Business Class Radicals & Holocaust Denial

As Michael Connor pointed out on Quadrant Online (“Business Class Radicals”), an Australian intellectual ‘2^nd Eleven’ will be speaking at a symposium on ‘The History Wars Revisited’ at the Free University of Berlin in October.

On the surface it appears that the participants will be rehearsing their tired old lamentations about how some beastly people on the right dared to question the various mythic confabulations surrounding the history of indigenous Australians.

However, beneath the surface, they may actually be contributing to what amounts to a sinister form of Holocaust denial associated with the ongoing Historikerstreit (‘historians’ dispute’) over the nature and direction of German history that first convulsed Germany in the late 1980s.

Those interested in this frequently vicious ‘History War’ can consult Forever In the Shadow of Hitler? (New York: Humanities Press, 1993). This provides an extensive selection of “original documents of the Historikerstreit, the controversy…