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Nolte's 'Causal Nexus'
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15793 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1989 |
1,795 Words |
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Tomislav Sunic
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DER EUROPAISCHE BURGERKERIEG, 1917-1945
Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus
Ernst Nolte
Berlin: Propylaen Verlag, 1987
599 pp.
In German national consciousness, the years since the Second World War have been marked by a painful process of suppressing the national-socialist past, as well as by a prodigious effort to readjust Germany to the model of exemplary liberal democracy. In the words of one German historian, Germany has functioned over the last forty years as a "negatively privileged nation." One the one hand, it could boast unparalleled economic performance; on the other, its margin of maneuvering in the realm of foreign politics has been virtually nil. With the Soviet threat receding, and with Germany becoming the main economic actor in European Community, a number of German public figures have suggested that Germany should seek an equally important role in the political arena. Moreover, some European scholars and historians have contended that recent German history deserved to be studied in a wider historical context, one that would include the critical assessment of the role of the Allies during the Second World War.
One of the central intellectual figures behind this effort to reconstruct German history has been Professor Ernst Nolte, whose name has been over the last several years in the center of what is known in Europe as the "historians' debate." Undoubtedly, many conservatives see in Nolte a brilliant theorist who is little by little succeeding in ridding Germans of their collective war guilt and in restoring German national consciousness to its pre-Nazi level. By contrast, many leftist and liberal scholars--notably the Marxist scholar Jurgen Habermas and the editor in chief of Der Spiegel, Rudolf Augstein--have accused Nolte and other revisionist historians of attempting to relativize and historicize the national-socialist crimes.
By using the methods of dialectical comparison and contrast, Nolte describes the clash between fascist and the Bolshevik ideologies and their chief protagonists, the national-socialist Germany and Bolshevik Soviet Union. His book is undoubtedly a fine primer for all those eager to learn about the main movers and shakers in the Bolshevik and national-socialist movements, although from the thematic angle, its weakness consists of trying to sift through too much data. For that, of course, even a book of 599 pages does not suffice. Although Nolte's title suggests the description of the civil war in the whole of Europe, it is obvious that his main focus is the German and Soviet ideological and military conflict.
In chronological order, Nolte reviews the political events in Germany and the Soviet Union, covering the period that stretched from the rise of the Bolshevik Soviet Union and the proclamation of Weimer Germany through the consolidation of Hitler's and Stalin's regimes. The book culminates with a description of the major war operations between Germany and the Soviet Union, the defeat of Germany, and the subsequent division of Europe into two opposing ideological and geopolitical blocs.
What is so controversial in Nolte's analysis that some scholars find appealing and others offensive? Nolte's main argument (which was already spelled out in his previous essays and polemics)
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