At H-Soz-u-Kult, a forum on Nicolas Berg's Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker.
Berg's treatment of post-war history writing in West Germany is receiving quite a bit of attention right now. An extremely condensed exerpt from Ian Kershaw's contribution suggests a bit of what the debate is all about:
Nicolas Berg...is keen to demonstrate that because memory and personal experience were inseparable from the way German historians viewed the Third Reich, even when they claimed to be writing detached and objective history, their attempts to explain "the German catastrophe" were exculpatory and apologetic...
[...]
Overall, Berg's analysis, though a work of history, has something ahistorical about it. It is as if he is asking why the historical questions of the 1990s were not those of the 1960s and 1970s, and why the legitimately differing perspectives of German and Jewish historians were not identical. In judging the work of earlier generations solely from the perspective of the 1990s and after, Berg underrates their achievements by narrowing the focus to what seems central to historical research now. And for all its centrality and pivotal significance, the Holocaust does not exhaust all the issues that needed (and still need) to be addressed about Nazism. The overriding concern of research in Germany on how the Nazi system had been possible, then into how it functioned, was not simply in itself legitimate; it was crucial.
→I see that Berg himself will be posting a response on Friday.
Update, 1. March: Berg's contribution keeps being pushed up; it's now scheduled to appear on Tuesday.
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