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gether) because they confuse explanation with justification. I would say
that what Nolte is engaged in is advocacy, not justification; he's not a
fascist; he's not justifying National Socialism or Hitler. But the tendency
of his latest work is quite unmistakeable. He is one of the great historians
of our age, a great scholar. But the political message of his latest work -
great historians always do have a message - is the following: Germany is
normal, not only now, but on the whole has always been normal.
Normal, for example, in the most terrible age of mankind, the first half
of the twentieth century, when the norm was genocide. So Germany,
says Nolte, was responding to some dangers, and there's one aspect in
which the danger was real. He says that Jewry had indeed, as Professor
Koch quoted him, something to do with Communism. Indeed, univer–
salism was an expression of those who from within glimpsed the exterior,
because they were a discriminated-against minority. This kind of univer–
salist regard and bias that was intrinsic and characteristic to Jewry was
akin to Communism: it was the extreme form of universalism, and it was
dangerous for Germany. Nolte has the "effrontery" to characterize the
victory of the Allies in 1945 as an ambivalent victory ofJewish national–
ism. Well, some people think he has gone too far; and indeed, it is a
very strange view of history.
But what is important politically in terms of the development of
German ideology - to use a time-worn term - is that as a result Ger–
many will enter the community of normal states regardless of its political
regime and its political past. Nolte's approach is similar to Strauss's and
others in its decidedly anti-political character. His approach says, we are
all normal, even if we are evil; evil is part of human nature. Germans
have committed unspeakable crimes, but so would others. What we
should regard now is the effective military, financial, and institutional his–
tory; without being terrified by the Moloch of millions of innocent
dead.
I think this is a dangerous view. I do believe that we cannot see this
phenomenon as momentous, but I wouldn't neglect its importance.
What I see here is the decline of the idea of citizenship and the inability
to form a political identification with one's nation, an inability to come
to terms not with the past but with the present. Germany's present is
modern, liberal, technological, consumerist, not tragic. Syberberg says,
Germany's trouble is that it has lost its sense of the tragic. But why
would a German today say, "We want the tragic to be the essence of
our being"? Germans want decency, and peace. That is the prevailing
mood. But for a long time German nationality was identified by tower–
ing cultural figures in a romantic , mythological way, and it is reflected
now (this is probably one of the only things I agree with Habermas
