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

The Use of History to
Legitimise Political Power:
The Case of Germany
97
Martin Sabrow
Throughout the twentieth century, described by Eric Hobsbawm as
an age of extremes, claims to historical legitimacy played a pre-eminent
role and the relationship between politics and history remained
intertwined and delicate. This was very much the case in Germany.
During the Nazi period and in the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), politics determined the lines of historical interpretation and
the ruling political elites prescribed and stipulated which historical
narratives were permitted and which were forbidden. The GDR
dictatorship based its claim of legitimacy on a so-called scientific
approach to politics and the ability to understand and follow the
rules of history. The national socialist movement based its attraction
and its political triumph on the ideological concept of an organic
modernity which would describe the future as a return to a better
past and emphasise continuity from Frederick II of Prussia to Hitler
and the Third Reich, or from the Saxonian Emperor Henry to Himmler.
Hitler seized power deploying a political rhetoric that attempted
to regain the past, own national recovery and return the country to
Germanic glory and a rebirth of a sense of being German. This
programme routinely involved the political instrumentalisation of
history. In the spring of 1933, the Bavarian Minister for Education
and Cultural affairs, Hans Schemm, declared to lecturers at the University
of Munich: “From now on it is no longer your task to find out
if something is true, but if it accords with the beliefs of the National
Socialist government.”
The politically dominated historiography of the GDR established a
whole network of institutions to approve topics, theses, findings
Martin Sabrow is Professor of History at the University of Potsdam,
Germany. He is since 2004 the Director of the “Zentrum für Zeithistorische
Forschung” in Potsdam. He studied History, German and
Political Science at the University of Kiel and Marburg. Professor
Sabrow is an expert in the history of the GDR and he has worked on
the issue of ‘Power and Legitimation in the 20th century’.