Ernst Nolte

Ernst Nolte , born on January 11th, 1923 with Witten in Germany, is a German Historien specialist in the political movements of the Entre-deux-guerres, in particular of Fascism. It is currently Professor with the Freie Universität of Berlin.

Biography

Ernst Nolte was the student one of Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink of which it takes again certain phenomenologic principles in his Méthodologie. With Reinhart Koselleck, it is placed among the German historians most outstanding of second half of the XXe century. Its work can be close to those of François Furet and the Italian specialist in the Fascisme Renzo De Felice. Besides Nolte maintained a correspondence with these two historians who, like, developed a to him Paradigme interpretative (or “understanding”) of the ideological phenomena of the XXe century.

With Eugen Weber, Nolte is one of the first historians to have devoted a very exhaustive study on the French Action during the Sixties. But this first volume of a work entitled Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche ( Fascism in its time ) was the several controversy object because Nolte brings closer the movement Nationaliste to French Action with Italian Fascism and the National-socialisme. In the same way, it makes proceed these three currents of Extreme-right-hand side of a Anticommunisme (which it divides partly itself) presented as one of the major causes of the formation of the three types of Fascism that it analyzes. If it is true that these assertions must be moderate, this work does not remain about it less one book of reference for the right knowledge of the S European nationalists.

After several volumes on Fascism, Nolte also is interested in the genesis of the Cold war; it devotes also works to the Bolchévisme (which it tries to bring closer to the Nazism), with methodology in history, Nietzsche and max Weber.

Controversies

He is often regarded as a nationalist “Révisionniste” because in particular of his comparisons, considered to be excessive, between Nazisme and Communisme. In the European Civil war , published in Germany in 1987, it affirms: “What there is in national-socialisme of more essential, it is his report/ratio with the Marxism, Communism particularly, in the form which it took thanks to the victory of the Bolsheviks”. Its thesis is that Fascisms are reactions to the Révolution Bolshevik which is former for them. He sees in particular in the Jewish presence within the communist movement the “rational core” of the Antisémitisme hitlérien.

One reproaches Nolte for minimizing the gravity of the crimes Nazis by bringing them closer to those of Italian Fascism and the Bolchevism. Partisan of the theory of the Totalitarianism, Nolte draws up a causal link between the Gulag and Auschwitz: this last would be only one copy of the communist original. According to the specialist in the Nazism Pierre Ayçoberry, “the skid which comparison makes slip towards vulgarizing, and of this one towards the unavowed payment, too often tranparaît in the extremely muddled sentences of E. Nolte. ”

His comparative method and his definition of Fascism as a “transnational” phenomenon European was the subject of many criticisms during the Eighties. This controversy is known under the name of Historikerstreit ; it implies several German historians known as “revisionists” and of the intellectuals of left like Jürgen Habermas.

At all events, the “understanding” method of Nolte is a considerable success in Italy; in France, its name remains associated with that with François Furet (their correspondence famous was published under the title: Fascism and Communism ), even if this last criticized it, considering in particular that a “bottom of humiliated German nationalism constitutes one within the essential competences of its books”.

In 2000, Nolte receives the Price Konrad Adenauer.

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