ABSTRACT
The question of ‘historicization’ has come to be central to debates about the historiography of Nazism, not least the ‘historians’ controversy’ (Historikerstreit). The Historikerstreit involved a polemical debate chiefly among German historians and intellectuals about how or whether the National Socialist era could be written into general history, and how different regimes were to be evaluated in relative terms (Stalinism versus Hitlerism, etc.). In a commentary on this debate Friedländer summed up the objectives of historicization as the attempt to make the study of the Nazi era ‘similar to that of any other historical phenomenon’, without pre-set limitation on the questions that can be asked and the methodology used:
It should be understood that the Nazi era cannot be judged only from the viewpoint of its catastrophic end, and that many aspects of life and social development during that era were not necessarily linked to bolstering the regime and its aims.
(1987: 313)