Forum: Authority, Sovereignty, Interpretation … Subtext? Controversies in Recent German Historiography

Like other historiographical fields, that of German history has been defined through most of its existence by the things historians argued about. We could go back well over a hundred years to the Methodenstreit over Karl Lamprecht's efforts to write multidisciplinary history, follow the line through the work of Eckart Kehr, Fritz Fischer, Hans Ulrich Wehler, and the Sonderweg debate, and continue on through the Historikerstreit and the Historikerinnenstreit of the 1980s, and the Goldhagen and Wehrmacht exhibit fights in the mid-1990s, to recent debates over the relative weight of colonial and Holocaust memory.

The traditional view, in line with the classical historical methodology that can be traced back to Ranke, has it that such debates are motivated by a rational search for demonstrably valid explanations through (again) rational, critical examination of source materials. Debates simply arise over differences in the application of Quellenkritik. Certainly, we have known for a long time that there is often more at work, and more at stake, in scholars’ arguments. The politics of such episodes as the Fischer controversy or the Historikerstreit were clear to all. In those instances it was the substantive conclusions different historians reached about responsibility for war and genocide that provided fuel for controversy. We have also seen new kinds of Methodenstreiten, such as Nicolas Berg's indictment of the functionalist school as a form of apologetics.¹

But what other, possibly much more subtextual factors might play a role in historians’ controversies? And how might these factors be changing as the field of central European history and the profession itself changes—in the questions we ask, the people who ask them, and the areas we study (much more attention to gender and sexuality, the experience of empire and of Black Germans, for instance) as well as in the technology and the venues in which historical debates are conducted? How do these factors interconnect with more traditional historical preoccupations, above all the questions of German peculiarity and the Holocaust?

To explore these questions, Benjamin Hett (Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY) convened a discussion forum with a group of historians (inlcuding himself) who have had their own recent experiences with controversy and debate: Hedwig Richter (Universität der Bundeswehr), Anna Hájková (University of Warwick), Jennifer Evans (Carleton University), and Nathan Stoltzfus (Florida State University).

Let's start with your scholarly experiences of historical controversy. What were they?

Hedwig Richter

My book Demokratie. Eine deutsche Affäre (Democracy: A German Affair) came out in 2020. It argued that the history of democracy is not a bright history of the “West” to which an exotic German history contrasts; that the history of democracy is also a history of the body; that democracy historically carries a temptation of populism or even fascism; and that elites play a crucial and highly contradictory role in democratization processes. Feelings ran so high over the book that the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung examined charges the historians Andreas Wirsching and Christian Jansen leveled at me and found them to be excessive.² Because a broad, substantive debate has meanwhile developed around my theses, the excitement my book generated now seems rather strange. Is it still worthwhile to deal with it? Well, that's hard to say. This was a matter not of measured reviews expressing more or less favorable opinions of my book, but of criticisms that scarcely engaged with my claims, instead devoting the larger part of their energies to attacking me at a personal level. These critics attributed arguments to me that they could not have found in my book, claiming, for instance, that I had downplayed National Socialism or interpreted the German empire (Kaiserreich) as a democracy. Such accusations are particularly well suited to destroying a German historian's reputation. Other claims of mine were crudely distorted: because I pointed out the connection between the history of democracy and the concept of the nation, I was accused of “neo-nationalism.” Historian Stefan Gerber wrote, in this regard: “Anyone familiar with the academic discourse field of cultural and social sciences in Germany knows that the accusation of ‘neo-nationalism’ in this country is not an offer for discussion, but tends to be nothing less than an attempt … to personally damage those so labeled.”³ And because I pointed out the dubious roots of democracy, I was accused of being anti-democratic. My attempt at writing women into the history of democracy was partly dismissed as wasting time on a sideshow. Even my style, it was claimed, was beneath the dignity of such a weighty topic as democracy, being instead reminiscent of Netflix.

My claims have been distorted by the vehemence of some critics, so I should like to set out my four theses—and point out some of the misinterpretations.

First: The impetus for democracy often originates with elites; “reform from above” (as opposed to “reform from below”) is an international phenomenon. The “people” is not so much a historical agent as a fiction. Of course, this is not a normative demand, but an empirical statement—this has also been confused at times. Some critics claim that I am arguing that democracy is purely an elite project, thereby downplaying the achievements of the labor movement, for example.

Second: The history of democracy is often told as one of revolutions—and German history is told as a history of failed revolutions. I do not deny the importance of revolutions and also give them much space in my history of democracy. But many processes of democratization can instead be traced to long-term processes of reform: the fights of women's movements for example, the growth of wealth, literacy, and the public sphere, the development of communication infrastructures, and the emergence of a strong parliament. Once again, the complexity of the thesis was simplified, and some critics claimed that I was downplaying the importance of revolutions.

Third: The history of the body is essential to the history of democracy, and what I am writing is a political history of the body. The history of democracy cannot be understood in isolation from the history of the labor movement, of women, of food, housing, hygiene, genocide, slavery, corporal punishment, and torture. Some critics found aspects such as the body in the history of democracy suspect and also somewhat ridiculous; already the inclusion of the first women's movement did not fit into their common narrative pattern of the history of the “West.”

Fourth: Democracy emerges within the framework of the nation, and nationalism has repeatedly proved to be highly aggressive and exclusionary. And yet the history of democracy throughout the North Atlantic sphere proceeds internationally, along distinctly parallel lines. I write as a historian who does not question the singularity of the Shoah and who believes that the questions of “Why Germany? Why 1933?” remain crucial. Yet the point I wish to make is that what happened in Germany was not an exotic anti-Western history. Fascism and National Socialism emerged within democracies, and to overlook this means failing to understand the many-layered and often disturbing history of democracy. Almost reflexively, I was accused of relativizing the Holocaust.

What my history tries to understand is not least how a crime on the scale of the Holocaust could take place with the involvement of a population that could look back at long-standing traditions of parliamentarianism, emancipation movements, and democratic reform. One way of understanding some of the attacks against me might be to read them as defenses of an unsullied West, of a West that has no need to confront, for instance, its racist or colonial past.

Anna Hájková

What makes difficult history, and what will become the target of controversy, is not a given; it is socially constructed. I wrote The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (2020) as a comprehensive account of Theresienstadt and also a case study of society in extremis. Had you asked me when I was preparing the book what topic I was anticipating some discussion about, it would have been my findings on Leo Baeck. He was the great rabbi of reform Judaism, about whom I discovered that he was amazingly skilled at navigating difficult environments. But that did not happen; in fact, colleagues who have since published on Baeck have failed to engage with my work.⁴ Instead, it has been my work on queer Holocaust history—the subject on which I am writing my second, and separate, book, that has been a topic of discussion and in part overshadowed the reception of the first.

The pushback came not in a form that I expected, nor would wish on anyone. In a way, that it was queer Holocaust history rather than Jewish councils is an example of the arbitrariness of what makes a debate: I have been working on queer Holocaust history since 2015 and, for much of the time, colleagues in Holocaust studies as well as in queer history have reacted to the topic first without comprehension, and later considering my work an interesting footnote. One of my case studies, which became a topic of the book I am writing, is the story of an enforced queer relationship between a woman guard and a Jewish woman prisoner in a satellite camp of Neuengamme.

The polite marginal interest colleagues had previously shown in my work changed in 2020. A year before, the daughter of the Jewish woman started legal action against me in Germany. This relative sought to stop any of my work on the topic. To this end, she also filed a complaint with my university. I myself am not allowed by my employer to speak about the events. But in 2020 and 2021, the daughter turned to the UK media, which also covered the complaint. It is ironic that I am barred from discussing a university investigation that was covered in British media from the legacy press to the tabloids.

The coverage played out very differently in the United Kingdom and Germany. The German reporting was accurate and fair, and sought context.⁵ The British media wrote articles that were ad hominem; they did not give me, a Jewish queer woman immigrant, a right to reply, nor were the many letters written in my defense by colleagues ever printed.

One place where this discussion played out was my German History article “Between Love and Coercion,” in which I analyzed the story of this enforced relationship.⁶ The piece is part of the special issue “Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma” I guest-edited; it has been back online since 2021 (it was taken down for a few months in September 2020) and came out in print in summer 2021. Similarly to what Hedwig said, it makes me sad to realize the wide divide between how my essay has been portrayed and what it actually says. First of all, the essay uses a pseudonym for its main subject; it is a careful analysis based on a wealth of research; and perhaps most importantly, I specifically differentiate between subjective sexual identity and queer acts and practices. But these important nuances were quite lost in the media backlash. I did not have it in me to engage with the British press; I sensed that they were out for blood, and I was fair game. It's pointless to spend all your energy when the odds are entirely against you.

What remains? It is not easy to draw a balance. First of all, I was fortunate for the wide show of solidarity among colleagues globally and I appreciated being protected by the camaraderie of colleagues, many of whom I had not known until then. I guess they understood that they could be pilloried next. In times of rising populism, a snap decision by anyone (often a politician) with a sizeable Twitter/X account can determine what will be a controversial topic. Secondly, I react with irritation to those few colleagues who were not there for me when I depended, quite existentially, on people's solidarity, and who then come to me with pretty much an invitation to “come talk to us about being controversial.” It is incredibly tactless and really reduces one to a circus animal. Sometimes people need a clear statement, so, here: I hope you are reading this forum.

Jennifer Evans

As cofounder of the New Fascism Syllabus (NFS), in the summer of 2021, I curated thirteen responses to Dirk Moses's “German Catechism” article, which first appeared in the Swiss online journal Geschichte der Gegenwart.⁷ I had many different reasons for doing this. First and foremost, I wanted to provide a forum for a diversified engagement with the ebbs and flows of historical memory in the postwar period, from multiple disciplinary and personal perspectives. Dirk's piece was designed to provoke, and provoke it did. I saw in this article the possibility for a multi-faceted debate but feared at the same time that its incendiary tone might polarize the conversation prematurely and close down a much-needed, wide-ranging, multi-perspectival discussion of the role of memory in post-migrant Germany. To a certain extent, this happened anyway, as the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and in the German newspapers centered certain aspects of Moses's argument over others. My aim, though, was to keep the aperture open by including the voices and perspectives of Black, queer, Jewish German, and female academics and writers, at various stages of their career and lives. I was trying to showcase our multiple blindspots: Are Germans reading Anglo-Americans and vice versa? Are scholars of memory following what memory activists claim is problematic? Are we collectively paying attention to queer and Black histories? And why are women still not referenced even when they intervene in the conversation, regardless of the position they take up and hold?

I hoped one of the outcomes of the NFS intervention might be to model an alternative way to engage with one another personally as well as professionally online. This proved difficult. It was, among other things, a delicate dance, one that tested the limits and possibilities of what Web 2.0 can do. Not everyone was happy with the results, and it took an emotional toll on all sides. I like to think there was some success in the way it helped sharpen our senses toward important shifts in memory culture that we will need to address going forward. At the same time, months on, as I watched successive articles and events look back at the debate, I could not help but feel a sense of frustration that the issues we were trying to raise of memory activism's many sides had fallen almost entirely from view. How quickly the center reestablished itself around a few key voices, raising for me all sorts of questions—personal as well as political—about the role of digital media in expanding what topics, themes, constituents count as part of our historical practice. As Hedwig and Anna mention, there is more to be done in thinking about how women and minoritized colleagues fare in public-facing work, both in terms of the way criticism unfolds around them and how much heft their ideas are accorded.

Nathan Stoltzfus

Maintaining comforting myths comes at a high cost.⁸

The arguments of my book Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest ⁹ have been debated for several decades. In 1989, I argued in Germany's Die Zeit that the Rosenstrasse protest had compelled the regime to make one more in a series of temporary concessions to defiance by intermarried couples. In June 1990, my lecture for the German Resistance Memorial drew hundreds and revealed that educated Germans keen to know Nazi history had never heard of the protest.¹⁰ In 2002, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer praised the Rosenstrasse protesters for civil courage that rescued Jews. German historians Wolfgang Scheffler in 1960 and Wolfgang Wipperman in 1982 had already concluded that the protest had rescued Jews, as did a 1965 German court indictment. With their partners at their side, these Jews had no need to hide, and they received government rations.¹¹

In 1988, German historian Wolfgang Benz identified rescued intermarried Jews in a chapter about German Jews who “surviv[ed] in hiding.” One of his students argued that the Gestapo had not planned to deport a single intermarried Jew during the Rosenstrasse protest, claiming that views to the contrary were postwar inventions.¹² Benz then wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in September 2003 that his student had “reconstructed the real [wirkliche] history of Rosenstrasse,” in contrast to earlier interpretations. He announced that Der Spiegel, too, had reported the new truth: it was apparently essential to guide popular opinion while at the same time there would be no more scholarly debate, given this renewed nineteenth-century certainty.

The evidence was precarious. Documents about the selection of workers from the makeshift prison on Rosenstrasse are treated as demonstrating the existence of a plan that precluded a protest with any impact, although there is no evidence that selecting these workers was not improvised as a response to the protest. The decree which, in the view of these historians, proves Jews were to be registered rather than deported hangs on a word (Erfassung) in a Gestapo decree from Frankfurt/Oder. In 1999, Beate Meyer wrote that this decree established that intermarried Jews were imprisoned on Berlin's Rosenstrasse “only [for] registration.” As recently as 2018, Der Spiegel, having scrapped its more nuanced and convincing interpretation of the protest from 1993, denied the protest's influence in Berlin because this decree provided not for dispatch but for the “registration” of intermarried Jews in Frankfurt/Oder.¹³

Regardless of the various ways the word Erfassung can be understood here, this decree illustrates how Berlin headquarters charged local Gestapo agents around the Reich with fitting orders to local circumstances. Instructions for the deportation of Germany's Jews were laced with euphemisms and deceptions and licensed local officials to improvise according to circumstances (especially regarding Germany's last Jews). Thus the Frankfurt/Oder decree targeted all Jews still working in factories, not just those in mixed marriages. And if perhaps by 1943 there were no Jews working in Frankfurt/Oder factories who were not intermarried, there were still thousands of such persons in Berlin factories.

More importantly, this order from a backwater was not binding for Berlin, where Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels was the regional Nazi leader and received instructions regarding the city's Jews directly from Hitler. Furthermore, in early March 1943, Auschwitz factories were expecting a number of Jewish laborers from Berlin, which could not have been acquired without including intermarried Jews.

The Frankfurt/Oder decree does reflect the Reich-wide effort to deport intermarried German Jews without drawing attention. Intermarried Jews would be sent to concentration camps for being “impertinent”—but only if this could be done “inconspicuously,” avoiding both “troublemaking crowds” and the “impression” that all Jews married to Aryans were being arrested. Appearances were decisive for fascist rule.

At stake is whether we see a top-down regime that set its course and crushed all in its way or one that improvised as needed to protect Hitler's image. We have so little evidence on the protest in part because of the Nazis’ efforts to control their image. Also Gestapo deportation orders were used to deceive people into believing the official story that Jews were being sent to work camps. Hitler relied on terror to the extent he considered it the most effective tactic and, in relationship to the Volk, he recognized the importance of norms, values, and laws that predated him. Variations in the Reich's treatment of intermarried Jews, from region to region, were arguably due to a preference in Berlin for working with circumstances that allowed improvised solutions on the spot, rather than being pinned down by a plan that could not be changed to accommodate circumstances. Intermarried history in particular reveals this preference for opportunistic improvisation.

Top-down interpretations were entrenched in postwar decades. A corollary foundational myth in Germany is that no one could resist openly without being put up against the wall. Despite bottom-up and everyday histories since the 1970s, this myth and previous models of resistance derived from top-down interpretations continue to endure. It has been more comfortable to say Hitler did it, not me.

Seeking definitive evidence from Gestapo orders that allow them to discontinue debates, these persons and institutions portray the regime as an exact system with Berlin distributing the same order to every Gestapo office, which was carried out exactly. Regardless of rival power centers and players, the regime is seen as a monolith, a united front of cooperating satraps around Hitler infallibly relying on terror.

One heartrending cost of treating a Gestapo order as completely trustworthy is the denial of all eyewitness reports that identify the protest as effective. One by one (but never as a whole in relation to one another or other sources), victims’ reports are thrown under the bus just to deny the women protesters the status of rescuers. Eyewitness testimonies of these intermarried non-Jews, who as much as anyone else in such desperate times proved their integrity by their actions, are dismissed as false and instead a Gestapo document is held up as the truth. Simply ignored or dismissed is also evidence like an American intelligence report from a “trustworthy” source of March 1943 that “action against Jewish wives and husbands on the part of the Gestapo … had to be discontinued because of the protest such action aroused.”

Disheartening as well is the sacking of scrupulous scholarly work across the decades that have interpreted the protest as rescue, with conclusions grounded not just in this or that document but in their overall view of how the regime made decisions in such circumstances. Rejected are the conclusions of scholars of the highest caliber, some if not all of whom no doubt examined the Frankfurt Oder decree said to show Jews were arrested only to be registered. These include Helmut Eschwege, H. G. Adler, Raul Hilberg, and Sybil Milton. The registration of German Jews (perhaps already the most registered population) was never done through imprisoning them for a week, not before and not after the Rosenstrasse Protest.

We cannot nail down conclusions about the Rosenstrasse protest with a document any more than we can certify Hitler's responsibility for the Holocaust that way. At stake is the way professional historians do their work. Recently a historian wrote that because we cannot be sure what happened, we must rely on the consensus that the Rosenstrasse had no impact at all. But historians have their own methods to maintain if they are to maintain the profession.

Benjamin Hett

Probably all readers of this journal will know that there has been a debate about who set fire to the Reichstag ever since 1933, taking shape particularly as a debate among historians after the publication of Fritz Tobias's book on the fire in 1962. By the 1980s a consensus had settled in that Marinus van der Lubbe was essentially Lee Harvey Oswald—a lone culprit who set fire to the building by himself and caught the Nazis by surprise. This view was advocated by historians such as Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Ian Kershaw, and Richard Evans. I entered the list in 2014 with my book Burning the Reichstag, arguing that in fact the Nazis—or some of them, anyway—had set the fire as election propaganda and to provide a pretext for passage of the Reichstag Fire Decree.

This is, and always has been, a debate with a lot of subtexts, some of them methodological and theoretical (as in the intentionalist/functionalist debate—Hans Mommsen himself told me that in the 1960s he saw the Reichstag fire debate as a way to put the functionalist model on the table), some of them more visceral: What do you think about responsibility for the Nazi regime in general? What do you think about the place of victim testimony in historical narratives? (Similar points to those that Nathan has identified arising in the Rosenstrasse debate!) The response to my book has mostly broken down on predictable lines, according to where people stand on these issues, with a few other issues of institutional or personal affiliation thrown in—again in much the same way as Nathan Stoltzfus has framed the issues in the debate on intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse protest.

But what, then, really drives debates among historians? Is it just the evidence, the theoretical and methodological premises? Or are other factors also often at work? How have you seen these factors play out in the debates you have been involved in?

Hedwig Richter

As ever, there is an element of the human and all-too-human at play in the debate over my book. Several critics freely expressed their fury at my receiving or being nominated for prizes and at Demokratie being selected as a notable book by reviewers. Many of the colleagues who supported me suspected there was mostly a generational angle to the debate.

Another curious aspect of this debate is how sharply criticized were even those of my claims that have long been advanced by others. After all, my claims derived not only from thorough archival research, but also from the work of many other historians. In this sense, my claims were far less novel than my critics claimed. I often refer to scholars who are not historians, such as the legal scholar Alexander Thiele, the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Dawn Teele, or the sociologist Rudolf Stichweh. Some of these names are not (yet) particularly well known, and this too angered one critic, who accused me of citing prominently an author he had never heard of.

Anna Hájková

As an academic who started publishing in popular media about ten years ago (and whose mother and brother are/were journalists), I have given a lot of thought to what and who can publish and to the nature of the beast that fuels debates. In a nutshell, the argument and facts in themselves are perhaps the smallest factors. Much more important are the status and prestige of the person speaking; their networks; their gender and race; the setting where the debate takes place; and only then the “sexiness” of the point at hand. All of these factors are malleable, they depend on the social field and time, and they influence one another. This is admittedly a sober, indeed Kissinger-esque outlook. This take on history as a social field contradicts a key rule of our discipline as Pierre Bourdieu formulated it with reference to another discipline: “The particular difficulty of sociology comes from the fact that it teaches things that everybody knows in a way, but which they do not want to know or cannot know because the law of the system is to hide those things from them.”¹⁴

Nathan Stoltzfus

The consensus historical narrative should, ideally, evolve in response to open discussion and the best evidence, but there are a number of reasons why this doesn't always happen. One has to do with sales. It is hard to overstate the appeal of simple explanations; “nuances,” however true, do not sell books. “Nations, like individuals, crave the comfort of simple, streamlined narratives,” wrote novelist Richard Russo of America's comforting prevarications. “Why muddy the waters by informing [our children] that many of [our] resources were stolen from the Indigenous peoples, that much of our communal and personal wealth derives from the free labor of African slaves.… One thing seems certain: The simpler and more straightforward their narrative is, the more likely it is to be untrue.”¹⁵

Then there is the factor of academic career paths. Consensus packs the power of conformity, and its gatekeepers determine the path of individual lives and tenure in academia. Consensus is a method of politics that could derail the methods of professional history. Showing the pressures of conformity, there are disjunctures between what people say in conversation and what they are willing to say in publications.

A historian's position on a particular issue is often predictable across the fault lines of major debates. This unity of action is characteristic of politics and their parties—a participant adopts an entire platform, checking required boxes. The German journalist Sven Felix Kellerhoff has been active in defending status quo interpretations in various debates, whether as a supporter of the single culprit explanation of the Reichstag fire or in condemning any interpretation that intermarried couples survived because of noncompliance and protest by their non-Jewish partners. Kellerhoff also lined up with German institutional views in the debate about whether Wehrmacht Mountain Troops committed war crimes by executing thousands of Italian soldiers occupying Greece in September 1943, backing a position that the Greeks had perpetrated the worst atrocities and were thus accountable for their own suffering.¹⁶

Benjamin Hett

Nathan talked about “consensus history,” and I have certainly learned a few things about how that works.

I think there is a powerful tribalism about theoretical and methodological approaches and interpretations that works much the same way as positions in our current tribalized politics—if you accept school of thought “A,” you are with us and you are okay (and you might have a professional future). If not, you are, to use an expression a friend of mine learned during his military service, “out of the platoon.” I wonder if the fact that academics are an often-misunderstood, often-misrepresented, and in US politics even sometimes-vilified minority contributes to this phenomenon: the sense of alienation makes one cling to one's tribe all the more fiercely.

In 2016, I had the pleasure of attending a conference at the Ruhr Universität Bochum in honor of the late Hans Mommsen, who of course was a strong advocate of the view that Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag all by himself. This was a conference heavily attended by Mommsen's former graduate students, and as an advocate of the opposing view, I was the proverbial skunk at the picnic. One senior scholar approached me with a friendly smile and informed me, “I haven't read your book, I don't need to, I already know it's wrong.” I felt this captured an important truth about the status of evidence in this debate. It reminded me of a story my graduate school mentor, David Blackbourn, told me once about a conversation he had had with another senior German scholar about a new book (I am afraid I don't remember which book). The German scholar had said of the book, “We don't like it.” David was struck by the “we,” and so am I. If one asks why sometimes the evidence doesn't seem to matter, I think one must conclude that Wir-Gefühl gets in the way.

A rather similar point emerges from the writings of Sven Kellerhoff (to whom Nathan Stoltzfus also referred), a journalist with Die Welt who published a short book on the Reichstag fire in 2008, with an English translation appearing in 2016. Kellerhoff evidently sees himself as being in the tribe of Hans Mommsen and Fritz Tobias (Mommsen wrote the introduction to his book), which has a powerful effect on Kellerhoff's interpretation of evidence. The credibility of statements about the fire by Hans Bernd Gisevius is a significant issue in the Reichstag fire debate. In the 1960s Gisevius was sued for libel by a former SA man, Hans Georg Gewehr, whom Gisevius had accused of leading the arson attack. Gewehr won at first instance (where the judges praised this Einsatzgruppe alum for his “political zeal”), but the court of appeal substantially overturned the trial verdict, on the basis that much evidence supported what Gisevius said, and a court could not force the retraction of statements that had considerable evidence behind them and might be true. The judges awarded seven-eighths of the court costs to Giseivus, always a good indication of how they think the case has gone. But long after Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel, and then I, brought these facts clearly to light, Kellerhoff insisted that Gisevius “was forced to retract his main allegations”—a statement so unambiguously false, about something Kellerhoff could be presumed to know, that it amounts to nothing less than disinformation.¹⁷

Why would he do this? Of course, it is always possible that he simply didn't understand the materials, but I think this is highly unlikely. For the first generation of Reichstag fire controversialists, there were very real substantive political stakes about responsibility for Nazism and who got to talk about it, but these stakes are also not nearly so present anymore—I would never suggest that Kellerhoff was carrying out pro-Nazi apologetics, although the argument he puts forward was born out of such a cause. I think it has to come down to tribalism: “The people I feel close to believe this, so I will too, at all costs.”

When we go back to the origins of the debate in the 1950s and 1960s, we can see that proposing Marinus van der Lubbe as a lone culprit was, among other things, a useful story for many Germans then. Fritz Tobias was very open about the fact that he was happy van der Lubbe was not German and that Hitler's dictatorship had happened “by blind chance” (as he claimed) after the Reichstag fire because of this non-German person. Significantly, Tobias's most hated opponent (and hate is definitely not too strong a word here), Hans Bernd Gisevius, was far ahead of his time in his open recognition of the widely popular basis of Nazi rule (anticipating some of Hedwig's arguments, in fact).¹⁸

One issue that we have been touching on here is that often historical debates seem to be about who gets to talk about an issue, who gets the final say on it. How do you see this working in your areas?

Jennifer Evans

As someone who has always worked on marginalized populations and viewpoints with a social justice mandate, I have necessarily developed an ethics of care and sensitivity around who gets to speak for whom, and more importantly, who gets to take the credit. I think it is eminently important to share authority with others, be that our colleagues or research subjects, to use the platforms that we may have as established scholars to ensure other voices are heard. This extends to seeking out other forms of knowledge creation that center collaboration, whether writing together with students, applying for grants with untenured faculty, or working together with local actors in mutually supportive relationships. What I have found, though, is that unlike colleagues of mine in Canadian history or Indigenous studies, communications or sexuality studies, in German history, we remain firmly wedded to the lone wolf independent scholar approach, which still favors men, persons of station or means, and those whose living situation mirrors traditional models of support. As we (I hope) are realizing, this isn't the world most of us live in. This lends itself to a pronounced methodological conservatism in the way we practice the craft and helps explain how certain voices are given more of a platform in ongoing debates. We believe it is structural and unchanging. But the reality is, it is constantly reinforced and rewarded in the way we continue to highlight individual effort over collective approaches, perpetuating the notion that it is somehow impervious to change. In other words, we give it life by refusing to countenance that there might be other ways of doing things. The New Fascism Syllabus interventions in the Catechism Debate last summer were an attempt to do things differently, to platform alternative voices, issues, and concerns and challenge the dog-eat-dog confrontational style we still seem to venerate in favor of models that center the work being done in other corners of the field, but which bear direct relevance to the debates at hand.

Changing the system requires actively seeking out forms of disruption. It means not just recognizing but anticipating that power operates disproportionally against women, racialized and minoritized students, and faculty, especially those working under extreme precarity and at the beginning of their careers. By folding this into everything we do, we are more adept at sharing opportunities to help build our collective capacity, which, in an age of global emergencies, institutional inequality, and dwindling resources, is all the more necessary.

Nathan Stoltzfus

The gatekeepers of consensus themselves determine what is admissible, closing off public debate by ignoring worthy dissent to make it appear as though the status quo has no legitimate challengers. Footnotes and scholarly form in general may appear convincing while obscuring evidence. Some historians of the Berlin Rosenstrasse events of early 1943 have dismissed sources that contradict their interpretations one at a time rather than considering them as an entire body of interwoven evidence. For example, the deportation of dozens of intermarried Jews directly to Auschwitz work camps corroborates written plans from the Main Office of the Economic SS promising to supply Auschwitz factories with a quota of Jewish workers from the Berlin deportations during the first week of March 1943, a number of Jewish workers that could never have been met without including intermarried Jews from Berlin.¹⁹ Some who quote the diaries of Joseph Goebbels as authoritative when it comports with consensus views simply ban from view other entries that contradict their construction of Nazi power. But Goebbels's frank admission that he released intermarried Jews due to open protest from Aryans taking the side of Jews comports with his perspective and other diary entries.²⁰ Those who deny the protest's impact and Goebbels's admission of it do not mention Goebbels's complaint more generally months later that the regime was abating authority by “giv[ing] in to the pressure of the street” (this followed another effective protest by women in October 1943, documented by the SD in a November 18, 1943, report).²¹ Evidence that doesn't fit is evaporated in consensus treatments.²² Like culture wars in politics that bypass the legislative process in favor of grabbing popular attention via the media, historians who appeal to the authority of consensus rather than bringing their work into line with the sources abandon established historical methods.

Benjain Hett

The issue that Nathan Stoltzfus has pointed to, of preferring official Nazi documents to memory, especially survivor memory, is a factor in the Reichstag fire debate as well. The real importance here is that of who gets to speak and who gets to be heard. This point was made very effectively almost twenty years ago by Nicolas Berg in a book that very unsurprisingly ruffled a lot of senior scholar feathers. He showed how (here referring to Jennifer Evans's point) the voices of German (and other) Jews had been largely written out of the Holocaust. I have attempted to highlight how this issue has worked in debates on the Reichstag fire too, which for years functioned as a kind of proxy battlefield for debates about the Holocaust. Quite simply, if you write from Nazi documents it is the Nazis who speak, and historians such as Fritz Tobias, Hans Mommsen, and those like Richard J. Evans who follow them, have consistently told the story of the fire the way the Nazis would want them to tell it. It is not surprising that those who argued for Nazi responsibility for the fire were resistance fighters or Jews who had suffered Nazi persecution, such as Hans Bernd Gisevius, Ernst Fraenkel, or Robert Kempner, and they were often widely unpopular in postwar German society, sometimes almost pariahs.²³

Anna Hájková

I referred earlier to Bourdieau's concept of “the law of the system.” So, what is the law of the system of how a debate emerges?

First, not everyone has the power to speak (and be heard). As Jennifer Evans says, “Where and how we are situated in relation to power is a core feature of queer and trans studies.” Speaking from experience, I can very much confirm this.

Largely, it is the influential figures who can call a debate. These tastemakers are most often full professors at prestigious universities, often doubling as journal editors. Richard Evans is such a figure, as is Andreas Wirsching in Germany, because of their institutional positions that in turn bring about editorial jobs and cachet. These men—and they are usually men—decide what new books will become a focus of a discussion forum or who will be a keynote speaker. These are important moments of bestowing legitimacy, and there are precious few possibilities for pushback or diversity. These influential players often have an outreach for popular readership, whether it is through the German legacy media, London Review of Books, the Guardian, or the New York Review of Books.

This is honestly also why I find myself a bit uninterested in reading these because I am just too well aware of the many important, worthwhile voices whom they actively did not allow to publish. Colleagues such as Yuliya Komska, one of the most insightful and beautiful writers of our generation, have drawn consequences and have moved elsewhere. Yuliya no longer tries to chase after getting into the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books, and she takes her beautiful, wise writing to platforms where she likes the editors, such as the Los Angeles Review of Books or the Cabinet Magazine. Thanks to social media but also paywalls, it has become less important where people publish and more who recommends their writing. These are not necessarily “stars,” but rather people whose work I have observed for a few years and whose takes (and recommendations) I consistently find worthwhile. So when say Benjamin Hett recommends an essay, I will probably read it.

These gatekeeping categories I described previously operate alongside gender division. Recently, Jennifer Evans, who alongside Svenja Goltermann and Philipp Sarasin has enabled much of the nuance and inclusive perspectives in the “Catechism” debate, pointed out how often women's contributions were either erased or marked as illegitimate in the gatekeeping media because they were too emotional or argued in an unacceptable way.²⁴ The devaluation of women's voices came also from the defenders of Dirk Moses through simple failure of citation, but also from Moses himself. I still wince when I recall how he interrupted Christine Achinger in the middle of her comment at an event organized by the Wiener Library.

But I also need to recognize my privilege. I work at a good university, I have been able to publish in nice journals, and I am invited to speak at prestigious (if not the tastemaker) events. Much of that goes to the fact that I am white. I also have a strong Twitter following and I have friends and colleagues on whose support I can count. This all allows me to write and to have an audience of people who are interested in what I have to say and who take it seriously.

Hedwig Richter

For all the apparent trifles and absurdities—criticisms based on my public visibility or use of social media—there is a serious heart to this matter, and that is the question of authority, of who may claim sovereignty over the interpretation of German history. Yet here, too, issues of substance are intertwined with personal ones: a historian whose habitus does not conform to one's own may be tolerated if she works in a minor field. But in the eyes of certain critics, someone daring to speak authoritatively on so central an issue as democracy ought to be an authority they recognize as such—or at least the pupil of one. Those who are not recognized as equals by these historians, who themselves appear with great authority, are usually accused of two things: either that what one says is banal and well known or that it is completely absurd and is not supported by anyone else. Both accusations demean the criticized person as a scholar, without having to deal with the argument. Disregarding or distorting the arguments is essential in this way of thinking anyway, to keep the criticized person out of the discourse.

I must, however, emphasize that I have a strong impression that these are mostly rearguard actions by old fighters.

Are there unique aspects to debates among historians of Germany? If so, what are they?

Hedwig Richter

It is remarkable how emotive an issue German history is. German history is always a tricky business. So many worldviews seem to hinge on its interpretation: Is there such a thing as progress or “the West,” how exceptional can “nations” be, what is the human being, what is evil? The idea of Germany's “special path” or Sonderweg has been considered obsolete since the 1980s; countless empirical studies have confirmed its implausibility. Some historians, such as Christopher Nonn or Margaret Anderson, have argued even more forcefully than I have how mistaken it would be to paint the Kaiserreich only in the darkest colors.

Jennifer Evans

I should state at the outset that I write as a person who works between fields. I write about German historical themes—though increasingly from a transnational perspective—but my way into German history has not always been through the historiographical questions that are central to the field. I have always been influenced by debates and issues in my other intellectual homes. In these places, gender, race, ethnicity, institutional affiliation, and so on are of course issues, but they are also fully thematized as core elements of one's positionality as an interlocutor. Where and how we are situated in relation to power is a core feature of queer and trans studies, especially in the wake of critical interventions from Black feminism and queer of color critique. It is the starting point of any and all epistemological questions, and also one reason why I think it is challenging for folks who likewise work in adjacent fields to land in German historical conversations, where outside of our niches these core questions have less of a toehold, where women and racialized minorities still have to fight as though it were 1985 to have issues tabled and their voices heard.

Of course, all scholars are given to debate. I suppose the question might be, what is distinctive about the way historians debate, and what might that tell us about the discipline and how it is constituted? This could be broken down further still in terms of academic cultures in central Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. As someone straddling different fields, from queer and trans studies to media and communication—all very concept-rich—points of contention coalesce around different theoretical assertions, be they based in intellectual traditions or schools of thought. One's conceptual moorings are explicit, even declarative, front and center in any book and article. The work of cultural studies, critical media studies, and queer/trans critique, then, is to demonstrate the usefulness of argument based on evidence and assertion, as drawn from materialist, psychoanalytic, feminist, post-structural, and other positions. On some level, this is no different in history. We come to our work forged by and through distinct intellectual traditions, although this might not enter into our writing explicitly.

Yet there is no denying that in some corners of the field, there remains a hesitance toward theoretical language and claims-making. How many times have I been told to “bury the theory”? I suspect that within this charge are often other things, such as the hint that theoretical work is somehow vacuous, or worse political and not historical, which is only another attempt to discredit without engaging work just beyond our fingertips. At worst, it undermines other disciplinary approaches whose vernacular might be grounded in those registers, suggesting they—and the subjects they also represent—are unimportant, peripheral, secondary. In other words, it lends itself to the remarginalization of certain approaches, people, voices, and themes.

This, combined with our different academic cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, can be a factor—a major one, actually—in how debates unfold in our field, as we have seen in rows over the various “turns” in history (cultural, linguistic, visual, spatial, nonhuman, etc).

Anna Hájková

Following BLM, there have been some overdue changes in German history. Tiffany Florvil's and Kira Thurman's books on Black German history are deservedly celebrated. Colleagues who publicize their syllabi include Black German history, invite scholars who are people of color to speak, and, importantly, pay them. But when we look at the tastemakers, was there any impact? Neither the Journal of Contemporary History nor Sehepunkte published a forum on Mobilizing Black Germany. Florvil's book has not been reviewed in German Feuilletons, whereas other English language books, such as Ned Richardson-Little's, have been. (This is by no means a criticism of Ned's smart book!) And then of course only a small selection of new English language histories are published in German, often works that confirm an established historical narrative. There are also exceptions: Monica Black's book came out immediately (and was reviewed in the FAZ). With ten years’ delay, 2021 saw Rothberg's Multidirectional Memory come out with a small academic German press.

Rothberg's translation has been received with considerable excitement, and the coverage was more often than not imprecise, at times deliberately misleading. People outside of academia weighed in. Although these discussions were difficult and at times unfair, Rothberg was given the right to reply, and the attacks were not ad hominem.

The Holocaust is the kind of history that many, unfortunately, believe they know well, and are often ready to mansplain, and at times attack the scholar, if the scholar comes to a conclusion that contradicts paradigms that are emotionally charged. When I was writing my PhD dissertation, my mentor, Lynne Viola, occasionally shared stories about some of her hard experiences during the 1980s Soviet Revisionism debate. Totalitarianism is akin to the Holocaust as an intellectual crutch that sorts out the “good West” as opposed to the dark, “oppressed East.” In showing a very different historical reality, Viola, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and others have shown this comfortable binary for what it is.

Does it make a difference if scholarly debate spills into the general public arena, as opposed to staying within the confines of academic publications and conferences? To what extent do issues, and people, lying outside the academy play a role in (or get ignored by) the work of professional scholars within the academy?

Hedwig Richter

Public debates complicate the situation. Though public discourse does not necessarily produce oversimplification, it does of course present matters in simpler terms than those of a scholarly article. The discussion about the German Sonderweg exemplifies how precarious the exchange between the public and academic spheres is.

One incidental outcome of all this was a particularly instructive lesson in public history. In 2021, I was frequently interviewed on the occasion of the 150-year-anniversary of the proclamation of the German Empire and took the opportunity to explain that historical research had moved on from the Sonderweg thesis. It was a pity, I said, that the last few decades of scholarship on the Kaiserreich had made so little impression on the public. This created something of an uproar. Jakob Augstein, for example, conducted an interview with me in which, according to my impression, he was full of anger that I questioned the Sonderweg and thus also part of the Spiegel story. I suspect that for him, as for many other German intellectuals, the Sonderweg narrative remains essential to their political self-understanding and that they are therefore unable to take note of the research on the Kaiserreich of recent decades.²⁵

Some journalists spoke up to condemn my arguments as outrageous, claiming that disbelief in the Sonderweg was tantamount to downplaying National Socialism. These journalists then went looking for historians who would support their opinion, and their search was successful—though most scholars who upheld the by-now marginal position of the Sonderweg tended to be historians who were not specialists on the Kaiserreich but whose empirical work had been conducted in other fields. I ventured into the debate with the familiar arguments against the Sonderweg thesis: first of all: What would be the Normalweg? And then, that the Kaiserreich had been a many-layered entity within which the most diverse groups had been active in pursuit of the most diverse aims, that dissent did not necessarily mean working toward a revolution, that society in 1914 and 1918 differed quite considerably from what it had been in 1867–1871, and that many of the phenomena associated with the Sonderweg had, far from being distinctively German, in fact been international phenomena—militarism, antisemitism, racism, colonialism, and so forth. I ultimately found myself refuting arguments lacking any foundation in fact, for instance that the Germans had been alone in having perpetrated a colonial genocide or that the Reichstag had been completely powerless.²⁶ This transfer of scholarly discourse to the public sphere yielded a large number of supportive emails and telephone calls from colleagues. Others, however, rather surprisingly and somehow comically enough claimed that I was making a “straw man” of the Sonderweg—in which, after all, nobody any longer believed. Having not followed the ins and outs of the debate, they were unable to retrace the twisted paths of communication between academia and the public sphere.

Anna Hájková

After my experience, and also what I witnessed with the Catechism Debate, I am wary of the way a scholarly topic will play out in the general public. Quite often I have seen an almost epistemic impossibility in understanding the nuanced argument or the very point that scholar is making. One example I found profoundly frustrating is that while queer historians have for decades established a move from hard sexual identities to acts and practices, the public perception translates these back to “she was a lesbian/homosexual.” This shift, however, misses key insights that queer studies have brought to the table, and is, even more importantly, simply an ahistorical and wrong understanding of how sexuality works. Given that I have been slapped with confidentiality from my employer and that the Guardian refused to print my response (or any letters to the editor from colleagues), it has been a toxic experience. So I appreciated reading Jane Ward's funny and insightful piece on the reception of her first book in mainstream gay media—she, too, has had some fairly poisonous reactions.²⁷ And I think we will all agree that a large part of the German mass media coverage of the Catechism Debate quite deliberately missed the point.

Of course, not all discussions that spill from academia into public reception will be intellectually lame or frustrating. These issues depend on the social field at hand, at the power position of the academics, and yes, some topics are simpler than others.

My sense is that the public backlash and ad hominem attacks have been so ugly that many people will think twice about going public with their work. Here in the United Kingdom, Corinne Fowler had a really hard time with her Green Unpleasant Land, a monograph on the colonial roots of the much-loved English countryside gardens.²⁸ She has been pilloried by the tabloids.

And finally, then there is the issue of trade authors and journalists writing popular nonfiction on, as they like to call it, “untold histories.”²⁹ These are invariably based on academic research that they invariably fail to mention. Twitter has been a useful place to flag this misconduct and push back. But it keeps happening and, honestly, it can be demoralizing.

Jennifer Evans

This is an interesting question to me because it brings with it the assumption that we scholars are the ones driving historical debate, and I fundamentally disagree there. In my areas of research, everyday people—quotidian intellectuals as Tiffany Florvil puts it—are often the ones leading the charge, be that in establishing historical societies, self-publishing, or building mutual aid networks to get their voices heard. It was the case in the Catechism Debate too. Although Dirk Moses's polemic opened the floodgates, before that publication, over years, there have been countless artist, activist, and antiracist groups—before Mbembe, before Rothberg too, raising concern around how to think about German memory. They have also often had breites Publikum as we'd say, through memory instillations and actions.

The better question might be: Why are we so slow in taking notice? And when we finally do, how does the institutionalization of inquiry change the debate itself? When critical interventions enter the mainstream, what falls away and what remains? Here, too, we see a difference in queer, trans studies, and antiracist work versus traditional quarters within German history, where I would say there is more recognition of community knowledge producers and the vital work they do in propelling that debate forward. The memory communities that have coalesced around the initiatives in the Schwules Museum*—not without discord—have played a fundamental role in shaping community and institutional knowledge around LGBTQIA lives and history. We who write on these themes are beholden to friends and colleagues for giving us access to the rich and complex arguments that circulate in a variety of scene publications, podium discussions, and board meetings. They push the agenda, and we follow. That these vibrant histories are still overlooked in German history departments in Germany, with the exception of a few islands in the stream, is a sign of the fundamental conservatism of the field toward gender, sexuality, and race.

How does the technology through which we engage in debates (books, scholarly journals, mainstream media op-eds, blogs, Twitter/X) affect and change our arguments, and how should it do so?

Jennifer Evans

There is no denying that social media has fundamentally changed the playing field for how scholarship circulates and what enters into public debate. I see this—like many of the folks writing in this forum—as a core part of the work that needs doing. In my own scholarly practice, I see my public writing as a deliberate way to recognize and honor the intellectual labor of others through citation. I use the platform I have been given or have built myself to draw attention to the places where critical work happens, to augment the voices of those often overlooked, and hopefully to take the conversation to new places. Social media can be used in nefarious ways of course. It is not always that different from the colleague who hogs the podium or refuses to cite those whose work came before. But when employed mindfully, with a deliberation for how we put ourselves out there, I think it can achieve great things. Blogs and microblogging sites like Twitter can be and often are infuriating. As Yardi and boyd [sic] found in their research already in 2006³⁰ on controversial topics, Twitter can build esprit de corps among the like-minded, but it can also reinforce in and out groups and entrenched positions. But new signals can penetrate the noise, and social media use has also spawned news ways of listening for it, what's sometimes called background listening, reciprocal, and delegated listening.

This new kind of social awareness—of being always on—can make social media exhausting. But there is no denying, at the same time, that it can also be a site of creativity, of hybridity, of new forms of authority and storytelling, which can enliven debate. As we saw this past summer, too, it can push through the usual forms of gatekeeping. The submissions in the New Fascism Syllabus and the conversation that followed on Twitter and Facebook were followed by the legacy press, cited in rejoinders and Replik (if published also in German), and recognized as an independent vehicle within this evolving Ausseinandersetzung. The “always on” nature of social media buoyed the conversation. It moved quickly, mobilizing emotions and hastening ideas, for better and sometimes also for worse. In the process, it opened up a space for all sorts of views—from a variety of actors with different skin in the game. My hope was that the NFS might create a space of agonistic pluralism in Chantal Mouffe's sense, fundamentally changing the pace, dynamics, and constitution of typical scholarly exchange.³¹ For a brief while, it seemed it had succeeded before the traditional vehicles of knowledge dissemination reestablished their authority, and the debate sunk into a conversation among three of four people, mostly if not entirely men. So the argument that social media tends toward a shallower analysis might need some revision here too.

Anna Hájková

When the pandemic started, we modern historians went online on Twitter, “We guys who hang out together,” to cite Karel Poláček's We Were a Handful. Not only have we used the medium to mediate loneliness, hash out new projects (including, I suspect, this very forum), but I believe we have learned a great deal about the making of historical academia, one another's struggles, reflections on how to be important but perhaps more importantly liked, the importance of kindness. And, of course: historians’ cats.

Twitter (and to a lesser extent, social media in general), has mixed up the social order of traditional academia. For instance, Richard Evans's periodic statements as editor of the Journal of Contemporary History have received systematic and loud pushback (many people, including me, understood them as xenophobic). This criticism has reached Cambridge University Press. The German catechism debate is one that owes much of its existence to Twitter. But this medium is inherently ephemeral, and although it can accomplish a strong pushback, it is also often of very short effect. There is also a telling ambivalence to when and whether the gatekeepers acknowledge Twitter as a legitimate medium. So here I would disagree with Hedwig's point on Twitter offering a flattened hierarchy. The asymmetry is still there, it just appears differently.

But there is also a dark side to social media and public engagement. Women, queer scholars, and historians of color experience a disproportionate amount of trolling and abuse, and not always as much acknowledgment and support from some colleagues who like to imagine themselves as good feminists. The sports historian Johanna Mellis's work has been targeted by vicious abuse that inluded sexualized violence when the sports commentator Dan Dakich tweeted at her a veiled rape threat.³² It means that the lightheartedness that you may believe you see on Twitter is accompanied by frequent anxiety and constant blocking.

Benjamin Hett

I liked Anna's reference to “we guys who hang out together.” My experiences with social media have been, maybe very atypically, mostly positive: I have found it (and mostly I am speaking here of Twitter) a great way to get to know other historians and learn about what they are doing. I first got to know a couple of the participants in this very forum via Twitter. In Anna's spirit, however, I should acknowledge that I am a white, heterosexual male, and well along in my career, and I know all of those factors supply a bit of cushion.

But that notwithstanding, I have also learned lately about the other side of social media and the internet more broadly, in a way that connects with the issues that have come up in this forum about facing a broader public. Lately I have been doing more work in general media outlets, and in our world, this means those who like or hate what you say can find a way to reach you, whether through Twitter or e-mail. Every time I publish an op-ed or something similar, it follows as the day the night that my e-mail inbox and Twitter mentions will fill up with rudely phrased and generally factually inaccurate comments on my ethnicity, parentage, political outlook, sexual orientation, and preferred sexual practices. Of course, there were public-intellectual historians long before the internet, but I doubt they had this kind of experience, or very much of it. A. J. P. Taylor used to note with evident satisfaction that his television appearances led to London cab drivers greeting him with a wave and a “Hullo, Alan!” Of course, he also claimed, probably correctly, that academic disapproval of these appearances cost him the Regius professorship. But I wonder what kind of impact our greater vulnerability to abuse in the public sphere has on how we approach a broader public. It's hard to imagine that this kind of abuse is not a deterrent to many people trying to reach a broader public—as Anna has touched on here. And if you believe that scholars should have a voice in public affairs, that is a loss.

I wonder, too, how the nature of social media might start to drive what we talk about and how we talk about it, even in our work away from the bright screen. Different subjects? Do you think about how many “likes” your journal article might get? And like Anna, I have noticed that gatekeepers intervene or don't intervene on social media as it appears convenient or inconvenient to them—after some engagement that doesn't go well, they may retreat under the covering fire of “this is not a place for nuanced argument.”

Hedwig Richter

Some colleagues suspect that some historians in Germany find themselves provoked by the mere fact of somebody's public presence, which they find to be at odds with their received idea of a historian. Is it not, one may ask, the job of scholars to keep the public at arm's length? The question then turns into: Is it not irrelevant whether the public take note of recent historical research? Is it even permissible to write German history with the aim of being widely understood?

This raises a second question: Is social media not an inherently problematic medium? Is scholarship not contaminated by even involving itself in social media (which is probably a very German question to ask)? Twitter, for instance, tends toward a flattened hierarchy, in which a professor, a journalist, and a graduate student are able to communicate directly and on a kind of equal footing—and this interferes with what is still the extremely hierarchical system of German academia. I suspect that this hostility to social media is also a last-ditch protest against the demise of a structured public sphere, of an age in which male gatekeepers in academia and in the media could claim the power to allocate attention and admit or disbar particular interpretations. So who is entitled to speak as a historian in public now?

Are conferences and lectures significantly different from written forms of debate?

Jennifer Evans

After three years of COVID, it is not hard to make the argument that computer-mediated communication pales in comparison to face-to-face interactions. We are certainly quick to react at the keyboard. But there is also an argument for putting ourselves out there with greater circumspection, with an ethics of care and attentiveness to draw on Claudia Breger's work, which gets us to think about how we can embolden one another in and through our public writing to find new ways to think about and frame issues under contention. It isn't a zero-sum game. Here, mediated, interactive communication holds a lot of potential amid the obvious drawbacks.

I think written forms of debate, whether in new or legacy media, are more likely to give rise to invective than, say, the conference plenary. Both are exclusionary in their own right, dependent upon who lands their op-ed and who can afford the registration fee. What we need are more spaces and places where agonistic debate can be nurtured productively, ethically, and with wide reach, reflexivity, and appeal. But this is a social practice, meaning it needs to be modeled and reproduced in our everyday experience. This is all the more important when we think about the challenge of illiberalism and what I've called fake history (like fake news), which just might be an argument for more of us to wade into the digital realm to meet our publics where they reside.

Anna Hájková

This rigid hierarchy has a few spots where it can be softened: conferences are a place that allow for some, limited, open discussion. However, conferences are also a place where hierarchies are staged and restaged, often to traumatic effect on the weaker/junior participants. Just think of the moment that probably we all experienced when we talked to an “important” colleague, who, in the two minutes held up by us, gazed over the room for anyone more worthwhile to engage with. Or the instances where the senior people talk only to one another during coffee breaks. Sure, I am as happy as anyone else to hang out with old friends. But I also really try to introduce myself to the junior scholars, ask them questions, listen, and spend the coffee breaks with them. In fact, the seemingly simple act of coming over and saying “Hello, I am Anna” is surprisingly important. Such an approach to conversations allows for inclusive debate and friendly disagreement.

And, last but certainly not least, how does the gravity (in both senses) of the Holocaust interact with and shape all of these other factors?

Jennifer Evans

As someone who writes about digital media and memory, it is probably obvious that I would argue that participatory media have tremendous potential to lend shape and contour to issues of critical and fundamental importance to our world, such as the place of the Holocaust in human memory, structural racism, and the impact and legacies of colonization. As I tried to demonstrate in practice in my last commentary in the NFS blog series, digital media can be a space of intimacy and reflection, sharing, and storytelling, of laying bare in the search for truth. But in order for it to rise to that potential, it requires we use it mindfully and judiciously, recognizing power differentials that continue to mark our field. Just as it can be a place of discord and frustration, so too can it be a place of solidarity in difference.

Nathan Stoltzfus

Debating Hitler's thoughts on the function of force for ruling his own Volk may seem a mere academic squabble, but the image of a madman with ungoverned will for butchery assures us that Hitler was not like us and might be jeered off. Laws governing historical narratives, such as prohibitions on Holocaust denial, are rare although it is not uncommon for governments and official history to throw their weight on matters of national identity and myths. The pervasive presence of social media, not excluding Wikipedia, may give the weight of popular opinion greater influence, particularly on interpretations of the Holocaust. Public commemorations illustrate the importance of popular reception for the impact of scholarly interpretations, which traditionally measure success in ways other than the market to some extent. Working together, politicians and scholars can leverage their power and authority, particularly in popular media. This is illustrated by a recent article in Germany's popular Der Spiegel titled “No Politics without History,” jointly authored by the director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte Professor Andreas Wirsching and Germany's (former) foreign minister Heiko Maas.³³

Benjamin Hett

I think a fundamental point about German historiography on the twentieth century is how much of it was written by, or at least sourced to, people who had the strongest possible interest—including in not getting hanged—in the narrative going a certain way. As historians we have spent a number of years unpacking this, and the process is far from complete. Appropriately, this first became an issue with the Holocaust, and even there not really until the Historikerstreit. There is that amazing moment in the 1987 Broszat-Friedländer exchange of open letters in which Broszat contrasts “a younger generation of German historians more focused on rational understanding” with those “who were persecuted and harmed by the Nazi regime,” carriers of a “mythical memory” that “functions to coarsen historical recollection.”³⁴ Then works like Ulrich Herbert's biography of Werner Best showed how profoundly Best could shape the narrative of Nazism after the war. The Wehrmacht exhibit in the 1990s stimulated the realization that the saubere Wehrmacht was also a highly self-interested narrative largely inspired by perpetrators facing war crimes trials. I have made the same argument about the Reichstag fire. In this way the Holocaust is both a kind of paradigm example of a historiographical process and a major complicating factor in getting to authentic accounts of Germany's twentieth-century experience.

Anna Hájková

Over the last fifteen years, history of sexuality in the Holocaust has become a burgeoning, trendy topic that has drawn some of the most brilliant people in the field (Annette Timm, Jennifer Evans, Dagmar Herzog, or Regina Mühlhäuser). We are at a key moment in the field, where sexuality and the Holocaust is the topic of much new research and is immensely popular. But in terms of gatekeeping it has not arrived yet; unlike “important” research on perpetrators or bystanders, it is classed as “interesting.” What does that mean? That tastemakers will not recognize history of sexuality as a key topic to understanding of the Holocaust, rather one that is trendy, or worthwhile for historiographical push, or simply appealing to the outside audience. My German book on queer young people in the Holocaust (one of them Anne Frank) was not reviewed beyond queer media,³⁵ while the legacy press spilled a significant amount of ink on the (lacking) merits of a horrible new book on her “betrayal.” But in spite of the many publications by some of the best minds in Holocaust studies that show how interpreting sexuality is key to understanding society and how it changes, it sometimes feels like it exists in an echo chamber.

In fact, some scholars outside the history of sexuality often do not even engage with the actual writing, or they read it, but it has not really sunk in. I have often seen my work on sexual barter categorized as sexual violence. Something comparable applies for much of Holocaust history vis-à-vis general modern European history: usually, Holocaust history is treated by generalists as a topic apart, albeit a fascinating one. Thus Holocaust monographs do not make it into “top ten new books in modern European history” or “look at my syllabus on twentieth-century Europe.” If the Shoah comes in, then it is usually in form as a memoir (Primo Levi) or a classic (Ordinary Men), in contrast to shiny new books.