The Historikerstreit ( [hɪsˈtoːʁɪkɐˌʃtʁaɪt], historians' quarrel) was an intellectual and political controversy in the late 1980s in West Germany about how best to remember Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
Contents
- Origins in postWorld War II German historiography
- The quarrel begins
- Issues
- Participants
- Later developments
- References
The Historikerstreit spanned the years 1986–89, and pitted right-wing against left-wing intellectuals. The positions taken by the right-wing intellectuals, led by Ernst Nolte, was that the Holocaust was not unique and therefore the Germans should not bear any special burden of guilt for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". In his article "The Past That Will Not Go Away", Nolte argued that what was needed for Germans to have a positive sense of national identity was for them to make the "past that will not go away" finally "go away". Nolte argued that because there was no moral difference between the crimes of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany—and, even more controversially, that because the Holocaust was something that the Germans were allegedly forced to do out of a fear of what the Soviet Union might to them—that Germans should not feel any guilt over the Holocaust and should essentially forget about it. Likewise, the conservative historian Andreas Hillgruber argued in his book Zweierlei Untergang that Germans should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front, and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944–45 and the genocide waged against the Jews. 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 one of its leading figures, Ernst Nolte, was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize for science.
Origins in post–World War II German historiography
Immediately after World War II, intense debates arose in intellectual circles about how to interpret Nazi Germany, 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 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 (of what?). In 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 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 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 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 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 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 the Third Reich. 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 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 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 the "singularity" of the Holocaust—and his work as an advisor to Chancellor Kohl should cause "concern" among historians.
The "quarrel" begins
The debate opened on June 6, 1986, when the philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte had a speech printed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will ("The Past That Won't Go Away"). Nolte argued that the "race murder" of the Nazi death camps was a "defensive reaction" to the "class murder" of the Stalinist system of gulags. In his view, the gulags were the original and greater horror. In the face of the threat of Bolshevism, it was reasonable that the German people would turn to Nazi fascism. Nolte had already articulated this argument the previous year in an essay published in English: "Auschwitz ... was above all a reaction born out of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution.... [T]he 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".
The philosopher Jürgen Habermas, responding in the newspaper Die Zeit, rejected this position, arguing that it could be seized upon as "a kind of cancelling out of damages" for the Holocaust (a phrase that he used as the article's title, and would use the following year as the title of an anthology of his recent political writings). Habermas complained that other historians, such as Michael Stürmer and Andreas Hillgruber, were seeking to whitewash the German past and the uniquely German aspects of the Holocaust.
Issues
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 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 sufferings of the Heimatvertriebene ("those expelled from their native land") to that of victims of 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:
Participants
On one side of the argument 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. On the other side were the philosopher Ernst Nolte, the journalist Joachim Fest, and the historians Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand, Rainer Zitelmann, Hagen Schulze, and Michael Stürmer. Karl Dietrich Bracher and Richard Löwenthal argued for some compromise; they said that comparing different totalitarian systems was a valid intellectual exercise, but insisted that the Holocaust should not be compared to other genocides.
A few foreign historians also contributed to the debate. The British historians Richard J. Evans and Ian Kershaw sided with the Sonderweg position. The American historian Gordon A. Craig was highly critical of the views of Nolte, but generally defended Hillgruber.
Later developments
A comparative approach to Soviet and Nazi crimes has gained momentum in much of Eastern and Central Europe following the fall of Communism after 1989–90. The debate was renewed in the Western world in 1997, with the publication of The Black Book of Communism. The British historian Norman Davies argued in 2006 that revelations made after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe after 1989–91 about Soviet crimes had discredited the left-wing position taken in the 1980s during the Historikerstreit debate. In recent years, the debate has arisen anew in the European Parliament and Western intellectual circles, notably resulting in the Prague Declaration of 2008.