Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 50, Number 3, 2004, pp. 425-433. © 2004 Department of History, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd. An Australian “Historikerstreit”? Review Article ANDREW G. BONNELL AND MARTIN CROTTY History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland Frontier Conflict. The Australian Experience. Edited by Bain Attwood and S.G. Foster (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), $39.95, pb. Historical Records of Australia Series III Despatches and Papers Relating to the History of Tasmania, Vol. VIII, Tasmania, January-December 1829. Edited by Peter Chapman (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003), $135.00, hb. The History Wars. By Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003), $29.95, pb. Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Edited by Robert Manne (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2003), $29.95, pb. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. By Keith Windschuttle (Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press, 2002), $49.95, pb. In the mid-1980s, a major controversy between German historians took place, which spilled over the usual boundaries of academic debate such as conferences and slow exchanges in learned journals. The academic debate dealing with the place of Nazism and the Holocaust in German history became a much broader media and public event, which was widely considered to carry significant implications for the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany, and for Germans’ relationship to their past. Leading German historians, such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, joined social theorist Jürgen Habermas in condemning what they saw as emergent “apologetic tendencies” among conservative and right-wing historians, whom they accused of seeking to minimize German responsibility for the Holocaust through relativizing Nazi genocide or seeking explanations for it outside German history. Right-wing or conservative historians, such as Erlangen historian Michael Stürmer, who had been a speechwriter for the conservative Christian Democrat Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in turn criticized left-wing historians for their rejection of any positive concept of national identity. 1 The battle among the historians (or “Historikerstreit”) took place in a particular context. The centre-right coalition government of Helmut Kohl had come to power in late 1982, with Kohl promising an “intellectual and moral turnaround” (geistig- moralische Wende). 2 Kohl campaigned against the alleged hegemony of the post-1968 1 The principal texts of the “Historikerstreit” are collected in “Historikerstreit”. Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich, 1987). The “Historikerstreit” generated an enormous body of writing. The most useful treatments in English are Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past. History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge MA and London, 1988); Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow. West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (London, 1989). 2 Geistig can also be translated as “spiritual”.