JFest, died...'He distorted history; helped relativize Holocaust'

[bobbieinok]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,,1873027,00.html

This historian was a German nationalist who distorted history
Joachim Fest had a negative influence on his nation's identity. It is wrong to praise him, says David Cesarani

David Cesarani
Friday September 15, 2006

Guardian

Joachim Fest, who died this week, was a conservative historian who played a leading role in shaping the new German nationalism and cultivating the sense of victimhood among Germans that lies at its core. So it was puzzling to find him the subject of the Guardian's leader column (In praise of ... Joachim Fest, September 13).

....

In July 1986, Fest, as an editor on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published an article by the historian Ernst Nolte arguing that it was time to end the "demonisation" of the Third Reich. Nolte maintained that Auschwitz was only a reaction "to the acts of annihilation that took place during the Russian revolution". The Nazis' exterminatory war against the Jews was merely a "German copy" of earlier genocides during a century typified by mass slaughter.

Fest then weighed in with an article supporting Nolte and went even further. Without any evidence he asserted that Hitler's genocidal policies were rooted in a deep German-Austrian fear of atrocities overwhelming them from "the east". He argued that there was anyway little difference between the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis or the Soviets. The victims were "here a race, there a class".

The wider targets of Fest's attack were West German historians and opinion leaders, whom he accused of mindless leftwing "conformism". In his calls for a "revision" of German history he was hardly a courageous dissident. Fest articulated the cold war consensus among West Germany's ruling circles. During Helmut Kohl's chancellorship he led a pack of rightwing intellectuals in savage literary assaults on the likes of Günter Grass.

....

With his book Inside Hitler's Bunker, the basis of the film Downfall, Fest further cultivated the myth that Nazi rule and the war were a tragedy for the Germans, perpetrated on an innocent people by a demented, criminal clique. He ignored the wealth of research by young German scholars that revealed the extent of popular consent for Nazi rule, complicity in racism and profiteering from genocide.

Far from being praiseworthy, Fest's history writing has had a malign influence on German national identity.

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Some of the comments/responses, praising fest and attacking the author, seem pretty bizarre.

[whistle]

1. Before they bury J Fest, be sure that the wooden stake pierces

...his heart, then bury his corpse extra deep in the most foul of dirt! The world needs no Nazi heroes and disciples who glorify and worship their evil.