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nation and reunification, who infuriated the West German left by un–
apologetically defending West German capitalist democracy, and who
refused to release the terrorists when their comrades sought their release.
As I said, such a man had powerful enemies. They acted.
The second episode I want to recall is, inevitably, the notorious
Historikerstreit
or historians' quarrel of 1986-87. It's a much messier affair
than the Filbinger case, and there are no smoking guns in the shape of
Communist disinformation campaigns. In this instance, the West Germans
provided their own disinformation. The
Historikerstreit,
narrowly speak–
ing, began in June 1986 and petered out early the following year. But in
a wider sense it was simply a concentration of public outpourings, at–
tacks, defenses, misunderstandings, and arguments, some rational, many
confused, that had been sloshing about, in some form or another, since
the beginning of
Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung
in the 1960s. In that sense, the
Historikerstreit
had been going on for at least twenty years; nor did it re–
ally end in 1987, but is still going on.
At one level, the
Historikerstreit
was about the past, namely about the
reason for the Holocaust, the National Socialist murder of six million
European Jews. The avalanche of debate was launched by the historian
Ernst Nolte who, in an article in the leading conservative daily, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
speculated that the National Socialists
were in part following an example, namely the example set by the Bol–
sheviks in Russia; and that the Holocaust was seen by its perpetrators as a
preemptive strike against people who, if not killed, would do to the
Germans what the Turks had done to the Armenians, and so on.
These remarks caused a furor, although Nolte embedded them in
assurances that two wrongs don't make a right and that no possible
number of examples or fanatical beliefs could or should justify the Holo–
caust. Wittingly or not, his critics seemed unable to distinguish explana–
tion from justification or apology. Thus it became clear that the real is–
sue was not the Holocaust and its real or imaginary precedents or causes,
but the very legitimacy of asking such questions, the legitimacy of com–
paring the Holocaust to anything else, of questioning its uniqueness, and
thus the unique burden of German, as opposed to Turkish, Russian, Chi–
nese, Japanese, British, American, or any other history. This legitimacy
very quickly became an issue not for scholars, but for those who con–
trolled or participated in public debate in West Germany during the
1980s, those who defined West German public morality, identity, and
self-worth. This was made clear by the British historian, Richard Evans,
who sympathized with Nolte's opponents when he wrote, "In view of
the position and the reputation of the Germans in the world it makes a
