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compelled to offer what amounts to the professional historian's
perspective. He observes how difficult it is to "orient" oneself to
"the role of mass murder in history generally." For the benefit of
Ph.D. candidates in search of a topic, he brightly notes, "Here lies
an obvious research desiderata." After discussing various reasons
why the Nazi past is always held up to the Germans, he concludes,
"And then it is much better, to take it for once tactically, when we
know and say how it is than when we always must let it be said to
us." According to Meier, if research is to be done and reproaches
made, it might as well be accomplished by Germans.
Reference to two other articles in the German press will give a
sense of the variety of voices raised in this debate. In
Die Neue
Gesellschaft,
a magazine associated with the Social Democratic Party,
Jurgen Kocka decried the growing number of "Alltagshistoriker,"
or "everyday historians" of the Nazi period. The work of these
writers takes the form of collections of oral histories or studies of par–
ticular regions or groups of individuals. Often the authors make no
attempt to tie the individual experience to the broader issues of the
period or the wisdom that the passage of time has granted. The
result can be a banalization or even a distortion of history. As part of
the trend of Nazi nostalgia, there is the development of" Adolph and
Eva tourism" with, for example, Berchtesgaden, the site of Hitler's
mountain retreat, drawing numbers of visitors. Although Sunday
trips by the family to Hitler's home are not likely to improve the
historical consciousness of the nation, everyday histories need not
inevitably be exercises in nostalgia. Like archeologists, we can use
evidence of the experience of institutions or regions or individuals to
help us reconstruct the past. What we must do, however, is use these
scattered bits of evidence with historical perspective.
It
is all well to
take note of the determined resistance of the Wehrmacht on the
Eastern Front and the terror of the civilians in those areas of the
German Reich overrun by the Red Army. The death camps func–
tioning in their midst are also worth mentioning.
In his article, Fest had expressed doubt as to the singularity of
the administrative murder of the Nazis. EberhardJackel, writing in
Die Zeit,
found a different ground on which to maintain that the
Nazis were unique. He writes, "never before had a state with the
authority of its responsible leader decided and announced the com–
plete murder of a group of people, including the old, the women, the
children and the babies, and translated into action, in point of fact,
this decision with all possible governmental means of power." Jackel
