The (, ) was a dispute in the late 1980s in West Germany between academics and other intellectuals about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography, and more generally into the German people's view of themselves. The dispute was initiated with the Bitburg controversy, which related to a commemorative service at a German military cemetery where members of the were buried. The service was attended by President of the United States Ronald Reagan, who had been invited by the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The Bitburg ceremony was widely interpreted in Germany as the beginning of the "normalization" of the nation's Nazi past, and inspired a slew of criticisms and defenses that made up the initiating arguments of the . The dispute quickly outgrew the initial context of the Bitburg controversy, however, and became a series of broader historiographic, political, and critical debates about how the episode of the Holocaust should be understood in Germany's history and identity.
The position taken by one faction intellectuals, most prominently Ernst Nolte, was that the Holocaust was not unique and therefore Germans should not bear any special burden of guilt for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".Kattago 2001, pp. 61–62. Nolte argued that there was no moral difference between the crimes of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany, and that the Nazis acted as they did out of fear of what the Soviet Union might do to Germany.Kattago 2001, p. 62. Others argued that the memory of the Nazi era could not be "normalized" and be a source of national pride, and that it echoed Nazi propaganda. Other central questions and topics debated within the dispute included the singularity of the Holocaust, the functionalist and intentionalist models of the Holocaust, methodological approaches to historiography, the political utility of history, the question of whether the Holocaust ought to be studied comparatively, and ethics of public commemorations of history.
The debate attracted much media attention in West Germany, with its participants frequently giving television interviews and writing op-ed pieces in newspapers. It flared up again briefly in 2000 when Nolte, one of its leading figures, was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize for science.
Background Immediately after World War II, intense debates arose in intellectual circles about how to interpret Nazi Germany, a contested discussion that continues today. Two of the more hotly debated questions were whether Nazism was in some way part of the "German national character" and how much responsibility, if any, the German people bore for the crimes of Nazism. Various non-German historians in the immediate post-war era, such as Taylor and Lewis Namier, argued that Nazism was the culmination of German history and that the vast majority of Germans were responsible for Nazi crimes. Different assessments of Nazism were common among Marxists, who insisted on the economic aspects of Nazism and conceived of it as the culmination of a capitalist crisis, and liberals, who emphasized Hitler's personal role and responsibility and bypassed the larger problem of the relation of ordinary German people to the regime.Within West Germany, then, most historians were strongly defensive. In the assessment of Gerhard Ritter and others, Nazism was a totalitarian movement that represented only the work of a small criminal clique; Germans were victims of Nazism, and the Nazi era represented a total break in German history.
Starting in the 1960s, that assessment was challenged by younger German historians. Fritz Fischer argued in favor of a conception of German history that saw Nazism as the result of the way German society had developed. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the functionalist school of historiography emerged; its proponents argued that medium- and lower-ranking German officials were not just obeying orders and policies but actively engaged in the making of the policies that led to the Holocaust. The functionalists thereby cast blame for the Holocaust across a wider circle. Many right-wing German historians disliked the implications of the conception and the functionalist school; they were generally identified with the left and structuralism and were seen by the right-wingers as being derogatory toward Germany.
By the mid-1980s, right-wing German historians began to think that enough time had passed since 1945 and thus it was time for the German nation to start celebrating much of its history again. A sign of the changed mood was the ceremony at Bitburg in May 1985, where US President Ronald Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl honored the German war dead buried at Bitburg, including the SS men buried there, which was widely seen as a sign that the memory of the Nazi past had been "normalized" (i.e., that the Nazi period was "normal" and therefore Germans should not feel guilty). President Reagan justified laying a wreath to honor all the Germans buried at Bitburg who died fighting for Hitler, including the SS men, and his initial refusal to visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp under the grounds that the SS men buried at Bitburg were just as much victims of Hitler as the Jews murdered by the SS and that "They [the Germans] just have a guilt feeling that's been imposed on them and I just think it's unnecessary". The ceremony at Bitburg and Reagan's remarks about the need to do away with a German "guilt feeling" about the Nazi past were widely interpreted by German conservatives as the beginning of the "normalization" of the memory of Nazi Germany. Michael Stürmer's 1986 article "Land without History" questioned Germany's lack of positive history in which to take pride. Stürmer's position as Chancellor Kohl's advisor and speechwriter heightened the controversy. At the same time, many left-wing German historians disliked what they saw as the nationalistic tone of the Kohl government.
A project that raised the ire of many on the left, and which became a central issue of the , consisted of two proposed museums celebrating modern German history, to be built in West Berlin and Bonn. Many of the left-wing participants in the claimed that the museum was meant to "exonerate" the German past and asserted that there was a connection between the proposed museum, the government, and the views of such historians as Michael Stürmer, Ernst Nolte, and Andreas Hillgruber. In October 1986, Hans Mommsen wrote that Stürmer's assertion that he who controls the past also controls the future, his work as a co-editor of the newspaper—which had been publishing articles by Ernst Nolte and Joachim Fest denying the "singularity" of the Holocaust—and his work as an advisor to Chancellor Kohl should cause "concern" among historians.
Overview Participants On one side were the philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte, the journalist Joachim Fest, and the historians Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand, Rainer Zitelmann, Hagen Schulze, and Michael Stürmer. Opposing them were the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the historians Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Heinrich August Winkler, Eberhard Jäckel, and Wolfgang Mommsen. Karl Dietrich Bracher and Richard Löwenthal argued for some compromise; they said that comparing different totalitarian systems was a valid intellectual exercise, but they insisted that the Holocaust should not be compared to other genocides.
Issues The views of Ernst Nolte and Jürgen Habermas were at the center of the debate, conducted almost exclusively through articles and letters to the editor in the newspapers and the . People in West Germany followed the debate with interest. The debate was noted for its vitriolic and aggressive tone, with the participants often engaging in attacks. In Hillgruber's 1986 book, ("Two Kinds of Downfall: The Smashing of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry"), he lamented the mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland at the end of World War II and compared the suffering of the ("those expelled from their native land") to that of victims of the Holocaust. Hillgruber had not supported Nolte, but the controversy over became linked with Nolte's views when Habermas and Wehler characterized both men as conservatives trying to minimize Nazi crimes.
The debate centered on four questions: Were the crimes of Nazi Germany uniquely evil or were other crimes, such as those of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, comparably so? Were other genocides comparable to the Holocaust? Many scholars believed that such comparisons trivialized the Holocaust. Others maintained that the Holocaust could best be understood in the context of other crimes. Did German history follow a "special path" () leading inevitably to Nazism? Were the crimes of the Nazis a reaction to Soviet crimes under Stalin? Should the German people bear a special burden of guilt for Nazi crimes, or can new generations of Germans find sources of pride in their history?
Immediate background "Between Myth and Revisionism" In 1980, the newspaper published a "Between Myth and Revisionism: The Third Reich In the Perspective of the 1980s", where Nolte sketched out many of the same ideas that later appeared in his 1986 essay "The Past That Will Not Go Away". The essay "Between Myth and Revisionism" was also published in English in the 1985 book Aspects of the Third Reich by the Anglo-German historian H. W. Koch, where it was billed incorrectly as an essay written for Aspects of the Third Reich. It was the 1985 version of "Between Myth and Revisionism" that Habermas noticed and referred to in his essay "On Damage Control".
According to Nolte in "Between Myth and Revisionism", during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the shock of the replacement of the old craft economy by an industrialized, mechanized economy led to various radicals starting to advocate what Nolte calls "annihilation therapy" as the solution to social problems.Nolte in Koch (1985) p. 31 In Nolte's views, the roots of communism can be traced back to 18th and 19th century radicals like Thomas Spence, John Gray, William Benbow, Bronterre O'Brian, and François-Noël Babeuf.Nolte in Koch (1985) pp. 30–31 Nolte has argued that the French Revolution began the practice of "group annihilation" as state policy, but not until the Russian Revolution did the theory of "annihilation therapy" reach its logical conclusion and culmination.Nolte in Koch (1985) p. 32 He asserts that much of the European Left saw social problems as being caused by "diseased" social groups, and sought "annihilation therapy" as the solution, thus leading naturally to the Red Terror and the in the Soviet Union.Nolte in Koch (1985) pp. 33–34 Nolte suggests that the Right mirrored the Left, with "annihilation therapy" advocated by such figures as John Robison, Augustin Barruel, and Joseph de Maistre; Malthusianism and the Prussian strategy of utter destruction of one's enemies during the Napoleonic Wars also suggest sources and influences for National Socialism.Nolte in Koch (1985) p. 33 Ultimately, in Nolte's view, the Holocaust was just a "copy" of Communist "annihilation therapy", albeit one that was more terrible and sickening than the "original".Nolte in Koch (1985) p. 36
Bitburg controversy