The Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit)

Comparison, context and national history

Nolte asked whether Bolshevik “class murder” was not the logical and factual precursor of Nazi “racial murder” – he thought a causal connection probable, a thesis that historical research has since rejected – while calling the Nazi acts of biological annihilation “qualitatively different” and holding that no mass murder can “justify” another. Hillgruber (Zweierlei Untergang, 1986) asked historians of the collapse in the East in 1944–45 to identify with the concrete fate of the German population there and with the troops protecting it; the book’s second essay dealt with the murder of the European Jews. Stürmer (“Geschichte in geschichtslosem Land”, 1986) warned that in a land without history the future belongs to those who fill memory, coin concepts and interpret the past. The four differed widely; they accused Habermas of unfair quotation and invoked the freedom of research.

Against apologetic tendencies: constitutional patriotism

Habermas saw in Nolte, Hillgruber, Stürmer and Hildebrand, in different ways, an attempt to put revisionist history to work for a nationalist refurbishing of a conventional identity; Nolte, he wrote, deprives the Nazi crimes of their singularity by making them comprehensible as an answer to Bolshevik threats. Against Hillgruber’s chosen perspective he set a fact that Hillgruber himself mentions, following Norbert Blüm: the killing in the camps could go on only as long as the German eastern front held. He did not reject historical distance as such: a historicizing portrayal can be well justified if it serves self-reflective remembering. He called the Federal Republic’s unreserved opening to the political culture of the West the great intellectual achievement of the post-war period, and held that only a “constitutional patriotism” would not estrange Germans from the West – a bond to universalist principles that in Germany could only form after and through Auschwitz.

Held by

• Jürgen Habermas1929–2026

Compare – but without the causal thesis

Many of Nolte’s opponents accepted comparison but rejected his causal thesis. In 1988 Jürgen Kocka called comparing Nazi and Stalinist mass crimes legitimate and not new, but found no empirical evidence for Nolte’s causal link; sober comparison above all reveals what was specific to Nazi terror. Eberhard Jäckel held the murder of the Jews to be unique: never before had a state, on its leader’s authority, decided and announced that a group of people, including the old, women, children and infants, was to be killed as completely as possible, and put all its means of power behind it. Martin Broszat, who had called in 1985 for a “historicisation” of National Socialism, set it clearly apart from moral relativisation (exchange of letters with Saul Friedländer, 1987).