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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 |
| Author
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Tomislav Sunic
Tomislave Sunic, a Croatian political theorist, has
contributed a long essay to Yugoslavia: The Failure of
Democratic Communism (New York, 1988). |
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
... (1995 of 11311 Characters)
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