When a book is entitled “Historical existence”, then one suspects that the not to this or that event is, not even to an epoch, but that everything on stake. It’s all or nothing. Ernst Nolte has published this book in the past year again. Theses of such coverage falling specialist historians usually difficult. And indeed Nolte had come upon a detour to the story: Because of a congenital disability obvious he was not fit for service war and could study philosophy, German and Classical Philology in Münster, Berlin and Freiburg. In Berlin he heard the philosophers Nicolai Hartmann.
In Freiburg Martin Heidegger was the outstanding figure. Last fall Nolte reported in Frank Böckel’s magazine “Tumult” about this period: “On the way from the door to the lectern, the diminutive man might like a normal high school teachers in a kind of, small farmers’ clothes exempt, but only after the uttered the first words, he turned into a speaker, the doctrine of the logos’ spoke with the utmost concentration, Heraclitus and his shining eyes turned the whole audience in rapt audience “(” the young student and the famous professor -. memories of Martin Heidegger from the last war year 1944/45 “)
” end of the history of mankind “
in the last weeks of the war, he visited Heidegger in undestroyed Messkirch. “Here, detailed discussions were lead, but of course the approaching end of the war overshadowed everything, and I remember with certainty only to the agreement, the first post-war term in Heidegger to write a dissertation on the Ennead Plotinus, about time and eternity ‘and thus the narrowest circle around him to belong for the duration “
over time and eternity -. which describes in Ernst Nolte’s educational program throughout the distance of history as limited academic discipline. “Past life” was at the end of what was in the twentieth century in the game and what, as Nolte, will be at stake. Because of the abolition of the story ran, the totalitarian projects, even if it as Marx so humanistic formulated that after the proletarian revolution only be reached “the end of history of mankind” and only then the fully developed human will compete. Even Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the “end of history” had Nolte trouble deep.
End of the Weimar Republic
He taught in Marburg since 1965. Recent History, 1973, he went to the Freie Universität Berlin , Born Ernst Nolte in 1923, the early crisis of the Weimar Republic. Mussolini’s “March on Rome” had already occurred, and Lenin was still alive. This shapes. Too rarely do you realize that the horizon of understanding even the most reflected and distancing most historian is limited at the end of one’s own life era. More broadly: we can only, of which we have not yet received oral tradition Really understand well
In 1923, a crucial year of the Weimar Republic.. Hardly ever had such a wealth of significant events in world history to find in such a small space – it Nolte once pointed. Inflation was hyperinflation, in October, the dollar was worth 4.2 trillion marks. In November Hitler tried his Munich Putsch, only a month before had the Communists, reinforced by Soviet Militäremissäre, the “German October” planned, from the then only the fast collapsing Hamburg rising under the later KPD leader Ernst Thalmann was. In the west, the Rhineland and especially in the Palatinate, there were separatist subversion. From France they were supported.
Goethe determinant
Politically, the year 1923 on January 11 (the day of birth Nolte) started when the French into the Ruhr (and thus also in Witten, Nolte birthplace) had invaded. Only then namely radicalization was comprehensive, right and left poignant: the crisis was one of the nation whose existence was at stake, and it was economically and socially dispossessed by SMEs by inflation. And actually went communist coup threat of Nazi advance
Psychoanalysis has spoken of a “trauma of birth” – there was a historic trauma, the initial constellation, which wanted to recognize Goethe as a determinant. “As to the day that lent you the world, / the sun was greeting the planets, / are so soon and continually thrived / According to the law by which you made contact. “it is no exaggeration barely if you understand Nolte’s life’s work as the unfolding of a constellation searches.
More about
in Hattingen in southern Ruhr, where Nolte grew up, were before 1933 confrontations Communists and Nazis on the agenda, and not without a mingled emotion and amusement feeling we read of the first attempts at writing of the man who should trigger the Historikerstreit later: “these trends I took an early and avid newspaper reader, lively, although still quite childish, mainly from fear toward communism fulfilled share, and I wrote at the age of seven or eight years a small manuscript on the reaching out of Russian Bolshevism to Germany. “
the temporal priority of the Bolshevik class to say extermination policy against the Holocaust – and therefore to be interpreted Nazism as radical response – that was the core of Nolte’s Frankfurt lecture “past that will not pass away” (FAZ of 6 June 1986), which led to the historical dispute. Then he fell into a tactile isolation, partly because of the harsh attacks, partly from its own clumsiness. Yesterday Ernst Nolte died in Berlin.
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