73 Facts About Ernst Nolte

Ernst Nolte was a German historian and philosopher.

Ernst Nolte was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973.

Ernst Nolte was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963.

Ernst Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controversies related to the interpretation of the history of fascism and communism, including the in the late 1980s.

In later years, Ernst Nolte focused on Islamism and "Islamic fascism".

Ernst Nolte received several awards, including the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize and the Konrad Adenauer Prize.

Ernst Nolte was the father of the legal scholar and judge of the International Court of Justice Georg Nolte.

Ernst Nolte was born in Witten, Westphalia, Germany to a Roman Catholic family.

In 1941, Ernst Nolte was excused from military service because of a deformed hand, and he studied Philosophy, Philology and Greek at the Universities of Munster, Berlin, and Freiburg.

At Freiburg, Ernst Nolte was a student of Martin Heidegger, whom he acknowledges as a major influence.

From 1944 onwards, Ernst Nolte was a close friend of the Heidegger family, and when in 1945 the professor feared arrest by the French, Ernst Nolte provided him with food and clothing for an attempted escape.

Between 1965 and 1973, Ernst Nolte worked as a professor at the University of Marburg, and from 1973 to 1991 at the Free University of Berlin.

Ernst Nolte married Annedore Mortier and they had a son, Georg Ernst Nolte, now a professor of international law at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Ernst Nolte came to notice with his 1963 book, in which he argued that fascism arose as a form of resistance to and a reaction against modernity.

Ernst Nolte's conclusion was that fascism was the great anti-movement: it was anti-liberal, anti-communist, anti-capitalist, and anti-bourgeois.

In Ernst Nolte's view, fascism was the rejection of everything the modern world had to offer and was an essentially negative phenomenon.

Ernst Nolte argued that fascism functioned at three levels, namely in the world of politics as a form of opposition to Marxism, at the sociological level in opposition to bourgeois values, and in the "metapolitical" world as "resistance to transcendence".

Ernst Nolte defined the relationship between fascism and Marxism as such:.

Ernst Nolte defined "transcendence" as a "metapolitical" force comprising two types of change.

In regard to the Holocaust, Ernst Nolte contended that because Adolf Hitler identified Jews with modernity, the basic thrust of Nazi policies towards Jews had always aimed at genocide.

Ernst Nolte believed that, for Hitler, Jews represented "the historical process itself".

Ernst Nolte argues that Hitler was "logically consistent" in seeking genocide of the Jews because Hitler detested modernity and identified Jews with the things that he most hated in the world.

Ernst Nolte's theories about Nazi antisemitism as a rejection of modernity inspired the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka to argue that National Socialism was an attack on "the very roots of Western civilisation, its basic values and moral foundations".

Criticism from the left, for example by Sir Ian Kershaw, centered on Ernst Nolte's focus on ideas as opposed to social and economic conditions as a motivating force for fascism, and that Ernst Nolte depended too much on fascist writings to support his thesis.

Later in the 1970s, Ernst Nolte was to reject aspects of the theory of generic fascism that he had championed in The Three Faces of Fascism and instead moved closer to embracing totalitarian theory as a way of explaining both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

In Ernst Nolte's opinion, Nazi Germany was a "mirror image" of the Soviet Union and, with the exception of the "technical detail" of mass gassing, everything the Nazis did in Germany had already been done by the communists in Russia.

In particular, Ernst Nolte seeks to find the essences of the "metapolitical phenomenon" of history, to discover the grand ideas which motivated all of history.

Ernst Nolte ended with a call for Germans to escape their fate as the world's foremost battleground for the rival ideologies of American democracy and Soviet communism by returning to the values of the German Empire.

Likewise, Ernst Nolte called for the end of what he regarded as the unfair stigma attached to German nationalism because of National Socialism, and demanded that historians recognize that every country in the world had at some point in its history had "its own Hitler era, with its monstrosities and sacrifices".

For Ernst Nolte, ideas have a force of their own, and once a new idea has been introduced into the world, except for the total destruction of society, it cannot be ignored any more than the discovery of how to make fire or the invention of nuclear weapons can be ignored.

Ernst Nolte is best known for his role in launching the of 1986 and 1987.

On 6 June 1986 Ernst Nolte published a feuilleton opinion piece entitled "" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Ernst Nolte's feuilleton was a distillation of ideas he had first introduced in lectures delivered in 1976 and in 1980.

One of Nolte's leading critics, British historian Richard J Evans, claims that the organizers of the Romerberg Conversations did not withdraw their invitation, and that Nolte had just refused to attend.

Ernst Nolte began his feuilleton by remarking that it was necessary in his opinion to draw a "line under the German past".

Ernst Nolte argued that the memory of the Nazi era was "a bugaboo, as a past that in the process of establishing itself in the present or that is suspended above the present like an executioner's sword".

The crux of Ernst Nolte's thesis was presented when he wrote:.

Ernst Nolte took the view that the principal problem of German history was this "negative myth" of Nazi Germany, which cast the Nazi era as the ne plus ultra of evil.

Ernst Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945.

Ernst Nolte suggests that if one wishes to understand the Holocaust, one should begin with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and then understand the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Ernst Nolte wrote that "if Europe was to succeed in establishing itself as a world power on an equal footing [with the United States and the Soviet Union], then Germany had to be the core of the new 'United States'".

Ernst Nolte claimed if Germany had to continue to abide by Part V of the Treaty of Versailles, which had disarmed Germany, then Germany would have been destroyed by aggression from her neighbors sometime later in the 1930s, and with Germany's destruction, there would have been no hope for a "United States of Europe".

The British historian Richard J Evans accused Nolte of engaging in a geopolitical fantasy.

Many were angered by Ernst Nolte's claim that "the so-called annihilation of the Jews under the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original", with many wondering why Ernst Nolte spoke of the "so-called annihilation of the Jews" in describing the Holocaust.

Geiss wrote Ernst Nolte's critics had "taken in isolation" his statements and were guilty of being "hasty readers".

Ernst Nolte had delivered a lecture at the Siemens-Stiftung in 1980, and excerpts from his speech were published in the without attracting controversy.

Many historians, such as British historian Richard J Evans, have asserted that, based on this statement, Nolte appears to believe that the only reason why Nazism is regarded as evil is because Germany lost World War II, with no regard for the Holocaust.

Hildebrand is pleased that Ernst Nolte denies the singularity of the Nazi atrocities.

The historian Eberhard Jackel, in an essay first published in the newspaper on 12 September 1986, argued that Ernst Nolte's theory was ahistorical on the grounds that Hitler held the Soviet Union in contempt and could not have felt threatened as Ernst Nolte claimed.

Fleischer argued that Ernst Nolte was only seeking the "historicization" of National Socialism that Martin Broszat had called for in a 1985 essay by trying to understand what caused National Socialism, with a special focus on the fear of communism.

Schulze argued that Habermas's attack on Ernst Nolte was flawed because he failed to provide any proof that the Holocaust was unique, and argued there were many "aspects" of the Holocaust that were "common" to other historical events.

The German historian Horst Moller, in an essay first published in late 1986 in the magazine, argued that Ernst Nolte was not attempting to "excuse" Nazi crimes by comparing them with the crimes of others, but was instead trying to explain Nazi war-crimes.

Moller argued that Ernst Nolte was only attempting to explain "irrational" events rationally, and that the Nazis really did believe that they were confronted with a world Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy out to destroy Germany.

In, Ernst Nolte claimed that the intentions of Holocaust deniers are "often honorable", and that some of their claims are "not evidently without foundation".

Kershaw has argued that Ernst Nolte was operating on the borderlines of Holocaust denial with his implied claim that the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany was created by Jewish historians, his allegations of the domination of Holocaust scholarship by Jewish historians, and his statements that one should withhold judgment on Holocaust deniers, who Ernst Nolte insists are not exclusively Germans or fascists.

In Kershaw's opinion, Ernst Nolte is attempting to imply that Holocaust deniers are perhaps on to something.

In, Ernst Nolte put forward five different arguments as a way of criticizing the uniqueness of the Shoah thesis.

Ernst Nolte called the case of arson "terrorism", and maintained that the attack was inspired by his opponents in the.

Mason wrote against Ernst Nolte, calling for the sort of theories of generic fascism that Ernst Nolte himself had once championed:.

Anson Rabinbach accused Ernst Nolte of attempting to erase German guilt for the Holocaust.

Ian Kershaw wrote that Ernst Nolte was claiming that the Jews had essentially brought the Holocaust down on themselves, and were the authors of their own misfortunes in the Shoah.

The American historian Charles Maier rejected Ernst Nolte's claims regarding the moral equivalence of the Holocaust and Soviet terror on the grounds that while the latter was extremely brutal, it did not seek the physical annihilation of an entire people as state policy.

Ernst Nolte's opponents have expressed intense disagreement with his evidence for a Jewish "war" on Germany.

Ernst Nolte is by his own admission an intense German nationalist and his stated goal is to restore the Germans' sense of pride in their history that he feels has been missing since 1945.

Ernst Nolte's defenders have pointed to numerous statements on his part condemning Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Between 1995 and 1997, Ernst Nolte debated with the French historian Francois Furet in an exchange of letters on the relationship between fascism and communism.

Furet noted that Ernst Nolte's theses went against the established notions of culpability and apprehension to criticize the idea of anti-fascism common in the West.

Ernst Nolte did not feel there was a precise parallel, as Nolte suggested, between the Holocaust and dekulakization.

Ernst Nolte often contributed Feuilleton to German newspapers such as Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Ernst Nolte was often described as one of the "most brooding, German thinkers about history".

On 4 June 2000, Ernst Nolte was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize.

Ernst Nolte expressed regret that he would not have enough time for a full study of Islamic fascism In the same interview, Nolte said that he could not forgive Augstein for calling Hillgruber a "constitutional Nazi" during the and claimed that Wehler had helped to hound Hillgruber to his death in 1989.

Ernst Nolte ended the interview by calling himself a philosopher, not a historian, and argued that the hostile reactions that he often encountered from historians were caused by his status as a philosopher writing history.