The German Genius

Finkelstein, whose own mother was in Majdanek concentration camp and the slave labor camps at Czestochowa and Skarszysko, accused American Jewry in particular of exploiting the Holocaust, of being “Holocaust hucksters,” exaggerating the numbers who suffered and the numbers who survived, for their own ends, mainly to benefit Israel. He described what he called a “sordid pattern” and detailed the large salaries and fees being drawn by officials administering compensation claims, far larger than the claims themselves. Again, his theme underlines the fact that interest in the Holocaust is a recent phenomenon. 24
    T HE H ISTORIANS’ D ISPUTE
     
    Just how extreme or unique was the Holocaust? This is a sensitive question that the Germans themselves have had difficulty adjusting to. Whereas in America, as Novick has shown, the Holocaust has grown in salience as the years have passed, in Germany there have been some equally forceful attempts to take the debate in the opposite direction and play down its extent, significance, and singularity. Charles Maier is just one American historian who has remarked on how the German scholarly community has been polarized by this subject.
    It was a division that first revealed itself in the 1980s in a phenomenon known as the Historikerstreit , the “historians’ dispute,” an acrimonious debate that was carried on among distinguished historians, such as Helmut Diwald, Ernst Nolte (a student of Heidegger), and Andreas Hillgruber, who had each produced solid, “regular” histories before. When it broke open, it comprised the following arguments:
     
It was argued that Fascism was not a totalitarian system in the mold of Stalinism, but a response to it;
Auschwitz was not a unique event but a copy of the Gulag; other, earlier, genocides had taken place in the twentieth century;
More Aryans than Jews were killed in the death camps;
Poles and Romanians were just as anti-Semitic as Germans;
The worst excesses of the war—the invasion of Russia and the extermination of the Jews—came about because one man, Hitler, intended them to happen.
     
    There are good answers to these arguments, not least, as Charles Maier dryly observed, “The Final Solution must not be made into a question of bookkeeping.” 25 Beneath the surface, however, was there more to it? Was the Historikerstreit the symptom of a deeper malaise that, forty years after the end of the war, was at last beginning to surface?
    There were those who thought that it was. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas observed that, “In the recent past, the memories accumulate of those who for decades could not speak about their suffering and we do not really know whether one may really still believe in the redemptive power of the word.” He thought that, in the historians’ dispute, the “floodgates of memory” had finally been opened “and made the [German] public realise that the past was not simply fading.” In 1986, in a German historical journal, Hermann Rudolph agreed that the Germans were more concerned with the war just then than they had been in the past. That concern, he said, was “apparently not wearing thin; rather the opposite…the question that is now thrown open is: should the Third Reich be treated historiographically so that it no longer blocks the way to our own past like some sombre and monstrous monument…?” 26
    Is there something to this? In an account of the Historikerstreit, Richard Evans, professor of history at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, has noted that, after World War II in Germany, “very little was said about Nazis. Next to nothing was taught about it in the schools. The Nazi affiliations of major figures in the economy were never mentioned. Even in politics, there was no great stigma attached to a Nazi background, so long as this did not become the embarrassing object of public debate.” 27 The desire, in West Germany, for a more determined confrontation with the German past only began, Evans says, with the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1960 and the Auschwitz trials in 1964. 28 So here is a tidy parallel with the growth in interest in the Holocaust in the United States.
    The importance of the Historikerstreit, in our context, is that it is yet further evidence of the obsession with Hitler and the Holocaust and of a particular pattern of forgetting or, more appropriately, not forgetting. Opinion polls in Germany showed that while 80 percent of Americans were proud to be