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Michael Stürmer
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Michael Stürmer (born September 29, 1938) is a German historian.
Born in Kassel, Germany, Stürmer received his education in history, philosophy and languages at the University of Marburg, the Free University of Berlin and the London School of Economics. From 1973 to 2003, he held a professorship at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and at various times has been a guest lecturer at the Sorbonne, Harvard University, and the Institute for Advanced Study. In the 1980s, Stürmer worked as an advisor to the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
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Michael Stürmer (born September 29, 1938) is a German historian.
Born in Kassel, Germany, Stürmer received his education in history, philosophy and languages at the University of Marburg, the Free University of Berlin and the London School of Economics. From 1973 to 2003, he held a professorship at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and at various times has been a guest lecturer at the Sorbonne, Harvard University, and the Institute for Advanced Study. In the 1980s, Stürmer worked as an advisor to the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. At present, Stürmer is chief correspondent for the newspaper Die Welt, published by the Axel Springer AG publishing group.
Stürmer's specializes in the history of the Second Reich. Stürmer began his career on the left in the 1960s, but during the course of the 1970s, he moved to the right. The turning point in Stürmer's politics occurred in 1974 when the SPD Landes government of Hesse attempted to abolish history as subject in the Hesse educational system with the replacement being "social studies". Stürmer played a major role in campaigning for the defeat of SPD government in the 1974 elections. Starting in the early 1980s Stürmer became a well known figure in the Federal Republic with frequent contributions to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, his editorship of a series of popular book series entitled "The Germans and their Nation" and holding a series of lectures to the general public. Stürmer argues that "the future is won by those who coin concepts and interpret the past". In a series of his essays published in book form in 1986 as Dissonanzen des Fortschritts (The Dissonances of Progress), Stürmer claimed that democracy in West Germany can not be taken for granted; that though Germany does have a democratic past, the present system of the Federal Republic was created in response to past totalitarian experiences of both left and right; that geography has played a key role in limiting the options of German governments; and that given the Cold War, the ideas of neutrality for the Federal Republic or reunification with East Germany were not realistic.
Stürmer is best known for his advocacy of a geographical interpretation of German history. In a geographical variant of the Sonderweg theory, Stürmer has argued that what he regards as Germany’s precarious geographical situation in Central Europe has been the deciding factor in the course of German history, and that to cope with this matter has left successive German rulers no other choice but to engage in authoritarian government. In Stürmer's opinion, the "belligerence" of the Reich was due to a complex interplay of Germany's location in the "middle of Europe" surrounded by enemies and "democratic" forces in the domestic sphere. Stürmer has asserted that confronted with dangers from a revanchist France and aggressive Russia that Germany as the "country in the middle" could not afford the luxury of democracy. Stürmer has argued that Imperial Germany was more democratic and less "Bonapartist" as historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler have claimed, and that these democratic tendencies came to the fore during the Revolution of 1918-1919. In Stürmer's view, it was too much democracy rather than too little that led to the end of the Kaiserreich as the "restless Reich" collapsed because of its internal contradictions under the stress of World War I.
In the mid-1980s, Stürmer sat on a committee together with Thomas Nipperdey and Klaus Hildebrand in charge of vetting the publications issued by the Research Office of the West German Ministry of Defense. The committee attracted some controversy when it refused to publish a hostile biography of Gustav Noske.
During the late 1980s, Stürmer played a prominent role in the Historikerstreit, and was much criticized by left-wing historians for an essay he wrote entitled "Land Without History" published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on April 25, 1986, in which Stürmer claimed that Germans lacked a history to be proud of, and called for a "positive evaluation" of German history as a way of building national pride. In Stürmer's view, what was needed was a campaign by the government, the media and historians to create a "positive view" of German history. In Stürmer's opinion, the Third Reich was a major block towards a positive view of the German past, and what was needed was a focus on the broad sweep of German history as opposed to the 12 years of Nazi Germany as a way of creating a national identity that all Germans could take pride in. Stürmer wrote the "loss of orientation" caused by the absence of a German national identity led to a "search for identity". In Stürmer's opinion, this search was crucial because of West Germany was "now once more a focal point in the global civil war waged against democracy by the Soviet Union". Because of the "loss of orientation", Stürmer argued that West Germans were not standing up well to the "campaign of fear and hate carried into the Federal Republic from the East and welcomed within like a drug". Stürmer claimed that Konrad Adenauer's policy in the 1950s of not prosecuting those responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes during the Third Reich was a wise one, and that it was a huge mistake to begin prosecutions in the 1970s as it destroyed any prospect of positive feelings about the German past. Writing in 1986, Stürmer complained that recent opinion polls showed 80% of Americans were proud of being American, that 50% of the British were proud of being British, and 20% of West Germans were proud of being German, and argued until national pride could be restored, West Germany could not play an effective part in the Cold War.
At the 1986 Römerberg Colloquia (a gathering of intellectuals held annually in Frankfurt), Stürmer argued that Germans had a destructive "obsession with their guilt", which he complained led to a lack of a positive sense of German national identity. Likewise, Stürmer argued that the legacy of 1960s radicalism was an over-emphasis on the Nazi period in German history. Stürmer called for Sinnstiftung, to give German history a meaning that would allow for a positive national identity. At the colloquia, Stürmer stated: "We cannot live by making our past...into a permanent source of endless guilt feelings". At the same gathering, Stürmer spoke of "the deadly idiocies of the victors of 1918", which led to a loss of a German national identity, and led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic as Germans confronted with the crises of modernity without a positive national identity, opted for the Nazi solution. Stürmer complained that "as Stalin's men sat in judgment in Nuremberg" proved that what he regards as the self-destructive German obsession with Nazi guilt was the work of outsiders serving their own aims.
Many of Stürmer's critics in the Historikerstreit such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka accused Stürmer of attempting to white-wash the Nazi past, a charge Stürmer vehemently rejected. Jürgen Habermas accused Stürmer of believing that "a pluralism of values and interests leads, when there is no longer any common ground...sooner or later to social civil war". Hans-Ulrich Wehler called Stürmer's work "a strident declaration of war against a key element of the consensus upon which the socio-political life of this second republic has rested heretofore". The particular paragraphs for which Stürmer was being attacked by Habermas and Wehler was: Stürmer's defenders such as the American historian Jerry Muller argued that Wehler and Habermas were guilty of misquoting Stürmer, and of unjustly linking him with Ernst Nolte as a sort of guilt by association argument.
The British historian, Richard J. Evans who was one of Stürmer's fiercer critics accused Stürmer of being an apparent believer that:
Along the same lines, Evans criticized Stürmer for his emphasis on the modernity and totalitarianism of National Socialism, the role of Hitler, and the discontinuities between the Imperial, Weimar and Nazi periods. In Evans's view, the exact opposite was the case with National Socialism as a badly disorganized, anti-modern movement with deep roots in the German past, and the role of Hitler much smaller then one Stürmer credited him with. Evans accused Stürmer of having no real interest in the collapse of Weimar, and only using the Nazi Machtergreifung as a way of making contemporary political points. Evans denounced Stürmer for writing a laudatory biography of Otto von Bismarck, which he felt marked a regression to the Great man theory of history and an excessive focus on political history. In Evans's opinion, a social historical approach with the emphasis on society was a better way of understanding the German past. In his 1989 book about the Historikerstreit, In Hitler's Shadow, Evans stated that he believed that the exchanges during the Historikerstreit had destroyed Stürmer's reputation as a serious historian.
Much of Stürmer's work since the Historikerstreit has been concerned with creating the sense of national identity he feels Germans are missing. In his 1992 book, Die Grenzen der Macht, Stürmer suggested that German history be viewed in the long-term starting from the 17th century to the 20th century to find the "national and trans-national traditions and patterns worth cherishing". Stürmer argued that traditions were tolerance for religious minorities, civic values, federalism and striking the fine balance between the peripheries and the center. In a July 1992 interview, Stürmer called his historical work a "bid to prevent Hitler remaining the final, unavoidable object of German history, or indeed its one and only starting point".
Stürmer's latest book is a biography of the Russian Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin that is due to be published later in 2008.
Endnotes
Work
- Putin And The Rise Of Russia The Country That Came In From The Cold, London: Orion 2008 ISBN 9780297855095
- "Balance from Beyond the Sea" pages 145-153 from The Washington Quarterly, Volume 24, Number 3, Summer 2001
- The German Empire, 1870-1918, New York : Random House, 2000 ISBN 0679640908.
- (Editor) The German Century London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999 ISBN 0297825240.
- Co-edited with Robert D. Blackwill Allies Divided : Transatlantic Policies for the Greater Middle East, Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT Press, 1997 ISBN 0262522446.
- Contributor to For the Friends of Nature and Art : the Garden Kingdom of Prince Franz von Anhalt-Dessau in Age of Enlightenment, Ostfildern-Ruit : G. Hatje ; New York : Distribution in the US DAP, Distributed Art Publishers, 1997 ISBN 3775707158.
- Dissonanzen des Fortschritts, Piper Verleg, Munich, 1986.
- Die Reichsgründung : deutscher Nationalstaat und europäisches Gleichgewicht im Zeitalter Bismarcks, München : Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984 ISBN 3423045043.
- Review of Meisterwerke Fränkischer Möbelkunst: Carl Maximilian Mattern by Hans-Peter Trenschel & Wolf Christian von der Mülbe pages 565-567 from Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 47 Bd., H. 4, 1984.
- Review of Les Meubles Français du XVIIIe siècle by Pierre Verlet pages 573-576 from Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 47 Bd., H. 4, 1984.
- Review of Gebrauchssilber des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts by Alain Gruber pages 289-291 from Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 47 Bd., H. 2 1984.
- Review of Artists and Artisans in Delft. A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century by John Michael Montias pages 614-615 from The Business History Review, Volume 57, No. 4, Winter, 1983.
- Das ruhelose Reich : Deutschland 1866-1918, Berlin : Severin und Siedler, 1983 ISBN 3886800512.
- Die Weimarer Republik : belagerte Civitas, Königstein/Ts. : Verlagsgruppe Athenäum, Hain, Scriptor, Hanstein, 1980 ISBN 3445120641.
- “An Economy of Delight: Court Artisans of the Eighteenth Century” pages 496-528 from The Business History Review, Volume 53, No. 4 Winter 1979.
- “'Bois des Indes' and the Economics of Luxury Furniture in the Time of David Roentgen” pages 799-807 from The Burlington Magazine, Volume 120, No. 909, December 1978.
- Review of Industrialisierung und Aussenpolitik: Preussen-Deutschland und das Zarenreich von 1860 bis 1890 by Horst Müller-Link pages 775-776 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 50, No. 4, December 1978.
- “Caesar's Laurel Crown--the Case for a Comparative Concept” pages 203-207 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 49, No. 2 June 1977.
- Regierung und Reichstag im Bismarckstaat 1871-1880 : Cäsarismus oder Parlamentarismus, Düsseldorf : Droste, 1974
- Bismarck und die preussisch-deutsche Politik, 1871-1890, München : Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1970.
- (Editor) Das kaiserliche Deutschland; Politik und Gesellschaft, 1870-1918, Düsseldorf, Droste 1970.
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