Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate (review)

Volume 10, No.1 Fall1991 147 Tschirgi defines the core of the Middle East conflict as the "struggle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs for sovereign control of Palestine ." Thus although he clearly recognizes Israel's existence, paired with Palestinian self-determination, as necessary elements of a solution, he neglects the importance of the Arab states and movements within those states in the context of a solution that would insure Israel's secure existence. In addition he fails to address the question of whether the two objectives might indeed be irreconcilable. Ultimately Tschirgi falls victim to the common mistake of assuming that there are really only two alternatives with regard to the territory that came under Israeli control in 1967: incorporating it into Israel or withdrawing from it so that a Palestinian state can be established. Perhaps the time has come to recognize that a solution might require looking creatively beyond these two choices. A number of other options do exist. Although complicated , some of them may offer a means of getting around the various stumbling blocks that have been encountered repeatedly since 1967. In the meantime, Tschirgi's book represents one account of the course of American diplomacy on the Middle East, but does not achieve the degree of evenhandedness that a superficial examination might suggest. Harold M. Waller Department of Political Science McGill University Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, edited by Peter Baldwin. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. 308 pp. $29.95. Between 1985 and 1988 a verbal confrontation erupted in the West German press which was known in German as the Historikerstreit. In the wake of President Reagan's honoring of war dead (including members of the Waffen SS) at Bitburg, two conservative professors, Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber, published essays which seemed to suggest that Nazi Germany and its crimes were more or less normal and understandable responses to the mass violence of the first half of the twentieth century in general and to the threat of Bolshevism in particular. In response Jilrgen Habermas, the leftof -center professor and critic, denounced them and their approach as representative of malevolent right-wing tendencies in the Federal Republic of Germany. What followed was the "Historians' Debate," as it is called in English . The term loses in translation the sense of bitterness and urgency which the German word maintains; it might better be called the historians' "conflict " or "fight." Every historian of modern Germany on both sides of the 148 SHOFAR Atlantic seemed anxious to get something into print as quickly as possible to take a stand on the issue and its various permutations. This anthology includes sixteen such essays, all of them critical of Nolte and Hillgruber. In a sense this book was out of date before it was released. Detailed, learned, and spirited disputation over questions raised by the Bitburg incident , the plans for a Museum of Ger:man History in Berlin, and the provocative essays on the German past, now have been overshadowed by the opening of the Wall, the crumbling of Communism in East Germany, and the reunification of Germany on terms set by the conservative coalition in Bonn. In May 1988 I visited divided Berlin at the invitation of the Federal Republic with several other Americans who study German history. The Historikerstreit was at its zenith, and we asked to speak with Ernst Nolte. He received us with impeccable courtesy, but behaved very much like a man under siege, carefully tape recording all of our dialogue as if he feare9 that wewould try to trap him intellectually or distort his position for dark political purposes . In March 1991 I returned to a new and undivided Berlin. A whole new series of questions was under discussion among historians, questions of rewriting the East German official histories, of restructuring school and university faculties, and of the future of Marxist historical analysis now that the self-proclaimed Marxist state on German soil has proven so artificial and transitory. Baldwin, assistant professor of history at Harvard when the book was published, was caught off guard by the rush of events (just as was every historian I know, including those who lived only a few...