Below are three Letters to the Editor that appeared in today's Globe and Mail. These letters address the "Historikerstreit" - translated, "Debate among Historians"- surrounding the prestigious Konrad Adenauer Literary Award given to Ernst Nolte for a lifetime of revisionist work.
I recognize the first letter as having been written by a Mennonite - an ethnic-religious group that has had more than its share of sad first-hand experience with "ethnic cleansing" and religious persecution, many of those people having been victimized by the Jewish-Bolshevik atrocities of the Lenin-Stalin era. I was very glad to see that letter, because I happen to know for a fact that this particular ethnic group has its share of guilt-ridden traitors and snitches who report to such outfits as B'nai Brith and even serve as informants for CSIS.
How do I know? We, too, have friends in highest places. :)
I liked and identified with that letter, even though I would not agree that Ernst Nolte is a "marginal German apologist." He is far more than that, and the award is thoroughly deserved and long overdue.
The second letter is an idiotic one and a disgrace for Germany. It is the bleating of a brain-washed post-war German - and no more need to be said than that.
The third letter comes from a writer living in BC, and might be called vaguely politically correct. It is noteworthy only for expressing its Angst at the thought that Germany might once again become a stronger player on the European landscape than some people might find comfortable.
All three letters are telling - but even more telling, and gratifying, is the title given to this letter section: "Open Season on Germans." And isn't it about time to call a spade a spade?
Enjoy!
Letters | Toronto Globe and Mail | June 30, 2000
Open season on Germans
By Hermann Janzen
Toronto -- Erna Paris's article on German "guilt fatigue" (Reimagining Hitler -- June 27) comes with ample editorial support from The Globe: pictures and a headline that a hasty reader is apt to interpret as a resurgence of Hitlerism in Germany, though her text is much more measured. There is money to be made on German guilt, and the readership will lap it up. So why not?
The article juxtaposes Ernst Nolte, a marginal German apologist on the right, with Martin Walser, arguably Germany's leading novelist -- though perhaps over the hill. Mr. Walser became infamous last summer for coining the phrase Moralkeule (moral club), to describe how references to the Holocaust are casually used in games of moral one-upmanship.
Mr. Walser is no apologist for any right-wing resurgence in Germany -- quite the contrary, as his record (even according to Ms. Paris) will show. However, he is one of the few German intellectuals who has the courage to object to the facile guilt-mongering in which opportunists of every persuasion, especially in Germany, habitually indulge.
Daniel Goldhagen, who, to my understanding, stipulates that anti-Semitism is inborn in Germans, has met with little criticism in Germany. In fact, his book tour became a triumphal ride through the public forums of the nation. Serious questioning of his theories came almost entirely from Jewish intellectuals.
Few people seem to sense any danger in demonizing a nation when that nation is German. The wall of racism that Germans encounter in the press of the so-called "civilized" world goes nearly unexamined. Children of German immigrants rarely escape the taunting of anti-German bigots in Ontario's schools.
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Open season on Germans
By Jan Eric Schulte
Dortmund, Germany -- I profoundly disagree with Erna Paris's perception of German Third Reich revisionism. Contrary to what her article suggests, the current debate in Germany is not about Ernst Nolte and his revisionist ideas on the origins of Hitler's racial ideology and methodology.
Since the German "historians' debate" in the 1980s, Mr. Nolte has been isolated by his peers and in German society as a whole. Unfortunately, that does not mean that everybody now disregards his view of the Nazi past. However, a fringe group such as the Deutschland Foundation on the far right of the German Christian Democratic Party can certainly not be regarded as the mouthpiece of a broader revisionist attack. The consensus on Nazi Germany's responsibility for the Second World War and the Holocaust is well-established.
The current debate concerns Horst Moeller, the director of the highly regarded Munich Institute of Contemporary History who delivered the speech. In his praise of Mr. Nolte's oeuvre, Mr. Moeller clearly went further in acknowledging Mr. Nolte's position than any other colleague in the past decade. But, unlike what Ms. Paris claims, even Mr. Moeller does not accept the most radical theories of Mr. Nolte.
The public reaction to Mr. Moeller's praise for Mr. Nolte clearly shows that there is no tendency for "Mr. Nolte's ideas [to] filter from the margins of the extreme right toward the conventional centre," as Ms. Paris puts it.
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Open season on Germans
By H. David Kirk
Brentwood Bay, B.C. -- For those who have followed what in Germany was called the Historikerstreit, the decision to honour historical revisionist Ernst Nolte has come as a disappointment. The question of whether that step is as unsettling as Erna Paris suggests in Reimagining Hitler, or is only a storm in a teacup (No New Wave of Nazism -- letter, June 28), cannot be settled by arguments.
It will be answered by the developments of the new Europe, in which Germany, for good or ill, is a major player. "English-only" readers who want to inform themselves about the issues involved in the German historians' controversy over Mr. Nolte's views may want to consult the essays edited by political sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, The Unresolved Past: A Debate in German History (1990).
Thought for the Day:
"In all the immense literature about the 1939-1945 war, one may observe a legend in process of being shaped. Gradually, authentic memories of the war -- of its boredom, its futility, the sense it gave of being part of a process of decomposition--fade in favor of the legendary version, embodied in Churchill's rhetoric and all the other narratives by field marshals, air marshals and admirals, creating the same impression of a titanic and forever memorable struggle in defense of civilization.
"In fact, of course, the war's ostensible aims--the defense of a defunct Empire, a spent Revolution, and bogus Freedoms--were meaningless in the context of the times. They will probably rate in the end no more than a footnote on the last page of the last chapter of the story of our civilization."
(-Malcolm Muggeridge, Esquire Magazine, February 1968)