As in the autumn of 1976 struck many students of West Berlin universities against prohibitions and Verschulung their courses, Ernst Nolte offered them his forehead and held his lectures wacker from. At least he tried to, until a small group of students, armed with a guitar, came to the lecture hall and the singing of strike songs blasted the lecture Nolte.
Nolte, usually very reserved, quiet man, was frantic. He accused the striking students before they are behaving like Joseph Goebbels and the SA men who had 1930 the screening of blasted using the release, for white mice “on the Western Front”.
Nolte had a tendency to strong comparisons was also paired with the pleasure in it to sit between all chairs. This contributed substantially to that of the deceased in Berlin at the age of 93 years professor emeritus a the most famous historian of his generation was. Without question he was the most controversial.
At the same time Nolte did not get beyond the status of an eccentric outsider of his profession. His colleague Walter Laqueur called him a “lone wolf” in his field
The 1923 in Witten born the son of a primary school director Nolte missing from birth three fingers on one hand. it was therefore in the Second World War the soldiering withheld. Instead of fighting for leaders, people and our country, Nolte studied philosophy at the Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. In 1952 he received his doctorate with a thesis on “self-alienation and dialectics from German Idealism and in Marx”.
A good ten years later published the teacher who taught German and ancient Greek, his investigation “Fascism in its epoch” which became a standard work. As Seiteneinsteiger into the scientific community, he first lecturer in Cologne, then professor at Marburg and finally from 1973 until his retirement in 1991 Professor of Modern History at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute at the Free University Berlin.
Challenging Habermas
Nolte considered himself a philosopher of history, thinking along the very long lines. In this pose he published in June 1986 an article in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, which was entitled “past that will not pass away”. Therein Nolte made a “causal nexus” between the violence of the Russian Communists and the murder of Jews by the German Nazis from
He said. “Was not the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ primary to Auschwitz was not the ‘class murder’? the Bolsheviks the logical and factual precedent for the ‘genocide’ of the Nazis? ” Jürgen Habermas attacked then Nolte’s theses and writings of two other conservative historians as “apologetic tendencies in German historiography” to. He accused them of “revisionism”, the attempt to shift historical debt.
Habermas contrast argued for a constitutional patriotism and a commitment to “political culture of the West”. Immediately Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Eberhard Jaeckel, Richard Lowenthal, Kurt Sontheimer and many other well-known colleague Nolte fought in the so-called historians dispute then on the side of Habermas and turned with great sharpness against his obvious relativize the Holocaust.
Nolte had maneuvered into the right corner, and he came out of his life no longer. He wanted it probably not. Instead clarify its partly vague theses Nolte demanded an end to “collectivist debt write-ups against Germany” and castigated the legal prohibition to deny the Holocaust, as a “threat to intellectual freedom.” In an interview Nolte said 1994 Holocaust: “I can not rule out that most victims do not in the gas chambers, but that the number of people is relatively larger, which went through epidemics basis or through mistreatment and mass shootings.”
When he Konrad Adenauer prize was awarded in 2000, the CDU leader Angela Merkel refused to give a eulogy. Nolte his professional and political isolation declared himself so that he has remained true to its positions, but the German company is constantly moved to the left.
The historian and journalist Franziska Augstein, who studied at Nolte, Nolte did indeed “for the best teacher”, they have met at the Free University, but his life’s work was only “an agglomerate of philosophically perceived, relined with interesting quotations, resentments”. Her father, SPIEGEL founder Rudolf Augstein, ended in 1988 its review of Nolte-Paper ‘European civil war from 1917 to 1945 “with the words:” O Nolte, why have you done this to us. “
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