Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Historians in Germany have not always been the victims of the
politicisation of history; they have oftentimes promoted it. After
1918 many German historians were only too eager to join the
scientific front in the fight against the disgraceful Treaty of Versailles.
During the Third Reich, the politicisation of history allowed
the setting up of the well funded Empire Institute for the History of
the New Germany, directed by the Nazi historian Walter Frank. During
World War II, the concept of a fighting historiography found
much resonance with historians who regarded themselves as soldiers
of thought. Even historians who generally stuck to their scholarly
principles contributed to the criminal memorandum, General
Plan East, which proposed to Himmler a gigantic resettlement of the
conquered regions of Poland and the Soviet Union. In the GDR,
the regime could count on a large group of communist and antifascist
historians who declared their approval of the establishment
of a new historiographical discipline that would demolish the seemingly
outdated wall between history and politics. The intention was
to help history find its desired vocation and thereby to enable
politics to act scientifically. Even today many of us, at least when
working as contemporary historians, serve on commissions and
advisory boards with political origins.
Historians may thereby be required to perform as both participants
and observers at one and the same time. Historians, for example,
may be consulted when memorial sites are being established or
they may be invited to join commissions investigating the involvement
of the German Foreign Office in national socialist crimes or
discovering the origins of gold deposited in Swiss banks. Thus it is
not enough to say that at any period there may have been historians
who betrayed the essential principles of objectivity and scholarliness.
Far more disturbing than personal and professional corruption,
is the evidence that the character of the science of history itself
has been malleable to the changing politics of the twentieth century.
National socialism not only destroyed science by politicisation but
also by demanding political utility and even instigating scientific
innovations in the fields of biology, medicine and historiography. In
the Germany of the 1930s, ethnic and even racial concepts with all
their immoral implications and even fatal consequences influenced
the transition from a history of state and institution to a history of nation
history by focusing on ethnic cultural and social phenomena.
99 Martin Sabrow