Historikerstreit

The Historikerstreit (German: [hɪsˈtoːʁɪkɐˌʃtʁaɪt] ^ⓘ, "historians' dispute")^[1] was a dispute in the late 1980s in West Germany between conservative and left-of-center 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.^[2] The dispute was initiated with the Bitburg controversy, which related to a commemorative service at a German military cemetery where members of the Waffen-SS 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 Historikerstreit. 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 conservative 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".^[3][4] 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.^[5] Others argued that the memory of the Nazi era could not be "normalized" and be a source of national pride,^[6] and that it echoed Nazi propaganda.^[7] 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.^[8]