One of the curiosities of the German culture of debate that many of their Chapter of people are given, which actually belong only marginally or not at all. Above all, the story returns as good examples. The most famous is certainly the “historians’ dispute” in 1986. Because he began with a debate between the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Nolte.
Who what was Ernst Nolte? The news that he has now died after a short illness at the age of 93 years on Thursday morning in Berlin , raises again this question: Was he really the most controversial historian of Germany? Or he was the philosopher and philologist, he was of his academic career, anyway? Or would the characteristic that it has imposed on itself: history thinker
An obituary Ernst Nolte is a difficult thing?. For decades it was considered politically correct, it was a reactionary, extravagant or even be described as intellectual arsonists, as a thinker so, for to find a word of understanding already provoked the suspicion of historical distortion. On the other hand it certified even his fiercest critics to have been a wise man, the only eventually began to be incorrigible. The judgment says something about Nolte and German sensitivities. therefore His death offers chance of a location determination.
Ernst Nolte’s life was marked by an outsider. First was a good source. The son of a primary school headmaster in Witten missing three fingers on his hand, which made him one of the few members of the vintage 1923, which were not collected and burned for military service. 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed, he got his degree in Freiburg and was a high school teacher for Ancient Languages and German. Years later the dissertation followed in philosophy. He was already 40 years old, a rigid teacher with Catholic roots – which has been registered yet with a fine antenna for historians of that generation – who wore with a habilitation project. He would have liked to well qualified in Heidegger, finally took with Theodor Schieder in Cologne one of the most influential historians of his cause to.
Nolte’s book” fascism in its epoch “(1963) was adopted as a habilitation thesis and catapulted the serious high school teacher with a time at the head of German historiography. His history of ideas comparison of Italian Fascism, German Nazism and French Action Française was soon regarded as a milestone on the way to break up the national state narrowness of the compartment by comparative perspectives.
one reviewer praised the “fascism” as well as “the most important work, which is the German historiography overgrown for over two decades”. That was who died in July 2014 Hans-Ulrich Wehler.
Twenty years later Wehler was also a master student Schieder, one of the heads of social history that her Mecca had built at the University of Bielefeld. And Nolte has held a professorship of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin. For the “Frankfurter Allgemeine” He wove some threads on, which had been already created in the “fascism”. They appeared in 1986 under the title “past that will not pass away”. Habermas, Wehler schoolmate from Gummersbach kept violently against it. The historians’ dispute was there.
In his habilitation Nolte had to “struggle against Marxism” recognized Hitler as “a defining element of his actions”, which the leader of National socialism from the “bare nationalists” distinction. In the truncated form of the newspaper article was from “the logical and factual precedent” that the Gulag Archipelago Bolshevik TO ISSUE before Auschwitz the Nazis. Hitler appeared as a kind of middle-class anti-Lenin, who imitated only the class murder in the Soviet Union with his Judenmord.
With its reply in the “time” was Jürgen Habermas the clock for the polyphonic choir critics before: who put Gulag before Auschwitz, relativizing the one hand the uniqueness of the Holocaust, on the other hand, the regressive barbarism of Nazism (and also denigrates the human approach of socialism). But that the German catastrophe would excuse a new national-conservative view of history in the sense. In these allegations be bundled in several ways time specific discomfort: re-election of Helmut Kohl as chancellor, his announcement in Berlin and Bonn to found National museums of German history, about the commemoration in the cemeteries of Verdun (with François Mitterrand) and Bitburg (with Ronald Reagan), on the NATO decision retrofit and new arms, outdated criticism of the theory of totalitarianism of the Cold war and – not least – distribution struggles in the universities. Over his few defenders of the bourgeois camp Ernst Nolte was a cipher this unwanted conglomerate. The beats blended content with morale and were soon in person, eventually burned Nolte’s car in the parking lot of the FU.
Nolte had not been someone who made playful fun on the conflict comes something Wehler justified in retrospect, why just the “monastic teacher” for him and his combatants had been a “godsend”. Because of the lay by with thick books, where he also for rational response to the “Jewish Bolshevism” said the Holocaust Hitler. The danger thus be exploited by sectarians at the right edge, Nolte has indeed seen, but repeated utterances and publications also the Seine helped make the impression ideological neighborhood arose.
Thus Nolte predestined as the ideal scapegoat for the disaster, which meant the unexpected fall of the wall for the winner of the historians dispute. Your social educational impetus to interpret the German two states as atonement for the Nazi genocide, broke up in the jubilation over the peaceful revolution. The moral claim had to capitulate to the story.
Although his cleverer opponent like Wehler and Heinrich August Winkler quickly realized that many allegations of Historikerstreit exaggerating sprang it was then for decades a proven method, unwelcome propositions with her – to disavow close to Nolte – apparent. In 2006, Nolte said in an interview with the “world”, it it was at that time been a matter not simply reduce German history only to Nazism, but to interpret in broader contexts. In the same year known Wehler that terrible sacrifices balance of communism would have to be “taken seriously as a counterweight”.
Eight years later, in 2014, said the Berlin European historian Jörg Baberowski, the “Scorched earth – Stalin’s reign of violence” for his book has been awarded the Leipzig book Fair prize, the “mirror”: “Nolte was done wrong it had historically right..” So well does the historicizing.
The fear of losing cherished images of history Ernst Nolte has stoked. With alternative designs he has failed. But as “history thinker”, as he saw himself, he has an example statuiert on which we will long hard nut our teeth.
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