Farewell to the Era of Contemporaries: National Socialism and Its Historical Examination en route into History

This first generation of empirical researchers stressed time and again the "objectivity" (Sachlichkeit) of their work, the "pathos of sobriety" to which they had pledged themselves:(21) one could by all means argue that a rationalist like [Martin Broszat] (and others, like Hans Mommsen) continued to subscribe to those principles in the 1980s while genuinely fearing them to be endangered -- particularly by the media and some of their younger colleagues whose work (especially in the field of "history from below") they welcomed as a sign of continuity and progress but also perceived with irritation.(22) Of course, to some extent this was due to normal intergenerational rivalry; but, more important, it arose from a suconscious bewilderment caused by the fact that the younger historians emphasized aspects of the Nazi period that their elders did not even conceive of as having historical importance. The new topics that were now considered as typical of the Nazi period and therefore valid objects of scholarly research and evaluation were those that the older generation had regarded with much more understanding -- if not as a part of their personal history. Moreover, sometimes a certain amount of "wear and tear" could be detected in the critical standards that the first generation of empirical researchers had started out with and had maintained with rigorous consistency for so many decades. In particular, the self-imposed rule to avoid any empathy -- which had been crucial in the beginnings of the discipline -- displayed signs of a certain weakening.
As if to compensate for politicians who have become unproductive in this respect, quite a few historians are now trying to be provocative regarding the Nazi period. Not that such attempts were completely unknown before; what is new, however, is that some of the long-debated apologetic "arguments" now seem to be attractive even to academic scholars. This is particularly true when it comes to a subject like Hitler's "preventive war" against the Soviet Union -- a subject that enables old propagandistic source material to be blended with allegedly revealing evidence from newly opened archives.(27) But, as has been recently demonstrated during the debate on the well-worn topic of "National Socialism and modernization," it is not at all necessary to come up with new source material in order to instigate dubious attempts at relativization, which have been promoted in recent years under various (completely arbitrary) categories such as "historicization," taboo-breaking, normalization or "depedagogization" and prove to be as problematic as ever.(28)
(21). For the "pathos of sobriety," see the striking title of a book in memory of Martin Broszat: Klaus-Dietmar Henke and Claudio Natoli, eds., Mit dem Pathos der Nüchternheit: Martin Broszat, das Institut für Zeitgeschichte und die Erforschung des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt/Main, 1991). Cf. the foreword to the historical statements in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (Hans Buchheim on the SS, Martin Broszat on the concentration camp system, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen on the Kommissarbefehl and the mass executions of Soviet POWs, [Helmut Krausnick] on the persecution of the Jews), in which Buchheim, writing in the name of his colleagues and rather programmatically, distanced himself from any form of "moralistic emotional theorizing," asserting that what the Germans needed was not a "conscience awakening," but "sober work combined with intelligence and common sense. Otherwise we run the risk of drawing the wrong lessons from the past. The strict rules of the judicial proceeding point the way to a standard of rationalism of which we are in dire need." Hans Buchheim et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates (Olten, 1965); quotation from English translation, Anatomy of the SS State (London, 1968), xv.