Martin Sabrow
The Use of History to Legitimize Political Power against the
Background of the 20th Century History: The Case of Germany
European Parliament Brussels, 5.11.2008, 10.00-12.30, Spinelli entrance, rue Wiertz, room ASP 5 G 1
I. The political instrumentalisation of history as a century lasting phenomenon
During the whole 20th century of extremes the claimed legitimacy has played a preeminent
role in Germany, and the relations between politics and history always have been as
dense as delicate.
During the Nazi period and in East Germany under the role of communism politics have
determined the lines of historical interpretation and the ruling political elites have
prescribed and stipulated the allowed and the forbidden narratives of history. The second
German dictatorship, based its legitimacy strongly on the scientific manner of politics and
the ability to understand and to follow the rules of history, whereas the national socialist
movement based its attraction and its political triumph on the ideological concept of an
organic modernity, that described the future as a return to the better past and put much
attention to the continuity e.g. from Frederic II. and Prussia to Hitler ant the Third Reich or
from Saxon Ian Emperor Henry to Himmler, and the seize of power began in the political
rhetoric as a recovery, a return, a rebirth of Germany and Germanhood. This program
meant political instrumentalisation of history: In spring 1933 the Bavarian minister for
education and cultural affairs Hans Schemm declared to the academic teachers of the
University of Munich: “From now own it is no longer your task to find out, if something is
true, but if it follows the meaning of the national socialist government.”1
The politically dominated historiography in the GDR established a whole network of
instances to approve topics, theses, findings and accounts of the professional dealing with
the past. After 1989 it was completely settled and a vast majority of historians passed a
„Von jetzt ab kommt es für Sie nicht darauf an festzustellen, ob etwas wahr ist, sondern ob es im Sinne der
nationalsozialistischen Revolution ist.“ Hans Schemm, bayerischer Kulturminister, 1933 vor Münchener
Professoren, nach Bracher, 131.
1
judgement, that because of its ‘total ideological domination’ the historiography of the GDR
had proved to be ‘scholarly nearly meaningless’ and ‘without any intellectual honesty.2
Direct instrumentalisation has not been a feature only of the periods of dictatorship, if we
look at the intense engagement of historians in order to fight against the Treaty of
Versailles that stipulated Germany’s exclusive responsibility for the First World War. And
even in the Federal Republic we know about political attempts to gain influence on
historical interpretation. Again it is the question of WW I, that made the German Foreign
Ministry in early sixties to prevent an American lecture tour of Fritz Fischer – the famous
author of the disputed thesis of Germany’s. The documentary about the expulsion of the
Germans from East-central Europe (1953-1962) in five volumes originally should have
been followed by a sixth volume and different supplementary volumes which were never
published because of political differences and the transition of power in the German
government 1966 and 1969. A last example: Under the title of “GDR-research” a special
branch of contemporary history and sociology in Germany that had gained profit for more
then twenty years form funding of the ministry of All-German or Inner-German relations,
but in the consequence for several years the annual reports of GDR researchers for the
Research advisory board (Forschungsbeirat) for questions of the reunification of Germany
did not get the permission to be published
From this point of view the message is simple: As historians or politicians: We have to
engage against political domination of our discipline, we have to stick to the principles of
scholarly research and so forth, and we can feel lucky to do our work in times of liberalism,
and professional autonomy.
II. No time transcending, supertemporal contrast between history and politics
But I fear, and that is my second point, that the relations between history and politics are
far more complicated, and the demarcation between both poles not as easy, as it may look
at first sight.
2
Interview mit Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Es rächt sich, daß wir nie über Europa gestritten haben, in: Die Welt, 26.
Feb. 1996, S. 7; vgl. auch Interview mit Heinrich August Winkler, Offen bleiben für die politische Kultur des
Westens, in: Die Welt, 29. Juli 1996, S. 7.
Historians in Germany were not always victims of politicisation. After 1918 many German
historians were not but eager to join the scientific front to fight the enemy with words in
order to hit the “disgraceful” treaty of Versailles. During the “Third Reich” the politicisation
of history allowed to establish a well funded “Empire Institute for the history of the new
Germany”, directed by the Nazi historian Walter Frank. And during WW II the concept of a
“fighting historiography” found much resonance under many historians who felt themselves
as soldiers of thought. Moreover, even historians who stick to their scholarly principles,
contributed to the criminal memorandum “General plan East” that proposed to Himmler a
gigantic resettlement in the conquered regions of Poland and the Soviet Union. In the GDR
the regime could count on a large group of communist and antifascist historians who
declared their accordance to the building of a new historiographical discipline that would
demolish the outdated wall between history and politics in order to help history to find its
actual vocation and to help politics to act on scientific basis. And even today most of us, at
least when working as contemporary historians, are engaged in commissions and advisory
boards with political origin. Historians act voluntarily as actors and observers at the same
time; historians are asked as consulters when establishing memorial places, they join
commissions to elaborate the destiny of the Foreign Office in Germany or the origins of the
Swiss bank gold – and today we have accept the invitation to Brussels instead to an
archive.
At all times historians may have betrayed the principles of objectivity and scholarliness.
From the perspective of the history science and far more disturbing than personal
corruption and treason is the evidence that the character of science themselves has turned
out to be changeable during the changing political demands of the 20 th century. National
socialism has not only destroyed science by politicisation, but by the demand of political
utility even organised the path to scientific innovations – mostly in biology and medicine,
but in historiography too: Racist concepts with all their immoral, even fatal implications
have strengthened the transition form state and institution history to nation history, and this
shift later on has inspired the development of cultural and societal history.
Under communist rule a completely renewed system of historical thinking had been
established that created own professional standards for meaningfulness and interpretation
values. The „bound history“ developed own scientific mechanisms to find and drop
research questions, own procedures to verify and to falsify an historical interpretation.
Inside the GDR professionalism and political dominance did not mean a contrary, but were
recognized as a unity, meanwhile the belief in the neutral objectivity of historical research
was denounced as bourgeois blindness. Inside the other historiography it was most natural
to understand decisions of the Politburo as scholarly considerations, to grasp political
changes of direction as scholarly progress. Eastern historians had to operate with a
concept of historical truth that deprived empirical evidence of its status as an autonomous
argument in the process of historical finding and understanding and relativized it by
binding it to the criterion of political utility.
The socialistic way of historical thinking declared the ‘necessity of ideological and political
partisanship as condition and constituent part of scholarly objectivity. 3 Historical
knowledge that only stood up to the scholarly standards of basic research could be
rejected as ‘objectivistic’ or ‘factological’ without leaving the sphere of scholarly discussion.
Even inside the ruling discourse in GDR historiography this separation of historical
evidence of empirical and ideological truth should not confounded with a mere victory of
political will on historical facts, but a fundamental belief in the harmonic unification of
partisanship and objectivity. To summarize: The belief in a basic difference between
history and politics has no superhistorical quality. It belongs to our present mental
framework, but not automatically to the historical discourse of the 20th century in the whole
– and that means, that in times, when the danger of politicisation becomes virulent,
perhaps the professional historiography has already lost the means of recognizing the
danger of politicisation.
III. The actual danger: the consent between history and politics
That brings me to my last point: Keeping the threatening historical legacy of the 20 th
century in mind, we are aware of the danger that once again historiography might be
overwhelmed by politic. But history does not just repeat. I would like to argue that the most
important danger today is not the wellknown conflict between history and politics, but its
hidden consensus.
3
Eckermann/Mohr 1966, S. 40.
The generation of historians, I belong to, hast successfully engaged against secrecy and
dismissing of the Nazi past and against a late nationalist ideology that suppressed the
memorisation of political guilt after 1933, of the prosecution and extinction of the Jews as a
national shame. Nowadays the European Union finds its identity, as the Stockholm
meeting of 200 on behalf of the holocaust has demonstrated, in the framework of the same
historical culture that has thoroughly moved from a mimetic culture of pride to a cathartic
culture of shame, of learning, of distance keeping. In this contrast between a mimetic and
a cathartic approach in historical cultural we find the most important cultural border line
between Europeans and Non-Europeans. That is why we blame Putins remarks on the
historians tasks to encourage Russian pride and Russian identity, and why we take the
question of the Armenian genocide as a guideline for the Turkish membership in the EU.
Once again: It is not a question of melting politics and history – Turkish politicians who
compare the recently abolished law on Turkish honour with the French law against
denying the Genocide, argue in a strong position. Not the partnership between politics and
history makes up for the difference, but the underlying paradigm of remembrance:
heroicisation versus victimisation, belief in continuity or discontinuity, identification with
national and imperial traditions or identification with the overcoming of national and
imperial tradition form the tension poles that organise the camps and conflicts of historical
awareness in Europe and beyond.
In Germany remembrance policy, public historical culture and professional historiography
by and large follow the same guidelines of a mode of representing the past that is shaped
by the demands of the “Erinnerungskultur” with its emphasis for contemporary witnesses
and its memories, for victimhood and mental compensation of human suffering. It would be
stupid to marginalise the great advantages and achievements of this paradigm that
honours no longer the general by a rider’s monument, but instead of him by a golden
coloured stumbling block (Stolperstein) on the sidewalk the desperate Jewish citizen who
has been deported from his home to Auschwitz. The conjunction of professional history
and rememberance policy has helped to depict the mechanisms of seduction during two
dictatorships, it has helped to establish a mental caesura after 1945 and again after 1989,
and it has contributed to a historical awareness that privileges the critical questioning of
the past instead of the uncritical affirmation of historical myths.
The German term for this specific unity in coming to terms with the past is “Aufarbeitung”.
It
has
replaced
the
former
mostly
used
term
of
mastering
the
past
(Vergangenheitsbewältigung) in hidden allusion to the Freudian concept of psychological
recovery by working through a traumatising and worrying experience. The era of
“Aufarbeitung” has brought back contemporary history to public attention, but is has at the
same time challenged the historians monopole role as professional experts. Today they
compete with mass media, contemporary witnesses and a political interest of sharing the
burden of Aufarbeitung. Professional contemporay history in Germany is more and more
linked to political efforts in the space of remembrance. Instead of following the benchmarks
of the scholarly discussion we follow the demands of a historical event culture concerned
with the jubilees of 1956 the before last year, of 1968 this year and 1989 next year. On
behalf of the next years ceremonies our Potsdam institute has not only to do with my
responsible state ministry, but with four and five others which are about to organise their
own activities for the 20th anniversary of the SED collapse.
I fear for the scholarly independence by the friendly ermbrace of politics. Science means to
challenge common sense; Aufarbeitung petrifies the state of the art. The different laws to
protect our societies against the mockery of revisionist who deny the holocaust, the
Armenian genocide or even the genocide in the Vendée during the French revolution
represent our present level of “Aufarbeitung”, but they threaten the freedom of research,
as the recently released appel de Blois by Pierre Nora and Etienne François underlined. I
do not want to recommend political ignorance of the past. But we have to consider that the
submission of history under the demands of politics does not necessarily be a hostile act; it
can develop as a fatal friendship, which offers public attention and moral esteem and costs
the radical independence of historical research.