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Forum: Authority, Sovereignty, Interpretation … Subtext? Controversies in Recent German Historiography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2024
Extract
Like other historiographical fields, that of German history has been defined through most of its existence by the things historians argued about. We could go back well over a hundred years to the Methodenstreit over Karl Lamprecht's efforts to write multidisciplinary history, follow the line through the work of Eckart Kehr, Fritz Fischer, Hans Ulrich Wehler, and the Sonderweg debate, and continue on through the Historikerstreit and the Historikerinnenstreit of the 1980s, and the Goldhagen and Wehrmacht exhibit fights in the mid-1990s, to recent debates over the relative weight of colonial and Holocaust memory.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association
References
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3 “Jeder, der das akademische Diskusfeld der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften in Deutschland kennt, weiß, dass der Vorwurf des ‘Neo-Nationalismus’ hierzulande kein Diskussionsangebot ist, sondern tendenziell nichts weniger als den Versuch darstellt, die so Etikettierte … persönlich zu beschädigen”: von Stefan Gerber, Rezension: “Hedwig Richter. Demokratiegeschichte publikumswirksam,” Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie 33 (2021): 321–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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11 Blau, “The Jewish Population of Germany 1939–1945,” 166.
12 See, for example, Margarete Sommer report, from August 22–23, 1943, in Hauff, Lisa, ed., Deutsches Reich und Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren April 1943–1945 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), document 72Google Scholar, 245. Also OSS report, April 1, 1943, NARA-CP, RG 226, Entry 134, Box 171, Folder 1079. The regime put off the deportations temporarily and the war ended before it saw another promising opportunity to deport them. If the protests appear decisive in hindsight, they were a (critical) component of the struggle and not its conclusion.
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20 See, for example, Wolf Gruner's frequent citations of Goebbels's diaries around the time of the Rosenstrasse Protest while ignoring Goebbels's explicit statement of March 6, 1943, saying he released intermarried Jews due to street protest. Gruner, Wolf, Widerstand in der Rosenstraße: Die Fabrik-Aktion und die Verfolgung der “Mischehen,” 1943 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2005), 47ffGoogle Scholar.
21 November 2, 1943, entry in Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 2, vol. 10.
22 Indeed a Der Spiegel article from 1965 carried secret police (SD) reports of angry collectivizing street gatherings that intimidated officials: “Der Führer darf das gar nicht wissen,” Der Spiegel, December 15, 1965 (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-46275329.html).
23 See Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen; Hett, “This Story Is about Something Fundamental.”
24 Ferenc Laczo's podcast with Jennifer Evans, “Contesting German Memory Culture,” 23 July 23, 2021 (https://revdem.ceu.edu/2021/07/23/contesting-german-memory-culture-a-conversation-with-jennifer-evans-on-the-catechism-debate/).
25 “Jakob Augstein spricht mit der Historikerin Hedwig Richter über Geschichte,” Der RadioEins und Freitag Salon, March 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8KowaBHnbM).
26 On this see “Der Nationalsozialismus wird wieder zu einem Betriebsunfall in der Geschichte,” Spiegel-Gespräch, Der Spiegel, June 7, 2021; Eckart Conze und Hedwig Richter, “Streitgespräch ‘Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in der Kontroverse,’” Stiftung Theodor Heuss Haus, July 15, 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA3KlRrO-G0).
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29 One of many examples: Hugh Kaye, “The Untold Gay Stories of Auschwitz,” Attitude, January 27, 2019.
30 “Tweeting from the Town Square” (https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/paper/viewFile/1490/1853).
31 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso Books, 2020). See also “For an Agonistic Pluralism,” April 1, 2020 (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4632-for-an-agonistic-pluralism).
32 See Johanna Mellis, Derek Silva, and Nathan Kalman-Lamb, “‘In the Arena’: Reflections on Critical Public Engagements on College Sport,” forthcoming. Thanks to the authors for sharing the draft with me.
33 Heiko Maas and Andreas Wirsching, “Keine Politik ohne Geschichte,” Der Spiegel, May 7, 2020 (https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/keine-politik-ohne-geschichte-a-d74deffe-c0f3-4ff7-a6af-dc713e74c6f3)/
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35 Menschen ohne Geschichte sind Staub: Homophobie und Holocaust (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021); for the latter, see Sullivan, Rosemary, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation (New York: Harper, 2022)Google Scholar.