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The Historikersteit (historians' dispute) was an intellectual and political controversy in West Germany about the way the Holocaust should be treated in history. It took place between 1986-1989, and pitted left-wing intellectuals against right-wing intellectuals. The debate attracted much media attention in West Germany with its participants frequently giving television interviews and writing co-op pieces in newspapers.
Origins
Immediately after World War Two, there arose intense historical debates (which continue to this day) both in Germany and abroad about how best to interpret Nazi Germany. Two of the more hotly debated questions were that Nazism was in some way part of the “German national character”, and a closely-related one concerning how much responsibility if any the German people bore for the crimes of Nazism. Most 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.
Within West Germany, most historians were generally conservatives, such as Gerhard Ritter, who adopted a strongly defensive tone. Historians such as Ritter portrayed Nazism as a totalitarian movement that represented only the work of a small criminal clique, saw Germans as victims of Nazism, and argued that the Nazi era represented a total break in German history. Starting in the 1960s, this historical paradigm started to be challenged by a younger generation of historians. Fritz Fischer argued in favor of a Sonderweg approach to German history that saw Nazism as the inevitable result of the way German society had developed. Likewise, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of the Functionalist school of historiography that rejected totalitarian theories and portrayed the Holocaust not as the work of an small criminal gang at the top, but instead 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. In this way, the Functionalists cast the net of blame for the Holocaust wider than it had been previously. Many right-wing German historians strongly disliked the implications of the Sonderweg and Functionalist schools of historiography, both of whom were generally identified with the left, which they saw as being derogatory to Germany.
By the mid-1980s, right-wing German historians started to feel enough time had passed and it was time for Germans to start celebrating their history again. Examples include Michael Stürmer's 1986 article “Land Without An History” bemoaning what Stürmer saw as the absence of positive history in which Germans could take pride. Attracting particular controversy was Stürmer’s role at the time as an advisor to the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. At the same time, many left-wing German historians disliked what they saw as the more nationalistic tone of the Kohl government.
The debate opened on June 6, 1986 when the philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte wrote an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will ("The Past That Does Not Want To Pass"). 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 logical that the German people would turn to Nazi fascism.
The left-wing philosopher Jürgen Habermas rejected this position, arguing that such a debate could be "a kind of settlement of damages" for the Holocaust. His "Eine Art Schadensabwicklung" appeared in the July 11, 1986, issue of Die Zeit. In his article entitled “Recent Apologetic Tendencies In Our History”, Habermas complained that certain historians such as Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer and Andreas Hillgruber were seeking to white-wash the German past.
Participants
Identifed with the left 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. Identified with the right were the philosopher Ernst Nolte, the journalist Joachim Fest, and the historians Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand, and Michael Stürmer. This labelling of the group representing the right is not entirely accurate because while Hildebrand and Fest were close supporters of Nolte, both Hillgruber and Strümer kept their distance from him. A rare effort at compromise was attempted by Karl Dietrich Bracher, who argued that comparing different totalitarian systems was a valid intellectual exercise, thereby agreeing with one of the central planks of the right camp, but who insisted further that the Holocaust should not be compared to other genocides, thereby agreeing with one of the central planks of the left camp.
Though the Historikersteit was primarily a dispute between German historians, some foreign historians also became involved. The British historians Richard J. Evans and Ian Kershaw sided with the left-wing position while the American historian Gordon A. Craig was sharply critical of Nolte's views, but generally defended Hillgruber.
Issues
The views of Ernst Nolte and Jürgen Habermas were at the center of the debate, which was conducted almost exclusively through articles and letters to the editor in the newspapers Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .
An important sub-issue was triggered by Hillgruber's 1986 book Zweierlei Untergang (Two Kinds of Ruin) which lamented the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War Two and compared the mass expulsions to the Holocaust. Hillgruber was not a supporter of Nolte, and the controversy over Zweierlei Untergang only became linked to the controversy over Nolte's view when Habermas and Wehler lumped Nolte and Hillgruber together as conservatives trying to minimize Nazi crimes.
The debate centered around four main questions:
- Were the crimes of Nazi Germany uniquely evil in history, or were the crimes of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union just as evil, if not more so?
- Did German history follow a Sonderweg or "special path" leading inevitably to Nazism? If so, then most or all of pre-1945 German history bore the taint of the Nazism to come. Furthermore, the validity of the Sonderweg analysis would undermine Nolte's argument that the Holocaust was a defensive reaction to Soviet crimes, and would instead suggest that the origins of Nazism go back to before World War One. The West German historians Klaus Hildebrand, Gerhard Ritter, and Andreas Hillgruber rejected the Sonderweg view, while the British historian A.J.P. Taylor and the West German historians Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Wolfgang Mommsen, Hans Mommsen and Fritz Fischer supported it.
- A sub-issue of the Sonderweg concerned the reasons for the alleged Sonderweg. Strümer argued for geographical factors as the reason for the Sonderweg while Wehler insisted on cultural and social factors.
- Were other genocides, including the Armenian genocide and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, comparable to the Holocaust? Many felt that these comparisons tended to trivialize the Holocaust, but others maintained that the Holocaust could best be understood in the context of the 20th century by means of these comparisons.
- Were the crimes of the Nazis a reaction to Soviet crimes under Stalin, as Nolte contended? Should the German people bear a special burden of guilt for Nazi crimes, or could new generations of Germans find sources of pride in their history?
Habermas' position was more widely accepted among the German people; Nolte was seen as an apologist for fascism.
Works
- Baldwin, Peter Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians Dispute, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990.
- Evans, Richard In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past, New York, NY: Pantheon, 1989.
- Hillgruber, Andreas Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reichs und das Ende des europäischen Judentums, Berlin: Siedler, 1986.
- Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretations, London: Arnold, 1989.
- Kühnl, Reinhard (editor) Vergangenheit, die nicht vergeht: Die "Historikerdebatte": Darstellung, Dokumentation, Kritik, Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1987.
- Maier, Charles The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
- Muller, Jerry "German Historians At War" pages 33-42 from Commentary Volume 87, Issue #5, May 1989.
- Nolte, Ernst Das Vergehen der Vergangenhiet: Antwort an meine Kritiker im sogenannten Historikerstreit, Berlin: Ullstein, 1987.
- Piper, Ernst(editor) "Historikerstreit": Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistschen Judenvernichtung, Munich: Piper, 1987 translated into English by James Knowlton and Truett Cates as Forever in the shadow of Hitler? : original documents of the Historikerstreit, the controversy concerning the singularity of the Holocaust, Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press, 1993.
- Wehler, Hans-Ulrich Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit" Munich: C.H Beck, 1988.
- Alfred Sohn-Rethel Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism,London, CSE Bks, 1978 ISBN 0906336007
- A.J.P Taylor Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848 1918, London, Oxford University Press, 1980 ISBN 0198812701
- A.J.P Taylor The Origins of the Second World War, Longman, 1997 ISBN 0582304709
See also
External links
Readers of the Nolte article are strongly encouraged to read the IHR entry for information on his publishers, who are themselves controversial as Holocaust revisionists and Nazi apologists.
- Nolte's point of view (in German):
- Throwing Off Germany's Imposed History - The Third Reich's Place in History: A Conversation with Professor Ernst Nolte from the Institute for Historical Review.
- of Revisionism: Holocaust Denial and the Conservative Call to Reinterpret German History
- Ernst Nolte and Holocaust Revisionism
- The logic of terror, an article by Götz Aly
Fascist/Nazi era scholars and writers | Historiography | Vergangenheitsbewältigung | West Germany | History of Germany
"Historikerstreit"