ABSTRACT
Reviewing concentration camp research in 1998, the German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky concluded that "historiographical academic discourse avoids irritation and destruction of historical meaning by rigidly concentrating on facts. Skeptical against large-scale interpretations it tends to focus on research of single case studies." The notion of the Holocaust's singularity played a crucial role in the tumultuous debates of the early 1980s. The effect of historical verisimilitude depends on successfully merging past historical contexts with present historical writing by way of ordinary prose composition. The historians' initial unwillingness to inquire about the Holocaust reflects a similar reluctance in West Germany's public sphere. The silence of the postwar era ended in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the legacy of the Nazi crimes and the question of postwar German anti-Semitism was raised through a number of scandals and trials. In mid-1986, the philosopher Jurgen Habermas delivered a frontal attack against a number of well-established conservative historians.
