for the past eleven years or so a subterranean debate has been going on among German historians of National Socialism. It has been growing increasingly bitter, and yet it has not really come out into the open, as a debate with a clear literary form. One has to trace its erratic public progress through a series of book reviews and odd passages within articles in journals and anthologies. The debate has reached such a pitch of intensity that some historians are now accusing other historians of ‘trivializing’ National Socialism in their work, of implicitly, unwittingly, furnishing an apologia for the Nazi regime. This is perhaps the most serious charge which can be made against serious historians of the subject. Since the historians so accused have not the least sympathy for fascist causes, past or present, but are on the contrary progressive in their political positions, the debate is not a political slanging match (although in a strange way it is that too) – it raises in an acute and bitter form fundamental questions about modes of historical understanding and methods of interpretation, and fundamental questions about the moral and political responsibility of the historian.

The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to this partly hidden debate; to put forward in the form of theses (rather than of extended and documented historical arguments) a critique of both positions in the controversy; and to suggest that the terms of debate can be and should be transcended. It is not an easy subject to write about.