Those who desire to envision history not as a mythologem but rather in its essential context are forced to a central conclusion: If history, in all its darkness and its horrors, but also in its confusing novelty, is to have meaning for coming generations, this meaning must be the liberation from collectivist thinking.

Source, in full

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article entitled “Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will” (“The past that will not pass: A speech that could be written but not delivered”), (June 6, 1986), Reprinted in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Translated by James Knowlton and Truett Cates, New Jersey: Humanities Press, (1993), pp. 22.

More quotes by Ernst Nolte

Bakunin went so far as to see in ‘Marx’ ‘authoritarian communism’ only the mirror miage of the reactionary Bismarck empire.

Marxism, Fascism, Cold War (1982)

As the classic form of fascism, national socialism also reaches Inside through its deepest roots, though in a disguised and dissimulating fashion, into the realm of the subversive-utopian element of ‘man’.

Marxism, Fascism, Cold War (1982)

On the contrary, for the doctrine of totalitarianism the ‘liberal constitutional state’ is the self-evident norm, from which Marxism and Fascism (or national socialism) are distinguishable as essentially identical, namely, totalitarian phenomena.

Marxism, Fascism, Cold War (1982)

National Socialism could not be deduced exclusively from a reaction to the Bolshevik movement, that on the contrary there existed, even before the war, a brutal German nationalism, and that explicit intentions of extermination of the Jews were even expressed in the program of one party.

Fascism & Communism (2004)

All Ernst Nolte quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ernst Nolte (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.

Share this quote

Source, in full

More quotes by Ernst Nolte

Attribution