Concerning the Public Use of History

Abstract

issue of Die Zeit and has not been following the emotional discussion in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung must have the impression that the argument we are involved in is about historical details. In fact, it is concerned with a political conversion of the revisionism which has emerged in modern historiography and which has been impatiently demanded by politicians of the Wende government (the Kohl government which in 1983 presented itself as the government of change/ reversal trans.). It is for this reason that Hans Mommsen shifts the controversy into the context of a realignment of historico-political thinking. With his essay in the September/October issue of Merkur, Mommsen has supplied the most thorough and most substantial contribution to the dispute to date. In the center of his deliberations stands the question: In which way is the Nazi period to be processed in public consciousness? The increasing distance in time, he asserts, makes a historicization necessary one way or another. Today, the grandchildren of those who were too young to assume the burden of personal guilt at the end of the Second World War are growing up. This, however, does not amount to a distanced form of remembering. The focus of modern history remains fixed upon the period from 1933 to 1945. It remains firmly within the horizon of our own life histories, entwined with sensibilities and reactions which, admittedly,