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Page 1: Historikerstreit and Reunification, Bartov

http://www.jstor.org/stable/488296

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ngc.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

New German Critique is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New GermanCritique.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Historikerstreit and Reunification, Bartov

Time Present and Time Past: The Historikerstreit and German Reunicwation*

by Omer Bartov

Reworking the Past. Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, Pe- ter Baldwin, ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1990).

One of the most paradoxical aspects of the Historikerstreit has been that if, on the one hand, it demonstrated the extent to which all history is indeed contemporary history, on the other hand it forcefully illustra- ted that historians must exercise a great deal of caution in relating their writing on the past too closely to current events. Looking back at the Historikerstreit following German reunification lends much of the debate a strikingly anachronistic air. Questions raised by members of both camps regarding German national identity seem to have been abruptly resolved, for better or for worse, by a series of rapid, mostly unexpected political events. Since the articles collected in Peter Baldwin's book were written, we have ceased to speak of the FRG and the GDR, and refer simply to Germany, even if it has remained a federal republic.

Yet in another sense, the Historikerstreit curiously anticipated reunifi- cation, by raising some issues which will now take on an increasing po- litical significance, as they concern both the social organization, ideo- logical outlook, and historical self-understanding of the new/old Ger- many, and the political, economic, and military role to be played in the future by a nation which has once more become one of the most powerful in the world. Historians are not always known for their acute observations of contemporary society, let alone for their ability to fore- tell and influence the course of political events; in this, Germany's

* I wish to thank Rogers Brubaker for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

173

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scholars have been anything but an exception. Nevertheless, the histo- rians' debate, itself merely the climax of an ongoing controversy that originated in the early postwar years now ramified far beyond the constraining medium of academic journals, can be said to have both reflected and influenced the changing fortunes of a nation at once in- creasingly aware of its enormous strength, and deeply divided as to the practical implications and the ideological legitimation of its newly found independence. These questions have much to do, of course, with Germany's historical experience; consequently, by force of clai- ming to be the most competent interpreters of the past, Germany's historians have moved to the forefront of current political debates. What is more, while politicians everywhere seek scholarly legitimation and reassurance when they set about charting the course of the future, this is especially the case in a nation whose present is so heavily burde- ned by its Nazi past. Whether either the sphere of scholarship, or that of politics, benefit from this melange, is a moot point.

Peter Baldwin's book is thus a valuable contribution to our know- ledge not only because it brings together some of the most interesting contributions to, and comments on, the controversy, but also because of the Aktualitdt and international significance of many of the questions it raises. After all, such is the cunning of history, that while the Histori- kerstreit was primarily concerned with the impact of National Socialism upon the national identity of a divided Germany, reunification and the expansion of German power have made this into a salient issue for much of the rest of the world as well. Thus the "German Question" has once more become everyone's problem, for when a major power determines its policies (or at least claims to do so) by reference to its past, then this power's past (or its understanding of that past) assumes a central role in world affairs. Nor were the participants in the Histori- kerstreit ignorant of the political weight of their historical interpreta- tions; indeed, some of them sacrificed a great deal of historical veracity for the sake of what seemed to them a legitimate political goal. Natu- rally, it was these political implications of the debate, along with the specific nature of the period actually debated, which made the Streit into such a heated, often angry affair, arousing a great deal of public interest and providing Germany's politicians with a new arsenal of arguments bearing the stamp of scholarly legitimation.

Up to now the best available books on the Historikerstreit have probably been the German-language collection of the original articles published

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Omer Bartov 175

by the Piper Verlag,1 Hans-Ulrich Wehler's polemical essay on the de- bate,2 and Charles Maier's excellent discussion of the controversy, its roots and implications.3 Reworking the Past, however, has the merit of inc- luding important discussions on related issues which have previously not always been associated with the Historians' Debate. Moreover, by pro- viding translations of some pertinent contributions hitherto available only in German, it is especially useful for students of the debate who have not been able to follow these publications in the original.4

Of the three introductory essays, Baldwin's own contribution lucidly discusses the (ordinarily vague) concept of historicization, clarifies the relationship between the politics and methodologies of the partici- pants, and argues that the timing of the controversy was related both to the growing awareness of the link between "Barbarossa" and the "Fi- nal Solution," and to the conservative Wende in Germany. He points out the curious similarity between Nolte's position that, just as the Nazis had claimed, Germany's attack on the Soviet Union was indeed a preemptive operation to ward off the "Bolshevik" threat,5 and Arno Mayer's thesis that the Holocaust was essentially the by-product of a general European crusade against communism.6 Baldwin concludes that the Historikerstreit was mainly about the FRG's historical - and therefore also national - identity, with one camp anxious to "normal- ize" and "relativize" a past which seemed to stand in the way of this objective, and another which successfully dammed (and damned) the attempt to "correct" the past by a combination of amnesia and distor- tion. This point is pursued further by Charles Maier, who notes that the effort by the politicians at Bitburg to present the Wehrmacht's troops as Hitler's victims no less than the Jews, was reiterated by Andreas Hillgruber,7 whose "vulgar Historismus" was aimed at "normalizing" the

1. Rudolf Augstein, et al., "Historikerstreit": Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987).

2. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit: Ein polemischer Essay zum Historikerstreit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988).

3. Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identi- ty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988).

4. Especially from Dan Diner's outstanding edited collection, Ist der Nationalsozia- lismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschen- buch, 1987).

5. See. Nolte's essavs in "Historikerstreit". 6. Aro Mayer, Why did The Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (New

York: Pantheon, 1988). 7. Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und

das Ende des europdischen Judentums (Berlin: Corso bei Siedler, 1986).

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past and thereby re-establishing a national identity rooted in a revival of a nationalist anticommunism. Moreover, this led him to insist on the need to identify with the Ostheer's soldiers, as well as to lament the loss of Germany's position as a central European power, all in con- scious disregard of the systematic murders taking place behind the front. Maier then criticizes the "contextualization" of the Third Reich practiced by Ernst Nolte, Joachim Fest, and Klaus Hildebrand, whose penchant for comparative analyses of genocide served them to assert that, as Germany was anything but unique in pursuing murderous policies, it must at last be "emancipated" from the burden of its Nazi past and be "given back" its history, that is, its national identity. For Maier, however, the Nazi attempt systematically to kill all theJews, and the mechanical precision with which this aim was pursued, make the Holocaust a unique event, incommensurable with all other brands of genocide. Moreover, as Anson Rabinbach points out, the Holocaust "has always belonged to the political discursive topography of the postwar Federal Republic," in that "every stage in the emergence of West German sovereignty has been linked to the question of responsi- bility for the German past." This began with Adenauer's declaration on reparations, clearly linked to his decision on integration with the Western Bloc, and ended with Bitburg and the Historikerstreit, that is, with the political and scholarly campaign to relativize the Holocaust and remove Germany from "Hitler's shadow," both obviously linked to Germany's unrelenting and ultimately successful drive toward reas- serting its historic position as a great Central European power.

The second part of this volume, entitled "Historicization," seems at first to be concerned mainly with methodological issues. However, a closer reading of these essays, and especially of the correspondence, reprinted here, between Martin Broszat and Saul Friedlander, reveals once more that all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, scho- lars writing on Nazism cannot be divorced from their own political con- text, national identity, and personal experiences. This opinion is not shared by Broszat, who asserts in his "Plea" that the chronological dis- tance from the period finally allows us to historicize National Socialism and put an end to the "total distancing from the Nazi past." Neverthe- less, his claim that "[t]he 'normalization' of our historical consciousness cannot in the long run exclude the Nazi period," ostensibly exemplifies the political content of methodological controversies. Broszat pleads for a new approach which would combine a greater degree of empathy

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with the protagonists and a willingness to examine those aspects of the regime which were not necessarily National Socialist or criminal, thereby "contextualizing" the Third Reich and more dearly percei- ving the continuity of German history. Instead of studying modem German history merely as a forerunner and aftermath of Nazism, Broszat thus recommends examining the Nazi period as one in which some long-established socioeconomic trends were continued, while others gradually evolved and reached full maturity only in the postwar era. Though not explicitly stated, such an approach may lead to a his- tory of the Third Reich with Nazism left out, or at least "contextuali- zed" and thereby de-emphasized, providing Germany with an easier past to "come to terms with," and one more serviceable for the forma- tion of a national identity liberated from the nastier aspects of Nazi rule. If there was an Auschwitz, Broszat says, there was also a social se- curity plan; if there were some fanatic Nazis, there were also innumer- able Bavarians who kept leading a normal existence. "Normalizing" the history of the Third Reich would be based on recognizing the nor- mality of much of what went on there, indeed, of describing much of the population's insistence on maintaining "normality" as Resistenz to the regime and its ideology.8 The moral implications of continued "normality" within the context of a criminal and murderous regime are left unexplored. This is the kernel of Friedlander's critique of the "Plea," where he objects to Broszat's attempt to "consider the Nazi era as any other era," an approach whose key elements are the "relativization of the political-moral framework implied in the delimination of the 1933-45 period and the relativization of the distance-takingfirom the whole era...." Friedlander argues that the Nazi past is still far too close for historians to believe that they can approach it with the same sort of personal detachment as would their colleagues writing on more distant periods, especially be- cause in historicizing the Third Reich there is an issue of "differential relevance," namely, that what seems relevant to contemporary Germans may greatly differ from what seems relevant to the victims of the regime. Consequently, he asserts that "historicization can be completed only if the crimes of the Nazi regime are entirely integrated within a complex historical context," so as to avoid a false and misleading reconstruction of the period.

8. Unlike Widerstand, defined as active political opposition, Resistenz treads the fine line between conformism and nonconformism, and is seen in much more passive terms.

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In the subsequent exchange of letters between the two scholars Broszat concedes that the concept of historicization is somewhat am- biguous, but reiterates that the Nazi period cannot be excluded from a scholarly inquiry "founded on a principal of critical, enlightening his- torical understanding [Verstehen]." Relativization would be avoided simply due to the nature and scope of the Nazi regime's crimes. Fur- thermore, he argues, there is now a younger generation of German scholars capable of writing "only in scientific terms" and of undertak- ing a "conscientious historical inquiry" aimed at "a rational compre- hension of this period." This he unfavorably compares with the pre- vious "declamatory, morally impotent general and wholesale distan- cing from the Nazi past," as well as with the "Jews," who "remain ada- mant in their insistence on a mythical form of this remembrance," even if "[r]espect for the victims of Nazi crimes demands that this mythical memory be granted a place." To these assertions Friedlander reacts by asking whether Broszat implies that all Jews are by definition carriers of a "mythical" memory, even those who undertake the kind of research he advocates? As for German scholars, he notes that in fact all major contributors to the Historikerstreit belong to the "generation of Hitler Youth," and therefore cannot be seen as divorced from the peri- od; certainly there is no reason to believe that the perpetrators would find it easier to distance themselves from the past than the victims.

Returning to this issue from a different angle, Broszat finds Fried- lander's view, that even nonparticipation and passivity served to stabi- lize the system, as understandable from the perspective of the victims. Yet he argues that employing only this perspective "would serve to block important avenues of access to historical knowledge, and would hardly justify the demands of historical justice." Broszat is also inter- ested in "why such large segments of a civilized nation succumbed mistakenly" to Nazism, but his aim in posing the question is for this period to be "integrated once again as a portion of one's own national history." And because he has chosen the German perspective, he goes on to say that the

German historian . . . qua scientist and scholar ... cannot readily accept that Auschwitz also be made, after the fact, into the cardi- nal point.... He cannot simply accept without further ado that this entire complex of history be moved into the shadow of Auschwitz - yes, that Auschwitz even be made into the decisive measuring rod for the historical perception of this period.

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Broszat's discontent with overly stressing the regime's criminality has thus to do with the fact that thereby "the ability to feel one's way empa- thetically into the web of historical interconnections evaporates along with the pleasure in historical narration." This remark prompts Fried- lander to ask what sort of "pleasure" an historian could expect to derive from a Gesamtdarstellung of National Socialism if, as he insists should be the case, Auschwitz is retained as its main focus. Furthermore, taking note of recent findings regarding the widespread knowledge of Nazi cri- minality among the German population, as well as the extent to which the regime's ideology had taken the form of a "political religion," Friedlander argues against the tendency to hide behind a distorted ren- dition of Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil" which seems to leave no one directly responsible for an evil outcome.

In his last letter, Broszat substantially reformulates his distancing argu- ment. No longer concerned with the younger historians, he remarks that he himself was in fact a member of the Hitler Youth, and as such "was old enough to be affected emotionally and intellectually to a high degree by the suggestivity ... which the Nazi regime was capable of .. ." Yet following the collapse, his generation seems to have undergone a pro- found metamorphosis: "Affected, yet hardly burdened, the generation of Hitler Youth was both freer than those who were older, and more motivated than those who were younger, to devote itself totally to the learning process of these years." Moreover, they "adopted with enthusi- asm the values denounced once by the Nazis, and made them their own." It is thus due to a desire "to ask scientific questions," rather than for any apologetic tendency, that he refuses to be "too overly 'con- cerned,' for didactic reasons, about" Auschwitz, or to piece together an artificial picture "from the original, authentic continuum of this era," one liable to "take on an independent existence" and be "understood and misunderstood as being the actual history of the time" by later gene- rations. Similarly concerned with the personal dimension, Friedlander asserts that the vehemence of the debate was directly related to the fact that most participants belonged to the last generation which had person- ally experienced Nazism, making for a "dissonance between personal memory and socially constructed memories." This leads him to con- cude that "for us a kind of purely scientific distancing from that past... remains ... a psychological and epistemological illusion." Nor does he believe that the chronological distance from the event is great enough to enable younger age groups to write the kind of "detached" history

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proposed by Broszat. In this context, he notes that in striving for a "scientific approach," historians confuse perceptions and reality; if the population perceived the criminal aspects of the regime as normal, this was obviously not authentic, but rather perceived normality. The other demand of historicization, the desire for plastic representation, or "historical narration," is also seen by Friedlander as impossible to re- alize when writing on Nazi crimes whose horrific nature leaves one in- capable of doing anything more than simply documenting them. Friedlander concludes by saying that whereas Broszat is involved in "restoring for the readers, i.e., for German society, a continuity in his- torical self-perception ... this type of perspective necessarily will differ considerably ... from the perspective of the victims," which comes to show that a "fusion of horizons" is not yet in sight.

The exchange between Broszat and Friedlander is important because it exposes some previously unspoken assumptions among the partici- pants in the Historikerstreit. For if the debate was ostensibly between the right and the left, in another important sense it was also about the differ- ent perceptions of the Third Reich by the perpetrators and the victims. This point is also pursued by Dan Diner, who notes that the past plays a major role in German political symbolism. For the politician Alfred Dregger, "the so-called overcoming of the past" has rendered Germany "incapable of facing the future," and for the historian Andreas Hillgru- ber, the defense of the Third Reich was a legitimate effort to preserve Germany's territorial integrity. Thus, writes Diner, "for the sake of the nation, the historian takes sides in a 'dilemma' - against the victims of National Socialism," employing for this purpose the perspective of All- tagsgeschichte with its depoliticizing effect, and ultimately "completely overlooking the defining feature of the regime: industrialized mass mur- der." The preference for the "banal portrayal of National Socialist rule" typical of AUtagsgeschichte is no accident, for historians and politicians con- cerned with re-establishing the German identity cannot allow Auschwitz to take a central place in the history and consciousness of the Germans. And by stressing the "normality" of the Germans, no room is left for the "abnormality" of their victims. Diner warns that the practitioners of AU- tagsgeschichte "will only unconsciously reproduce in their reconstruction the same opposition that the Nazis themselves created. They will bring forth two histories of National Socialism - that of its perpetrators and that of its victims." Instead, Diner proposes to seek "a 'third dimension' of 'simultaneous nonsimultaneity"' which "would be equally valid for both victims and perpetrators."

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For his part, Otto Dov Kulka defends a more traditional approach, by stressing "the essential role of anti-Semitism, the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its world-historical significance." Kulka is highly critical of the three revisionist arguments: Nolte's "far-reaching relativization of National Socialism and the Holocaust" by means of a comparison of genocides; Broszat's shift to internal German social history and his claim that the preoccupation with the Holocaust distorts historical re- ality; and Hans Mommsen's emphasis on the impersonal bureaucratic machine of the totalitarian Nazi state and his disregard for ideological motivation. Kulka concludes therefore that stressing the singularity of the Holocaust will serve as a counterweight to the attempt to create "a new authentic national-historical consciousness" by means of a far- reaching revision of German history.

Interestingly, the third part of this volume, entitled "Appraisal," opens with Hans Mommsen's article, which similarly laments the fact that "the widespread consensus concerning the thoroughly reprehensi- ble nature of National Socialism is dissolving," and stresses that "[w]hat was earlier an academic dispute ... has now gained immediate political relevance." Unlike Broszat, Mommsen asserts that "the Holocaust was long neglected by researchers in West Germany," and that "[t]he real is- sue ... remains the relative weight of the Nazi period within the broa- der continuity of both German and European history." Whereas until recently the conservatives have insisted on the uniqueness of Nazism so as to divorce it from any nationalist, neoconservative, and populist roots, new evidence regarding the continuity between pre-Nazi and Nazi foreign policy has led some conservative historians to advocate a "change of paradigm" favoring a "relativizing, world-historical per- spective." Hence Nolte's argument that the Holocaust was a "form of anti-Marxism," and Nazism a response to the Bolshevik threat. Mommsen charges that this sort of historical writing aims at "fostering an aggressive national consciousness." To his mind, historicization "means analyzing both the destructive elements of the system and the features that appeared promising in the eyes of many contemporaries." Nevertheless, Mommsen believes that contemporary German society has developed "a sober skepticism vis-ai-vis nationalist slogans and the setting up of ideological enemies,"9 indeed, that "Germany today is

9. An attitude he has unfortunately recently ascribed also to the "average Landser" on the Eastern Front during the war. Hans Mommsen, "Kriegserfahrungen," in U. Borsdorf and M. Jamin, eds. Uber Leben im Krieg (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989) 13.

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ahead of its neighbors in its wariness of patriotic appeals for violent solutions to domestic conflicts." Of course, one wishes to accept his view that the conservative attempt "to use history to such manipulative ends ... is hardly compatible with the political maturity Germans have acquired through the bitter and sobering recognition of their complic- ity in the crimes of the Third Reich." But the fact remains that even if he was right when he wrote that "neither a 'reconstruction of the Euro- pean center' nor an exonerating theory of 'Germany's middle posi- tion' is necessary," in the meanwhile the former has already been achieved, and the latter is increasingly being used to justify that reality.

Hagen Schulze provides a good example of this kind of argumenta- tion. Objecting to the singularity of Auschwitz as making that event both "unhistorical" and "irrelevant to contemporary politics," Schul- ze proposes to "inquire into the continuities of German history which made Hitler possible" by means of "a resolute historicization of Na- tional Socialism and its crimes." The continuities he presents, howev- er, are rather peculiar. Thus the Weimar Republic appears to have col- lapsed because it was "repeatedly humiliated by an armistice, a peace treaty, demands for reparations, and persistent foreign policy discrimi- nation," while the Nazis came to power because Hindenburg, "a pres- ident full of good will," was compelled to appoint Hitler as chancellor "after lengthy and honorable resistance" only "because this was now the one person who could promise him a majority in the Reichstag and thereby bring an end to the reign of emergency decrees." This bi- zarre piece of "historicization" is followed by the discovery that Ger- many's fate was in any case sealed by its geography, which left it with only two alternative courses of action, either to become prey "to the political influences of neighboring powers," or to "organize and arm in order to wage war along all the far-flung borders and against foreign alliances." Yet though it obviously chose the latter course, Germany failed to modernize and democratize its domestic politics also due to "the limits placed on [its] existence by the European balance of pow- er." This, claims Schulze, "is the thread of continuity leading to the events of 1933." In other words, the Third Reich was a consequence of geographic determinants and foreign influence. This thread was bro- ken, he reasons, "by the defeat of 1945 and the division of Germany," a view which leaves one wondering whether reunification will spell a return to the policies of antimodernism and expansion, as Schulze's logic seems to indicate.

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Schulze's geo-political determinism, highly reminiscent of that pro- pagated by Michael Stirmer, can be seen as symptomatic of the psy- chological mechanism used to "ward off the past" discussed by Wolf- gang Benz, whereby "undesirable and unpleasant elements can be split off from reality, and simply not perceived." This "defiant revolt against reality" is illustrated by reference to popular claims that the gas chambers in German concentration camps were actually built by the Americans after the war, that the so-called "Auschwitz lie" is merely a manifestation of "anti-Germanism," and that German youth must be preserved from such contaminating ideas by retaining "as much dis- tance as we can from these matters." Benz observes that in the imme- diate postwar years a strong aversion to the survivors was combined with a sense of self-pity and a preoccupation with food shortages, pro- fessional difficulties, and anger at the disruption of "normality" by the occupiers. Resistance by local communities to any mention of the for- mer concentration camps in their vicinity and a tendency to refer to them as "correctional institutions"; an often obsessive preoccupation with the precise number of victims; portrayal of the resistance fighters and emigres as traitors and "communists"; an emphasis on the Ger- mans' own suffering under the bombing, the occupation, and of course the subsequent partition of Germany, seen as a counterbalance to Nazi crimes - all this points to a powerful tendency to distort and repress the past. More recently, however, a new attitude of defiance and self-pity has emerged, characterized by a sense of frustration at be- ing endlessly accused of crimes for which Germany has already alleg- edly "paid." Yet the attempt thereby "finally to step out from under the shadow of Hitler," writes Benz, may fail precisely because "the fee- lings of guilt and shame are not being articulated" due to "a refusal to engage in work on memory." Thus he concludes, in stark contradic- tion to Broszat, that "[a]n interval of only forty or fifty years is still not enough to render the Nazi period something historical."

Hans-Ulrich Wehler shares Mommsen's opinion that the Historikerstreit "is first and foremost a public political controversy," as well as his opti- mistic conclusion that the right's attempt to bring about a "regeneration of national historical consciousness" and "to unburden German history of its worst aspects," has failed. Wehler rejects Nolte's ideas on the anti- marxist origins of Nazism by noting that its Weltanschauung was mostly derived from right-wing ideologies predating the First World War, while its political success relied on long-term domestic conditions in Germany,

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such as the antagonistic class structure, authoritarianism, militarism, subservience to the state, susceptibility to charismatic leaders, etc., and from conditions produced by war and defeat in 1914-18. Hillgruber is similarly charged with aiming at "the return of an unreflecting national- ism" consciously based on the need "to extrude and exclude the vic- tims of National Socialism from his narrative." Germany's misfortune is hence always someone else's fault: for Hillgruber it is the Western Allies, for Nolte the "Bolsheviks," for Michael Stiirmer the "logic of power geography." These historians, Wehler argues, "undermine the existing, resilient loyalty toward the Federal Republic more quickly than one would think." Yet he believes that "[t]he FRG's citizens have no need for such a change of identity," and sees the final outcome of the debate as a victory for the "liberal political culture" in Germany. What his opinion would be following reunification is another question.

The clear delineation between the positions of scholars from the left and the right portrayed by Wehler is shown to be much more complex in Mary Nolan's perceptive essay. Indeed, in her opinion, "[t]he cent- rality of the Holocaust to the Historikerstreit serves as a deserved repri- mand to Left historians who have ignored anti-Semitism, racism, and the Final Solution." Her most critical remarks are reserved for the pro- ponents of Alltagsgeschichte. Thus she maintains that "the Right has challenged social historians to connect everyday life and high politics, and to rethink each in light of the other," because the crucial question to have emerged from the debate is "whether history from below ... can avoid inadvertently serving conservative and apologetic ends." Historians of the working class and of everyday life have argued that Germany under Nazism remained a polycratic society, characterized by a coexistence of conformity and nonconformity and a large meas- ure of "normality." They urge scholars to integrate National Socialism into moder German history as a whole, that is, to "historicize" or "normalize" it. However, says Nolan, the "(mis)appropriation" of these ideas by the new right has highlighted "the relationship between historical understanding and political identity.... For all concerned with questions of identity," whatever political camp and methodologi- cal approach they represent, "defining the past is integral to defining the present." The depoliticizing effects of Alltagsgeschichte have served the right in its search for an edifying history as a means to reconstruct a national identity. By focusing on identity and subjective experience - problematic in any case considering the radically different perceptions

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of perpetrators and victims - the "thick description" favored by Alltags- geschichte risks ignoring the wider context in which the described events and experiences were taking place. There is a difference between empa- thizing with women and workers, and identifying with the troops of the Ostheer. Nolan is troubled by the connection between the "normaliza- tion" of National Socialism advocated by the right, and the emphasis on the "normality" of daily life characteristic of Alltagsgeschichte. She proposes that historians of everyday life also pay attention to "the politicization of the private," that is to the manner in which people's lives were transformed under Nazi rule even when they were not fully conscious of this process. Resistenz, for instance, can also imply the kind of indiffer- ence, silence and withdrawal which stabilized the regime and enabled it to carry out its criminal policies. Otherwise, Nolan concludes, we face the danger of writing a history of "a Final Solution with no anti- Semitism; a Holocaust that is not unique."

This issue in tackled from two other angles in the fourth part of this volume, entitled "Ramifications." Dan Diner analyzes what he terms a process of "negative symbiosis" between Germans and Jews, who re- main tied to each other by the incomprehensibility of Auschwitz. The "Final Solution" is "too monstrous to be reduced to intention alone," while "the theory of an overpowering totalitarian system, of a direc- tionless autonomous process ending in Auschwitz, encourages [in Germany] an exculpating approach that sees no actors, although the event took place." Yet the psychological presence of Auschwitz is still strongly felt: "Auschwitz is thus part of the unconscious in a double sense: as something unconscious that was realized in a collective act, and as a continuing, collective sense of guilt caused by the act." This sense of guilt can lead to a persistent fear of revenge, to a "ritualized self-stylization as a victim," and to a compulsion to see history repea- ted in a different way - as manifested, for instance, in the anticipation of a genocide by Israel (seen as a metaphor for the Jews) against the Palestinians that would free the Germans of their own sense of guilt. For Diner, "all attempts to normalize life after, and in spite of, Ausch- witz ... are doomed to failure." Nevertheless, both Germans and Jews have formed what he calls "covering memories" of the event, the for- mer by preferring to speak of other victims of genocide, the latter by trying to integrate the Holocaust "into the confines of an exclusively Jewish view of history" and to transfigure it "into a meaningful nation- al martyrdom." The Jewish sense of shame for not having resisted,

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claims Diner, is also "based on an insistent refusal to understand Auschwitz," as is the attempt to perceive the Holocaust as the legitima- tion of Zionism. Similarly, he believes, any attempt to recreate a Ger- man identity after the Holocaust, "will run up against the absolute bar- rier of Auschwitz, with the result that the significance of Auschwitz - not only as the mass murder of the Jews, but also as a break with civili- zation itself - will be pushed aside, or sidestepped through a process of historicization." The German younger generation's "inability to mourn" stems from the dilemma that "empathy with the victims seems to block the path to reconciliation with their parents; and reconciliation with their parents gives the impression of a betrayal of that empathy with the victims." Thus normality, in the sense of "reconciliation with oneself and the nation's past," does not seem to be close at hand.

Andrei Markovits, concentrating on the organized and intellectual German left, notes that it initially felt less burdened by the past because it too had been a target of Nazi persecution. Moreover, the marxist inter- pretation of the "Jewish question" and fascism, both seen as mere by- products of the capitalist system, made it possible to reject any notion of collective guilt; being anticapitalist, the workers were by definition also antifascist. But while the right presented the Holocaust as an aberration devoid of any significance for the normal course of German history, the West German left, besieged by the anticommunism of the Cold War, created what Markovits calls "a major mechanism of displacement," namely, "the special relationship to the State of Israel." Consequently the left strongly supported Adenauer's reconciliation with Israel against much conservative opposition. Israel's triumph in the Six Day War, how- ever, brought about a radical shift in positions: the right embraced an Is- rael which had now liberated it from any remaining sense of guilt; while the radical and new left, perceiving the Jews now as persecutors rather than victims, adopted what Markovits calls an "anti-philo-Semitism" bordering on anti-Semitism, and openly questioned Israel's right to ex- ist. This process indicated, he believes, Germany's failure to cope with the past, for the "relationship to Israel simply mirrored the one-dimen- sionality with which the Germans had tried to overcome their own his- torical encounters with theJews." And although the moderate organized left has by and large continued to support Israel, the new Green move- ment has adopted the left's traditional position on the "fascist" phenom- enon, according to which Nazism has no unique characteristics, and the murder of the Jews is a mere sideshow rather than the distinguishing fea- ture of National Socialist rule.

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In his concuding remarks to this volume, Jurgen Kocka readily con- cedes the need to compare the Nazi period and the Holocaust with similar instances in this century, as indeed the concepts of "totalitari- anism" and "fascism" have done for years. Nevertheless, he maintains that in spite of some similarities between the Soviet and Nazi cases, the essentially "divergent social-historical positions" of these countries makes such a comparison unhelpful, let alone comparisons between Germany and countries of an even less advanced socioeconomic level in the Third World. Thus he insists that one ought to compare Germa- ny with similarly developed Western nations which, however, did not turn to either fascism or Stalinism. This brings him back to the Sonder- weg perspective, according to which the peculiarities of German history have to do with long-term causes such as the "belated" creation of the German nation state "from above," the disproportionate strength of the preindustrial elites, the weakness of its system of government, and the illiberal tradition in Germany's political culture, all of which clas- hed with a remarkably rapid process of industrialization and socioeco- nomic modernization, thereby producing both domestic instability and foreign aggression. Kocka takes note of recent criticisms of this theory, and particularly the argument that it makes for viewing Ger- man history only from the perspective of the Nazi period, that it exag- gerates the role of premodern attitudes, structures, and elites, and that it underestimates the more immediate causes of the collapse of Wei- mar. Nonetheless, Kocka believes that because the Nazi period has remained a major issue of German history (as amply demonstrated by the Historikerstreit), and since it can only be understood by means of comparison, one cannot avoid the comparative, long-term inquiry advocated by Sonderweg theorists, though the more direct causes for the "seizure of power" must not be ignored. Indeed, Kocka seems to believes that only the Sonderweg thesis offers a legitimate tool to "con- textualize" Nazism and serve the cause of German national identity without distorting the past as some revisionist historians have done. However, expressing the same optimism we have seen already in Mommsen and Wehler, Kocka too asserts that "[t]he break after 1945 and the furiously paced modernization that followed seem to have brought the Sonderweg to an end." Whether this is indeed the case in view of the opinions voiced in the Historikerstreit and the possible conse- quences of reunification is debatable.

Just when the left-liberal defenders of a West German identity were

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celebrating their triumph in the Historians' Debate, Helmut Kohl unleashed the political Blitzkrieg which within a few months shattered the old fronts and brought into existence a reunified Germany which everyone discussed and no one actually expected; and just when the Germans were beginning to adjust to their new circumstances and to redraw their domestic and foreign alignments, the Gulf Crisis threw all the old disputes and animosities into a state of renewed chaos. There is now in Germany, it seems, a sense of bewilderment and confusion, al- beit tinged with pride and hope, concerning its future social character and international role. One thing is certain: reports on the demise of the debate on German national identity, and therefore on Germany's National Socialist past, were greatly exaggerated. This is amply illustra- ted by the flood of articles on the subject in German dailies and maga- zines. One such essay, by the professor of literature Wilhelm Hort- mann, is suggestively entitled "What Does it Mean to be a German: Changes in the Fundamental Consensus due to Reunification and the Gulf Crisis."10 Hortmann begins with the assertion that "Europe is liv- ing through a deep crisis of identity, one which is most virulent in Ger- many," and then states categorically that "[w]e have once more be- come the object of history, even if we believed to have put it under control." After the "political and moral devastation" wrought by the Gulf War, he predicts, "nothing will be as it was." The time has come for Germany to "newly determine its role in Europe and in the world," especially as "the decline of American power" compels Germany to "take over the responsibility for the future and security of Atlantic civ- ilization." Yet Germany has "failed" to act, due to the paralyzing influ- ence of those who advocate a politics of absolute morality, legitimized by constant reference to the Nazi past. Nevertheless, due to reunifica- tion and the Gulf crisis, the two "bastions" of absolute morality, the "Power Taboo" (Gewalttabu) and the "Fascism Taboo," are finally crumbling. Germans can no longer claim to march along a moral Son- derweg; rather, they should acknowledge not only their "past guilt, but also their part in common future tasks of security policy." If "hitherto the profound conviction as to the uniqueness of German crimes belonged to the German definition of identity," and if the left insisted that Germany had lost all moral claim to ever be reunited due to its

10. Professor Dr. Wilhelm Hortmann, "Was es heigt, Deutscher zu sein. Verande- rungen im politischen Grundkonsens durch Wiedervereinigung und Golfkrise," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 Feb. 1991: 14.

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"ultimately inexpiable" crimes, reunification has made this position completely irrelevant. If by merging with the GDR, which for Hort- mann is a direct successor of the Nazi state, "we do not want to criti- cize" its inhabitants "of being fellow-travellers, we are forced subse- quently to decriminalize their fathers and grandfathers from being fel- low-travellers under Hitler, and to accept the thought that the Ger- mans did not vote for Bergen-Belsen in 1933." This is necessary also because, "German youth no longer feels itself duty-bound constantly to manifest its antifascist opinions." The attempt to make them feel guilty merely had the unfortunate result that "German youth describes itself as European. They have been taught by no one how to be Ger- man." Finally, foreign nations perceive German protestations of guilt only as a tool for dodging international responsibilities. Hortmann therefore claims to have observed "the marked loss of Auschwitz as a pivotal and cardinal point of political thinking, as an escape point from German history, as a negative divine proof and a unique break of civili- zation, as an inherited and singular German guilt and as a basis of Ger- man self-understanding written down for eternity." Saddam has shown that Hitler was not unique: "The claim of the uniqueness of German guilt and history can therefore no longer be maintained." Hence "the refusal to develop a German identity becomes also obso- lete." The time has come: "We will decide what is German, we will have to find out what it means to be German." Hortmann hails this point in time as "the end of the postwar period" for Germany. Indeed, further "identity refusals" will fail also "in view of the economic agg- ressivity of the Germans." The new "European Germany," he conclu- des, "is a solution only if it is not populated by faceless Europeans, but by identifiable Germans."

It is such articles, published in respectable dailies and written by uni- versity professors, which illustrate that if some of the paradigms of the Historikerstreit have been transformed by recent political events, the essen- tial issues it had raised remain at the center of public debate in Germany. Indeed, one may presume that in a nation which has now become fully independent, highly conscious of its immense power, and greatly preoc- cupied with its future role in the world, the urge to redefine national identity by means of "unburdening" Germany of the past will only grow. In due course, it seems, Auschwitz will inevitably recede into the past, not merely because of the growing chronological distance from the event, but also because increasing numbers of Germans are becoming

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impatient with the idea that their forefathers' sins should set limits to their own ambitions. Is it not possible to accept the burden of the past and yet pursue pragmatic and more or less decent policies in the pres- ent? This does not seem to be the opinion of the majority of Germans. Paradoxically, it is precisely due to the German awareness of the hor- rific weight of Auschwitz on the present, that the desire to "normalize" the past is so strong. Ultimately, it is the present which will be "norma- lized" by a repression, if not distortion of the past. Nor will this mech- anism be limited to the perpetrators, because it is just as essential for the victims, if they too wish to "normalize" their existence. But until the past becomes the excusive domain of historians, one may expect that for quite some time to come National Socialism will remain at the center of German politics. One only hopes that some future economic and political crisis will not release the evil spirits which have for so long been repressed and plunge this nation into chaos, especially as whatev- er happens in Germany is once again bound to have a major impact on the rest of the world.

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