Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? : The Dispute about the Germans' Understanding of Hisotry: Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust

The original documents comprising the German controversy over the singularity of the Holocaust are here translated into English for the first time. Was Hitler's program of genocide just another example of totalitarian terror, comparable to such other 20th-century atrocities as Stalin's purges of the 1930s or those of Cambodia's Pol Pot? Are some German historians seeking to stabilize the present and determine the future by sanitizing the Nazi past? These questions are at the heart of a heated debate that galvinized the West German public in the 1980s before the fall of the Berlin wall. This collection of primary documents relating to this crucial controversy, which remains under the surface of current German politics, includes contributions by Jürgen Habermas, Ernst Nolte, and many other eminent scholars.