The world stands by and marvels as West German historians, social scientists and journalists fire broadsides at each other on the meaning of their national past. One's reaction is manifold. On the one hand there is admiration. Recent German history is a serious and important subject. That it should be a matter of public debate is surely to be welcomed. Would that similar debates took place in the mass media of Britain, France, the USA or the Soviet Union. We know, of course, why there is a special historical question in Germany: the impact of German nationalism, as instrumentalised in the Third Reich, on the rest of Europe marks the question of state and nation in Germany out from other, analogous, questions. All the same, the existence of the debate is a symptom of seriousness of purpose.

Against that, there is dismay at the tone of the debate. It was, from the start, heavily politicised. Historians of the Right, however variously defined, complained of the heavy emphasis on the Third Reich in current historiography, arguing that this made it difficult for Germans to be patriotic; historians of the Left, however variously defined, insist that to ‘relativise' and ‘historicise’ the Third Reich, and above all the Holocaust, is to trivialise them and to desensitise Germans to them.

Lastly, there is near-incomprehension at the conceptual confusions involved in the ‘quarrel’. For there are in reality three simultaneous disputes going on. The first is about history as pedagogy- the Left's suspicion that the Right, which, since 1982, includes the government, wants to use the teaching of history to restore conservative values in the population; and the Right's complaint that the Left's retrospective anti-Nazism has deprived Germans of their past. The second is about Ernst Nolte's attempts to ‘historicise’ the Third Reich, by framing it in the much larger canvas of the history of human oppression and of the twentieth century battle between Radical Left and Radical Right, an attempt elaborated in his 616-page Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, published in late 1987.