| Abstract | What he meant exactly has remained unclear. On the one hand, he contended that a moral perspective acts as an impediment to knowledge. Yet [Saul Friedl]änder's probing questions and arguments induced [Martin Broszat] to describe "the now widely accepted evaluation of the basic political-moral character of Nazi rule" as a "foundation" of historicization.(7) I think that is an inconsistency on his part, although one that can be clarified and surmounted if we analyze how historical thought is constituted. The immediate beneficiaries of Broszat's inconsistency were those who interpreted his plea primarily as a call for a more distanced and detached objectivity, a bid to "de-moralize" the German relation to National Socialism and the Holocaust.(8) Broszat's remark that historicization in respect to the Nazi period should be conceived as "anti-thetical" -- i.e. a synthesis of distancing objectivization and subjective appropriation, of judgment (Urteil) and understanding (Verstehen)(9) -- needs to be fleshed out and anchored in basic historical theory. After all, this antitheticality applies more broadly, not just to our historical relation to National Socialism, but in a primary sense to the bonds of significance between past and present more generally, the reticulation we are wont to call "history."
The debate on the historical place and function of [Auschwitz] is conducted on the same plane. When Broszat claims that "the role of Auschwitz in the original historical context of action" was "significantly different from its subsequent importance in terms of later historical perspective,"(19) he is calling attention to a "blindness" of historical vision that has a similar blocking effect on knowledge to that of condemnatory moralism. Auschwitz distorts present-day sight to such an extent that those previous times can no longer be perceived as they appeared to most contemporaries at the time. In order to render this "authenticity" plausible, Broszat points to a basic difference, noting that the era of National Socialism can be viewed retrospectively, i.e. from its catastrophic end backward: Auschwitz then becomes the "decisive measuring rod for the historical perception of this period."(20) One could also develop an approach that proceeds from the perspective of the time.(21) He amplifies this difference into an exaggerated "contrast between authentic historical reconstruction" on the one hand, and its use "for pedagogical purposes" on the other, leaving no doubt which is the sole plausible alternative.(22)
By means of historicization, Broszat wants to release National Socialism from the status of erratic blockage and transform it into one more era of German history among others. Within that history's span, National Socialism appears together with periods before and after in an overarching continuity of development -- one in which the Germans are able to rediscover their historical identity. Broszat's aim is nothing less than an "original authentic continuum" of German history.(37) The "most profoundly depraved chapter in German history" should become "capable of reintegration as part of our national history."(38) Authenticity and narrative representation help to render the historical experience of National Socialism more malleable for integration. A temporal span linking the era of National Socialism with preceding and, in particular, subsequent periods endows it with a decidedly historical physiognomy. The standard term for this is "continuity."(39) Naturally, this refers to an internal genetic nexus in which National Socialism is incorporated as one epoch within an overarching span of history, in which it finds its distinctive historical signature and impact on German historical self-understanding. Here, continuity has nothing to do with specific patterns of social life (or at least elements of such patterns) that can be connected with earlier or later periods.
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