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The Historikerstreit (German: [hɪsˈtoːʁɪkɐˌʃtʁaɪt] , "historians' dispute") was a dispute in the late 1980s in West Germany between conservative and left-of-center academics and other intellectuals about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography, and more generally into the German people's view of themselves. The dispute was initiated with the Bitburg controversy, which related to a commemorative service at a German military cemetery where members of the Waffen-SS were buried. The service was attended by President of the United States Ronald Reagan, who had been invited by the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The Bitburg ceremony was widely interpreted in Germany as the beginning of the "normalization" of the nation's Nazi past, and inspired a slew of criticisms and defenses that made up the initiating arguments of the Historikerstreit. The dispute quickly outgrew the initial context of the Bitburg controversy, however, and became a series of broader historiographic, political, and critical debates about how the episode of the Holocaust should be understood in Germany's history and identity. The position taken by conservative intellectuals, most prominently Ernst Nolte, was that the Holocaust was not unique and therefore Germans should not bear any special burden of guilt for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Nolte argued that there was no moral difference between the crimes of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany, and that the Nazis acted as they did out of fear of what the Soviet Union might do to Germany. Others argued that the memory of the Nazi era could not be "normalized" and be a source of national pride, and that it echoed Nazi propaganda. Other central questions and topics debated within the dispute included the singularity of the Holocaust, the functionalist and intentionalist models of the Holocaust, methodological approaches to historiography, the political utility of history, the question of whether the Holocaust ought to be studied comparatively, and ethics of public commemorations of history. The debate attracted much media attention in West Germany, with its participants frequently giving television interviews and writing op-ed pieces in newspapers. It flared up again briefly in 2000 when Nolte, one of its leading figures, was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize for science. Background Immediately after World War II, intense debates arose in intellectual circles about how to interpret Nazi Germany, a contested discussion that continues today. Two of the more hotly debated questions were whether Nazism was in some way part of the "German national character" and how much responsibility, if any, the German people bore for the crimes of Nazism. Various non-German historians in the immediate post-war era, such as A. J. P. Taylor and Sir Lewis Namier, argued that Nazism was the culmination of German history and that the vast majority of Germans were responsible for Nazi crimes. Different assessments of Nazism were common among Marxists, who insisted on the economic aspects of Nazism and conceived of it as the culmination of a capitalist crisis, and liberals, who emphasized Hitler's personal role and responsibility and bypassed the larger problem of the relation of ordinary German people to the regime. Within West Germany, then, most historians were strongly defensive. In the assessment of Gerhard Ritter and others, Nazism was a totalitarian movement that represented only the work of a small criminal clique; Germans were victims of Nazism, and the Nazi era represented a total break in German history. Starting in the 1960s, that assessment was challenged by younger German historians. Fritz Fischer argued in favor of a Sonderweg conception of German history that saw Nazism as the result of the way German society had developed. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the functionalist school of historiography emerged; its proponents argued that medium- and lower-ranking German officials were not just obeying orders and policies but actively engaged in the making of the policies that led to the Holocaust. The functionalists thereby cast blame for the Holocaust across a wider circle. Many right-wing German historians disliked the implications of the Sonderweg conception and the functionalist school; they were generally identified with the left and structuralism and were seen by the right-wingers as being derogatory toward Germany. By the mid-1980s, right-wing German historians began to think that enough time had passed since 1945 and thus it was time for the German nation to start celebrating much of its history again. A sign of the changed mood was the ceremony at Bitburg in May 1985, where US President Ronald Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl honored the German war dead buried at Bitburg, including the SS men buried there, which was widely seen as a sign that the memory of the Nazi past had been "normalized" (i.e., that the Nazi period was "normal" and therefore Germans should not feel guilty). President Reagan justified laying a wreath to honor all the Germans buried at Bitburg who died fighting for Hitler, including the SS men, and his initial refusal to visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp under the grounds that the SS men buried at Bitburg were just as much victims of Hitler as the Jews murdered by the SS and that "They [the Germans] just have a guilt feeling that's been imposed on them and I just think it's unnecessary". The ceremony at Bitburg and Reagan's remarks about the need to do away with a German "guilt feeling" about the Nazi past were widely interpreted by German conservatives as the beginning of the "normalization" of the memory of Nazi Germany. Michael Stürmer's 1986 article "Land without History" questioned Germany's lack of positive history in which to take pride. Stürmer's position as Chancellor Kohl's advisor and speechwriter heightened the controversy. At the same time, many left-wing German historians disliked what they saw as the nationalistic tone of the Kohl government. A project that raised the ire of many on the left, and which became a central issue of the Historikerstreit, consisted of two proposed museums celebrating modern German history, to be built in West Berlin and Bonn. Many of the left-wing participants in the Historikerstreit claimed that the museum was meant to "exonerate" the German past and asserted that there was a connection between the proposed museum, the government, and the views of such historians as Michael Stürmer, Ernst Nolte, and Andreas Hillgruber. In October 1986, Hans Mommsen wrote that Stürmer's assertion that he who controls the past also controls the future, his work as a co-editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper—which had been publishing articles by Ernst Nolte and Joachim Fest denying the "singularity" of the Holocaust—and his work as an advisor to Chancellor Kohl should cause "concern" among historians. Overview Part.... Discover the Ernst Piper popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Ernst Piper books.