PRZEGLĄD ZACHODNI I, 2017 ANDRZEJ DENKA Poznań ON THE ROLE OF THE “INTELLECTUAL FIRE-RAISERS” IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF GERMAN HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL IDENTITY FROM THE MID-1980S TO THE TURN OF THE CENTURY Much has been written and spoken about Germany’s political and social trans- formations of recent decades in the context of debates and controversies that have involved some of the best-known and most respected German intellectuals. For each such debate to be triggered, a sufficiently controversial thesis had to be pre- sented – usually one that would challenge the social consensus. Any such “com- municative event” (Niklas Luhmann)1 leads as a rule to a number of protests or objections against the thesis being put forward. Using the concept of a “scandal” (in this case a media or political scandal) one may speak of the “scandalmonger”, one who “scandalises”. Such people in fact take on themselves the odium of public opinion, since they make statements that lie outside the bounds of political cor- rectness, thus mobilising a group of people who feel scandalised. In almost every situation of this type there are those who try to act as intermediaries, to explain, to be the voice of reason, and sometimes end up defending the “scandalmonger”. A scandal is a kind of game, in which the protagonists, if they wish to remain in the game, must take on specific roles.2 I shall illustrate this mechanism with the example of the media debates that took place between the mid-1980s and the end of the 1990s against the background of Germany’s Nazi past, concentrating on the personalities who generated the controversies that lay at the heart of the debates. I also wish to draw attention to the quite significant role of conflicts and scandals in processing social irritations, the fruit of which is always a new quality, including in terms of social consciousness. 1 Cf. O. Sill, Literatur in der funktional differenzierten Gesellschaft. Systemtheoretische Perspek- tiven auf ein komplexes Phänomen, Wiesbaden 2001, p. 50. 2 Cf. S. Neuhaus, Skandal im Sperrbezirk? Grenzen und Begrenzungen der Wirkung von Kunst und Literaturskandalen, in: S. Neuhaus, J. Holzner (eds.), Literatur als Skandal. Fälle – Funktionen – Fol- gen, Göttingen 2007, pp. 41-52, here especially the chapter Das Skandal-Spiel, pp. 46-51. 280 Andrzej Denka NOLTE AND THE “HISTORIANS’ DEBATE” In the mid-1980s a dual-faceted change took place in the perception of Germany’s Nazi past. On the one hand, in a German society which, from the time of the post-war Nuremberg trials up to the Auschwitz trials and the trial of Eichmann in the 1960s, had gained an ever greater awareness of the enormity of the Nazis’ crimes, a genera- tional change took place which would bring with it “a relaxed historical conscious- ness that did not acknowledge taboo subjects.”3 The chief spokesman of the new moral evaluation seemed to be the German President Richard von Weizsäcker, who on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War referred to the eighth of May as a “day of liberation.”4 On the other hand, in the spirit of the so-called mor- al renewal and restorative climate of Helmut Kohl’s government, in May 1985 a visit was made by Ronald Reagan to a cemetery in Bitburg where many Waffen-SS troops are buried. Reflecting this somewhat ambiguous context of change, 1986 saw the beginning of the so-called historians’ debate, in which the main protagonist was the historian Ernst Nolte (b. 1923). Nolte is seen as representing the intellectuals who, for the remainder of the century, would play an important role in the transformation of German identity; as a kind of enfant terrible, or else an “intellectual fire-raiser” (geistiger Brandstifter), a term applied several years later, after neo-Nazis set fire to a synagogue in Lübeck in 1994, to Nolte and those like him by the long-term chair- man of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis.5 In the later reception of the debates a certain mental shortcut came to dominate, as if those words of Bubis had been directed against Botho Strauß.6 Bubis in fact used them in the context of an argument about Strauß, although he fairly soon withdrew them and made an explicit semantic distinction. He reserved the description “intellectual fire-raisers” for the extreme right-wing politicians of the time (Gerhardt Michael Frey, Franz Schönhu- ber, Günter Deckert), while applying the label “intellectual precursors” to certain representatives of the non-mainstream right-wing press (Rainer Zittelmann). In the case of writers like Strauß and Enzensberger he merely warned against changes in the intellectual climate.7 3 J. Jabłkowska, L. Żyliński, Rozrachunek z narodowosocjalistyczną przeszłością a tożsamość nie- miecka, in: idem (eds.), O kondycji Niemiec. Tożsamość niemiecka w debatach intelektualistów po 1945 roku, Poznań 2008, pp. 7-49 (here: 24). 4 “The 8th of May is a day of liberation. It freed us from the National Socialist system of violence that despised human dignity.” R. v. Weizsäcker, 8 maja 1945 – czterdzieści lat później, in: J. Jabłkowska, J. Żyliński (eds.), op. cit., pp. 325-336 (here: 326). Cf. E. Rathgeb, Die engagierte Nation. Deutsche Debatten 1945–2005, Munich/Vienna 2005, pp. 327-330. 5 I. Bubis, M. Lehming, ‚Schönhuber ist ein Fälscher.‘ Der Vorsitzende des Zentralrates der Juden verzichtet auf eine Klage, Der Tagesspiegel, 2 April 1994, p. 5. 6 Cf. e.g. J. Jabłkowska, J. Żyliński, op. cit., p. 36. 7 I. Bubis, “Wegbereiter wie Nolte” Ignatz Bubis erläutert seine Intellektuellen-Schelte, Der Spiegel 1994, no. 16, p. 170. The “Intellectual Fire-Raisers” in the Transformation of German Identity 281 Let us return to Nolte, however. What was it that this historian, highly regarded in the 1960s8 wrote or said to become the subject of such great controversy and debate? In his text Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will (“The Past that Will Not Pass”), intended to be read in 1986 during the traditional panel discussions known as the Römerberggespräche held in Frankfurt (although in the end the lecture was cancelled), he put forward the thesis that the Holocaust had been a response to the genocide committed by the Bolsheviks, who (in his view) had enjoyed large-scale Jewish support. The controversial thesis might be expressed in the sentence: he who speaks of Auschwitz must also think in subtext about the Gulag. Both one and the other are to some extent simplifications, since Nolte constructed fairly complex his- torical dependences in which he tried to show that Hitler and his supporters were aware of the murderous methods of the Soviets, and in some sense the genocide of the Jews committed by the Nazis (which, it should be noted, Nolte did not dispute) should be seen as a form of confrontation with the cruelty of communism: [...] the following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National So- cialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Was the Gulag Archipelago not primary to Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the “racial murder” of National Socialism? [...] Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?9 Even without the mental shortcut, this thesis – expressed so emphatically and with a series of rhetorical questions – seems outrageous: the racial genocide of the Jews committed by supporters of Hitler is to be justified by the fact of the genocide committed by the Bolsheviks on the kulaks, the bourgeoisie and other class ene- mies. Nolte’s views cannot, however, be reduced solely to the fact of historical rela- tivisation. Although he did not question the exceptional status (Singularität) of the Holocaust as the only genocide of its kind, he was a proponent of historisation, of viewing the genocide within “a wider context, namely the context of those qualita- tive ruptures in European history that began with the Industrial Revolution.”10 This wider context is partly reflected by the title of Nolte’s 1987 bookDer europäische 8 Chiefly due to the workDer Faschismus in seiner Epoche (1963) he was also admired by Marxist- leaning historians and student rebels of the “68 generation”. Only later did he radicalise his position, becoming more and more isolated. Cf. W. Pięciak, Niemiecka pamięć: Współczesne spory w Niemczech o miejsce III Rzeszy w historii, polityce i tożsamości (1989–2001), Kraków 2001, in chapter 13 the sec- tion Ernst Nolte: Człowiek i dzieło, pp. 418-426 (here: 420). 9 Ernst Nolte, “The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered”, in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit Controversy Concern- ing the Singularity of the Holocaust, translated by James Knowlton and Truett Cates, Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1993, pp. 18-23. (Originally published in German as Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht mehr gehalten werden konnte, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986.) 10 E. Nolte, op. cit., p. 417. 282 Andrzej Denka Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (“The European Civil War 1917–1945: National Socialism and Bolshevism”). The correspondence is only partial, since the Industrial Revolution took place in the mid-18th century, but even when the three decades between the watersheds of 1917 and 1945 are considered, Auschwitz is made to appear slightly less exceptional. Nolte’s theses triggered a huge debate among academics; his main opponents included the soci- ologist Jürgen Habermas and the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler. There were also historians who declined to distance themselves from Nolte or else supported him (Klaus Hildebrand, Michael Stürmer, Andreas Hillgruber).