Ernst Nolte - Recent Work

Recent Work

In his 1991 book Geschichtsdenken im 20. Jahrhundert (Historical Thinking In the 20th Century), Nolte asserted that the 20th century had produced three “extraordinary states”, namely Germany, the Soviet Union, and Israel. He claimed that all three were “abnormal once”, but whereas the Soviet Union and Germany were now “normal” states, Israel was still “abnormal” and, in Nolte’s view, in danger of becoming a fascist state that might commit genocide against the Palestinians.

Between 1995–1997, Nolte debated with French historian François Furet in an exchange of letters on the relationship between fascism and Communism. The debate had started with a footnote in Furet's book, Le Passé d'une illusion (The Passing of an Illusion), in which Furet had expressed his disagreement with Nolte's theories about Communism and fascism. This prompted Nolte to write Furet a letter of protest. Furet argued that both ideologies were Totalitarian twins that shared the same origins, while Nolte repeated his views of a kausale Nexus (causal nexus) between fascism and Communism, to which the former had been a response. After Furet's death, their correspondence was published as a book in France in 1998, entitled Fascisme et Communisme: échange épistolaire avec l'historien allemand Ernst Nolte prolongeant la Historikerstreit (Fascism and Communism: Epistolary Exchanges With The German Historian Ernst Nolte Extending The Historikerstreit). This was translated into English as Fascism and Communism in 2001. While pronouncing Stalin guilty of great crimes, Furet wrote to Nolte that he did not feel there was a precise parallel, as Nolte suggested, between the Holocaust and the expulsions of the Kulaks. Furet contended that, although the histories of fascism and Communism were essential to European history, there were singular events associated with each movement which differentiated them, contrary to Nolte's conception of them as ultimately comparable.

Nolte often contributes Feuilleton (opinion pieces) to German newspapers such as Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He has often been described as one of the "most brooding, German thinkers about history". The historical consciousness and self-understanding of the Germans form a major theme of his essays. Nolte called the Federal Republic "a state born of contemporary history, a product of catastrophe erected to overcome catastrophe" In a Feuilleton piece published in Die Welt entitled “Auschwitz als Argument in der Geschichtstheorie” (Auschwitz As An Argument In Historical Theory) on 2 January 1999, Nolte criticized his old enemy Richard J. Evans’s book In The Defence of History, on the grounds that aspects of the Holocaust are open to revision, and that therefore Evans’s attacks on Nolte during the Historikerstreit were unwarranted. Specifically, citing the American political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Nolte argued that the effectiveness of the gas chambers as killing instruments was exaggerated, that more Jews were killed by mass shooting than by mass gassing, that the number of people killed at Auschwitz was overestimated after 1945 (with about 1 million rather than 4 million being killed there), that Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir of Auschwitz was a forgery and that accordingly the history of the Holocaust is open to reinterpretation. In October 1999, Evans stated in response that he agreed with Nolte on these points, but argued that this form of argument was an attempt by Nolte to avoid responding to his criticism of him during the Historikerstreit.

On 4 June 2000, Nolte was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize. The award attracted considerable public debate. It was presented to Nolte by Horst Möller, the Director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History), who praised Nolte’s scholarship while trying to steer clear of Nolte’s more controversial claims. In his acceptance speech, Nolte commented that "We should leave behind the view that the opposite of National Socialist goals is always good and right", while suggesting that excessive "Jewish" support for Communism furnished the Nazis with "rational reasons" for their anti-Semitism.

In August 2000, Nolte wrote a favorable review in the Die Woche newspaper of Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry, claiming Finkelstein’s book buttressed his claim that the memory of the Holocaust had been used by Jewish groups for their own reasons. Nolte’s positive review of The Holocaust Industry may have been related to Finkelstein’s endorsement in his book of Nolte’s demand, first made during the Historikerstreit, for the “normalization” of the German past

In a 2004 book review of Richard Overy's monograph The Dictators, the American historian Anne Applebaum argued that it was a valid intellectual exercise to compare the German and Soviet dictatorships, but complained that Nolte’s arguments had needlessly discredited the comparative approach. In response, Nolte was defended against Applelbaum's charge of attempting to justify the Holocaust by Paul Gottfried in 2005, who contended that Nolte had merely argued that the Nazis had made a link in their own minds between Jews and Communists, and that the Holocaust was their attempt to eliminate the most likely supporters of Communism. In a June 2006 interview with the newspaper Die Welt, echoing theories he first expressed in The Three Faces of Fascism, Nolte identified Islamic fundamentalism as a "third variant", after Communism and National Socialism, of "the resistance to transcendence", expressing regret that he will not have enough time to fully study Islamic fascism In the same interview, Nolte said that he could not forgive Augstein for calling Hillgruber a "constitutional Nazi" during the Historikerstreit, and claimed that Wehler had helped to hound Hillgruber to his death in 1989. Nolte ended the interview by calling himself a philosopher, not a historian, and argued that the hostile reactions he often encountered from historians was due to his status as a philosopher who writes history.

In his 2005 book, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés And The Making of National Socialism, the American historian Michael Kellogg argued that there were two extremes of thinking about the origins of National Socialism with Nolte arguing for a "causal nexus" between Communism in Russia and Nazism in Germany while the other extreme was represented by the American historian Daniel Goldhagen's theories about a unique German culture of "eliminationist" anti-Semitism Kellogg argued that his book represented an attempt at adopting a middle position between Nolte’s and Goldhagen’s positions, but that he leaned closer to Nolte’s, contending that anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic Russian émigrés played a key and underappreciated role in the 1920s in the development of Nazi ideology with their influence on Nazi thinking about Judeo-Bolshevism being especially notable

In his 2006 book No Simple Victory, the British historian Norman Davies lends Nolte's theories support by writing:

"Ten years later, in The European Civil War (1987), the German historian Ernst Nolte (b. 1923) brought ideology into the equation. The First World War had spawned the Bolshevik Revolution, he maintained, and fascism should be seen as a "counter-revolution" against Communism. More pointedly, since fascism followed Communism chronologically, he argued that some of the Nazis' political techniques and practices had been copied from those of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, such propositions were thought anathema by leftists who believe that fascism was an original and unparallled evil.

Davies concluded that revealations made after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe after 1989-91 about Soviet crimes had discredited Nolte's critics.

Nolte's assertion that Nazi Germany was a "mirror image" of the Soviet Union has also received support from several other more recent scholars, notably from Stéphane Courtois who argues both that Nazi Germany adopted its system of repression from Soviet methods and that the Soviet genocides of peoples living in the Caucasus and the exterminations of large social groups in Russia were not very much different from similar policies by the Nazis:

"The deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's regime "is equal to" the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime".

Courtois wrote the preface to the French edition of The European Civil War, published in 2000.

Developments in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, both political and scholarly, have supported Nolte's position; notably the 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism which calls for the equal condemnation of Communism and Nazism. Since 2009, the European Union has a common remembrance day for Stalinism and Nazism.