The Historikerstreit ("historians' quarrel"^[1]) was an intellectual and political controversy in West Germany about the way the Holocaust should be interpreted in history. The German word Streit translates variously as "quarrel", "dispute", or "conflict". The most common translation of Historikerstreit in English language academic discourse is perhaps "the historians' dispute", though the German term is itself often used.

The Historikerstreit spanned the years 1986-1989, and pitted left-wing against right-wing intellectuals. The debate attracted much media attention in West Germany, with its participants frequently giving television interviews and writing op-ed pieces in newspapers. Its embers flared up again briefly in 2000 when one of its leading figures, Ernst Nolte, was awarded a literary prize.^[2]

[edit] Origins in post World War II German historiography

Immediately after World War II, 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 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. Two particular schools in the assessment of Nazism were the Marxist, which insisted on the economic aspects of Nazism and conceived of it as the culmination of a capitalist crisis, and the liberal, which instead emphasized Hitler's personal role and responsibility, thus bypassing the problem of the adherence of the German people to the regime.^[3]

Within West Germany at this time, most historians adopted a strongly defensive tone. 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, the assessment of domestic historians was challenged by their younger colleagues. Fritz Fischer argued in favor of a Sonderweg conception of German history that saw Nazism as the inevitable result of the way German society had developed. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of the functionalist school of historiography, which 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 wider than it had been cast previously. Many right-wing German historians strongly disliked the implications of the Sonderweg conception and the functionalist school, both of which 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 started to feel enough time had passed and it was time for Germans to start celebrating their history again. An example of this attitude is Michael Stürmer's 1986 article Land without history, bemoaning what Stürmer saw as the absence of positive history in which Germans could take pride.^[4] The fact that Stürmer was serving as an advisor and speechwriter to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl heightened the controversy created by his remarks. At the same time, many left-wing German historians disliked what they saw as the more 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,^[5][6][7][8] were two proposed museums celebrating modern German history, to be built in West Berlin and Bonn. Many of the left-wing participants in the Historikerstreit were to claim that this 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 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" among historians.^[9]

[edit] 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'^{[citation needed]} to the 'class murder' of the Stalinist system of gulags. In his view, the gulags were the original and greater^{[citation needed]} horror. In the face of the threat of Bolshevism, it was reasonable that the German people would turn to Nazi fascism. He had in fact already articulated this argument the previous year in an essay published in English:^[10] 'Auschwitz... was above all a reaction born out of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution... 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'.

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas, responding shortly 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 (which phrase he used as the article's title and would use the following year as title of an anthology of his recent political writings).^[11] In this article, Habermas also complained about certain other historians, in particular Michael Stürmer and Andreas Hillgruber, accusing them of seeking to whitewash the German past.

[edit] 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. The debate excited immense interest in West Germany, where historians enjoy more prestige than they do in the English-speaking world. The debate was noted for its highly vitriolic and aggressive tone, with the participants often engaging in personal attacks against the participants on the other side.^[12]

An important sub-issue was triggered by Hillgruber's 1986 book Zweierlei Untergang ('Two kinds of downfall: the smashing of the German Reich and the end of European Jewry'^[13]), in which he lamented the mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland at the end of World War II and compared the sufferings imposed on these Heimatvertriebene ('those expelled from their native land') to the Holocaust. Hillgruber had not supported Nolte, and the controversy over Zweierlei Untergang only became linked to the controversy over Nolte's views when Habermas and Wehler lumped Hillgruber with Nolte, characterizing them as conservatives trying to minimize Nazi crimes.

The debate centered on four main questions:

• Were the crimes of Nazi Germany uniquely evil in history, or were other crimes such as those of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union comparably evil.
• Did German history follow a "special path" (the above mentioned Sonderweg) leading inevitably to Nazism? If that teleological interpretation was accepted, then most or all of pre-1945 German history bore the taint of the impending Nazism, while Nazism itself was considered inevitable. 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 predated World War I. The Sonderweg analysis, however, did not necessarily consider Nazism from a teleological perspective, but only aimed at underlining historical factors explaining its apparition (i.e. popularity of anti-Semitism in pre-Nazi Germany, Prussian militarism, etc.) 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 thesis concerned the reasons for the alleged Sonderweg. Stürmer argued for geographical factors as the reason for the Sonderweg while Wehler insisted on cultural and social factors. One of Stürmer's leading critics, Jürgen Kocka, himself a proponent of the Sonderweg view of history, argued that 'Geography is not destiny'.^[14]
• 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?

[edit] 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. A rare effort at compromise was attempted by Karl Dietrich Bracher and Richard Löwenthal, who argued that comparing different totalitarian systems was a valid intellectual exercise, thereby agreeing with one of the central points of the supporters of Nolte et al., but who insisted further that the Holocaust should not be compared to other genocides, thereby agreeing with one of the central points of the Sonderweg.

A small number of 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 sharply critical of the views of Nolte, but generally defended Hillgruber.

[edit] See also

• Functionalism versus intentionalism
• Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past)
• Sonderweg

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

The voluminous academic literature on the Historikerstreit includes multiple anthologies of the major interventions, e.g., Augstein 1993 [1987], Habermas 1987, and New German Critique 1988.

• Aly, Götz. 2006. The logic of horror, June 12, 2006 German original in Die Zeit on June 1, 2006).
• Augstein, Rudolf, et al. 1993 [1987]. 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. (English language edition of 'Historikerstreit': Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistschen Judenvernichtung, Munich: Piper.)
• Baldwin, Peter. 1990. Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians Dispute. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
• Cohen, Roger. 2000. Hitler Apologist Wins German Honor, and a Storm Breaks Out. New York Times, June 21, 2000.
• Craig, Gordon. 1987. The War of the German Historians. New York Review of Books, February 15, 1987, 16-19.
• Eley, Geoff. 1988. Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit 1986'1987. Past and Present, 1988 Nov., 121: 171'208.
• Evans, Richard. 1989. In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past, New York, NY: Pantheon.
• Habermas, Jürgen. 1986. Eine Art Schadenabwicklung: Die apologetischen Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung [free translation: A kind of canceling out of damages: the apologistic tendencies in German writing on postwar history]. Die Zeit, 18 July 1986.
• Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: kleine politische Schriften VI. Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp.
• Hillgruber, Andreas. 1986. Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reichs und das Ende des europäischen Judentums. Berlin: Siedler.
• Hirschfeld, Gerhard. 1987. Erasing the Past? History Today, 1987 Aug., 37(8): 8-10.
• New German Critique. Special Issue on the Historikerstreit. 1988 Spring - Summer, v. 44.
• Jarausch, Konrad H. 1988. Removing the Nazi stain? The quarrel of the historians. German Studies Review, 1988 May, 11(2): 285-301.
• Kershaw, Ian. 1989. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretations, London: Arnold.
• Kühnl, Reinhard (editor). 1987. Vergangenheit, die nicht vergeht: Die "Historikerdebatte": Darstellung, Dokumentation, Kritik. Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein.
• Maier, Charles. 1988. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Muller, Jerry. 1989. German Historians At War.Commentary, 1989 May, 87(5): 33-42.
• Nolte, Ernst. 1985. Between myth and revisionism. In H. W. Koch (ed.), Aspects of the Third Reich. London: Macmillan.
• Nolte, Ernst. 1986. Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986.
• Nolte, Ernst. 1987. Das Vergehen der Vergangenheit: Antwort an meine Kritiker im sogenannten Historikerstreit, Berlin: Ullstein.
• Peter, Jürgen. 1995. Historikerstreit und die Suche nach einer nationalen Identität der achtziger Jahre, European University Studies, Political Science Vol. 288, Frankfurt am Main, New York: Peter Lang
• Alfred Sohn-Rethel. 1978. Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism,London, CSE Books.
• Stürmer, Michael. 1986. Land ohne geschichte [Land without a history], translated into English as "History In a Land Without History" pages 16'17 from Forever In The Shadow of Hitler? edited by Ernst Piper, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993.
• A. J. P. Taylor. 1980. Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918. Oxford University Press.
• A. J. P. Taylor. 1997. The Origins of the Second World War. Longman
• Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 1988. Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit" Munich: C.H. Beck.

[edit] External links

• Nolte's article in FAZ Republished by the German government's German Historical Museum.