The problem of normalization in three debats: Historization, Historikerstreit and Goldhagen

Abstract

In a context of historical revisionism is expected to have dispute about risks of political resignification on the issues discussed. However, when the object of discussion is political violence, it is usually more problematic challenge certain canon, given their moral burden in other areas of discursive validity. We call here “normalization” to the mode of “relativization” or resignification of certain collective guilt in relation to the political violence. Normalization is a discursive strategy that seeks to transcend their original intention of historiographical revision by winning the public area in its significant multiplicity. We will rebuild in this article three contexts where we can identify different modes of normalization. The first context concerns the debate between Broszat and Friedländer about the Historicization from Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday). The second one enroll in the Historikerstreit or complaint of historians, and begins with a public debate in which Habermas responds to an Article of conservative historian Ernst Nolte, that compared Nazi Germany to the Soviet Stalinism in the context of the Cold War. Finally we deal with the debate on the bestseller by Daniel Goldhagen, widely echoed in the German public sphere, where an exaggerated “culturalization” of German antisemitism as the sole cause of the Holocaust stands out.