page_title: Ernst Nolte
section_title: Later work
hierarchical_section_title: Ernst Nolte / Later work
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Grabstein des Historikers Ernst Nolte auf dem Friedhof der St. Matthiasgemeinde (Berlin-Tempelhof)
context_page_description: Ernst Nolte was a German historian and philosopher. Nolte's major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism. Originally trained in philosophy, he was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973. He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963. Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controversies related to the interpretation of the history of fascism and communism, including the Historikerstreit in the late 1980s. In recent years, Nolte focused on Islamism and "Islamic fascism".
  He was the father of legal scholar Georg Nolte. Nolte received several prizes, including the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize and the Konrad Adenauer Prize.
context_section_description: In his 1991 book Geschichtsdenken im 20. Jahrhundert (Historical Thinking in the 20th Century), Nolte asserted that the 20th century had produced three “extraordinary states”, namely Germany, the Soviet Union, and Israel. He claimed that all three were “abnormal once”, but whereas the Soviet Union and Germany were now “normal” states, Israel was still “abnormal” and, in Nolte's view, in danger of becoming a fascist state that might commit genocide against the Palestinians.
  Between 1995–97, Nolte debated with French historian François Furet in an exchange of letters on the relationship between fascism and communism. The debate had started with a footnote in Furet's book, Le Passé d'une illusion (The Passing of an Illusion), in which Furet acknowledged Nolte's merit of comparatively studying communism and Nazism, an almost forbidden practice in continental Europe. Both ideologies typify in a radical way the contradictions of liberalism. They follow a chronological sequence: Lenin predates Mussolini who in turn precedes Hitler. Furet noted that Nolte's theses went against the established notions of culpability and apprehension to criticize the idea of anti-fascism common in the West. This prompted an epistolary exchange between the two of them in which Furet argued that both ideologies were Totalitarian twins that shared the same origins, while Nolte maintained his views of a kausaler Nexus (causal nexus) between fascism and communism, to which the former had been a response. After Furet's death, their correspondence was published as a book in France in 1998, entitled Fascisme et Communisme: échange épistolaire avec l'historien allemand Ernst Nolte prolongeant la Historikerstreit (Fascism and Communism: Epistolary Exchanges with the German Historian Ernst Nolte Extending the Historikerstreit). This was translated into English as Fascism and Communism in 2001. While pronouncing Stalin guilty of great crimes, Furet contended that, although the histories of fascism and communism were essential to European history, there were singular events associated with each movement which differentiated them; i.e., he did not feel there was a precise parallel, as Nolte suggested, between the Holocaust and the expulsions of the Kulaks.
  Nolte often contributed Feuilleton (opinion pieces) to German newspapers such as Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He has often been described as one of the "most brooding, German thinkers about history". The historical consciousness and self-understanding of the Germans form a major theme of his essays. Nolte called the Federal Republic "a state born of contemporary history, a product of catastrophe erected to overcome catastrophe" In a Feuilleton piece published in Die Welt entitled “Auschwitz als Argument in der Geschichtstheorie” (Auschwitz as An Argument in Historical Theory) on 2 January 1999, Nolte criticized his old enemy Richard J. Evans’s book In The Defence of History, on the grounds that aspects of the Holocaust are open to revision, and that therefore Evans’s attacks on Nolte during the Historikerstreit were unwarranted. Specifically, citing the American political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Nolte argued that the effectiveness of the gas chambers as killing instruments was exaggerated, that more Jews were killed by mass shooting than by mass gassing, that the number of people killed at Auschwitz was overestimated after 1945 (the Soviets initially exaggerated the death toll at 4 million where the consensus today is 1.1 million), that Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir of Auschwitz was a forgery and that accordingly the history of the Holocaust is open to reinterpretation. In October 1999, Evans stated in response that he agreed with Nolte on these points, but argued that this form of argument was an attempt by Nolte to avoid responding to his criticism of him during the Historikerstreit.
  On 4 June 2000, Nolte was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize. The award attracted considerable public debate. It was presented to Nolte by Horst Möller, the Director of the Institut für Zeitgeschich
caption: Ernst Nolte's grave in Friedhof der St.-Matthias-Gemeinde (Berlin-Tempelhof)
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