What is "historikerstreit"

The Historikerstreit ("historians' quarrel") was an intellectual and political controversy in the late 1980s in West Germany about the crimes of Nazi Germany, including their comparability with the crimes of the Soviet Union. The German word Streit translates variously as "quarrel", "dispute", or "conflict". The most common translation of Historikerstreit in English language academic discourse is "the historians' dispute", though the German term is often used.

The Historikerstreit spanned the years 1986-1989, and pitted right-wing against left-wing intellectuals. The positions taken by the right-wing intellectuals were largely based on the totalitarianism approach which takes a comparative approach to totalitarian states, while left-wing intellectuals argued that fascism was uniquely evil, referred to as the Sonderweg approach, and could not be equated with the crimes of Soviet communism. The former were accused by their critics of downplaying Nazi crimes, while the latter were accused by their critics of downplaying Soviet crimes. The debate attracted much media attention in West Germany, with its participants' frequently giving television interviews and writing op-ed pieces in newspapers. It flared up again briefly in 2000 when one of its leading figures, Ernst Nolte, was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize for science.

Debates similar to those of the Historikerstreit in West Germany have been conducted in other countries independently of the German debate, especially after the fall of communism. In most of Eastern and Central Europe, a comparative approach to Soviet and Nazi crimes is the mainstream scholarly and official position taken. In the western world, the debate revolving around issues similar to those of the Historikerstreit was renewed following the publication of The Black Book of Communism in 1997. The British historian Norman Davies argued in 2006 that revelations made after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe after 1989-91 about Soviet crimes had discredited the left-wing position in the Historikerstreit debate.