THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY:

REFLECTIONS ON THE PLACE OF THE THIRD REICH IN GERMAN HISTORY

I. THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BISMARCK AND HITLER: 

1.    “Thus Bismarck succeeded at obstructing the development of a sense of civic responsibility among the middle classes. No matter how long and tortuous the road from Bismarck to Hitler, the Iron Chancellor was responsible for the change in course away from the development of liberal parliamentary government and toward a new authoritarianism, a course whose unfortunate progress towards its culmination in our own time has been only too apparent.” {Liberal historian Hans Rothfels, writing in 1946.} 

2.    “A gulf separates Bismarck from a modern nationalist and adventurer like Adolf Hitler. Apart from the vast difference in their intellectual endowment and human quality, there is the distance separating two centuries of European history. Precisely that which characterizes the destroyer of Bismarck’s empire was completely alien to the founder of that empire: the fanaticism of national passion which depends upon the blind frenzy of the masses and knows so well how to arouse it. And precisely that which Hitler lacked completely was the real secret of Bismarckian statecraft: sober, cool reason of state, unobscured by passion, imposing firm restraints on the exercise of power, pursued with the consummate skill of a born diplomat who knew the great courts of Europe as no other knew them.” {Conservative historian Gerhart Ritter, also writing in 1946.} 

3.    “The 75 years of the Prusso-German Empire stand in sharp relief both from Germany prior to 1866-71 ... and from Germany after 1945-49.... Elements of this continuity may be identified internally and externally: internally, it was an association of agrarian and industrial power elites attempting to maintain their positions against the rising forces of democracy and Social Democracy. Their defensive and conservative domestic purpose was bound up with an expansive and offensive external objective: Prussia’s hegemony in Germany was to be followed by the hegemony of Prussia-Germany in Europe, which was to serve as the basis for securing a position of global power as well.” {Fritz Fischer, the favorite historian of the “New Left,” in From Kaiserreich to Third Reich (London, 1986).}

II. REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE THIRD REICH:

1.     “I considered our country and nation to be bound by a historic duty and responsibility which could not be shrugged off as the rulers of the other German state were seeking to do. Although the German Federal Republic has done a great deal under the heading of ‛compensation’, this must not diminish our moral vigilance. To me, the recognition of realities entailed, first and last, sufficient courage to acknowledge our own history and its consequences. This applied above all to our relations with Poland.” {From the memoirs of Willy Brandt, explaining the rationale for the “Ostpolitik” of the late 1960s and 1970s.} 

2.    “Germans should get off their knees and learn to walk tall again. That means saying yes to the idea that we have been born German, and not letting the vision of a great German past be blocked by the screens of those accursed twelve years between 1933 and 1945.... German history cannot be presented as an endless chain of mistakes and crimes.” {Franz Josef Strauss, leader of Bavaria’s CSU, speaking in 1987, after his party had suffered major electoral losses to the Republikaner.} 

3.    “Hitler’s scheme for the Eastern war represented an attempt, largely realized in the occupied areas, to transfer aims and methods heretofore common only in non-European colonial warfare to a conflict between two European great powers.... For the first time, an enemy great power was not simply to be reduced to a middle-level power.... Rather, the conquered state was to be reduced to the level of a colony in every respect. This was the ultimate exaggeration of imperialism.” {Andreas Hillgruber, Germany and the Two World Wars (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 88.} 

4.    “All those who talk about the ‛guilt of the Germans’ fail to see how much this resembles the talk about the ‛guilt of the Jews’ that was one of the main arguments of the National Socialists.... Is it not possible that the Nazis and Hitler carried out their ‛Asiatic’ deed [i.e., the mass murder of the Jews] only because they honestly feared becoming the victims of an ‛Asiatic’ deed? Was not the GULAG Archipelago [Stalin’s network of labor camps] in some sense the origin of Auschwitz? Was not the ‛class murder’ of the Bolsheviks the logical and historical precondition for the ‛race murder’ of the National Socialists?” {The conservative historian Ernst Nolte, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 6, 1986. The leftist philosopher Jürgen Habermas responded indignantly that historians close to the CDU, such as Hillgruber and Nolte, were violating all rules of historical scholarship in a campaign to pander to radical nationalists.} 

5.    “Those young men [i.e., Waffen-SS soldiers who died in combat] are victims of Nazism also.... They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps. Germans have a guilt feeling that’s been imposed on them, and I just think it’s unnecessary. I feel strongly that instead of re-awakening the memories, we should observe this day as the day when, forty years ago, peace began.” {President Ronald Reagan, responding to critics of his decision to join Helmut Kohl in May 1985 to commemorate the end of the Second World War at the Bitburg military cemetery, which contains the graves of thousands of Waffen-SS soldiers.} 

6.    “Union with the G.D.R. in the form of annexation would involve losses that could never be made good. For the citizens of a subsumed state, there would be nothing left of their hard-earned identity. Their own history would sink beneath the dull weight of a standardized history. Nothing would be gained except an alarming excess of power, swollen with the lust for more and more power. Despite all our protestations, we Germans would once again be feared. A reunited Germany would be a colossus, bedeviled by complexes and blocking its own path and the path to European unity.” {Günter Grass, “Don’t Reunify Germany!”, The New York Times, January 7, 1990.}