분단초기 독일 역사학과 과거청산 문제(1946~1961)

The German Historiography and the Nazi Past in the Early Postwar Period

The Nazi past was the most critical question both for the East and West German historians of the early postwar period, because that provoked the revised views of the German past. Faced with the immense losses of historical consciousness, they took either political mythos or appeal to the tradition as alternative strategy. So they tried to divide the Nazi past from the German national history. The East German historians, in line with the slogan of new communist regime, recurred to the mythos of antifascist resistance movement of Stalinist provenance. Hereby did they canalize the past political oppositions of different couleur into a single stream, namely that of the communist party. This hard line of historical representation of the past, however, was not free from change in it's point of accent. Alexander Abusch, a communist revolutionary, in the first years of the postwar period offered an idea of “Irrweg" of the whole German history, a radical conception that only very few professional German historians had ever before in mind. Faced with the “Cold War" situation, this potentiality of the selfcritical thinking disappeared. Under the initiatives of the political power the East German historians begann to turn to the idea of “socialist patriotism", thereby the whole German “good" traditions became endowed with “progressive"－anticapitalist－nature and legitimized. The West German historiography shows a different way. It's first stadium was the “revision of the German conception of history". What belonged to this intellectual stream were a new reception of the both classical masters “Ranke and Burckhardt", appeal to the pan－european historical consciousness and new access to the universal history. The “revision" contributed to interpret the Nazi past as a by－phenomenon of general “crisis of the modern world" so that the German national history was contrarily endowed with the western identity. By means of the strategy of oblivion the West German historians were able to “renew" German national tradition let alone a critical judgement on it. By this time the Nazi past became a historical subject. While Friedrich Meinecke by means of their new analytical concept of “Hitlerism" diagnosed wide cultural decadence of the modern world and asserted the innocence of the German tradition, Hans Rothfels under the influence of the theory of totalitarism tried to establish contemporary historical studies by reducing the Nazi－regime to the crisis of the world politics. These new contemporary historical studies contributed to blur vivid memory of the Nazi past through the abstract criticism on the "totalitarian" tendencies of the modernity. So the West as well as the East German historians in the early postwar period made use of the Nazi past for the sake of legitimizing their new regime by abandoning their moral consciousness.