Ernst Nolte

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Ernst Nolte (born January 11, 1923 in Witten ; † August 18, 2016 in Berlin ) was a German historian and philosopher . In particular, his studies on European fascism , which he presented in the 1960s, were influential. His thesis of a "causal nexus" between the crimes of the Gulag system in the Soviet Union and the Holocaust , the annihilation of European Jews under National Socialism , sparked the historians ' dispute in 1986 .

Life

Ernst Nolte was born in 1923 into the family of a Catholic elementary school principal in Witten an der Ruhr . He graduated from high school in 1941 and immediately began studying philosophy, German literature and classical philology at the universities of Münster , Berlin and Freiburg im Breisgau . Since he was missing three fingers on his left hand, Adaktylie , he was not fit for military service. The "burden" of having been preferred to many of his peers who, like his younger brother, had died in World War II , he later explained as an important factor in his lifelong preoccupation with National Socialism : "in dislike, but without hatred". After graduating in 1945, he went to school at high schools, where he taught German, Latin and Greek. In addition, he continued his scientific work and received his doctorate in 1952 in Freiburg im Breisgau with the work Self-Alienation and Dialectics in German Idealism and under Marx with Eugen Fink , one of the former assistants of the philosopher and founder of the phenomenology Edmund Husserl . Shortly before the end of the World War, he originally agreed on a doctoral project “On Eternity and Time” with Martin Heidegger .

Nolte then became an assistant to Theodor Schieder at the University of Cologne . His book, Fascism in its Era , published in 1963, was accepted as a habilitation thesis in 1964 . This work, which was soon translated into several languages, made him known internationally. He then worked for a short time in Cologne as a private lecturer . As early as 1965, Nolte was appointed full professor for modern history at the University of Marburg . In 1973 he followed a call to the Free University of Berlin , where he worked at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute until his retirement in 1991 as a professor of modern history. In 1985 he received the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize for his “services to consolidate and promote the foundations of a liberal community” .

His son is the Berlin international law professor Georg Nolte , his daughter the journalist and writer Dorothee Nolte .

Ernst Nolte died at the age of 93 after a short, serious illness. He found his final resting place in the cemetery of the St. Matthias Congregation in Berlin-Tempelhof .

"Fascism in its epoch"

In the work Fascism in his epoch , Nolte defined fascism on the basis of its self-expressions, a method that Nolte names phenomenological and has founded philosophically, as “anti-Marxism, which the opponent through the formation of a radically opposite and yet neighboring ideology and the application of seeks to destroy almost identical and yet characteristically re-shaped methods, but always within the impenetrable framework of national self-assertion and autonomy ”.

According to the typological method - based on Max Weber - anti- Marxism , anti- liberalism , nationalism , violence and propaganda are identified as general characteristics of fascism , whereby Nolte himself refers to the limits of this procedure, since racism or anti-Semitism do not play a defining role here. In his phenomenological exploration of the prehistory of fascism, however, anti-Semitism and racism are all the more central. In his fascism theory, Nolte not only summarizes German National Socialism and Mussolini's Italian fascism , but also Action française , a right-wing extremist French movement of the Third Republic , whose racial anti-Semitism directly anticipates Hitler's worldview . This made him the first German historian without a Marxist background to use the term fascism. Nolte saw the origins of European fascism in the tradition of the French counter-revolution.

His book was also received positively by moderate leftists because it was understood as an alternative to the theory of totalitarianism . Nolte himself made it clear in 1978 in a “Review of Fifteen Years” that this was a misunderstanding: “In truth, I wanted to differentiate, historicize and, to a certain extent, also de-emotionalize the theory of totalitarianism, but I neither wanted to overcome nor suppress it”.

Historians' dispute

A contribution Nolte in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) of 6 June 1986 on Jürgen Habermas in the time responded publicist, sparked the so-called historians dispute out. The text was based on ideas that he had already expressed on July 24, 1980 in an article in the FAZ.

In it, Nolte stated that the “ Gulag Archipelago ” had “the logical and factual Prius” before Auschwitz , that is, the “racial murder” of the National Socialists was only a result of fear of the older “class murder” of the Bolsheviks . The mass murder of the Jews and Hitler's anti-Semitic worldview, which according to his older theses revealed the essence of fascism, is interpreted by Nolte in his work The European Civil War 1917–1945 , published in 1987 . National Socialism and Bolshevism as an “excessive reaction” to the challenge of the October Revolution , which set a precedent with its class murder and the concentration camps established since 1918.

This thesis, which however did not prompt Nolte to question the singularity of the Holocaust , he extended to the assertion of a “European civil war” that raged from 1917 to 1945. Here Nolte puts fascism , National Socialism and Bolshevism in close correspondence, in which Bolshevism was Hitler's offensive model and “terrifying image”. The boycott of German goods proclaimed by British and American Jews, which was published under the title Judea Declares War on Germany in the Daily Express of March 24, 1933, and Chaim Weizmann's declaration of loyalty to Great Britain in September 1939, Nolte used as a justification “that Hitler was Jews as prisoners of war [...] were allowed to treat and intern ”. Nolte took the argument with a “Jewish declaration of war” on Germany from right-wing extremist literature. It was widely viewed as anti-Semitic and contributed to the fact that Nolte was increasingly isolated in academic circles. In the opinion of the educational scientist Micha Brumlik , Nolte is “the first German, somewhat renowned scholar who not only 'understands' both anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but openly justifies it”.

In addition to massive accusations based on methodology and sources, the criticism of Nolte's understanding of the Nazi ideology began: For Nolte, their anti-Semitism was an ideology of defense against a specific threat, but in fact it was a decisive characteristic of the National Socialist ideology and its ethnic precursors from the start which, for example, does not apply to Italian fascism in this aggressiveness. Nolte did not explain the differences that existed here and referred to considerations that might have a certain plausibility in the case of fascist movements, without reflecting on the in many respects different völkisch nature of the Nazi movement.

Increasing isolation

In the years after the height of the historians' dispute, Nolte became increasingly isolated among historians. From now on, as Alexander Cammann says, he only found his audience “on the far right”.

In the anthology published by Rainer Zitelmann , Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse in 1990 , The Shadows of the Past , Nolte argued that the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists had a “fundamentum in re”, a rational core that lay in the behavior of the Jews: He cited expressions pro-revolutionary and anti-German from Ernst Blochs , Georg Lukács ' and Max Horkheimers and then stated that whoever wrote so “uninhibited”, “should not be surprised if this reality results in a counter-attack that is no less uninhibited”. The reviewer of the Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands criticized the fact that Nolte evidently accepted a natural right to such a counter-attack, regardless of whether the peripheral statements of these Jewish intellectuals were ever received significantly: “In transcendentalist speculation, it is sufficient to prove that something was written was already out for its effectiveness ”.

In his work History Thinking in the 20th Century , he stated in 1991 that there were three “extraordinary states” in that century, namely the USSR, divided Germany and Israel. The USSR and Germany have returned to "normality" - Israel alone must still achieve this state of affairs, otherwise it runs the risk of becoming the "only state after Hitler's heart". The reception of this book was mostly negative. In 1994 he was one of the authors of the new right anthology The Self-Confident Nation , which was also largely met with incomprehension. In the same year he gave an interview to the Journal of Historical Review , a body of pseudoscientific arguments against Holocaust deniers . As the only senior scientist, Nolte did not dismiss the Leuchter Report from 1988 as a pseudoscientific historical falsification . In it, the American engineer Fred A. Leuchter asserted that no mass murder could have taken place in the gas chambers of the extermination camps because of the alleged lack of cyanide traces. Nolte praised his text as "important", even if he did not want to call it scientific.

Sometimes the rejection that Nolte encountered with his statements was expressed in physical violence. In February 1988, for example, an arson attack was carried out on the Noltes car parked on the grounds of the Free University of Berlin. At the beginning of February 1994, around 30 “demonstrators” prevented Nolte from giving a planned lecture on the subject of “Nietzsche and the Present” in the building of the Catholic student community in Friedrichshain and attacked Nolte with beatings and tear gas.

Nolte's rejection of the tightening of Section 130 of the Criminal Code (punishable by denying the Holocaust as incitement to hatred ) in a newspaper article as a “danger to intellectual freedom” in Germany also met with a largely lack of understanding. His 1998 book Historical Existence. Between the beginning and the end of the story? , which he himself wanted to understand as his main work in a lecture, intensified his theses from the historians' dispute. He stated that the activity of Soviet partisans behind the front had provoked the mass murder of the Jews as a reaction. Hitler also had "serious reasons" for viewing the Jews as hostile since 1939 "and taking appropriate measures" - by which Nolte did not mean their murder. However, he drew parallels between the threats of annihilation contained in the Old Testament for the enemies of Israel and Hitler's ideas in World War II. In addition, Nolte admitted Hitler to have had a “remarkable knowledge of the Old Testament” - lines of thought that were evaluated in the press as evidence of Nolte's “scientific decline”.

In his book The Third Radical Resistance Movement: Islamism , Nolte tried, according to contemporary historian and terrorism researcher Walter Laqueur , to classify Islamism “in the great political systems of our time”. However , according to Laqueur, the phenomenon of Islamism cannot be explained by Chaim Weizmann , Theodor Herzl and Zionism . The new book gives Nolte "an opportunity to repeat his old theories". Nolte is “interested in ideology, he rarely talks about reality”. In this book, Nolte also put forward the thesis that a so-called “Occidentosis” threatens “all of Islam from within” and “has a lot to do with the work of the Jews within the supposedly Christian culture”. According to the historian Volker Weiß , Nolte's “defense of Arab hostility towards Jews” confirms the “close connection between anti-universalism, Islamism and anti-Semitism ”. Nolte's book, on the other hand, was received positively in the new-right Junge Freiheit and the NPD- related magazine Hier & Jetzt .

In 2012, Nolte interpreted National Socialism in the New Right Secession as “a copy of the Bolshevik original”. Also in the Secession in 2012, he wrote in relation to Jews of an alleged "anti-scientific unequal treatment of a world-historical and in all differentiation very active people [...] which seems to insist on the exclusivity of its victim status for internal and external reasons".

In 2000, Nolte received the Konrad Adenauer Prize from the Germany Foundation . Angela Merkel declined to give the laudation for Nolte. This task was then taken over by the director of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History , Horst Möller . After 2003/2004 the CDU - German MP Martin Hohmann for his as anti-Semitic considered speech on the Day of German Unity of party and faction was expelled, said Nolte Hohmann for brave and respectable advocate of expression and freedom of conscience. In 2006 he signed the “Appeal for Freedom of the Press” staged by the weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit , against the exclusion of Junge Freiheit from the Leipzig Book Fair . In November 2011, he received the Gerhard Löwenthal Prize for Journalism from the Foundation for Conservative Education and Research and the weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit . In 2012, Nolte received the Erich and Erna Kronauer Historian's Prize “for his extensive scientific and historical-philosophical oeuvre”. Foundation of which he was a member of the Board of Trustees.

Fonts

  • Self-alienation and dialectics in German idealism and Marx. o. O. [1952] (dissertation, Freiburg im Breisgau, University, December 20, 1952).
  • Fascism in its epoch. Action francaise - Italian fascism - National Socialism . Piper, Munich 1963.
  • The fascist movements. The crisis of the liberal system and the development of fascisms (= dtv world history of the 20th century. Vol. 4). DTV, Munich 1966.
  • (Ed.) Theories on Fascism. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1967.
  • The crisis of the liberal system and the fascist movements. Piper, Munich 1968.
  • The sense and absurdity of democratization in the university. Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 1968.
  • University institute or party college? Documentation on the Kühnl habilitation process. Markus, Cologne 1971.
  • Germany and the Cold War. Piper, Munich 1974.
  • Marxism, fascism, cold war. Lectures and essays 1964–1976. DVA, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-421-01824-3 .
  • What is civil and other articles, treatises, arguments. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-12-915051-X .
  • Marxism and Industrial Revolution. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-608-91128-6 .
  • The European Civil War 1917–1945. National Socialism and Bolshevism. Propylaea, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-549-07216-3 .
  • The passing of the past. Answer to my critics in the so-called historians' dispute. Ullstein, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-550-07217-1 .
  • Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism. Propylaea, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-549-05833-0 .
  • Historical thinking in the 20th century. From Max Weber to Hans Jonas. Propylaea, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-549-05379-7 .
  • Martin Heidegger. Politics and history in life and thought. Propylaea, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-549-07241-4 .
  • Points of contention. Present and future controversies about National Socialism. Propylaea, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-549-05234-0 .
  • The Germans and their pasts. Remembering and forgetting from the founding of Bismarck's empire until today. Propylaea, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-549-05493-9 .
  • Historical existence. Between the beginning and the end of the story? Piper, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-492-04070-5 .
  • with François Furet : "Hostile proximity": Communism and fascism in the 20th century. An exchange of letters. Herbig, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7766-2029-3 .
  • The causal nexus. About revisions and revisionisms in historical studies. Studies, articles and lectures 1990–2000. Herbig, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-7766-2279-2 .
  • with Siegfried Gerlich : Insight into a complete oeuvre. Siegfried Gerlich in conversation with Ernst Nolte. Antaios, Schnellroda 2005, ISBN 3-935063-61-X .
  • The Weimar Republic. Democracy between Lenin and Hitler. Herbig, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7766-2491-4 .
  • History of Europe 1848–1918. From the March Revolution to the end of the First World War. Herbig, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-7766-2532-5 .
  • The 20th century. The ideologies of violence. Herbig, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7766-2579-0 .
  • The third radical resistance movement. Islamism. Landt, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-938844-16-8 .
  • Late reflections. About the world civil war of the 20th century. Karolinger, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-85418-142-2 .
  • Italian fonts. Europe - Historical Thought - Islam and Islamism. Essays and interviews from 1997 to 2008. Landt, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-938844-22-9 .
  • At the end of a lifetime. Last speeches 2011/2012. Antaios, Schnellroda 2012, ISBN 978-3-935063-67-8 .
  • Review of my life and thinking. Lau-Verlag, Reinbek 2014, ISBN 978-3-95768-023-5 .
  • Historical existence. Between the beginning and the end of the story? Lau-Verlag, Reinbek 2015, ISBN 978-3-95768-137-9 .

literature

Ernst Nolte's gravestone in the cemetery of the St. Matthias Congregation (Berlin-Tempelhof)

Movie

  • Interview with Nolte in “Was war links?” , Four-part documentary series by Andreas Christoph Schmidt , part 1, protest and theory. 2003, 4 × 60 minutes.
  • "German Dispute: The Historian Ernst Nolte" , documentary by Andreas Christoph Schmidt, 2005, 80 minutes.

Web links

Commons : Ernst Nolte  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Franziska Augstein : The eccentric in his epoch. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 11, 2013, p. 12.
  2. ↑ Johannes Willms : The enemy is the neighbor. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 19, 2016, p. 9.
  3. ↑ Lorenz Jäger : On the death of Ernst Nolte. It was all about it . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung # FAZ.NETFAZ.NET , August 18, 2016.
  4. ↑ Marcus Schwering: The ascetic provocateur . In: Kölner StadtAnzeiger, August 19, 2016, p. 21.
  5. ^ Knerger.de: The grave of Ernst Nolte
  6. ↑ Ernst Nolte: Fascism in its epoch. Action francaise - Italian fascism - National Socialism . Paperback edition, Piper Verlag, Munich 1984, p. XIV.
  7. ↑ Ernst Nolte: The European Civil War 1917–1945. National Socialism and Bolshevism . Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 524.
  8. ↑ Quoted from Augstein (ed.): Historikerstreit , 1980, p. 24.
  9. ^ Christian Mentel: Historikerstreit . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Vol. 4: Events, decrees, controversies . de Gruyter Saur, Berlin / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-598-24076-8 , p. 167 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  10. ↑ Micha Brumlik: Still out of date - Ernst Nolte and the Holocaust . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , May 7, 1994.
  11. ↑ See: Wolfgang Schieder: National Socialism in the Misjudgment of Philosophical Historiography. On the method of Ernst Nolte's “European Civil War” . In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15, 1989, pp. 89–114.
  12. ↑ See: Andreas Wirsching: From World War to Civil War? Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 313 ff., P. 462 ff., P. 518 f.
  13. ↑ Article Nolte, Ernst . In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 45/2007 of November 10, 2007 (Munziger Online, last accessed on July 3, 2009).
  14. ↑ Alexander Cammann: Obituary Ernst Nolte: Where does the world spirit fight? . In Die Zeit , September 19, 2016.
  15. ↑ Ernst Nolte: Concluding reflections on the so-called Historikerstreit. In: Uwe Backes, Eckhard Jesse and Rainer Zitelmann (eds.): The shadows of the past. Impulses for the historicization of National Socialism. Propylaeen, Frankfurt am Main 1990, pp. 83-109, the quotation p. 97.
  16. ↑ Philipp Heyde: Review of The Shadows of the Past. Impulses for the historicization of National Socialism, ed. v. Uwe Backes, Eckhard Jesse Rainer Zitelmann. - Frankfurt a. M./Berlin: Propylaen 1990. 655 S. In: Yearbook for the history of Central and Eastern Germany 40 (1992), p. 189.
  17. ↑ Christian Mentel: Journal of Historical Review (USA, 1980–1986; 1988–2002) . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Vol. 6: Publications . de Gruyter Saur, Berlin / New York 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-025872-1 , p. 310 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  18. ^ Christian Mentel: Leuchter Report (Fred A. Leuchter, 1988) . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus, Vol. 6: Publications . de Gruyter Saur, Berlin / New York 2013, p. 427 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  19. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau of February 11, 1988
  20. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 5, 1994, p. 27, full text at: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/soc.culture.german/P6DjMX4NUBw
  21. ^ So Michael Zimmermann: Obsessions and Suggestions . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 22, 1999, p. 10.
  22. ↑ The historian Nolte betrays Islamism. www.welt.de, April 17, 2009
  23. ↑ Volker Weiß: The authoritarian revolt. The New Right and the Fall of the West. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2018, p. 223
  24. ↑ Elke Rajal: “Open, coded, structural. Anti-Semitism among the 'identitarians'. ”In: Judith Goetz, Joseph Maria Sedlacek, Alexander Winkler (eds.): Untergangster des Abendlandes. Ideology and reception of the right-wing extremist 'identitarians'. Marta Press, Hamburg 2018 (2nd edition), pp. 328, 337
  25. ↑ Claus Leggewie : "Historikerstreit - transnational." In: Steffen Kailitz (Ed.): The present of the past. The “Historikerstreit” and German historical politics. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, 2008, p. 64
  26. ↑ nz: Celebrities stand up for “Young Freedom”. Archived from the original on January 13, 2014 ; accessed on January 2, 2013 (in Netzeitung , February 7, 2006).
  27. ↑ Festkorona pays homage to a "steadfast" www.mainpost.de, June 19, 2012
  28. ↑ Historian Prize of the Kronauer Foundation to Professor Ernst Nolte , H-Soz-u-Kult , Nachrichten, June 3, 2012, accessed on August 9, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Nolte, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian, philosopher and author
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Witten
DATE OF DEATH 18th August 2016
Place of death Berlin