German Historians Debate the Nazi Past
Rabinbach, Anson
The Historikerstreit or historians' controversy that erupted in summer 1986 was an intellectual event unprecedented in postwar West Germany. Its importance lies less in its originality or...
...This might never have become a scandal if Jiirgen Habermas, West Germany's most renowned social philosopher, had not responded in Die Zeit with an extraordinary article called "A Kind of Damage Liquidation...
...8 He reiterated Hillgruber's view of the German tragedy: "squeezed between the arch evils of the century, between Hitler and Stalin, between a destruction under the sign of race or the sign of class...
...29 Michael Stiirmer, "Deutsche Identität: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nationalgeschichte," Neue Ziiricher Zeitung, May 28/29, 1983, in Stiirmer, Dissonanzen des Fortschritts, p. 209...
...42 Andreas Hillgruber, "Fiir die Forschung gibt es kein Fragebverbot," Rheinischer Merkur/Christ und Welt, October 31, 1986, HS, p. 240...
...Habermas is right to see as "compensatory" this history in the service of national integration...
...16 Recalling Karl Jaspers's role in the immediate postwar era, Habermas accused the FAZ "ideology planners" of "mounting a campaign for a revision of the Nazi past...
...A substantially altered version appeared in English as "Between Myth and Revisionism...
...12 Cited in Dieter Kramer, "Die Diskussion der `Römerberggespräche' 1986," in Gegen den Versuch Vergangenheit zu verbiegen, Hilmar Hoffman, ed...
...The 1980 original did not include some of the more controversial passages that appeared in the Koch volume...
...The claim of Nazi singularity, he said, rests on four premises: (1) Hitler committed crimes against "guiltless" victims...
...25 Christian Meier, president of the German Historical Association, in his "non-conclusion" published in the FAZ at the end of November—obviously meant to signal a retreat—also condemned the debate on the singularity of the Holocaust as a "flight" from the real debate on "what our Federal Republican identity is and can be...
...What has emerged is a. conservative "German ideology" that gives a new and clearly independent German national twist to the interpretation of 1945...
...Nolte mused in print on why Nazism refused to recede into history according to the "simplest rules valid for any historical past," and why "more than anything else it was the memory of the 'Final Solution' which contributed to a past which would not pass on...
...30 To legitimize postwar division, Stiirmer argues, after 1945 liberal historians simply inverted the old image of Germany's special mission, the Sonderweg, painting the conservative tradition into the Hitlerian picture, while painting out the political, social, and cultural achievements of the nineteenth century Bismarckian national state...
...13-36...
...Cited in Ibid., P. 44...
...The basis of the European postwar order will be placed in question through nationalism and neutralism...
...19 And he underscored the point that the defeat of Germany and its subsequent "dismemberment" was a capitulation to Stalin, "tolerated" by the U.S...
...7 Andreas Hillgruber, "Jurgen Habermas, Karl-Heinz Janssen und die Aufklärung Anno 1986," Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, December 1986, pp...
...He also focused public attention on the exculpatory purposes of the new historical revisionism, which promised to "shake off the mortgage from a past happily freed of morality...
...5 The first essay laments the Russian conquest and the loss of Germany's Eastern territories, while the second is a dry account of the Nazi crime against the Jews in light of recent historical works on anti-Semitism...
...By attacking Stiirmer, and by questioning government plans for the historical museums, he underscored the idea that the new desire for a positive German history belongs to the discourse of a new conservative nationalism and that such homogeneous history is incompatible with the pluralistic character and what he calls the "post-conventional" identity required for a true democracy...
...46 Sturmer, "Was Geschichte Wiegt," HS, p. 295...
...15 Nolte, "Between Myth and Revisionism...
...If the two essays are read side by side, it is difficult to escape the conclusion of the publisher on the dust jacket "that the amputation of the Reich in favor of a greater Poland was a war aim of the Allies long before Auschwitz...
...This history, written by "outsiders" who carried "modern social history in their suitcases" when they returned from the USA, created a negative identity which no longer serves its purpose...
...For Hillgruber the destruction of the German Army, the terror unleashed by the Soviets, and the loss of the German East are consequences of blind antiPrussianism: "the extremely negative, clichériddled image of Prussia of the leading Western statesmen...
...For Fest, none of these arguments bears up under comparison to Stalin's crimes, which were no less bureaucratic, hardly the product of an "inferior" or humane culture, and whose victims were equally guiltless...
...Kocka, a social historian based in Bielefeld, made the essential point: it was "dangerous and shameful" to use comparative history to "repress the singularity of German developments by comparison with Stalin and Pol Pot...
...The most interesting aspect of the Historikerstreit, as Ralf Dahrendorf noticed, may not be the positions of the protagonists, but the confusions and reversals they have generated...
...2 This lack of historical identity made Germans politically unreliable, their past plagued by "unconditional war" and their present by "unconditional peace...
...44 Indeed, this rehabilitation of German national history is not concerned with the old dream of reunification or reconquest, but rather with establishing, in Heine's words, "in the realm of dreams" a revindication of the status of Germany as a European power, within a realistic assessment of its present possibilities...
...3) the crime occurred against the backdrop of a highly developed culture...
...Never before have the "spirits" been so divided, the polemics so fierce, the political fronts so immobile, or the issues so interlaced...
...34 Dregger even reminded U.S...
...100-112...
...A potential collision had to be avoided with "revanchist" groups who rejected accommodation with the East German regime and continued to press for German claims to territory relinquished in 1945...
...2 Nolte also wondered if there were not certain "interests" at play here, like those of the "persecuted and their descendants," who sought "the permanent status of a select and privileged existence...
...Nolte did not deny the horror or the uniqueness of the Holocaust...
...156-174...
...At almost the same time that Nolte's article appeared in the FAZ, the Erlangen historian Michael Stiirmer, Helmut Kohl's adviser and speechwriter, participated in a stormy session of the ROmerberggesprache, a Frankfurt symposium series...
...37 Less than a week after Bitburg, on May 8, President Richard von Weizsacker delivered his now famous speech—widely praised abroad but with little consequence—to the German parliament...
...and justified ex post facto only as a response to the crime against the Jews...
...The protagonists of the Historikerstreit, for all their unbridgeable differences, agree that no one can envision an alteration in the "German Question" without also envisioning an end to the 198 • DISSENT NAZI PAST global realities in which it is embedded...
...Even the FAZ reluctantly recognizes that reunification has become a "distant goal...
...62-76...
...200 • DISSENT...
...The Historikerstreit was at once a conflict over the meaning of the Nazi past, historical method, generational perceptions, the uses of anti-Communism, and the possibility or impossibility of a post-Auschwitz German national identity...
...The most "original" of Nolte's musings concerned the historical origins of Nazi crimes against the Jews: Did not the National Socialists, did not Hitler commit an "Asiatic" deed only perhaps because he and his kind considered themselves potential or 192 • DISSENT MASI PAST real victims of an "Asiatic" deed...
...With the not-so-new Ostpolitik, the conservative government has finally abandoned the pretense of a single German nation...
...36 If for the Reagan administration the Bitburg visit was a public relations debacle, for the Kohl government it was a bungled diplomatic effort to achieve what Raul Hilberg called "a nebulous collective innocence...
...17-38...
...Among others, the noted Hitler scholar, Eberhard Jackel provided an eloquent refutation in Die Zeit, noting that Fest astonishingly excluded from his list Hitler's often repeated desire to exterminate the Jews as a "race...
...At the very least, the German tragedy that he later called (quoting Alfred Heuss) "the gravest consequence of the war" — the loss of the German East and the fate of its population—competes with the Jewish catastrophe for preeminence.' Hillgruber's departure from conservative conventions is less in his ideology than his view that the historian must identify with the concrete fate of the German population in the East, and with the desperate and costly sacrifices borne by the German Army and Navy in the East, who tried to protect them from the orgies of revenge of the Red Army, from mass rapes, arbitrary murders, and forced deportations, and who tried to keep the escape routes of the East Germans . . . to the West open in this last phase...
...28 Michael Stiirmer, "Die Deutsch Frage—Kein Eigentum der Deutschen: Zum 17...
...41 Winkler, "Auf ewig in Hitler's Schatten," HS, p. 262...
...13 Michael Stiirmer, "Geschichte in geschichtslosen Land," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 25, 1986, HS, p. 36 14 Jürgen Habermas, "Eine Art Schadensabwicklung...
...Stiirmer is the most interesting and perplexing of the conservative protagonists, precisely because he trundles between German national history and the imperatives of global politics, between the benefits of Western orientation and the deficits of a defunct German nationhood: For as bitter as it may appear to us, the division of Germany remains a factor of stability in a divided world...
...Hitler's crime against the Jews was a plagiarism born out of a fear of self-annihilation, a defensive reaction to another terror—establishing a "causal nexus" between Bolshevism and Hitler...
...8 Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang, pp...
...I should add that this is precisely the right-wing criticism of von Weizsacker's speech—hostility to his remark that the anachronistic legal claims in Silesia and East Prussia should be forgotten...
...20 The point is not to examine all of Fest's claims, in which half-truth and nonsense congeal...
...3 Auschwitz is not a German crime, nor a product of German history, nor primarily a result of traditional anti-Semitism, he claimed...
...For the first time since 1945 the idea of the Federal Republic as a nation has caught up with its reality...
...But he added, "with the singular exception of the technical procedure of gassing," everything that the National Socialists did was already described in the literature of the 1920s...
...q Notes ' Jürgen Habermas, "Geschichtsbewusstsein und posttraditionale Identität: Die Westorientierung der Bundesrepublik," in Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), p. 162...
...Several critics, like the liberal historians Wolfgang Mommsen, Heinrich August Winkler, and Jurgen Kocka, reacted sharply to Fest and Nolte...
...Merkur (September/October 1986), pp...
...42 More plausibly, the nostalgia for the old German nation state, emphasized by Stunner and shared to some degree by all of the conservative protagonists in the Historikerstreit, is predicated not on a rejection of the geopolitical realities of "division," but, paradoxically, on their acceptance...
...27 Michael Stiirmer, "Wem gehört die deutsche Geschichte...
...Conducted mainly in West Germany's major newspapers, especially the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and the liberal Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, the Historikerstreit followed the Kohl government's efforts to achieve a positive symbol of normalization at Bitburg...
...84-92...
...34 Frankfurter Rundschau, July 20, 1983...
...17 Several days later Hildebrand accused Habermas of lacking knowledge of the sources, falsifying quotations, and applying "censorship" to "parallels" between the annihilatory quality of "communism and National Socialism...
...In this terrible context," Habermas adds, "the annihilation of the Jews appears merely as the unfortunate result of a nonetheless understandable reaction to what Hitler must have perceived as the threat of annihilation...
...23 There was, however, considerably more sympathy for Hillgruber and Stiirmer than for the "eccentric" Nolte or Fest...
...In the words of Jiirgen Habermas, it was a "debate over the self-understanding of the Federal Republic...
...47 Ralf Dahrendorf, "Zur politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik," Merkur (January 1987), p. 71...
...31 Michael Sturmer, "Zwei Staaten in Deutschland—zwei deutsche Geschichten...
...Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1987), pp...
...725-738, HS, p. 339...
...The road to Bitburg was paved with calculated fiascos in which the German chancellor proved his fidelity to rightist public opinion by getting crucified in the liberal and international press...
...This also produced conservative anxieties of a party to the "right of the CDU," such as, for example, the right-wing populist Die Republikaner in Bavaria...
...The German historical controversy unleashed two strategies for mastering the past...
...In summer 1985 Kohl spoke (he was the first German chancellor to do so) at a convention of Heimatvertriebene, a group of ultraconservative Silesian exiles, under a banner proclaiming "Silesia Remains Ours...
...28 In characteristically rococo prose, Stiirmer often complains of the absence of a history that "provides anchorage in the cataracts of progress...
...Hillgruber's sharpest prose is reserved, not for Soviet barbarism, but for the Western Allies, especially the British, who, he believes, sealed the fate of Germany by capitulating to Stalin's plans for a dismemberment of the Eastern territories before, and without regard to, the crime against the Jews...
...The second, virtually uncommented on here, is far more sophisticated: it places the burden of responsibility on Hitler, does not deny his crimes, but relegitimates German "national identity" and its role as a middle-European power in the past...
...Normalization, conservatives believed, might also counteract the assumption that a corollary of the government's acceptance of Willy Brandt's and Helmut Schmidt's Ostpolitik was acceptance of the "policy of renunciation" with regard to revision of the German question...
...Die apologetischen Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtschreilbung," Die Zeit, July 11, 1986, HS, pp...
...25 Winkler, HS, p. 260...
...Tomorrow the Historikerstreit may be remembered as a dress rehearsal for a rebirth of the national question in Germany...
...39 Nolte and Fest no doubt share Franz Joseph Strauss's attitude that Auschwitz and Hitler finally be allowed to "sink or be sunk out of sight, or better put, disappear...
...The defense of the nation is divorced from the catastrophic policies of the leader, the expansionist dance from the lunatic dancer...
...2 Ernst Nolte, "Vergangenheit die nicht vergehen will," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986...
...The Germans have been removed from their history...
...Habermas accused Nolte, Hillgruber, Stiirmer, FAZ copublisher Joachim Fest, and another wellknown historian, Klaus Hildebrand of Bonn, of "apologetic tendencies," of "a revisionist history in the service of buoying up a conventional national historical identity...
...A German original of the English language version is included in HS, pp...
...These conservatives blame the "German paralysis" on what they see as a dangerous mistrust of power politics—the consequence of a moralistic misinterpretation of Hitler as the result of, rather than a retreat from, realpolitik—a misjudgment they see epitomized in Willy Brandt and others of the liberal left...
...16 Habermas, "Eine Art Schadensabwicklung," HS, p. 69...
...26 Christian Meier, "Kein SchluRwort," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 20, 1986, HS, p. 268...
...In his view American acquiescence in the "extermination and deporSPRING • 1988 • 197 NMI PAST tation" practices of Stalin was "a complete departure from their humanitarian traditions...
...24, 25...
...9 In this Niebelungenlied to the struggle of the old Mitteleuropaische Reich against the onslaught of red barbarism, even the "highest officers of the NSDAP" (Nazi or National Socialist Workers' Party), despite some obviously wretched excesses, achieve a romantic Heldentod in their "desperate defensive struggle for the preservation of the autonomy of the great power position of the German empire, which, according to the will of the Allies, should be destroyed...
...22 Fest, "Die geschuldete Erinnerung," p. 109...
...Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987), pp...
...112, 113...
...Ilya Levkov, ed., (New York: Shapolsky Books, 1987), p. 95...
...23 See Jurgen Kocka, "Hitler sollte nicht durch Stalin und Pol Pot verdant werden," Frankfurter Rundschau, September 23, 1986, HS, p. 135, and Heinrich August Winkler, "Auf ewig in Hitlers Schatten: Zum Streit iiber das Geschichtsbild der Deutschen," Frankfurter Rundschau, November 14, 1986, HS, pp...
...To the extent that younger, more liberal historians emphasize this "normality" of daily existence, they no doubt give fuel to the claims of those, like Hillgruber, who believe that the Nazi elite, or Hitler personally, should bear sole responsibility for the fate of Germany...
...During his 1984 visit to Israel Kohl astonished Israelis with well-placed faux pas, which the FAZ described as "disgraces," "blunders," and "embarrassments . " 33 Speaking of his "grace of belated birth," Kohl left no doubt that he meant his generation was absolved of the moral obligations previous German generations felt toward Israel...
...p. 36...
...It should simply be said that Fest's obsessive effort to eviscerate the Holocaust with comparisons to Cambodia, Algeria, Vietnam, and "millions of dead of this century" confirms what Fest himself seems to admit, that "this is nothing but an effort to derive exoneration for oneself from crimes everywhere in the world...
...16-19...
...The FAZ, he concluded, pressed this campaign because it solved a dilemma that Stiirmer himself identified when he wrote, "Germans must find their identity in a divided Germany, which is no longer grounded in the nation state, but is also not possible without the nation...
...This distinction between vulgar relativizers and proponents of a new historical paradigm for German national identity roughly parallels ideological divisions within the Kohl government...
...Was not the "Gulag Archipelago" antecedent to Auschwitz...
...3, Stiirmer, unlike Hillgruber, gives no evidence of nostalgia for the last battles of the German army, nor does he bemoan the consequences of Allied victory...
...21 Eberhard Jäckel, "Die elende Praxis der Untersteller: Das Einmalige der nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen," Die Zeit, September 12, 1986, HS, pp...
...From Michael Sttirmer, "Kein Eigentum der Deutschen: die deutsche Frage," Die Identitiit der deutschen: Fragen, Positionen, Perspektiven, Werner Weidenfeld, ed...
...This collection contains Habermas's contributions to the debate, as well as several unrelated articles...
...10 Ibid...
...The novelty of Two Kinds of Collapse and Hildebrand's more recent scholarly articles is their open stand against Britain and America for depriving Germany of its continental power...
...864-874, HS, pp...
...The Allied failure accurately to assess the value of German conservative aims in the East sacrificed Germany to Soviet hegemony in Europe...
...3 Ernst Nolte, "Die negative Lebendigkeit des Dritten Reiches...
...Was not the "class murder" of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual prius of the National Socialist "race murder...
...The first relativizes the Holocaust by reducing it to one phenomenon in the "age of tyrants...
...44 Hans Peter Schwarz, Die gezdhmten deutschen (Stuttgart: DVA, 1984...
...Still more important, Habermas discovered the 1985 Englishlanguage version of Nolte's earlier essay, where he revived one of the most scurrilous shibboleths of neo-Nazi propaganda (first propounded in historical circles by David Irving): the alleged September 1939 "declaration of war" by Chaim Weizmann, then speaking for the Jewish Agency...
...Peter Glotz, general secretary of the Social Democratic party, summed up Dregger's (and Kohl's) reaction to American critics: "Your letter is infused by the idea that the Americans would do well to forget the past, because we are now allies and support the policies of the present American administration...
...1984), p. 45...
...26 I n short, the casuistry of "comparative genocide" was short-lived, the tack too tasteless, the apologetic intent too obvious...
...14 Stiirmer's vague demands for a "higher creation of meaning," he argued, obliterated German complicity in Hitler's triumph, whereas Hillgruber's identification with the Wehrmacht makes identification with the real victims ipso facto impermissible...
...2) the crime had an abstract, mechanical, and administrative character...
...Christian Democratic Parliamentary Chairman Alfred Dregger's brackish appeal to the Bundestag for a monument indiscriminately honoring all the dead of the war during a "National Day of Mourning" (its very language, Volkstrauertag, recalled the idiom of the era it wanted to forget) made it clear that a leveling of distinctions was on the agenda...
...After the myth of Yalta, the myth of Teheran...
...Der jiidische Faktor in der Mythologie der Wende-Republik," Asthetik und Kommunikation: Beiträge zur politischen Erziehung, Heft 56, 15 Jg...
...4) Hitler's motives were radically different from the humanist aspirations of communism...
...ambassador in Bonn, who urged greater parity with West Germany and an end to the German guilt requirement (Kristol called for West German control of nuclear weapons...
...45 Hans Mommsen, "Suche nach der `verlorenen Geshichte...
...It was in its core not merely a 'genocide' but above all a reaction born out of the anxiety of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution...
...Its importance lies less in its originality or profundity than in its intensity...
...SPRING • 1988 • 199 NAZI PAST 3° Michael Sttirrner, "Was Geschichte Wiegt," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 26, 1986, HS, p. 294...
...His appeal to the moral dimension of politics as an antidote to nationalist nostalgia owes more to Arendt and Jaspers than to Marx and Horkheimer...
...Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1984), p. 96...
...4 Nolte's article coincided with the publication of a small volume of two essays by the Cologne military historian Andreas Hillgruber, Two Kinds of Collapse: The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry...
...The Way to Bitburg The Kohl government's desire for a symbol of normalization was amplified by the chancellor's unhappiness at being snubbed at the seaside ceremonies honoring the invasion of Europe in June 1984...
...18 Klaus Hildebrand, "Das Zeitalter der Tyrannen," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 31, 1986, HS, pp...
...There were other indications of this CDU/CSU campaign to reassert "typical German virtues" and place the issue of national pride at the center of its ideological thrust...
...32 Stiirmer, "Deutsche Identität," p. 208...
...6 The second essay, "The Historical Place of the Persecution of the Jews," is an expanded version of Hillgruber's concluding remarks at a May 1984 Stuttgart congress on "The Murder of the European Jews During the Second World War...
...This course, aimed at ending West Germany's "negative" self-image, was provoked by conservative fears, which emerged during the missile debate of 1983-4, that Germany might be governed by a left coalition with neutralist leanings and hostile to the U.S...
...Eine Frage aus dem Blickwinkel des Jahres 1980," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 24, 1980...
...45 When Stunner argues that "no people can in the long run live without historical identity," it is this compensatory nationalism, and not a return to the old conservative habits of the past, that is at stake...
...The chancellor's insistence on Bitburg, despite strong American disapproval, coincided with a number of other signs that the government had its sights set on normalization fiber alles...
...24 Despite Hillgruber's "pronounced sympathies for the Prussian Junkers and the military," Winkler cautioned, he and Stiirmer "are no relativizers a la Nolte, and don't deserve to be thrown into the same pot with him...
...Certainly a positive German history on the right wing of the spectrum could offer a challenge to the Green party and the peace movement in the post-Nazi generation...
...Martin's, 1985), pp...
...The thesis of singularity," he concluded, "stands on weak ground...
...congressional opponents of Bitburg that "he had defended the . . . town of Marklissa in Silesia against attacks by the Red Army" and 196 • DISSENT NAZI PAST that his brother, a "decent German," was buried there...
...36 Ibid., p. 104...
...But if by late summer the "relativization" of the Holocaust had become journalistically more interesting than the World Cup, more sober heads prevailed...
...20 Joachim Fest, "Die geschuldete Erinnerung: Zur Kontroverse uber die Unvergleichbarket der nationalsozialistischen Massenverbrechen," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 29, 1986, HS, pp...
...33 Y. Michal Bodemann, "Die `Überwölbung' von Auschwitz...
...115-122...
...38 As Hans Mommsen noted, after Bitburg the government would provide free space to apparently obsolete nationalist strivings, "without being able to harness the spirits it evoked...
...They are beginning to understand that the history which led to Hitler, also leads beyond him, and will lead beyond that...
...A public sign of normality, in short, could simultaneously affirm West Germany's equal partnership in the Western Alliance and put an end to lingering anxieties about Germany's past...
...II Hillgruber is of course not responsible for his publisher's blurbs, but this cannot be said for the juxtaposition of the two essays...
...Germany has become, if not the victim, at least one victim, among others...
...In an article first published in 1980, Nolte wrote that the "so-called annihilation of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original...
...Strauss, Dregger (the so-called "Stahlhelm" faction of the CDU/CSU) have been relatively "uninhibited" about "not wanting to live eternally in the shadow of Hitler and his crimes," as Strauss so delicately put it...
...The attraction of Ostpolitik for a majority of Germans has to be carefully reconciled with the NATO alliance...
...Stiirmer strongly supported two museum projects of the chancellor, a German historical museum in West Berlin and a museum of the Federal Republic in Bonn, because: "In a land without history he who fills memory, coins the concepts and interprets the past, wins the future...
...His nostalgia is reserved for the Bismarckian "equilibrium of forces in Europe's middle," even if he rejects its result, the German Sonderweg with its "restless Reich" buffeted between East and West...
...24 See, for example, Gordon Craig, "The War of the German Historians," the New York Review of Books, January 15, 1987, pp...
...Weizmann's appeal to Jews to support Britain and the democracies (ironically, directed largely against Ben-Gurion's anti-British policy), Nolte wrote, "might justify the consequential thesis that Hitler was allowed to treat the German Jews as prisoners of war and by this means intern them...
...43 Der Spiegel, January 5, 1987, p. 30...
...Koch, ed., Aspects of the Third Reich (London: St...
...Stiirmer accepts Germany's geopolitical fate, and yet he looks to national cultural traditions rather than power political aspirations as a source of identity...
...One possibility is that it is a veiled "call for German reunification...
...The German nation," he reminds us, is "older than the nation state...
...It was, however, encouraged by American neoconservatives, especially Irving Kristol and Richard Burt, U.S...
...In the past, left-wing historians focused on continuities in German history, but now it is conservatives who have attached themselves to the long view, whereas their critics underscore the crucial break of 1945...
...There is evidence for this, not only in the coded language of FAZ editorials, in the rhetoric of the Heimatvertriebene, and even in Hillgruber's vision of the movement of European history "towards the free-democratic order of the Federal Republic, towards a unified Germany (Gesamtdeutschland) on the basis of the right of self-determination...
...6 Hillgruber never explicitly connects the two essays, but their juxtaposition creates a parallel between German and Jewish suffering—if not an eradication then a leveling of the distinction between them...
...Kicking off the Debate The opening salvo was a disturbing article by the West Berlin historian Ernst Nolte, published by the FAZ on June 6, 1986, entitled "The Past Which Will Not Pass On...
...Sturmer, Dissonanzen des Fortschritts, p. 248...
...39-47 (subsequently referred to as HS...
...40 But if we take seriously that Hillgruber and Stiirmer are not "relativizers" a la Nolte or Fest, it is important to identify what Winkler calls "the deeper reasons for the national apologetic wave...
...21 "The National Socialist murder of the Jews was unique," he wrote, "because never before did a state decide and proclaim with the authority of its responsible leader that a specific human group should be killed . . . and then translate this decision with all the possible means at the disposal of that state...
...5 Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschalgung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 1986...
...32 To resolve this paradox, Stiirmer returns to the old German kulturnation, with its pretenses to power played out...
...19 Ibid., HS, p. 88...
...64, 65...
...As Hans Mommsen has pointed out, much of what has occurred in the recent debate on national identity has been part of the expansion of German economic and military sovereignty within the parameters of NATO...
...27 Although Stiirmer is a strong advocate of the Federal Republic's place in the Western alliance, there is a highly ambiguous mood in his ruminations on the national question...
...4 Nolte, "Between Myth and Revisionism...
...The Historikerstreit has shown that in Germany today the Nazi era is in little danger of becoming "past," despite the fact that, and indeed because, the very demand for "historicizing distance" is politically freighted...
...37 Raul Hilberg, "Bitburg as Symbol," in Geoffrey Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) p. 19...
...256-263...
...Resenting Habermas's charge of a conspir194 • DISSENT NAZI PAST acy, Fest took up the cudgels more systematically than Nolte himself...
...It does not historicize the crimes of Hitler out of existence, but reasserts continuities between the political "Kleindeutsch" Bismarckian state and the role of the Federal Republic...
...Hitler's crime is the betrayal of Germany's continental aspirations: with the amputation of the Prussian heartland in the East, the geopolitical, spiritual-historical, and social-historical foundations on which the Bismarck Reich stood, and upon which its autonoSPRING • 1988 • 193 NAZI PAST mous power political role between East and West . . . rested, were played out...
...Sttirmer explicitly supports the East treaty, and proclaims the kulturnation as a necessity of a sober realpolitik...
...Stiirmer referred to the "guilt obsession" that had left Germans a people without a history, "the sons of nothingness...
...46 On the other hand, the more aggressive assertion of national themes in the Historikerstreit may signal a new ideological independence from the West...
...Habermas condemned the "relativization" of Hitler's crimes under the guise of historicizing them...
...Even more striking is the harsh tone regarding the role of the West in creating postwar Germany...
...In this way German expansionism—divorced from Hitler's personal war aims (e.g., the Jewish catastrophe) — is relegitimized...
...Habermas, for example, strongly emphasizes this moment of "release from a past centered on national history" and staunchly defends the "enlightenment culture of the West" while refusing the hazy discourse of neutralism and pacifism...
...Franz Joseph Strauss's remark during the 1987 election campaign that Germany should "emerge from the dismal Third Reich and become a normal nation again" summed up this mood unabashedly...
...22 Much of the debate that ensued focused on these strategies of "relativization" enunciated by Nolte and Fest...
...Germany's loss of global political status as a "Failed World Power" (Hillgruber) was a consequence of the antiPrussian (not expressly anti-Hitler) prejudices of the Allies...
...47 Conservatives have found unwitting support in the idea of a history motivated by the search for identity (a motif of the new social history), as well as in the distinction social historians have made between the "normality" of everyday life in the Third Reich and the more "radical" criminal "aspects" of the regime...
...29 Without the "guideposts" of national history, he warns, there is little counterweight to the Euroneutralist left...
...Hillgruber's anti-American discomfiture also shows through, as does his attempt to provide a compensatory ideology for the relinquished dream of a reconquest of the East...
...That idea is morally corrupt...
...The Historikerstreit soon became a public debate among German intellectuals on the limits of "normalization...
...Stiirmer's distinction between "hegemonial" and "balancing" power is another cautious expression of this desire for more political options within the geopolitical status quo...
...43 But the modernizing wing of the CDU/CSU (figures such as Norbert Bliim and the intellectual magazine Sonde) is more concerned with accommodating the right wing, and offer a new and "positive" image of the German past...
...9 Ibid., pp...
...National-politisches Profil in Ostberlin," Neue Ziiricher Zeitung 1982 May, 22/23, p. 37...
...Also published in the collection, Historikerstreit...
...35 Bitburg and Beyond: Encounters in American, German and Jewish History...
...The Third Reich in the Perspective of the 1980s," in H.W...
...8 The unemotional tone of the essay on the Jews contrasts sharply with his elegy to the German soldier's sacrifice "for the centuries-old German area of settlement, the Heimat of millions...
...38 Gunter Hofmann, "Der Präses und der Populist," Die Zeit, May 31, 1985, p. 3. 39 Cited in Ibid., p. 3. 4° Der Spiegel, January 5, 1987, p. 25...
...p. 28...
...Juni 1953," Dissonanzen des Fortschritts: Essays Uber Geschichte und Politik in Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1986) p. 231...
...One of the most blatant examples was Dregger's 1983 Bundestag speech condemning Nazism for undermining the "spiritual substance" of the German nation and for creating "a trauma of self-evaluation" through its "revolutionary attitudes...
...Deprived of a connection to history and "in light of eco-pacifism, Germans might forget the SPRING • 1988 • 195 NAZI PAST distance between dictatorship and democracy, and seek both past and future in Mitteleuropa...
...Less frequently commented on, however was the negative reaction within CDU/CSU circles, which were openly "uncomfortable" with the president's upstaging of the chancellor, and upset by Von Weizsacker's refusal of any gesture of normalization—a position closer to Brandt's than to Kohl's own perfunctory condemnation of "the dictator...
...35 This pillar of the German right, now echoed by Hillgruber, incorporates ex post facto the last phase of Germany's defeat into the first phase of the cold war...
...Hence, the nationalist option is carefully balanced with a realistic assessment of the German question...
...Yet all recognize that the glacial politics of the blocs is once again in motion, and that the gradual warming of the cold war may once again crack the certainties of geopolitical calculation...
...17 Cited in Habermas, "Schadensabwicklung," p. 71...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
