A nation under guilt

National Interest, The, Fall, 2004 by Martin Walker

"When this past is laid before me every day in the media, I notice something awakes inside me that resists such continual harping on our shame", Walser said at the presentation of the German Booksellers' Peace Prize. His remarks were made in the context of two controversies of the day: the reparation payments of German industry and banks to forced laborers from the Nazi era and the building of the Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin.

THERE SHOULD be little surprise that history has become such an intellectual battleground in contemporary Germany and much comfort to be drawn from the liveliness of the debate. Much of this debate focuses on the work of Ernst Nolte, whose Three Faces of Fascism remains a classic. But in 1980, Nolte ventured into highly controversial territory with a speech that is credited with unleashing the Historikerstreit, the clash of the historians.

In his 1980 lecture, "Historical Legend and Revisionism?", Nolte said:

   The Third Reich should be removed from the
   historical isolation in which it remains....
   The demonization of the Third Reich is
   unacceptable.... [Instead, it] must become
   an object of scholarship, of a scholarship that
   is not aloof from politics, but that is also not
   merely a handmaiden of politics.

So far, so reasonable. Then Nolte went further, suggesting that Hitler's assault on the Jews might have had some shred of justification:

   It is hard to deny that Hitler had good reason
   to be convinced of his enemies' determination
   to annihilate him long before the first information
   about the events in Auschwitz became
   public.... Chaim Weizmann's statement in
   the first days of September 1939, that in this
   war the Jews of all the world would fight on
   England's side ... could lay the foundation
   for the thesis that Hitler would have been justified
   in treating the German Jews as prisoners
   of war (or, more precisely, as civilian
   internees), thus interning them.

In June 2000, Nolte was awarded "Konrad Adenauer Prize" for literature, one of Germany's most prestigious prizes by the Munich-based Germany Foundation (Deutschlandstiftung). In his acceptance speech, Nolte suggested that the contemporary historian "should leave behind the view that the opposite of National Socialist goals is always good and right" and asked the dangerous question "whether Hitler's antisemitism may not have had a kernel of truth [or a] ... rational, comprehensible core."

Because the Third Reich was the "strongest of all counter forces" to Soviet communism, a movement with wide Jewish support, Nolte raised the question whether Hitler may have had rational reasons for persecuting the Jews, and suggested that there was now "a Jewish paradigm" of history, which is assuming the status of a "near-religion" of which Nazism is the "new Satan." It is at this point that the reasonable questions of the serious historian start to blend into something markedly more sinister and the prospect emerges that yesterday's history becomes a contentious factor in today's politics.