fortschritts ( Dissonances of Progress ), he claimed that democracy in West Germany cannot be taken for granted; that though Germany does have a democratic past, the present system of the Federal Republic developed in response to past totalitarian experiences of both left and right; that geography has played

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9072-613: The Die Zeit newspaper on 12 September 1986, argued that Nolte's theory was ahistorical on the grounds that Hitler held the Soviet Union in contempt and could not have felt threatened as Nolte claimed. Jäckel later described Nolte's methods as a "game of confusion", comprising dressing hypotheses up as questions and then attacking critics demanding evidence for his assertions as seeking to block one from asking questions. The philosopher Helmut Fleischer, in an essay first published in

9288-489: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 31 July 1986, he went on to praise Nolte for daring to open up new questions for research. Nolte, for his part, started to write a series of letters to newspapers such as Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung attacking his critics; for example, in a letter to Die Zeit on 1 August 1986, Nolte complained that his critic Jürgen Habermas

9504-506: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Joachim Fest , allowed Nolte to have his speech printed as a feuilleton in his newspaper. One of Nolte's leading critics, British historian Richard J. Evans , claims that the organizers of the Römerberg Conversations did not withdraw their invitation, and that Nolte had just refused to attend. Nolte began his feuilleton by remarking that it was necessary in his opinion to draw

9720-471: The Nürnberger Zeitung newspaper on 20 September 1986, defended Nolte against Habermas on the grounds that Nolte was only seeking to place the Holocaust into a wider political context of the time. Fleischer accused Habermas of seeking to impose on Germans a left-wing moral understanding of the Nazi period and of creating a "moral" Sondergericht (Special Court). Fleischer argued that Nolte

9936-415: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . His feuilleton was a distillation of ideas he had first introduced in lectures delivered in 1976 and in 1980. Earlier in 1986, Nolte had planned to deliver a speech before the Frankfurt Römerberg Conversations (an annual gathering of intellectuals), but he had claimed that the organizers of the event withdrew their invitation. In response, an editor and co-publisher of

10152-604: The Annales School had made geography the centre of their studies of French and European history while at the same time promoting a sense of French identity that gave the French a history to be proud of. Stürmer went on to argue that the German people had not had a really positive view of their past since the end of the Holy Roman Empire, and this lack of a German identity to be proud of was responsible for all of

10368-473: The Historikerstreit ("Historians' Dispute") on 6 June 1986 with an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht mehr gehalten werden konnte (" The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered ") . His feuilleton was a distillation of ideas he had first introduced in lectures delivered in 1976 and in 1980. Earlier in 1986, Nolte had planned to deliver

10584-657: The Institute for Advanced Study . Also, he is on the advisory board of OMFIF where he regularly participates in various meetings regarding the financial and monetary system. In the 1980s Stürmer worked as an advisor and speech-writer to the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl . As of 2013 Stürmer works as chief correspondent for the newspaper Die Welt , published by the Axel Springer AG publishing group. Stürmer specializes in

10800-640: The Vietnam War , the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia , and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In particular, Nolte argued that the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945–46 was "to be categorized...under the concept of genocide". As part of this argument, Nolte cited the 1979 book of the American historian Alfred-Maurice de Zayas , Die Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle , which argues that

11016-553: The Wehrmacht held out, the Holocaust continued, but that Hillgruber's approach which emphasized the war on the Eastern Front from the viewpoint of the ordinary German soldier and the "desperate civilian population" serves to sever the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" from history. Habermas charged that Hillgruber had much sympathy with the German soldiers who found a "picture of horror of raped and murdered women and children" at Nemmersdorf, but his way of "identifying" with

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11232-459: The Wehrmacht meant the Holocaust went unmentioned. Habermas wrote in the second part of his essay, Hillgruber who previously insisted on a "bird's eye" view of the Eastern Front from the viewpoint of the ordinary German soldier now used the perspective of a historian to argue the Allies were always planning on destroying Germany and it was wrong for the Allies to impose the Oder-Neisse line as

11448-520: The Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in 1944–45, giving a lengthy account of Red Army war crimes against German civilians. Hillgruber argued that the Wehrmacht in 1944-1945 was fighting "for a centuries-old area of German settlement, for the home of millions of Germans who lived in a core of the German Reich - namely in eastern Prussia, in the provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Silesia, East Brandenburg and Pomerania". Hillgruber wrote: "If

11664-607: The ne plus ultra of evil. Nolte wrote that after the American Civil War , the defeated South was cast as the symbol of total evil by the victorious North, but later “revisionism” became the dominant historical interpretation against the “negative myth” of the South, which led to a more balanced history of the Civil War with a greater understanding of the “motives and way of life of the defeated Southern states”, and led to

11880-587: The "class genocide" and "Asiatic barbarism" of the Bolsheviks . Nolte cited as example the early Nazi Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter , who during World War I had been the German consul in Erzerum , Turkey , where he was appalled by the genocide of the Armenians . In Nolte's view, the fact that Scheubner-Richter later became a Nazi shows that something must have changed his values, and in Nolte's opinion it

12096-472: The "lost history" that would inspire national pride in being German. Stürmer wrote that Germany's allies were becoming concerned with the German lack of pride in their history, stating: "the Federal Republic has political and economic responsibility in the world. It is the centerpiece of European defense within the Atlantic system...It is also becoming evident that the technocratic underestimation of history by

12312-462: The "metapolitical" idea of partition caused by rival ideologies. In Nolte's view, the division of Germany made that nation the world's central battlefield between Soviet communism and American democracy, both of which were rival streams of the "transcendence" that had vanquished Nazi Germany, the ultimate enemy of "transcendence". Nolte called the Cold War the ideological and political conflict for

12528-593: The "negative myth" of Nazi Germany is, in Nolte's opinion, an examination of the impact of the Russian Revolution on Germany. Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917 , which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945. To Nolte, fascism, Communism's twin, arose as a desperate response by the threatened middle classes of Europe to what Nolte has often called

12744-430: The "past that would not pass", it was controversial for Reagan to visit Bitburg, but it was not controversial for Adenauer to visit Arlington. Nolte cited the Bitburg controversy as an example of the power exerted by historical memory of the Nazi past. Nolte concluded that there was excessive contemporary interest in the Holocaust because it served the concerns of those descended from the victims of Nazism, and placed them in

12960-794: The "singularity" of the Holocaust—and his work as an advisor to Chancellor Kohl should cause "concern" among historians. On one side were the philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte , the journalist Joachim Fest , and the historians Andreas Hillgruber , Klaus Hildebrand , Rainer Zitelmann , Hagen Schulze , and Michael Stürmer . Opposing them were the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the historians Hans-Ulrich Wehler , Jürgen Kocka , Hans Mommsen , Martin Broszat , Heinrich August Winkler , Eberhard Jäckel , and Wolfgang Mommsen . Karl Dietrich Bracher and Richard Löwenthal argued for some compromise; they said that comparing different totalitarian systems

13176-416: The "spirit of modernity"). Nolte defined the relationship between fascism and Marxism as such: Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy. Nolte defined "transcendence" as

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13392-523: The 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe by attending a memorial service at a military cemetery in Bitburg. Reagan accepted the offer, unaware that members of the Waffen-SS were buried in the Bitburg cemetery, and when this was reported in early 1985, many Americans urged Reagan to cancel the planned visit to Bitburg under the grounds it was offensive for president of the United States to lay

13608-447: The Allies were just as guilty of war crimes as the Germans as the "happy evidence of the will to objectivity on the part of a foreigner" In Nolte's opinion, Hitler was a "European citizen" who fought in defence of the values of the West against "Asiatic" Bolshevism, but due to his "total egocentrism" waged this struggle with unnecessary violence and brutality Since in Nolte's view, the Shoah

13824-411: The American historian Jerry Muller argued that Wehler and Habermas were guilty of misquoting Stürmer, and of unjustly linking him with Ernst Nolte as a sort of guilt by association argument. In response to his critics, Stürmer in an essay entitled "How Much History Weights" published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 26, 1986, wrote that France was a major power in the world because

14040-527: The Atlanticist Stürmer of seeking to revive the original concept of the Sonderweg , that of Germany as a great Central European power that was neither of the West nor of the East. That aside, Meier felt that Stürmer’s claim that the future belonged to those who controlled the past, and that it was the duty of German historians to ensure the right sort of future by writing the right sort of history

14256-399: The Bitburg controversy and to Weizsäcker's speech brought to the fore the question of whether Germans should still feel shame at the Nazi past forty years later or not. On one side, there were those who insist that West Germany was a "normal" country that should have a "normal" history that would inspire national pride in being German, and on the other there were those who insisted the memory of

14472-593: The Bolshevik victory in the Russian Revolution". In Nolte's view, Nazi anti-communism was "understandable and up to a certain point, justified". For Nolte, the "racial genocide" as he calls the Holocaust was a "punishment and preventive measure" on the part of the Germans for the "class genocide" of the Bolsheviks. American historian Peter Baldwin noted parallels between Nolte's views and those of American Marxist historian Arno J. Mayer :. Both Nolte and Mayer perceive

14688-602: The Catholic Church, which angered him. In 1941, Nolte was excused from military service because of a deformed hand, and he studied Philosophy , Philology and Greek at the Universities of Münster , Berlin , and Freiburg . At Freiburg, Nolte was a student of Martin Heidegger , whom he acknowledges as a major influence. From 1944 onwards, Nolte was a close friend of the Heidegger family, and when in 1945

14904-572: The Cold War ), Nolte wrote there was "a worldwide reproach that the United States was after all putting into practice in Vietnam, nothing less than its basically crueler version of Auschwitz". The books Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche , Deutschland und der kalte Krieg , and Marxismus und industrielle Revolution ( Marxism and the Industrial Revolution ) formed a trilogy in which Nolte seeks to explain what he considered to be

15120-494: The Cold War. At the 1986 Römerberg Colloquia (a gathering of intellectuals held annually in Frankfurt ), Stürmer argued that Germans had a destructive "obsession with their guilt", which he complained led to a lack of a positive sense of German national identity. Likewise, he argued that the legacy of 1960s radicalism was an over-emphasis on the Nazi period in German history. He called for Sinnstiftung , to give German history

15336-760: The Dialectic in German Idealism and Marx ). Subsequently, Nolte began studies in Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history). He published his Habilitationsschrift awarded at the University of Cologne , Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche , as a book in 1963. Between 1965 and 1973, Nolte worked as a professor at the University of Marburg , and from 1973 to 1991 at the Free University of Berlin . Nolte married Annedore Mortier and they had

15552-517: The Eastern Front in 1944–45 and mourned the end of "the German east". Hillgruber had been born and grew up in the town of Angerburg (modern Węgorzewo, Poland) in what was then East Prussia and often wrote nostalgically about his lost Heimat . Hillgruber expressed much anger in Zweierlei Untergang about the Oder-Neisse line, the expulsions of the Germans from Eastern Europe and the partitioning of Germany, all of which he used to argue that

15768-750: The European Left saw social problems as being caused by “diseased” social groups, and sought “annihilation therapy” as the solution, thus leading naturally to the Red Terror and the Yezhovshchina in the Soviet Union. Nolte suggests that the Right mirrored the Left, with “annihilation therapy” advocated by such figures as John Robison , Augustin Barruel , and Joseph de Maistre ; Malthusianism and

15984-465: The French had a history to be proud of, and claimed that West Germany could only play the same role in the world if only they had the same national consensus about pride in their history as did the French. As the example of the sort of history that he wanted to see written in Germany, Stürmer used Fernand Braudel 's The Identity of France volumes. Stürmer wrote that Braudel and the other historians of

16200-501: The German "philosophy of history" tradition, a form of intellectual history which seeks to discover the "metapolitical dimension" of history. The "metapolitical dimension" is considered to be the history of grand ideas functioning as profound spiritual powers, which infuse all levels of society with their force. In Nolte's opinion, only those with training in philosophy can discover the "metapolitical dimension", and those who use normal historical methods miss this dimension of time. Using

16416-548: The German Reich and the End of European Jewry ), was published in Berlin. The book consisted of two essays by Hillgruber, in which he argued the end of Germany as a great power in 1945 and the Holocaust were morally equivalent tragedies. Much of the controversy generated by Zweierlei Untergang was due to the essay Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45 ( The Collapse in the East 1944/45 ) in which Hillgruber presented an account of

16632-487: The German past". Along the same lines, Evans criticized Stürmer for his emphasis on the modernity and totalitarianism of National Socialism, the role of Hitler, and the discontinuities between the Imperial, Weimar and Nazi periods. In Evans's view, the exact opposite was the case with National Socialism as a badly disorganized, anti-modern movement with deep roots in the German past, and the role of Hitler much smaller than

16848-416: The German side in the Eastern Front had waged an "honorable" fight to protect German civilians from the Red Army. Dregger called Hitler and his regime a small criminal clique that had nothing to do with the honorable and noble war waged by the Wehrmacht to "defend" Germany from the Red Army, arguing that the battles and campaigns to protect German civilians from the Red Army was an episode in Germany worthy of

17064-504: The Germans in Europe" (Stürmer) and "the reconstruction of the destroyed European Center" (Hillgruber). The only patriotism that will not estrange us from the West is a constitutional patriotism." Ernst Nolte Defunct Defunct Ernst Nolte (11 January 1923 – 18 August 2016) was a German historian and philosopher . Nolte's major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism (cf. Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism ). Originally trained in philosophy, he

17280-422: The Holocaust by reducing it to just one of many 20th century genocides. A common line of criticism was that Nazi crimes, above all the Holocaust, were singular and unique in their nature, and should not be loosely analogized to the crimes of others. Some historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler were most forceful in arguing that the sufferings of the " kulaks " deported during the Soviet " dekulakization " campaign of

17496-435: The Holocaust that many see as anti-Semitic]...The Nazi crimes lose their singularity in that they are at least made comprehensible as an answer to the (still extant) Bolshevist threats of annihilation. The magnitude of Auschwitz shrinks to the format of technical innovation and is explained on the basis of the “Asiatic” threat from an enemy that still stands at our door”. In particular, Habermas took Nolte to task for suggesting

17712-537: The Holocaust was an act of “Asiatic barbarism” forced on the Germans by the fear of what Joseph Stalin , whom Nolte believed to have significant Jewish support, might do to them. Nolte contends that the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack provides a parallel to the German "internment" of the Jewish population of Europe in concentration camps , in light of what Nolte alleges

17928-540: The Holocaust with similar mass killings in Pol Pot 's Cambodia , Joseph Stalin 's Soviet Union , and Idi Amin 's Uganda were invalid because of the backward nature of those societies. Michael St%C3%BCrmer Defunct Defunct Michael Stürmer (born September 29, 1938) is a conservative German historian best known for his role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, for his geographical interpretation of German history and for an admiring 2008 biography of

18144-405: The Holocaust. Hillgruber had not supported Nolte, but the controversy over Zweierlei Untergang became linked with Nolte's views when Habermas and Wehler characterized both men as conservatives trying to minimize Nazi crimes. The debate centered on four questions: In 1980, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper published a feuilleton "Between Myth and Revisionism: The Third Reich In

18360-452: The House of History in Bonn, which he criticized for a nationalistic view of German history. Habermas accused Stürmer of subordinating history to politics and of attempting to strangle the emergence of individualistic society with his demand for "historical consciousness as vicarious religion". Habermas wrote: "The unconditional opening of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West

18576-414: The Jews as prisoners of war and intern them. Other objections aside, I cannot distinguish between the insinuation that world Jewry is a subject of international law and the usual anti-Semitic projections. And if it had at least stopped with deportation. All this does not stop Klaus Hildebrand in the Historische Zeitschrift from commending Nolte's 'pioneering essay', because it 'attempts to project exactly

18792-539: The Jews exterminated in the death camps. This clumsy attempt at public relations damage control only increased the controversy, with both veterans' groups and Jewish groups in the United States being adamantly opposed to Reagan attending the Bitburg ceremony. Reagan also refused to visit a concentration camp to balance out the visit to the Bitburg cemetery by saying the Germans "have a guilt feeling that's been imposed on them, and I just think it's unnecessary". The Franco-Romanian Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel issued

19008-448: The Jews needed to be "tactful" in dealing with Germans and should not be bringing up the Holocaust as that would insult German sensitivities. The minister-president of Bavaria, Franz Josef Strauss, complained that the Germans had spent too long "on their knees" and needed to learn how to "walk tall again", arguing that 40 years of guilt had been quite enough. As part of his "walk tall" speech, Strauss argued that West Germany needed to "become

19224-604: The Jews to “the technical process of gassing”. He supports his thesis about the Gulag Archipelago is “primary” to Auschwitz with the rather abstruse example of the Russian Civil War. The author gets little more from the film Shoah by Lanzmann than the idea that “the SS troops in the concentration camps might themselves have been victims of a sort and that among the Polish victims of National Socialism there

19440-488: The Nazi era could not be "normalized" and be a source of national pride. The debate was not entirely along left-right lines as Weizsäcker was a Second World War veteran and a conservative. The intense controversy caused by the Bitburg memorial service with its suggestion that the Nazi era was a "normal" period led those who were in favor of "normalization" to redouble their efforts. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper published an opinion piece in early 1986 saying that

19656-520: The Nazi past, a charge Stürmer vehemently rejected. In response to Stürmer's geographical theories about how Germany's "land in the middle" status had forced authoritarianism on the Germans, Kocka argued in an essay entitled "Hitler Should Not Be Repressed by Stalin and Pol Pot" published in the Frankfurter Rundschau on September 23, 1986, that “Geography is not destiny” Kocka wrote that both Switzerland and Poland were also "lands in

19872-631: The Nazis) and Schreckbild (the terrible model for the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis). Nolte labeled the Holocaust an " überschießende Reaktion " (overshooting reaction) to Bolshevik crimes, and to alleged Jewish actions in support of Germany's enemies. In Nolte's opinion, the essence of National Socialism was anti-Communism , and anti-Semitism was only a subordinate element to anti-Bolshevism in Nazi ideology. Nolte argued that because "the mighty shadow of events in Russia fell most powerfully" on Germany, that

20088-639: The Perspective of the 1980s", where Nolte sketched out many of the same ideas that later appeared in his 1986 essay "The Past That Will Not Go Away". The essay "Between Myth and Revisionism" was also published in English in the 1985 book Aspects of the Third Reich by the Anglo-German historian H. W. Koch, where it was billed incorrectly as an essay written for Aspects of the Third Reich . It

20304-538: The Prussian strategy of utter destruction of one's enemies during the Napoleonic Wars also suggest sources and influences for National Socialism. Ultimately, in Nolte's view, the Holocaust was just a “copy” of Communist “annihilation therapy”, albeit one that was more terrible and sickening than the “original”. In 1984, the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl invited the U.S. President Ronald Reagan to mark

20520-649: The Russian politician Vladimir Putin . Born in Kassel , Germany, Stürmer received his education in history, philosophy and languages at the University of Marburg , at the Free University of Berlin and at the London School of Economics . From 1973 to 2003 he held a professorship at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and at various times has served as a guest lecturer at the Sorbonne , Harvard University , and

20736-517: The Siemens-Stiftung in 1980, and excerpts from his speech were published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung without attracting controversy. In his essay, Nolte argued that if the PLO were to destroy Israel, then the subsequent history written in the new Palestinian state would portray the former Israeli state in the blackest of colors with no references to any of the positive features of

20952-430: The Soviet Union might do to Germany. Others argued that the memory of the Nazi era could not be "normalized" and be a source of national pride, and that it echoed Nazi propaganda . Other central questions and topics debated within the dispute included the singularity of the Holocaust, the functionalist and intentionalist models of the Holocaust, methodological approaches to historiography, the political utility of history,

21168-438: The Soviet Union to the Cold War, arguing that all of the men buried in Bitburg, whatever they were in the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS , had died fighting nobly and honorably against the Soviet Union, which was just as much the enemy in 1985 as it had been in 1945. Bringing up a point later made by Andreas Hillgruber , Dregger emphasized Red Army atrocities against German civilians in 1945, insisting he and everybody else served on

21384-493: The Soviets to be victims of German aggression. Operation Barbarossa, in Nolte's thinking, was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler by an alleged impending Soviet attack. Nolte wrote that Hitler's view of the Russian people as barbarians was an "exaggeration of an insight which was basically right in its essence" and that Hitler "understood the invasion of the Soviet Union as a preventive war" as the Soviet desire to bring Communism to

21600-482: The United States in 1953, if he had failed to visit Arlington National Cemetery a storm of controversy would have ensued. Nolte argued that since some of the men buried at Arlington had in his view "participated in terror attacks on the German civilian population", there was no moral difference between Reagan visiting the Bitburg cemetery, with its graves of Waffen SS dead, and Adenauer visiting Arlington with its graves of American airmen. Nolte complained that because of

21816-462: The Vietnam War and SALT. The rationale is evidently that Germany can be interpreted only in the light of the world conflict, but the result verges on a centrifugal, coffee-table narrative. Nolte has little regard for specific historical context in his treatment of the history of ideas, opting to seek what Carl Schmitt labeled the abstract "final" or "ultimate" ends of ideas, which for Nolte are

22032-448: The Weimar Republic, once it got into economic difficulties. Thus for today he seeks nothing less than the creation of a substitute religion, a nationalist faith held by all, which will lend calculability to West Germany's foreign policy by providing its citizens with a new sense of identity held together by patriotism, and resting on a unitary, undisputed, and positive consciousness of German history, unsullied by negative guilt feelings about

22248-613: The West” that in Habermas's view has existed since 1945. In particular, Habermas took Nolte to task for suggesting a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge genocide . In Habermas's opinion, since Cambodia was a backward, Third World agrarian state and Germany a modern, industrial state, there was no comparison between the two genocides. In response to Habermas's essay, Klaus Hildebrand came to Nolte's defence. In an essay entitled "The Age of Tyrants", first published in

22464-456: The West” that in Habermas's view has existed since 1945. Habermas criticized Stürmer for his essay "History in a land without history" as engaging in "damage control" with German history and wrote that Hillgruber and Nolte were putting his theories into practice. Habermas criticized Hillgruber for demanding historians "identify" with the Wehrmacht ' s last stand on the Eastern Front as being purely "selective". Habermas charged that as long as

22680-492: The actual gassing of Jews by Nazis, which Kershaw suggests is an idea which originates in neo-Nazi pamphleteering. In his 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945 , Nolte argued in the interwar period, Germany was Europe's best hope for progress. Nolte wrote that "if Europe was to succeed in establishing itself as a world power on an equal footing [with the United States and the Soviet Union], then Germany had to be

22896-729: The age of violence, terror and population displacement. Nolte claimed that this age had started with the genocide of the Armenians during World War I, and also included the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, Maoist terror in China as manifested in such events as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution , compulsory population exchanges between Greece and Turkey from 1922 to 1923, American war crimes in

23112-498: The alleged "Jewish" desire to "annihilate" Germans prior to the Holocaust. An August 1941 appeal to the world by a group of Soviet Jews seeking support against Germany was also cited by Nolte as evidence of Jewish determination to thwart the Reich . Nolte argued that the Nazis felt forced to undertake the Holocaust by Hitler's conclusion that the entire Jewish population of the world had declared war on Germany . From Nolte's point of view,

23328-421: The assessment of Gerhard Ritter and others, Nazism was a totalitarian movement that represented only the work of a small criminal clique; Germans were victims of Nazism, and the Nazi era represented a total break in German history. Starting in the 1960s, that assessment was challenged by younger German historians. Fritz Fischer argued in favor of a Sonderweg conception of German history that saw Nazism as

23544-418: The basic thrust of Nazi policies towards Jews had always aimed at genocide. Nolte wrote that: Auschwitz was contained in the principles of Nazi racist theory like the seed in the fruit. Nolte believed that, for Hitler, Jews represented "the historical process itself". Nolte argues that Hitler was "logically consistent" in seeking genocide of the Jews because Hitler detested modernity and identified Jews with

23760-408: The book Aspects of the Third Reich , first published in German as "Die negative Lebendigkeit des Dritten Reiches" ( "The Negative Vitality of the Third Reich" ) as an opinion piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 24 July 1980, but which did not attract widespread attention until 1986 when Jürgen Habermas criticized the essay in a feuilleton piece. Nolte had delivered a lecture at

23976-475: The changed mood was the ceremony at Bitburg in May 1985, where US President Ronald Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl honored the German war dead buried at Bitburg, including the SS men buried there, which was widely seen as a sign that the memory of the Nazi past had been "normalized" (i.e., that the Nazi period was "normal" and therefore Germans should not feel guilty). President Reagan justified laying

24192-418: The communal order". Habermas accused Stürmer of believing that "a pluralism of values and interests leads, when there is no longer any common ground...sooner or later to social civil war". Hans-Ulrich Wehler called Stürmer's work "a strident declaration of war against a key element of the consensus upon which the socio-political life of this second republic has rested heretofore". Stürmer's defenders such as

24408-488: The compulsory deportations." Besides for his call for historians to "identify" with the Wehrmacht , Hillgruber condemned the putsch of 20 July 1944 as irresponsible and wrong and praised those Wehrmacht officers who stayed loyal to Hitler as making the correct moral choice. Hillgruber argued that the need to protect German civilians from the Red Army should have been the overriding concern of all Wehrmacht officers, which required remaining loyal to Hitler. Nolte launched

24624-409: The confines of the everyday world, and which, as an ‘awareness of the horizon’, makes it possible for him to experience the world as a whole. Nolte cited the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961 as an example of “practical transcendence”, of how humanity was pressing forward in its technological development and rapidly acquiring powers traditionally thought to be only the province of the gods. Drawing upon

24840-474: The core of the new 'United States'". Nolte claimed if Germany had to continue to abide by Part V of the Treaty of Versailles , which had disarmed Germany, then Germany would have been destroyed by aggression from her neighbors sometime later in the 1930s, and with Germany's destruction, there would have been no hope for a "United States of Europe". The British historian Richard J. Evans accused Nolte of engaging in

25056-493: The criticism of Nolte came from historians who favored either the Sonderweg ( Special Way ) and/or intentionalist/functionalist interpretations of German history. Coming to Nolte's defence were the journalist Joachim Fest , the philosopher Helmut Fleischer, and the historians Klaus Hildebrand , Rainer Zitelmann , Hagen Schulze , Thomas Nipperdey and Imanuel Geiss . The last was unusual amongst Nolte's defenders as Geiss

25272-457: The deciding role in the course of German history, and that coping with this has left successive German rulers no other choice but to engage in authoritarian government. In Stürmer's opinion, the "belligerence" of the Reich came about through a complex interplay of Germany's location in the "middle of Europe" surrounded by enemies and of "democratic" forces in the domestic sphere. Stürmer has asserted that Germany - confronted with dangers from

25488-433: The deeds—with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists later committed had already been described in a voluminous literature of the early 1920s: mass deportations and shootings, torture, death camps, extermination of entire groups using strictly objective selection criteria, and public demands for the annihilation of millions of guiltless people who were thought to be "enemies". It

25704-410: The defunct state. In Nolte's opinion, a similar situation of history written only by the victors exists in regards to the history of Nazi Germany. Many historians, such as British historian Richard J. Evans , have asserted that, based on this statement, Nolte appears to believe that the only reason why Nazism is regarded as evil is because Germany lost World War II, with no regard for the Holocaust. In

25920-410: The disasters of German history since then. Stürmer asserted "All of our interpretations of Germany had collapsed". As a result, he claimed that at present, the German people were living in historical "rubble", and that the Federal Republic was doomed unless the Germans once again had a sense of history that provided the necessary sense of national identity and pride The classicist Christian Meier, who

26136-671: The early 1930s were in no way analogous to the suffering of the Jews deported in the early 1940s. Many were angered by Nolte's claim that "the so-called annihilation of the Jews under the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original", with many wondering why Nolte spoke of the "so-called annihilation of the Jews" in describing the Holocaust. Some of the historians who denounced Nolte's views included Hans Mommsen , Jürgen Kocka , Detlev Peukert , Martin Broszat , Hans-Ulrich Wehler , Michael Wolffsohn , Heinrich August Winkler , Wolfgang Mommsen , Karl Dietrich Bracher and Eberhard Jäckel . Much (though not all) of

26352-619: The end of the Kaiserreich as the "restless Reich " collapsed because of its internal contradictions under the pressures of World War I . In the mid-1980s Stürmer sat on a committee - together with Thomas Nipperdey and Klaus Hildebrand - in charge of vetting the publications issued by the Research Office of the West German Ministry of Defense. The committee attracted some controversy when it refused to publish

26568-409: The entire world "must be seen as mental acts of war, and one may even ask whether a completely isolated and heavily armed country did not constitute a dangerous threat to its neighbors on these grounds alone". The crux of Nolte's thesis was presented when he wrote: "It is a notable shortcoming of the literature about National Socialism that it does not know or does not want to admit to what degree all

26784-457: The essay "The Age of Tyrants: History and Politics" by Klaus Hildebrand that defended Nolte, Habermas wrote: "In his essay Ernst Nolte discusses the 'so-called' annihilation of the Jews (in H.W. Koch, ed. Aspects of the Third Reich , London, 1985). Chaim Weizmann's declaration in the beginning of September 1939 that the Jews of the world would fight on the side of Britain, 'justified' – so opined Nolte – Hitler to treat

27000-634: The excessive valuation of abstraction as a surrogate for real transactions that Heine satirized and Marx dissected. How should we cope with a study that begins its discussion of the Cold War with Herodotus and the Greeks versus the Persians? ... Instead Nolte indulges in a potted history of Cold War events as they engulfed Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe, up through the Sino-Soviet dispute,

27216-406: The fear of being labelled anti-semitic; Nolte wrote based on his viewing of the film Shoah it was clear that the SS guards of the death camps were "victims of a sort and that among the Polish victims of National Socialism there was virulent anti-Semitism". Nolte complained that excessive present-day interest in the Nazi period had the effect of drawing "attention away from the pressing questions of

27432-773: The fine balance between the peripheries and the center. In a July 1992 interview, Stürmer called his historical work a "bid to prevent Hitler remaining the final, unavoidable object of German history, or indeed its one and only starting point". In 2004 Stürmer became a founding member of the Valdai Discussion Club . Stürmer's latest book, a biography of the Russian Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin , appeared in 2008. A British reviewer praised Stürmer for his refusal to hold Putin's KGB background against him and for his willingness to accept Putin for who he was. Much of Stürmer's biography

27648-485: The first to understand that Weizmann's letter to Chamberlain was a "Jewish declaration of war" on Germany that justified the "interning" of the Jews of Europe. Nolte went on to praise Irving for putting the Holocaust "in a more comprehensive perspective" by comparing it to the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943, which Nolte views as just much of an act of genocide as the "Final Solution". The sort of revisionism needed to end

27864-426: The future structure of a united world, carried on for an indefinite period since 1917 (indeed anticipated as early as 1776) by several militant universalisms, each of which possesses at least one major state. Nolte ended Deutschland und der kalte Krieg with a call for Germans to escape their fate as the world's foremost battleground for the rival ideologies of American democracy and Soviet communism by returning to

28080-415: The general as opposed to the specific attributes of a particular period of time. In his 1974 book Deutschland und der kalte Krieg ( Germany and the Cold War ), Nolte examined the partition of Germany after 1945, not by looking at the specific history of the Cold War and Germany, but rather by examining other divided states throughout history, treating the German partition as the supreme culmination of

28296-488: The heterogeneity of goals and the multiplicity of answers to the question of the meaning of life: all of these are a constitutive part of a pluralistic, free society. The market economy is not only its economic basis, it is also a metaphor for its political existence. But conflicts must be limited: through the legal order, through the values of the constitution, through a consensus about the past, present and future. When conflicts do not remain within these boundaries, they shatter

28512-529: The historian gazes on the winter catastrophe of 1944–45, only one position is possible...he must identify himself with the concrete fate of the German population in the East and with the desperate and sacrificial exertions of the German Army of the East and the German Baltic navy, which sought to defend the population from the orgy of revenge of the Red Army, the mass rapine, the arbitrary killing, and

28728-588: The history of the German Empire (1871–1918). He began his career on the political left in the 1960s, but shifted rightward during the course of the 1970s. The turning point occurred in 1974 when the Social Democratic Party of Germany Land government of Hesse attempted to abolish history as a subject in the Hesse educational system and to replace it with "social studies". Stürmer played

28944-499: The ideology and of the regime, and to comprehend this totalitarian reality in the interrelated context of Russian and German history". The philosopher Jürgen Habermas in an article in the Die Zeit of 11 July 1986 strongly criticized Nolte, along with Andreas Hillgruber and Michael Stürmer , for engaging in what Habermas called “apologetic” history writing in regards to the Nazi era, and for seeking to “close Germany’s opening to

29160-472: The implications of the Sonderweg conception and the functionalist school; they were generally identified with the left and structuralism and were seen by the right-wingers as being derogatory toward Germany. By the mid-1980s, right-wing German historians began to think that enough time had passed since 1945 and thus it was time for the German nation to start celebrating much of its history again. A sign of

29376-469: The interwar period as one of intense ideological conflict between the forces of the Right and Left, positing World War II as the culmination of this conflict, with the Holocaust a byproduct of the German-Soviet war. Baldwin distinguished Nolte from Mayer in that Nolte considered the Soviets aggressors who essentially got what they deserved in the form of Operation Barbarossa , whereas Mayer considered

29592-417: The lack of a past to be proud of was "seriously damaging the political culture of the country" and wrote that it was "morally legitimate and politically necessary" for Germans to have a positive view of their history. In his view, what was needed was a campaign by the government, the media and historians to create a "positive view" of German history. In Stürmer's opinion, the Nazi era was a major block towards

29808-656: The leaders of the Confederacy becoming great American heroes. Nolte urged that a similar "revisionism" destroy the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany. Nolte argued that the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge genocide, the expulsion of "boat people" from Vietnam, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan meant the traditional picture of Nazi Germany as the ultimate in evil was no longer tenable, and proved

30024-419: The left, for example by Sir Ian Kershaw , centered on Nolte's focus on ideas as opposed to social and economic conditions as a motivating force for fascism, and that Nolte depended too much on fascist writings to support his thesis. Kershaw described Nolte's theory of fascism as "resistance to transcendence" as "mystical and mystifying". The American historian Fritz Stern wrote that The Three Faces of Fascism

30240-444: The logical and factual prius of the "racial murder" of National Socialism? Cannot Hitler's most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass? In addition, Nolte sees his work as the beginning of a much-needed revisionist treatment to end the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany that dominates contemporary perceptions. Nolte took

30456-456: The memory of the Nazi past should to a certain extent be exorcised with the idea to honor those who died fighting in the Waffen -SS as victims of Hitler, but instead the immense controversy caused by the Bitburg ceremony caused shown that the Nazi past could not be "normalized" as they had wished. On the same day as the Bitburg ceremony, the West German president Richard von Weizsäcker delivered

30672-512: The methods of phenomenology , Nolte subjected German Nazism , Italian Fascism , and the French Action Française movements to a comparative analysis. Nolte's conclusion was that fascism was the great anti-movement: it was anti-liberal, anti-communist , anti-capitalist , and anti-bourgeois . In Nolte's view, fascism was the rejection of everything the modern world had to offer and was an essentially negative phenomenon. In

30888-401: The middle", and yet neither country went in the same authoritarian direction as Germany. Martin Broszat accused Stürmer of attempting to create an "ersatz religion" in German history that Broszat argued was more appropriate for the pre-modern era then 1986. Hans Mommsen wrote Stürmer's attempts to create a national consensus on a version of German history that all Germans could take pride in

31104-456: The most extreme conclusions which can be drawn from an idea, representing the ultima terminus of the "metapolitical". For Nolte, ideas have a force of their own, and once a new idea has been introduced into the world, except for the total destruction of society, it cannot be ignored any more than the discovery of how to make fire or the invention of nuclear weapons can be ignored. In his 1974 book Deutschland und der kalte Krieg ( Germany and

31320-417: The most extreme reaction to the Russian Revolution took place there, thus establishing the "causal nexus" between Communism and fascism. Nolte asserted that the core of National Socialism was "neither in criminal tendencies nor in anti-Semitic obsessions as such. The essence of National Socialism [was to be found] in its relation to Marxism and especially to Communism in the form which this had taken on through

31536-503: The most important developments of the 20th century. Nolte is best known for his role in launching the Historikerstreit ("Historians' Dispute") of 1986 and 1987. On 6 June 1986 Nolte published a feuilleton opinion piece entitled " Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht mehr gehalten werden konnte " ("The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered") in

31752-505: The museum was meant to "exonerate" the German past and asserted that there was a connection between the proposed museum, the government, and the views of such historians as Michael Stürmer , Ernst Nolte , and Andreas Hillgruber . In October 1986, Hans Mommsen wrote that Stürmer's assertion that he who controls the past also controls the future, his work as a co-editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper—which had been publishing articles by Ernst Nolte and Joachim Fest denying

31968-542: The need for "revisionism" to put an end to the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany. In Nolte's view, the first efforts at revisionism of the Nazi period failed because A. J. P. Taylor 's 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War was only a part of the "anti-German literature of indictment" while David Hoggan in Der erzwugnene Krieg , by only seeking to examine why World War II broke out in 1939, "cut himself off from

32184-482: The need for Germans to forget about Nazi crimes in order to feel good about their past. Despite his editing of his essay, he refused to allow it to be published in an anthology about the Historikerstreit out of the concern it might damage his reputation as a historian. Stürmer's critic, the British historian Richard J. Evans stated that the remarks he quoted Stürmer as making at the 1986 Römerberg Colloquia came from

32400-410: The need to do away with a German "guilt feeling" about the Nazi past were widely interpreted by German conservatives as the beginning of the "normalization" of the memory of Nazi Germany. Michael Stürmer 's 1986 article "Land without History" questioned Germany's lack of positive history in which to take pride. Stürmer's position as Chancellor Kohl's advisor and speechwriter heightened the controversy. At

32616-477: The new eastern frontier of Germany, which Habermas felt to be a double standard. Habermas wrote Hillgruber had failed as a historian, stating: "Hillgruber is most deeply appalled by the high proportion of university-trained men who participated [in the Holocaust]-as if there were not a completely plausible explanation for that. In short, the phenomenon that a civilized populace let these horrible things happen

32832-550: The one Stürmer credited him with. Evans accused Stürmer of having no real interest in the collapse of Weimar, and only using the Nazi Machtergreifung as a way of making contemporary political points. Evans denounced Stürmer for writing a laudatory biography of Otto von Bismarck , which he felt marked a regression to the Great man theory of history and an excessive focus on political history . In Evans's opinion,

33048-401: The organizers of the Römerberg Conversations had not withdrawn their invitation, and that Nolte had just refused to attend. Nolte began his feuilleton by remarking that it was necessary in his opinion to draw a "line under the German past". Nolte argued that the memory of the Nazi era was "a bugaboo, as a past that in the process of establishing itself in the present or that is suspended above

33264-504: The past". Stürmer warned that with most Germans lacking pride in their history that this a destabilizing factor that nobody could predict where it would end. Stürmer felt that the left had too much power in regards to the memory of the past, complaining that the Social Democrats were still concerned 40 years after 1945 with "battling the social foundations of fascism in the Federal Republic". Stürmer wanted for historians to find

33480-545: The point of becoming a myth", which according to Hillgruber led them to seek the complete dismantlement of the Prussian-German state in World War II and blinded them to the fact that only a strong Central European state led by Prussia could have prevented the "flooding" of Central Europe by the Red Army. Hillgruber in Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45 was also concerned with the "justified" last stand of

33696-520: The policies of the Allies towards the Germans during and after World War II were just as horrific as the Holocaust. In particular, Hillgruber accused Winston Churchill and the rest of the British government of being obsessed with anti-German and anti-Prussian prejudices going back to at least 1907, and maintained it was always Britain's goal to "smash" the German Reich . Hillgruber accused the British of holding "a negative image of Prussia, exaggerated to

33912-456: The political Right and the progressive strangulation of history by the Left is seriously damaging the political culture of the country. The search for a lost past is not an abstract striving for culture and education. It is morally legitimate and politically necessary". In May 1986, a book by Andreas Hillgruber , Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums ( Two Kinds of Ruin: The Smashing of

34128-426: The potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Wasn't the ' Gulag Archipelago ' more original than Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the "racial murder" of National Socialism? Cannot Hitler's most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?" Nolte wrote

34344-463: The present like an executioner's sword". Nolte used as an example of the problem of the "Past That Will Not Go Away" that in Nazi Germany, the "mania of masculinity" was "full of provocative self-confidence", but now German men were afraid to be manly because German feminists had made National Socialism the "present enemy". In the same way, Nolte charged that Germans were being forced to live under

34560-539: The present-for example, the question of "unborn life" or the presence of genocide yesterday in Vietnam and today in Afghanistan". Nolte argued that the furor in 1985 over the visit of the American president Ronald Reagan to the Bitburg cemetery reflected in his view the unhealthy effects of an obsession with the memory of the Nazi era. Nolte suggested that, during West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer 's visit to

34776-577: The principal problem "for the coming generations...must be liberation from collectivist thinking", which Nolte claimed dominated scholarship on Nazi Germany. Nolte ended his essay with calling for a "more comprehensive debate" about the memory of Nazi Germany that would allow for "the past that will not go away" to finally go away "as is suitable for every past". Nolte subsequently presented a 1940 book by American author Theodore N. Kaufman entitled Germany Must Perish! . The text contends that all German men should be sterilized, evidencing, according to Nolte,

34992-488: The proceedings of the Colloquia, he refused to allow his contributions to be published, complaining of the "defamations and denunciations" he alleged to have been subjected to. When his contribution, the essay "Weder verdrängen noch bewältigen: Geschichte und Gegenwartsbewusstein der Deutschen" was published in the Swiss journal Schweizer Monatshefte , he edited it heavily to remove many of his more controversial statements about

35208-450: The professor feared arrest by the French, Nolte provided him with food and clothing for an attempted escape. Eugen Fink was another professor who influenced Nolte. After 1945 when Nolte received his BA in philosophy at Freiburg, he worked as a Gymnasium (high school) teacher. In 1952, he received a PhD in philosophy at Freiburg for his thesis Selbstentfremdung und Dialektik im deutschen Idealismus und bei Marx ( Self Alienation and

35424-454: The question of "unborn life" or the presence of genocide yesterday in Vietnam and today in Afghanistan ". The crux of Nolte's thesis was presented when he wrote: "It is a notable shortcoming of the literature about National Socialism that it does not know or does not want to admit to what degree all the deeds—with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists later committed had already been described in

35640-604: The question of whether the Holocaust ought to be studied comparatively, and ethics of public commemorations of history. The debate attracted much media attention in West Germany, with its participants frequently giving television interviews and writing op-ed pieces in newspapers. It flared up again briefly in 2000 when Nolte, one of its leading figures, was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize for science. Immediately after World War II , intense debates arose in intellectual circles about how to interpret Nazi Germany,

35856-540: The really decisive questions". Then the next revisionist efforts Nolte cites were the Italian historian Domenico Settembrini 's favorable treatment of Fascism for saving Italy from Communism, and the British historian Timothy Mason 's studies in working class German history. The best of the revisionists according to Nolte is David Irving , with whom Nolte finds some fault, although "not all of Irving's theses and points can be dismissed with such ease". Nolte praises Irving as

36072-452: The result of the way German society had developed. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the functionalist school of historiography emerged; its proponents argued that medium- and lower-ranking German officials were not just obeying orders and policies but actively engaged in the making of the policies that led to the Holocaust. The functionalists thereby cast blame for the Holocaust across a wider circle. Many right-wing German historians disliked

36288-527: The same time, many left-wing German historians disliked what they saw as the nationalistic tone of the Kohl government. A project that raised the ire of many on the left, and which became a central issue of the Historikerstreit , consisted of two proposed museums celebrating modern German history, to be built in West Berlin and Bonn . Many of the left-wing participants in the Historikerstreit claimed that

36504-455: The seemingly unique aspects of the history of the Third Reich onto the backdrop of the European and global development'. Hildebrand is pleased that Nolte denies the singularity of the Nazi atrocities." In an essay entitled "Encumbered Remembrance", first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 29 August 1986, Fest claimed that Nolte's argument that Nazi crimes were not singular

36720-414: The sense of national identity he feels Germans are missing. In his 1992 book, Die Grenzen der Macht , Stürmer suggested that German history be viewed in the long-term starting from the 17th century to the 20th century to find the "national and trans-national traditions and patterns worth cherishing". Stürmer argued that traditions were tolerance for religious minorities, civic values, federalism and striking

36936-430: The site of the Warsaw Ghetto, was very polarizing. In a feuilleton published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 25 April 1986, the German historian Michael Stürmer complained that most Germans lacked pride in their history, which he felt threatened the future. Stürmer wrote "...that in a land without history, the future is controlled by those who determine the content of memory, who coin concepts and interpret

37152-543: The solution to social problems. In Nolte's views, the roots of communism can be traced back to 18th and 19th century radicals like Thomas Spence , John Gray, William Benbow, Bronterre O’Brian, and François-Noël Babeuf . Nolte has argued that the French Revolution began the practice of “group annihilation” as state policy, but not until the Russian Revolution did the theory of “annihilation therapy” reach its logical conclusion and culmination. He asserts that much of

37368-467: The striving to go beyond what exists in the world towards a new future, eliminating traditional fetters imposed on the human mind by poverty, backwardness, ignorance, and class. Nolte himself defined "theoretical transcendence" as such: Theoretical transcendence may be taken to mean the reaching out of the mind beyond what exists and what can exist toward an absolute whole; in a broader sense this may be applied to all that goes beyond, that releases man from

37584-468: The things that he most hated in the world. According to Nolte, "In Hitler's extermination of the Jews, it was not a case of criminals committing criminal deeds, but of a uniquely monstrous action in which principles ran riot in a frenzy of self-destruction". Nolte's theories about Nazi antisemitism as a rejection of modernity inspired the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka to argue that National Socialism

37800-582: The threatened middle classes of Europe to what Nolte has often called the "Bolshevik peril". He suggests that if one wishes to understand the Holocaust, one should begin with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and then understand the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia . In his 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945 , Nolte argued in the interwar period, Germany was Europe's best hope for progress. Nolte wrote that "if Europe

38016-399: The totalitarianism paradigm in the 1960s and replaced it with the fascism paradigm. British historian Roger Griffin has written that although written in arcane and obscure language, Nolte's theory of fascism as a "form of resistance to transcendence" marked an important step in the understanding of fascism, and helped to spur scholars into new avenues of research on fascism. Criticism from

38232-474: The tradition of Western philosophy and religion, and left no doubt that for him they were not only adjuncts of Rousseau 's notion of liberty, but also of the Christian Gospels and Parmenides ' concept of being. It is equally obvious that he regarded the unity of world economics, technology, science and emancipation merely as another and more recent form of ‘anti-nature’. It was not difficult to find

38448-412: The utmost admiration, and should be honored with Reagan attending the Bitburg memorial service. Amid much controversy, on 8 May 1985, Kohl and Reagan visited the Bitburg cemetery and placed memorial wreaths to honor all of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS men buried there. The American historian Fritz Stern wrote that Kohl and Reagan were engaging in "symbolic politics" with the Bitburg ceremony, to suggest

38664-568: The values of the German Empire . Likewise, Nolte called for the end of what he regarded as the unfair stigma attached to German nationalism because of National Socialism, and demanded that historians recognize that every country in the world had at some point in its history had "its own Hitler era, with its monstrosities and sacrifices". In 1978, the American historian Charles S. Maier described Nolte's approach in Deutschland und der kalte Krieg as: This approach threatens to degenerate into

38880-531: The vast majority of Germans were responsible for Nazi crimes. Different assessments of Nazism were common among Marxists , who insisted on the economic aspects of Nazism and conceived of it as the culmination of a capitalist crisis, and liberals , who emphasized Hitler 's personal role and responsibility and bypassed the larger problem of the relation of ordinary German people to the regime. Within West Germany , then, most historians were strongly defensive. In

39096-411: The view that the principal problem of German history was this "negative myth" of Nazi Germany, which cast the Nazi era as the ne plus ultra of evil. Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917 , which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945. To Nolte, fascism, communism's twin, arose as a desperate response by

39312-454: The visit to Bergen-Belsen should not be the cause for Germans to have any "guilt feelings" about the Nazi past. The Bitburg ceremony was widely interpreted in Germany as the beginning of the "normalization" of the Nazi past, namely the viewpoint that the Germans had a "normal" history that would not cause shame or guilt, and instead inspire pride in being German. The Christian Democratic politician and Second World War veteran Alfred Dregger , in

39528-430: The work of Max Weber , Friedrich Nietzsche , and Karl Marx , Nolte argued that the progress of both types of "transcendence" generates fear as the older world is swept aside by a new world, and that these fears led to fascism. Nolte wrote that: The most central of Maurras 's ideas have been seen to penetrate to this level. By ‘monotheism’ and ‘anti-nature’ he did not imply a political process: he related these terms to

39744-546: The world. Nolte wrote about the horrors perpetuated by the "Chinese Cheka" as showing the "Asiatic" nature of the Bolsheviks. Furthermore, Nolte argues that the "rat cage" torture was an ancient torture long practiced in China , which in his opinion further establishes the "Asiatic barbarism" of the Bolsheviks. Nolte cited a statement by Hitler after the Battle of Stalingrad that Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would be soon sent to

39960-527: The “Bolshevik peril”. He suggests that if one wishes to understand the Holocaust, one should begin with the industrial revolution in Britain, and then understand the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia . Nolte then proceeds to argue that one should consider what happened in the Soviet Union in the interwar period by reading the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn . In a marked change from the views expressed in The Three Faces of Fascism , in which Communism

40176-406: The “extermination of the bourgeoisie”. Nonetheless, the following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “ Asiatic ” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be the potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Wasn’t the ' Gulag Archipelago ' more original than Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not

40392-488: The “rat cage” in the Lubyanka as proof that Hitler had an especially vivid fear of the “rat cage” torture. Along the same lines, Nolte argued that the Holocaust, or "racial genocide" as Nolte prefers to call it, was an understandable if excessive response on the part of Adolf Hitler to the Soviet threat and the "class genocide" with which the German middle class was said to be threatened. In Nolte's view, Soviet mass murders were Vorbild (the terrifying example that inspired

40608-413: Was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin , where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973. He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch , which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963. Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and

40824-457: Was "now once more a focal point in the global civil war waged against democracy by the Soviet Union". Because of the "loss of orientation", he argued that West Germans were not standing up well to the "campaign of fear and hate carried into the Federal Republic from the East and welcomed within like a drug". He claimed that Konrad Adenauer 's policy in the 1950s of not prosecuting those responsible for Nazi-era crimes against humanity and war crimes

41040-452: Was Stürmer's way of "relativizing" Nazi crimes. In another essay, Mommsen argued that Stürmer's assertion that he who controls the past also controls the future, his work as a co-editor with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper which had been publishing articles by Ernst Nolte and Joachim Fest denying the “singularity” of the Holocaust, and his work as an advisor to Chancellor Kohl should cause "concern" with historians. Stürmer

41256-494: Was a "mirror image" of the Soviet Union and, with the exception of the "technical detail" of mass gassing, everything the Nazis did in Germany had already been done by the communists in Russia. All of Nolte's historical work has been heavily influenced by German traditions of philosophy. In particular, Nolte seeks to find the essences of the "metapolitical phenomenon" of history, to discover the grand ideas which motivated all of history. As such, Nolte's work has been oriented towards

41472-519: Was a reflection that the German rightists could not stomach modern German history, and were now looking to create a version of the German past that German rightists could enjoy. Mommsen charged that to find the "lost history", Stürmer was working towards "relativizing" Nazi crimes to give Germans a history they could be proud of. However, Mommsen argued that even modern right-wing German historians might have difficulty with Stürmer's "technocratic instrumentalization" of German history, which Mommsen claimed

41688-480: Was a stream of “transcendence”, Nolte now classified communism together with fascism as both rival streams of the “resistance to transcendence”. The “metapolitical phenomenon” of Communism in a Hegelian dialectic led to the “metapolitical phenomenon” of fascism, which was both a copy of and the most ardent opponent of Marxism. As an example of his thesis, Nolte cited an article written in 1927 by Kurt Tucholsky calling for middle-class Germans to be gassed, which he argued

41904-417: Was a valid intellectual exercise, but they insisted that the Holocaust should not be compared to other genocides. The views of Ernst Nolte and Jürgen Habermas were at the center of the debate, conducted almost exclusively through articles and letters to the editor in the newspapers Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . People in West Germany followed the debate with interest. The debate

42120-477: Was a wise one and that it was a huge mistake to begin prosecutions in the 1970s as it destroyed any prospect of positive feelings about the German past. Writing in 1986, Stürmer complained that recent opinion polls showed 80% of Americans were proud of being American, that 50% of the British were proud of being British, and 20% of West Germans were proud of being German, and argued until national pride could be restored, West Germany could not play an effective part in

42336-416: Was an "uneven book" that was "weak" on Action Française , "strong" on Fascism and "masterly" on National Socialism. Later in the 1970s, Nolte was to reject aspects of the theory of generic fascism that he had championed in The Three Faces of Fascism and instead moved closer to embracing totalitarian theory as a way of explaining both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union . In Nolte's opinion, Nazi Germany

42552-531: Was an attack on "the very roots of Western civilisation, its basic values and moral foundations". The Three Faces of Fascism has been much praised as a seminal contribution to the creation of a theory of generic fascism based on a history of ideas, as opposed to the previous class-based analyses (especially the "Rage of the Lower Middle Class" thesis) that had characterized both Marxist and liberal interpretations of fascism. The German historian Jen-Werner Müller wrote that Nolte "almost single-handedly" brought down

42768-406: Was attacked by Habermas and Wehler for writing the following: "A pluralism of values and interests, when there is no longer any common ground, when it is no longer bunted by economic growth, no longer subdued by the acceptance of responsibility, leads sooner or later to social civil war, as at the end of the Weimar Republic... Social conflicts, competition regarding the values of our communal order,

42984-473: Was attempting to censor him for expressing his views, and accused Habermas of being the person responsible for blocking him from attending the Römerberg Conversations. In the same letter, Nolte described himself as the unnamed historian whose views on the reasons for the Holocaust had caused Saul Friedländer to walk out in disgust from a dinner party hosted by Nolte in Berlin in February or March 1986 that Habermas had alluded to an earlier letter Responding to

43200-412: Was born in Witten , Westphalia , Germany to a Roman Catholic family. Nolte's parents were Heinrich Nolte, a school rector, and Anna (née Bruns) Nolte. According to Nolte in a 28 March 2003 interview with a French newspaper Eurozine , his first encounter with communism occurred when he was 7 years old in 1930, when he read in a doctor's office a German translation of a Soviet children's book attacking

43416-425: Was correct. Fest accused Habermas of "academic dyslexia" and "character assassination" in his attacks on Nolte. In a letter to the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on 6 September 1986 Karl Dietrich Bracher accused both Habermas and Nolte of both "...tabooing the concept of totalitarianism and inflating the formula of fascism". The historian Eberhard Jäckel , in an essay first published in

43632-451: Was involved in many controversies related to the interpretation of the history of fascism and communism, including the Historikerstreit in the late 1980s. In later years, Nolte focused on Islamism and " Islamic fascism ". Nolte received several awards, including the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize and the Konrad Adenauer Prize . He was the father of the legal scholar and judge of the International Court of Justice Georg Nolte . Nolte

43848-419: Was much more deplorable than the celebratory comments made by some right-wing newspapers about the assassination of the German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in 1922. Richard J. Evans , Ian Kershaw and Otto Dov Kulka all claimed that Nolte took Tucholsky's sardonic remark about chemical warfare out of context. Kershaw further protested the implication of moral equivalence between a remark by Tucholsky and

44064-588: Was normally identified with the left, while the rest of Nolte's supporters were seen as either on the right or holding centrist views. In response to Wehler's book, Geiss later published a book entitled Der Hysterikerstreit. Ein unpolemischer Essay ( The Hysterical Dispute: An Unpolemical Essay ) in which he largely defended Nolte against Wehler's criticisms. Geiss wrote Nolte's critics had "taken in isolation" his statements and were guilty of being "hasty readers" In particular, controversy centered on an argument of Nolte's 1985 essay “Between Myth and Revisionism” from

44280-414: Was not a unique crime, there is no reason to single out Germans for special criticism for the Holocaust. In addition, Nolte sees his work as the beginning of a much-needed revisionist treatment to end the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany that dominates contemporary perceptions. Nolte took the view that the principal problem of German history was this "negative myth" of Nazi Germany, which cast the Nazi era as

44496-454: Was not seeking to "endow" history with a "higher meaning", and quoted from Stürmer's book Dissonanzen des Fortschritts to support his contention. In response to Habermas, Stürmer in his "Postscript" of April 25, 1987, accused Habermas of being a Marxist who was responsible for "the invention of fact-free scholarship". Stürmer claimed that Habermas had played an "obscene role" in the West German election of 1987 by labeling anyone he disliked as

44712-480: Was noted for its vitriolic and aggressive tone, with the participants often engaging in ad hominem attacks. In Hillgruber's 1986 book, Zweierlei Untergang ("Two Kinds of Downfall: The Smashing of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry"), he lamented the mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland at the end of World War II and compared the suffering of the Heimatvertriebene ("those expelled from their native land") to that of victims of

44928-483: Was only seeking the "historicization" of National Socialism that Martin Broszat had called for in a 1985 essay by trying to understand what caused National Socialism, with a special focus on the fear of communism. In an essay first published in Die Zeit on 26 September 1986, the historian Jürgen Kocka argued against Nolte that the Holocaust was indeed a "singular" event because it had been committed by an advanced Western nation, and argued that Nolte's comparisons of

45144-460: Was president of the German Historical Association in 1986 wrote that Stürmer was seeking to make history serve his conservative politics by arguing that Germans needed a history capable of creating a national identity that would allow Germans to face the challenge of the Cold War with pride and confidence in their future. Meier argued that Habermas was correct in expressing his concerns about Stürmer’s work, but asserted that Habermas had wrongly accused

45360-412: Was the Russian Revolution and such alleged Bolshevik practices as the "rat cage" torture (said by Russian émigré authors to be a favorite torture by Chinese serving in the Cheka during the Russian Civil War ) that led to the change. Nolte used the example of the "rat cage" torture in George Orwell 's 1948 novel 1984 to argue that the knowledge of the "rat cage" torture was widespread throughout

45576-409: Was the "Jewish" declaration of war on Germany in 1939 which Weizmann's letter allegedly constitutes. Subsequently, Nolte expanded upon these views in his 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945 ( The European Civil War, 1917–1945 ) in which he claimed that the entire 20th century was an age of genocide , totalitarianism , and tyranny , and that the Holocaust had been merely one chapter in

45792-412: Was the 1985 version of "Between Myth and Revisionism" that Habermas noticed and referred to in his essay "On Damage Control". According to Nolte in “Between Myth and Revisionism”, during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the shock of the replacement of the old craft economy by an industrialized, mechanized economy led to various radicals starting to advocate what Nolte calls “annihilation therapy” as

46008-465: Was the work of outsiders serving their own aims. During the same session, Stürmer attacked those historians who argued that Germany started World War I in 1914, and instead blamed France and Russia for the First World War. Moreover, he argued that whatever Germany did to start the First World War was only a defensive reaction imposed by geography. The sessions of the 1986 Römerberg Colloquia involving Stürmer were stormy. When it became time to print

46224-469: Was to succeed in establishing itself as a world power on an equal footing [with the United States and the Soviet Union], then Germany had to be the core of the new 'United States'". Nolte claimed if Germany had to continue to abide by Part V of the Treaty of Versailles , which had disarmed Germany, then Germany would have been destroyed by aggression from her neighbors sometime later in the 1930s, and with Germany's destruction, there would have been no hope for

46440-435: Was troubling. Imanuel Geiss wrote that Stürmer was acting within his rights in expressing his right-wing views, and arguing against Habermas claimed there was nothing wrong in claiming that geography was a factor in German history The British historian Richard J. Evans who was one of Stürmer's fiercer critics accused Stürmer in his 1989 book In Hitler's Shadow of being an apparent believer that: "...Germany can only be

46656-457: Was virulent anti-Semitism”. These unsavoury samples show that Nolte puts someone like Fassbinder in the shade by a wide margin. If the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was justifiably drawn to oppose the planned performance of Fassbinder's play, then why did it choose to publish Nolte's letter [A reference to the play The Garbage, the City, and Death by Rainer Werner Fassbinder about an unscrupulous Jewish businessman who exploits German guilt over

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