After the Second World War, the `conservative revolution' ceased to exist. Today, this culture has abandoned its radical tendencies and adapted itself to a more conventional conservatism. But his place within this current is that of an epigone, in a time in which it has lost any greatness or power to fascinate and its apocalyptic appeal rings like a distant echo of the past. A former student of Martin Heidegger, he belongs to an intellectual tradition of nationalism and conservatism that unquestionably possesses, from Treitschke to Meinecke and from Heidegger to Schmitt, its titres de noblesse. Perceived as a left historian by many observers at the beginning of the 1960s, when he published Three Faces of Fascism,7 he has taken the lead among German conservative historians since the mid-1980s, with the outbreak of the Historikerstreit. Within this anti-communist wave, Nolte appears as a forerunner. In the dock is the Russian Revolution, approached in different ways but always interpreted as the first step towards modern totalitarianism. Beyond their methodological divergences, their battles as `engaged' historians converge on an essential point: anti-communism raised to the status of an historical paradigm, a hermeneutic key to the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the exchange of letters between Nolte and Furet6 on the one hand and Courtois' preface to the French edition of Nolte's The European Civil War on the other hand reveals a host of `elective affinities' and forges a sort of united front in the present historical and political debate.
In fact, they belong neither to the same national context nor to the same intellectual generation furthermore, the quality of their works is very uneven. These historians cannot be lumped together without an explanation.
Praised by Furet in a long footnote to The Passing of an Illusion, the once unpopular scholar is now highly regarded in France, where several of his books have been published (most recently his highly controversial Der europaische Burgerkrieg, The European Civil War).5 It reached its zenith in 1995 with the publication of The Passing of an Illusion by Francois Furet.1 Two years later came The Black Book of Communism, an anthology edited by Stephane Courtois, whose aim was to show that communism was much more murderous than Nazism.2 On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the old school of Cold War historians seems to have rediscovered its youth, as The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes (1990) and The Soviet Tragedy by Martin Malia (1994) show.3 In this context Ernst Nolte, a conservative historian who had been isolated since the Historikerstreit of the mid-1980s, when Jurgen Habermas and many German historians accused him of rehabilitating the Nazi past, suddenly achieved a new legitimacy.4 The old revisionism became acceptable, and even fashionable. How, then, do we reclaim the tradition of communism after revisionism? As Traverso says, "the Stalinist legacy, made up of a mountain of ruins and dead, did not erase the origins of communism in the tradition of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century rationalist humanism."Īs many analysts have observed with great astonishment, the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not usher in a more ‘objective', less passionately and ideologically oriented approach to the history of the twentieth century, but rather a new wave of anti-communism: a ‘militant', fighting anti-communism, all the more paradoxical inasmuch as its enemy had ceased to exist.
Traverso sees that these historians placed the conflict between fascism and communism as the central conflict of the twentieth century - yet the ultimate aim of this was to remove communism as a force from the present day. In this essay by Enzo Traverso (taken from History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism ), he takes aim at Nolte, Furet and a host of other revisionists who studied Communism in the twentieth century. Why did the revisionist historians gain such fame in the 1980s and '90s? What is the place of historical scholarship today? And how do we reconstruct a Marxist historical scholarship after revisionism? With the recent passing of Germany's most acclaimed revisionist historian Ernst Nolte, the question of how we assess the revisionist moment has reappeared.
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