History is Prologue: A German Debate

31st IMISE International Conference, Naples.

““It was no longer a fresh event, it was a thing of the far past; it was not properly news, it was history.”

- Mark Twain”

 In a recent interview the eminent historian of Contemporary Germany Dieter Langewiesche when asked, “what keeps nations together” responded…”That depends, but surely a shared historical consciousness. The nation is a ‘memory community’ and that is also why one cannot just step-out. Without a historical foundation, a nation cannot develop.”[i]

As thoughtful as this response is, it is not shared by a majority of Germans in a poll as current as January 2007, where only 47% of the questioned viewed German history in a positive perspective as opposed to the rest who registered a negative (36%) or a mixed response.  In the same questionnaire, 65% considered themselves Germans as opposed to Europeans (28%); however, only 47% were willing to “defend their country should it come under attack,” whereas 42% refused outright to defend Germany. In addition, 22% stated that there is not a single German historical event of which they are proud.[ii]

If this poll reflects at least in part views Germans hold of their nation and history, where shall we look to find a “shared historical consciousness,” a “memory community” or the “historical foundation” from which Germany developed?

In general, historians of Contemporary Germany consider 1945 as the beginning or end of narratives of the German nation-state.

From the end of World War Two up to German unification (1990), the notion of the “German Nation” appears moot as a result of Germany’s destruction, occupation, and division.  Germany’s post-war arrival as a “national state” (Nationalstaat) is perhaps as fresh as 2006, if the “national sentiment” (Nationalgefuehl) that swept the country as it hosted the world championship in soccer is any indication. Such a view is forwarded by Joschka Fischer, minister of foreign affairs from 1998 to 2005, in his argument for Germany strengthening the European Union, rather than the “nation state.”[iii].

While Fischer argues for the end of the “nation state” to advance the European Union, historians after 1945 held that the German “nation state” was buried among the rubble of Hitler’s Third Reich (Empire).

Take the work of Hans Kohn, The German Mind, for decades a classic text and still popular when I was a graduate student in the 1970s. Kohn begins his study with the Middle Ages and argues that all German history from 500 years ago led to the Nazi years, the culmination and end of German culture. Kohn’s work is not singular. Peter Viereck’s The Roots of the Nazi Mind has a similar “chain of being,” evaluating German historical events with “progress” toward National Socialism.

Other historians who do not follow such a strict causal/linear or diachronic argument still find difficulties in explaining the Nazi years. The renowned German historian, Friedrich Meinecke, so overwhelmed by the Nazi era stated in The German Catastrophe that Germany took the wrong turn in history and pointed to another by suggesting the creation of “Goethe Institutes” that would resuscitate the humanism of Germany’s great poets and thinkers. Indeed, the question is still asked: How could a nation of musicians and philosophers become one of barbarians and criminals? In efforts to confront that problematic of German history, West Germany took up Meinecke’s suggestion and established “Goethe Institutes” worldwide for the study of German language and history.

Nevertheless, explaining how Hitler came to power or how the Nazi dictatorship could take a hold of German society and culture, or how the Third Reich could reach such levels of destruction and barbarism, has been the focus of many examinations of Contemporary German history. Even current international politics are still influenced by events of Nazi Germany as negotiations of a new European Union charter revealed with Poland’s leadership questioning an increase in Germany’s voting power as recent as 22 June 2007.

Reference to Germany’s Nazi era is frequently related to a broader study of German history. Historians tend to view 1933 with Hitler’s seizure of power and the end of democracy in Germany through the politics of the 1848 revolutions, when Germans failed to establish a democratic state. Others view Hitler’s annexation of Austria (1938) and the Sudetenland with the destruction of Czechoslovakia (1939) in the light of Bismarck’s politics of 1866 and 1871 with the creation of the Second German Empire. The date 1918 and the end of the Second Reich is often compared to 1945 and the fall of the Third Reich.

There are other reasons as well why historians of Germany place 1945 at the beginning or end of their narratives. For one, the Third Reich may have lasted a mere twelve years—a brief span in history’s life—yet in that short period Germany had a more profound effect on the rest of the world than in previous centuries. Moreover, the immoral politics and historical abnormalities of Nazism and its crimes have led historians to examine “abnormalities” in the longer span of German history.

Were Martin Luther’s “authoritarian personality” and “his appeal to state authority” against the peasant uprisings after 1521, precursors, for example, for German acquiescence to state authority and eventual acceptance of Hitler’s totalitarianism? Was Bismarck’s “blood and iron” policy another forerunner that reappeared after 1933?  Historical examples abound and it is apparent that the burden of the past weights heavily on contemporary German history.

Another consequence of 1945 is the division of Germany into West Germany (May 1949) and East Germany (October 1949), one capitalist and democratic, the other communist and authoritarian. With that division there was an end of German history that had Prussia as its center.

Prussia emerged as a strong German state after 1740 with King Fredrick II’s successful attack on the Habsburg Empire. With military skill, discipline and luck—the death of his enemy Tsarina Elisabeth—Fredrick had forged Prussia into a powerful European state when the wars ended in 1763. Emerging victorious with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Prussia developed into an economically, modern industrial and politically, anachronistic feudal state, which by 1866 successfully challenged the Habsburg Empire for German supremacy. In 1870 Prussia defeated Napoleon III and its chancellor Bismarck united the German states under Prussian dominance to create the Second German Empire. That Empire was Prussian in government and social organization and established the provincial Prussian town of Berlin as Germany’s capital. The Empire’s defeat saw a truncated Prussia with the reappearance of Poland in 1918. When Stalin drew the Oder/Neisse border between Poland and Germany there was little if anything left of Prussia; it was officially declared dead by the victorious Allies in 1947.

With the disappearance of Prussia, founder of the modern German nation state, vanished a sizable part of German history, one that had shaped German affairs for at least 250 years.

The Germans call 1945 the “Stunde Null,” the zero hour. Rossellini, the Italian director, made a film with that title, depicting social conditions in Berlin at that time. One could argue that 1945 was the “zero hour” for another reason: It was the year when German history began anew after a good part of it was wiped out first by the Nazis and then by the Allies.

From 1945 to 1949 there was no German nation, rather an Allied “Occupied Germany.” When the two German states were created in 1949 they were of Allied production, and so were German politics east and west for the subsequent years of the Cold War. It was not until Chancellor Willy Brandt’s “Ostpolitik,” the politics of the “small steps,” that West Germany ventured briefly into a quasi-independent foreign policy in 1969, when the United States was fully engaged in the war in Viet Nam. But by then the politics of the Cold War had hardened, the Berlin Wall in place since 1961, and the idea of a German nation only a memory.

Historians in East and West Germany were writing histories of not one but of several Germanys, claiming legitimacy of a past viewed through a prism of multiple ideological and historical variations.

East German historians claimed Fredrick II and Martin Luther in part to legitimize East Germany itself, not recognized by the Western Allies until 1972. West German historians focused on regional identity—Bavaria, the Rhineland—that challenged a national one. Regional identity questioned as well Bismarck’s creation of the Second Empire in 1871, one viewed as artificial, lasting only a few decades until 1918.  Besides, the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I and Hitler’s annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland had transformed Bismarck’s concept of the German nation, based on the “small German solution” rather than the “large German solution” that included the Habsburg lands of Austria and Bohemia (the latter Czechoslovakia after 1918).

Since the French revolution (1789), France has undergone many experiments in government from return to monarchy during the restoration to the building of two Napoleonic empires, from Prussian and Nazi occupation to the Vichy division, and to the creation of five republics. Yet through all the radical political upheavals France retained its basic unit, the French nation. France can to this day continue its myths of progress and improvement, despite its radical transformations

Not so Germany, where national fissures were more radical and lasting.

Bismarck’s creation of the German nation was viewed as partial, flawed and a temporary condition that was finally undone by Hitler. For Germany the idea of history as steady progression toward freedom—Hegel’s notion of history—was askew and out of place, at least since 1933 and certainly since 1945.

Consider Bronowski’s television chronicle “Ascent of Man” that began its narrative in the mud of the Mesopotamian river valley and ended in the mud of Auschwitz; or consider the question of Theodore Adorno, who asked if poetry was possible after Auschwitz. The break in German history seemed complete.[iv]

In response to this divided and fragmented Germany a new approach to history emerged with the works of neo-conservative historians like Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, and Michael Stuermer. Their writings provoked the “historians’ debates” in 1986, unleashing a tempest in the academic world with heated discussions worldwide that have now subsided but not ended.

In summer 1986 Ernst Nolte proposed a novel assessment of German history. Known internationally for his Fascism in its Epoch, where Nolte linked the French, Italian and German fascist movements, he now argued that the crimes of Nazism were not unique to world history, as many historians have stated.  Rather Nazi crimes were similar in degree, kind and scale to other crimes of the 20th century, including Stalin’s extermination of the kulaks (estimated 20 million dead) and Pol Pot’s auto-genocide of the people of Cambodia.

Nolte took his argument further, suggesting that Stalin’s gulags were a model for Hitler’s death camps. For Nolte, Nazism itself was a response to Soviet communism with the mass murders of the Bolsheviks a threat to the rest of Europe, eliciting Nazi retaliation.

By comparing events of Nazi Germany to those of the Soviet Union, Nolte linked German history of that period to a wider European one and established a synchronic narrative on the level of macro-history.

He coupled the evil of the Nazis to that of the Bolsheviks and by analogy found similarity. With that argument Nolte historicized the Third Reich and gave German history a broader continuity, one that started before Nazism and continued to current international events in Cambodia. In addition, his historical comparison had “unburdened” German history of its Nazi weight.

The liberal Hans-Ulrich Wehler labeled Nolte’s work a “borderless misdeed of erroneous comparison” and the German-American Peter Gay accused Nolte of “trivializing” the Holocaust. The Hitler expert Eberhard Jaeckel pointed out that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was public knowledge with the publication of Mein Kampf in the 1920s, where Hitler disclosed that his war against the Jews was shaped in Vienna before World War I, and thus was not a response to the Bolshevik terror in Russia after 1917.[v]

Objectionable too was the scale of Nolte’s comparison. Wehler doubted that it was possible to compare Pol Pot’s “stone age communism” with its brutal extermination of Cambodians to Hitler’s efficient and highly industrialized murder machinery. The comparison with the Soviet Union was questionable as well. In the previous two decades, studies of totalitarian governments have drawn many parallels between the brutal governments of Hitler and Stalin. Yet other historians have argued for another reading of history.

Germany was historically a part of the great Western tradition of the advancement of science and technology, and of the values of Christianity, Humanism and the Enlightenment. Russia, on the other hand, had missed the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and that had left an impact on its culture, one that the historian Theodore von Laue and the political theorist George Kennan argued retained an “authoritarian political culture.” In fact, what had shocked historians like Friedrich Meinecke was that Hitler’s terror and destruction could happen in Germany with its great cultural heritage, one unable to prevent Nazism from taking over the country. Leonard Krieger in The German Idea of Freedom drew the conclusion that in Germany more emphasis was given to culture than to politics. Thus not only is Nolte’s argument faulty according to his critics, but the added weight of Germany’s cultural history tilts the scale of comparison.[vi]

The historians’ debates were from beginning to end about the “politics of memory” in an intellectual struggle over German history, the German nation (divided at the time), and the burden of the past. Although not stated by the academic combatants, the historians’ debates were also about the “use value of the past.” Just as the playwright Bertolt Brecht “plundered” earlier dramas for their “use value” (Gebrauchswert) in writing his works, so historians “seized history” to write “history.”

Take Michael Stuermer’s statement that “As Dresden in a February evening burnt—more than 70,000 deaths were counted—this was a German Hiroshima!” The comparison of the British fire bombing of Dresden to the US dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima should call for similar unease according to Stuermer. Yet Hiroshima’s destruction is written far larger in human memory than Dresden’s fate.

What too had faded from memory with the disappearance of Prussia is that Germany was historically the land of Europe’s center. Turning to geopolitics, Stuermer finds that in Germany’s older geography there was a “curse” that condemned the nation to power politics of the land in the middle. Germany’s “destiny” was coupled to “temptation and damnation,” and thus lumbered by its geography in Europe’s center. Consequently, the place of “German history, in the center of Europe, signifies still and will for the future her first condition.” In other words, all else—the two world wars, the horrors of the Nazis, the division of Germany—follows from that “first condition” of geographical determinism. The implication of Stuermer’s narrative is apparent: Nature is the cause of German politics and history, and there is little we can do about it. Here a deus ex machina has “unburdened the German past.[vii]

The historian Andreas Hillgruber’s studies of the German past led to his examination of several “identification options.” In his evaluation, Hillgruber could certainly not “identify” with Hitler and his Germany, yet he could not identify either with the “victors” as long as the Allied armies held German prisoners, for he “shared the fate of the German nation in its totality.”

Hillgruber finds it not possible to identify as well with the “men of 20 July 1944” who attempted to assassinate Hitler and establish a new German government. Not challenging their “ethics,” Hillgruber does question the “timing” of their engagement, that is, when they knew that the Red Army was on the way to East Prussia, the home of many Prussian aristocrats who participated in the coupe against Hitler. Yet Adam von Trott zu Sulz, one of the plot’s main participants, had assumed as early as 1942 that East Prussia was lost to the Russians; and the principal plotter Count von Stauffenberg originated from southern Germany.[viii] More importantly, Hillgruber evades substance by omitting that the plotters sought to establish a Germany of democratic values as argued by Helmut von Moltke. When an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I discussed the resistance in detail with Countess von Moltke, the widow, who informed me that her husband’s opposition to Hitler was based on moral and political convictions, what historical evidence sustains.[ix]

Finally, Hillgruber can identify himself with the “concrete fate of the German population in the East and with the desperate and selfless efforts of the German Army East.” Again, Hillgruber’s identification choice is open to another reading of German history.

Certainly as a German of Upper Silesia, who with his family fled the approaching Red Army in late January 1945, I should have personal cause to sympathize with Hillgruber’s choice. We like millions of East Germans fled in fear of the Red Army’s terrible retribution for Hitler’s brutal war in the East; and millions of East German civilians perished in the westward trek of that harsh winter, including my sister. Yet I also know that as we fled our hometown, Kattowitz (now Kattowice), the Red Army liberated the concentration camp inmates of Auschwitz, thirty kilometers to the southeast. The“selfless efforts of the German Army” may have given us additional time to prepare our flight—what my grandfather would dispute as German soldiers confiscated his car—but the resistance of the German Army certainly delayed the liberation of the concentration camp victims.[x]

Hillgruber’s schema of “identification models” is either too broad or too narrow to allow for the sharing “of the fate of the German nation in its totality.” Furthermore, the phrase “the German nation in its totality” is a questionable, abstract notion, or to quote Adorno: “The whole is false.”[xi]

When was the German nation “in its totality?” Was it before 1933 with borders drawn by the Treaty of Versailles that excluded Silesia? Was it the Germany after 1933, one that excluded millions of Germans with the racist Nuremberg laws? Could Hillgruber refer to the Second Empire that included Alsace and Lorraine? The disjunctions of German history void his phrase of historical meaning.

As the historians’ debates intensified and spread to the United States, historians like Saul Friedlander called for a “new style” of historical writing with focus on “description” that would offer “documentary precision and rendition of events,” rather than the visualization of historical actions. Apparently “representation” of history had encountered limits.

Even in insightful films like Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” (1955), Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985) and Stephen Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) the immensity of the Holocaust’s horror eluded filmmakers. Yet, documents on the Third Reich were in abundance and available to historians after 1945. Only “revisionists” rejected the overwhelming documentation of evidence; and they would surely not be convinced by more “documentary precision and rendition of events.”[xii]

Given that situation, the philosopher Juergen Habermas in his The New Conservatism argued to the contrary, for visual historical presentation of “the images of that unloading ramp at Auschwitz.” Such images represent for Germans a “traumatic refusal to pass away of a moral imperfect past tense that has been burned into our national history.” That is, the image of Auschwitz’s unloading ramp is a timeless, fixed icon for Germans, “burned” in perpetuity into their “national history.”

For Habermas, the Holocaust remains unique and singular and cannot be compared to other crimes against humanity; its singularity and exceptionality reject historical contrast and repetition. Thus the Holocaust stands representative of German history as a permanent negative, unique event outside normalized history.[xiii]

Habermas holds further that for Germans “life is linked to the life context in which Auschwitz was possible”…and…”our form of life is connected to that of our parents and grandparents…through a historical milieu that made us what and who we are today.” He concludes, Germans “cannot escape this milieu, because our identities, both as individuals and as Germans, are indissolubly interwoven with it…. We stand by our traditions…if we do not want to disavow ourselves.”[xiv]

Let us consider Habermas’ paradoxical argument. On the one hand, he pleads for a permanent image of Auschwitz burned into German national history, meaning, a hypostatized image, one in stasis literally frozen: A permafrost of historical events. On the other, he appeals to historical continuum to link the present to the past, including past and future in the here and now. However, that historical link is a negative continuity, one meant to serve Germans in the present to reflect on their sinister historical patrimony.

Habermas’ paradoxical reflections of historical continuum/stasis find political purpose in an earlier essay published in the liberal weekly Die Zeit, where he stated that “The only patriotism that does not estrange us from the West is a patriotism for the constitution. One in a conviction-anchored union with the universal principles of the constitution could first spread after—and only through—Auschwitz. Whoever wants to drive out with a cliché like ‘guilt-obsessed’ the deep shame of that fact, whoever wants to call the Germans back to a conventional form of their national identity, destroys the only reliable basis that bind us to the West.”[xv]

Auschwitz stands large for the destruction of Jews in Europe. Habermas, in turn, suggests that as “negative symbol” Auschwitz can have a redemptive dimension as universal icon in the West German constitution, one that fastens West Germany to the political ideas of the West.

By placing Auschwitz as foundation stone for German democracy Habermas proposes a different historical identity for West Germans. Resisting a narrative of “normal” German history, what events of the Nazi period made impossible, and rejecting a “normal continuity” of German history, Habermas argues for a ‘negative continuity” with the “life context of Auschwitz” located in the present.[xvi]

In other words, from the “loading ramp of Auschwitz,” that is, Germany’s dark past, Habermas draws a “use value,” one that attaches West Germany to Western values and advances democracy. By creating an innovative form of “Bildung” founded on negative history, Habermas suggests that Germans can draw lessons from their historical lesions.

With the “Berlin Republic” in place after German unification in 1990, Habermas’ historicization of the “German past” will require rethinking to include the 16 million East Germans “in our national history” that was not their “own.”

East German historians, defining fascism as a degenerate form of late bourgeois capitalism, found remnants of it in the capitalism of West Germany. That logic justified construction of the “antifascist protection rampart”—the Berlin Wall—to shield the East German proletariat from West German neo-fascist influences.

In the West, theories of totalitarianism compared communism to fascism, identifying the East German state as continuation of Hitler’s Germany. In the political culture of divided Germany, the fascists were on the other side of the Berlin “rampart/wall” in east or west, subject to different versions of German history.

As appealing as Habermas’ arguments may be in response to the neo-conservative normalization of the Nazi era, his proposal to template the Auschwitz unloading ramp as guide to democracy in Germany rests on historical determinism and is as reductive and narrowing as a Brechtian “Lehrstueck” or learning play, imposing cultural pedagogy to buttress a political program.

Auschwitz, the symbol of what went wrong in the 20th century, has a surplus of meanings impeding historicist reductions whether with document or image; its historical recuperation opens various heterogeneous possibilities.

Debates of German history outlined above suggest that attempts to claim a “use value” of the Nazi era activated historical criticism in all directions, rendering a resistance to historicization by exposing homogeneous narratives to heterogeneous variations.

Historical recuperation in architecture suggests open-ended interpretations as well. Daniel Libeskind’s design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin is in his words an attempt “…to create a new Architecture for a time which would reflect an understanding of history.” After walking through exhibits documenting the once culturally rich presence of Jews in Germany, the visitor arrives at a dead-end corridor of the “Holocaust Void,” a large, semi-dark, empty concrete chamber. After several awkward minutes of silence in the chamber, many visitors exist with tears flowing.

Libeskind, who felt “the necessity to integrate physically and spiritually the meaning of the Holocaust into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin” sought to put into concrete space what Habermas committed to writing.[xvii]

Observing a visitor’s group of the “Holocaust Void” less than an hour later enjoying a rich lunch with gusto and making plans for the evening’s entertainment, I had doubts of the effectiveness of Libeskind’s cultural pedagogy. A Nietzschean thought came to mind that such “sensitivity” is secondhand experience and cannot become our own as we are too removed from that lived world.[xviii]

At that moment I remembered my uncle Miron, a survivor of Mauthausen-Gusen. His burden of the past was part of his existence. When I visited him in Binghamton, New York in the 1990s he quickly pulled me out of the driveway and frantically pushed me into the house. He shouted at me that I was in the line of fire of a Nazi machine gun nest lodged on the wooded ridge behind his house!

Yes, he had survived…sort of. Perhaps he had even saved my life.

It is difficult to place the history of “Contemporary Germany” under the normal academic genre of “national history,” given the events of the past hundred years; and it is problematic to speak of a “shared historical consciousness” or of a “memory community” when considering German history, one that was “made,’ “unmade” and “remade” many times with each “national change” evoking another Germany.

Since 1871 with the foundation of the “German nation-state” at least six major territorial transformations took place, three changes of “national capital,” and at least half a dozen contentious ideologies applied to governments from monarchy to democracy, fascism to occupation, communism to renewed democracy; and the difficulty of “national history” was enhanced by every “new Germany” denouncing the politics of its predecessors.

The task of the historian, of course, is to make sense of this human muddle, to propose an interpretation, present logic and give meaning to events, even offer a mode of comprehension or cultural pedagogy. Given human savagery of the previous and the ongoing butchery of our fellow creatures in the present age that task is monumental and at times historians and philosophers despair or perhaps feel “shame and anger over the explanations and interpretations—as sophisticated as they may be—by thinkers who claim to have found sense to this shit.”[xix]

How to draw history lessons from our lesions of history? Why is it so difficult to make sense of what we have made? Giambattista Vico recognized as early as 1740 that we are always ahead in the making of things, yet behind in understanding what we have made. But since history is a human “factum,” that is “what is made” by us, it is, Vico believed, knowable to us.[xx]

Several decades later, Immanuel Kant argued for enlightenment with his challenge of sapere aude, dare to know, and the “truth will set you free.” Yet the Enlightenment project of reason as the tool for perfecting human nature and life was severely damaged by historical events of the 20th century with reason an instrument of destruction and violence of unprecedented scale.

The past century has given us many examples of “knowledge is power,” yet few of “knowledge is emancipation.” Perhaps we can change that history.

END NOTES

[i] Dieter Langewiesche, “Die Nation schafft Freiheit,” Spiegel Special Geschichte (1, 2007), p. 16.

[ii] TNS Forschung fuer den Spiegel vom 9. bis 11 Januar 2007, Ibid, pp. 10-11.

[iii] Joschka Fischer, “Wachstum oder Niedergang,” Spiegel Special Geschichte (1, 2007), pp. 171-175.

[iv] See www.screenonline.com to access Jacob Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man” (1973).

Theodore Adorno, Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse. Ein philosopisches Lesebuch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,1997).

[v] Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit: Ein polemischer Essay zum ‘Historikerstreit’ (Muenchen: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1988), p.72, pp. 40-42, and pp. 100-101.

[vi] Ibid, p. 168, Wehler’s argument that Germany was a carrier of the great Western cultural traditions.

[vii] Ibid, p. 72.

[viii] Walter Schmitthenner and Hans Buchheim, Eds. Der deutsche Wiederstand gegen Hitler (Koeln: Kiepenhauer und Wisch, 1966), p. 68, pp. 156-160.

[ix] Ger van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand (Muenchen, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1967). Roon’s work is a thorough study of the “Kreisauer Circle,” the resistance group guided by Helmut James Count von Moltke at his estate Kreisau in Upper Silesia.

[x] Ibid, pp.50-53.

[xi] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951), section 29.

[xii] M. Broszat and S. Friedlander, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism,” New German Critique 44 (Spring/Summer 1988), p. 124.

[xiii] Juergen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Nicholson (Cambridge: MIT Press 1989), pp.229-230.

[xiv] Ibid, p. 233.

[xv] Juergen Habermas, “Eine Art Schadensabwicklung. Apologetische Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung,” Die Zeit, 11 June 1986, pp. 120-136. See also Historische Zeitschrift 242, pp. 265-289.

[xvi] For a critique of Habermas’ model see Sande Cohen, “Habermas’ Bureaucratization of the Final Solution,” in his Academia and the Luster of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 63-80.

[xvii] Daniel Libeskind, “The Jewish Museum Berlin: Between the Lines,” www. daniel-libeskind.com.

[xviii] Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fuer das Leben,”(1873/74), Werke, 2. Band (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroener Verlag, 1921), pp. 101-239.

[xix] F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p.98.

[xx] Leon Pompa, editor and translator, Vico Selected Writings (Binghamton: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.33-56.

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