WALTER LAQUEUR
385
or perhaps in Somalia, pressing for an end to "the Auschwitz
propaganda" which, in the words of one recent writer, "has no purpose
other than to inculcate a bad conscience among the Germans." Accord–
ing to this school of thought, bringing up Auschwitz except in a foot–
note is tantamount to the suppression of freedom of thought. And the
prison doctor treating Knut Hamsun in prison, though a democrat, be–
haved in principle no differently from the way the Auschwitz doctors
did. (Hamsun, the great Norwegian writer, was also a collaborator with
the German occupants and therefore arrested after the war.) This is an
interesting argument, thought it omits the fact that Hamsun was released
from prison after a little while, whereas the patients of the Nazi doctors
were less fortunate. It may be true on the level of abstraction that, as
Harvard University historian Charles Maier has written, historicization
need not necessarily lead to apology, but in actual fact it usually does.
The revisionists of the left, on the other hand, want to make the
mass murders "sociological." They pay little attention to ideological
(and even political) considerations and concentrate on socioeconomic
factors. The net result of these approaches, while not identical, is very
similar. They are by no means fringe views, and very often they are given
a sympathetic hearing by mainstream historians. They are welcome as
novel interpretations which should be given serious attention and further
explored, even though it may appear in the end that the original claims
were somewhat exaggerated. A majority of historians in Germany and
elsewhere now probably belongs to the "historicizers," although there
are notable exceptions such as German liberals of the older generation,
including Karl Dietrich Bracher and Eberhard Jaeckel.
About three-quarters of the population of Germany wants a line to
be drawn through the Nazi past, and German historians do not live in a
political vacuum. The percentages in Britain and America may be less
dramatic, but there too other historical concerns are taking over, and
academic fashions call for new historical and sociological perspectives on
Nazism. Historians are more and more interested in social history and the
history of everyday life, for, they reason, the great majority was perfectly
normal, except that the whole enterprise ended in disaster. The great
majority was neither Jewish nor anti-Nazi, and they enjoyed themselves.
Seen in this light, "historicization" and "sociologization" are indeed in–
evitable. Only Jewish historians, overtaken by these developments, find it
difficult to draw a line through the extinction of one-third of their
people, and they are criticized for being unforgiving and unyielding.
There was, of course, more to Nazism than Auschwitz, and it is
certainly true that at the bottom of some of the revisionist arguments
there is usually some rational kernel. The argument about chaos in the
