The persistence of national-oriented German Germans is not difficult to fathom: they did not wish to endure a nonidentity. Most people are not intellectuals or educators for whom daily reflection on the meaning of the Nazi past constitutes their habitus. Moreover, populist journalists and politicians defend the population's intuitive national identity against Non-German German efforts to promote the national stigma and consequent transformative culture of contrition. Until the 1980s, they still denounced those who dredged up the past as Nestbeschmutzer (foulers of the nest) – those who defecate on and thereby pollute the family and nation. The problem for conservatives was that the national ideal had been stigmatized by its association with National Socialism. The issue was how to separate them. Some argued that the Nazis abused and perverted the idea of the nation, while others contended that the two concepts were in fact unrelated. National Socialism's biological puritanism was a twentieth-century concept dialectally united in its supranational aims with its mortal enemy – the international class war of Bolshevik Russia. The idea of the nation had no necessary unsavory implications, and National Socialism had no specific German roots. Moreover, conservatives continued, the Nazi phenomenon possessed no metahistorical significance but was explicable in terms of the pressures brought to bear on Germany during the Weimar Republic. And German history had trajectories that reached beyond the twelve dark years of Nazi rule.