German Yearbook of Contemporary History

A Slap in the Face for the Domestic Intelligence Services

In July 2020 some startling news made the rounds in the German media: the Bayerische Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Bavarian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution—the Bavarian branch of Germany's domestic intelligence agency) was having to "pulp" its report for 2019, which it had officially presented in April.¹ What had happened? The Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt e.V. (ZFI—Contemporary History Research Center Ingolstadt), which had been founded in 1981, had been mentioned for the first time in the intelligence agency's report under the heading of "other right-wing extremist organizations." The report stated that the ZFI was publishing speeches that conveyed "antisemitic content and glorified the Nazi period" and that "ZFI events" were attended by "individual speakers who expressed extreme right-wing sentiments or who had already appeared at events staged by other [End Page 171] extreme right-wing organizations." Furthermore, statements in the same vein by leading members of the ZFI had come to light.² According to its charter, the ZFI, an association based in Ingolstadt in Upper Bavaria, pursues the objectives of strengthening personal development (Bildung), education, "tolerance," and international understanding "by supporting academic work on contemporary history."³ Needless to say, the ZFI was not prepared to let these accusations stand. It therefore sued the Free State of Bavaria for an injunction before the administrative court in Munich—and won. The court left no doubt that the ZFI "had knowingly made appearances in far-right extremist historical revisionist spheres pertinent to the protection of the constitution." And although it conceded that the assessment of the Bayerische Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz was "not per se objectionable," no "concrete indications of ambitions" running counter to the liberal democratic basic order of the Federal Republic of Germany could be proven, and thus the ZFI's infringement of basic rights mentioned in the Verfassungsschutz's report could not be justified.⁴

This judgment was music to the ears of the ZFI, which attempted to reinterpret it as a kind of democratic clean bill of health (known in German as a Persilschein)⁵ and pompously announced that "on the basis of the judgment, the institute will now endeavor to resolutely continue its lecturing and publication work in a way consistent with its objectives."⁶ While the "defeat for the Bavarian Verfassungsschutz"⁷ was also construed as a "flop for the CSU spooks"⁸ and smugly received by certain commentators with gratification and blatant schadenfreude, others, such as Bayerische Rundfunk (BR—Bavarian TV and radio), rubbed their eyes in disbelief. After all, BR commented, it had been known for a long time that the ZFI was one of the "leading stooges of German revisionist history."⁹ The ZFI had not enjoyed so much attention in a long time, and journalists who looked a little closer found a surprising link. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper wrote, for example, that "the Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt" had been established long ago "as a counterproject to the highly esteemed Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, which has been investigating the history of the National Socialist period since 1949."¹⁰

How a history association with a niche existence in (New) Right echo chambers came to be connected with an internationally recognized non-university research institute certainly requires some explanation. One attempt to shed some light on this takes us back to the decade from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s when contemporary history was not as firmly established as a separate discipline as it is today, neither in academia nor in the political and public domains,¹¹ and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ—Institute for Contemporary [End Page 172] History) had yet to undergo some important stages in its academic and organizational development. At the same time, the question of a (West) German identity and the place of National Socialism in the country's history were still being fiercely debated; in the process the Holocaust was also increasingly coming into political and societal focus as a constituent element of German history, resulting in a new culture of remembrance¹²—or historical culture (Geschichtskultur), as it was starting to be known.¹³

The ZFI was an offshoot of this robust mainstream academic and nonacademic interest in history, which for several years enjoyed an astonishing degree of publicity. In addition to providing a subject for discussion at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, it also induced the Federal Archives, an organizationally more established institution, to undertake noteworthy action. Admittedly, the temporary success of the ZFI in the early 1980s had less to do with the research work being done there than with the revisionist unease (firmly anchored in certain segments of West German society) surrounding twentieth-century German history, which repeatedly erupted into heated debates¹⁴ (not by chance usually triggered by references to the National Socialist period). In addition to marginalized right-wing extremist milieus,¹⁵ it primarily involved associations (known as Landsmannschaften) of Germans who had been expelled from former German or German-speaking territories after World War II; nationalist-conservative forces, which were also represented in the conservative Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU)/Christlich-Demokratische Union (CDU) political parties; and influential representatives of the generation who had personally experienced the Nazi era and, prior to 1945, had worn the uniforms of the Wehrmacht or the Waffen SS. The ZFI likewise took root in this heterogeneous soil, which comprised extremist and conservative-democratic elements in equal measure. Furthermore, it benefited from a longing, widespread in the final decade of the Bonn Republic, to regain a "lost normality."¹⁶

The ZFI's significance did not originate with the organization as such, but rather stemmed from its being part of a still under-researched informal network of institutions, organizations, short-lived associations, and publications that grew significantly in the late 1970s and early 1980s and posed a far-right challenge to the liberal basic order of the Federal Republic of Germany, as indeed it did to the CDU and the CSU, the mainstream parties of the center right.¹⁷ Examples include the Studienzentrum Weikersheim, established in 1979;¹⁸ the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich, headed by Armin Mohler; the political party Die Republikaner, led by Franz Schönhuber; and the short-lived "Deutschlandrat" (Council of Germany), all of which attempted [End Page 173] to permanently shift the axis of West German conservatism to the right.¹⁹ Key figures such as Mohler, Schönhuber, Hellmut Diwald, and Hans Filbinger functioned as human "nodes" or interfaces in this network, and the contemporary history narrative played a central role for the majority of stakeholders. Therefore, the ZFI was no less than a revisionist-apologist stooge in the guise of a history association committed to academic principles and a pier of the "bridge between conservatism and right-wing extremism."²⁰

This essay will focus on the three-way relationship between the Institute for Contemporary History, the German Federal Archives, and the ZFI against the backdrop of the "return of history"²¹ in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the ZFI clearly differentiated itself from such established institutions, it is no coincidence that it shares the same initials as the IfZ in the reverse order. The kind of anti-establishment sentiments (however "the establishment" is defined) often found on the far right were also a central motive of the ZFI's founders.²² The question, then, is what conditions allowed a history association founded by outsiders in the Bavarian provinces to boost its own status, at least for a period of time, to become established as a double interface between academia and politics and between national conservatism and right-wing extremism? And how did the historical profession react to the revisionist challenges from this murky undergrowth of civil society? The documents from the collections of the Institute for Contemporary History and the Federal Archives presented in this essay hold the answers. At the same time, these documents offer a first glimpse behind the scenes of an astonishingly long-lived history association that repeatedly produced politically explosive material,²³ an initiative that in a certain sense also typifies the "age of fracture,"²⁴ characterized by a loss of, and search for, meaning.

Alfred Schickel, Hellmut Diwald, and the ZFI

The ZFI was launched in 1981. There is no consensus about the exact date; we are dealing with a phase of uncertain latency, about which little was known until now.²⁵ The ZFI itself alleges that it was founded on November 21²⁶—not without reason, as will be shown—while the Verfassungsschutz dates its inception to July 1.²⁷ However, correspondence bearing a May date and the letterhead "Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt" has also been found.²⁸ In fact, the founding phase of the ZFI lasted nearly a year and only concluded when the Ingolstadt District Court entered it in the register of associations in May/June 1982.²⁹

It can be assumed that the founding group met to begin organizational [End Page 174] preparations in early summer 1981. At the end of August, Alfred Schickel drew attention to the ZFI with a letter campaign in which he appealed to recipients to support this new "academic institution of school and university historians," either as "active staff members or as sponsors," and outlined the following agenda arising from the "need for an unconditional illumination of contemporary German history."³⁰ The ZFI, he wrote, had "espoused the goal" of collecting archival material and statements from contemporary witnesses and of preparing a program of lectures, seminars, and publications, in order to ensure the "provision of unbiased and factual information for all interested parties" and to contribute to the "clarification of controversial issues of contemporary history."

Leading members of the ZFI never grew tired of emphasizing that the first maxim of the history association was "the obligation to serve only the academic illumination of the most recent history and to exclude any biased partisanship or interpretation." According to a voice from later years, it was a matter of "shedding light on the past," and this "whether or not the findings suit the traditional view of history of prevailing opinion leaders."³¹ In the early 1980s this methodologically simplistic understanding of history, informed by an ostensibly naive historism, had few advocates among scholars. Furthermore, a look at both the selection of topics, which was often motivated by the members' own biographies, and the ZFI's disregard for academic standards in its work shows that the association's purpose was primarily political rather than scholarly. A characteristic approach of the ZFI was to examine historical events about which its members were in ideologically induced denial, and which cast dark shadows over the German nation and German identity. The questions Schickel included in the invitation to support the ZFI can barely be read any other way. For example: "How many Gypsies died under Hitler? How many people do the Poles mourn on account of the Germans?"³² The skeptical and relativizing subtext is hard to ignore.

Schickel's appeal, launched on August 27, was followed by the first ZFI "conference" on November 20 and 21, 1981, at the Ingolstadt Bavaria hotel. Approximately sixty participants attended the conference, which culminated in the formative members meeting.³³ The key players were Alfred Schickel and Hellmut Diwald, both historians with the dubious reputation of propagating a nationalistic-revisionist view of history. The former was elected as chair with thirty-three votes and one abstention; the latter as deputy chair with the same result. They were assisted by Ludwig Blanck-Conrady as second deputy chair, Hans Joachim Kloeppel as treasurer, and Wolfgang Tandetzke as secretary, the last of whom would later also become managing director of the ZFI.³⁴ Among [End Page 175] the leading co-founders of the institute, the name of the well-known CSU politician Alfred Seidl often crops up.³⁵ Seidl had defended the major war criminals Rudolf Heß and Hans Frank at the Nuremberg trials, and until his death in 1993 stayed in secret contact with Gerhard Frey, who, as the owner of the National-Zeitung newspaper and chair of the Deutsche Volksunion party, was a key right-wing extremist figure in the Federal Republic of Germany. Indeed, it was Seidl who gave the opening lecture at the first ZFI "conference," in which he enthusiastically shared his memories as a "defense lawyer in Nuremberg 1945/46." However, the CSU politician was more of a figurehead than an activist; he held no office and it is doubtful whether he ever joined the ZFI as a member, even though he published in one of its series.³⁶

Both Schickel's and Diwald's lifelong obsession was their lost homeland: the Sudetenland.³⁷ Diwald was born in Schattau in 1924, although his family moved to Nuremberg before World War II. In 1952, in the neighboring town of Erlangen, he submitted his dissertation about nineteenth-century historical realism; his supervisor was Hans-Joachim Schoeps.³⁸ Six years later, Diwald qualified as a professor at the Friedrich Alexander University with a paper on Wilhelm Dilthey, and from 1965 onward he taught there as an adjunct professor of medieval and modern history.³⁹ He gained a certain degree of prominence, above all through his 1969 biography of Wallenstein⁴⁰ and through numerous TV appearances in the 1970s.

Unlike Diwald, Schickel had experienced the expulsion from the Sudetenland first-hand, a trauma that he sought to process throughout his life, including in his publications.⁴¹ His parents had owned a farm in Slabisch, near Aussig an der Elbe, where Schickel was born in 1933 as the second of four sons. Already dispossessed in October 1945, his family had to perform forced labor before they were deported to Bavaria in July 1946. Eventually the Schickels found accommodation close to Eichstätt, where Alfred went to school. He then gained a scholarship to the Jesuit St. Blasien college in the Black Forest, which he attended until 1954. Upon finishing school, he studied history and philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Subsequently he worked as a prefect at the Catholic Canisius seminary and, despite having no teaching qualifications, as a teacher of history and social studies at a Catholic girls' school in Ingolstadt. At the same time, he worked on a dissertation in ancient history, with which he would earn a doctorate under Siegfried Lauffer in 1966.⁴²

Admittedly Schickel's passion was not antiquity but contemporary history, and he indulged this passion alongside his day job at the school by publishing essays, reviews, and newspaper articles, publications that primarily dealt with [End Page 176] the prehistory and history of the Nazi regime and the history of World War II. Yet he certainly did not "predominantly" serve right-wing extreme media from the very beginning;⁴³ rather, he published in journals such as Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht or Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. From 1968 he also regularly wrote for the FAZ newspaper, where he reviewed political books, including weighty titles such as Hitlers Weltanschauung by Eberhard Jäckel or Ludwig Volk's two-volume edition of Akten Kardinal Faulhabers.⁴⁴ Occasionally he also published articles in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper⁴⁵ and produced contributions for Bavarian and Hessian Radio.⁴⁶ By contrast, the editors of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ) rejected his manuscripts more than once.⁴⁷

Schickel joined the CSU and in 1959/60 was chair of the Bavarian section of the conservative student association Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten. It is not surprising, therefore, that he wrote regular contributions for the Bayernkurier newspaper and the Politische Studien journal, published by the CSU-affiliated Hanns Seidel Foundation.⁴⁸ Yet genuinely political or party-political statements were rare; indeed, one would not have imagined that he would take a rather critical attitude to the Radikalenerlass (radicals decree), which was primarily aimed against left-wing activists.⁴⁹ On the one hand, Schickel was an outsider—as the child of an expellee family at a time when a "welcoming culture" was a foreign concept,⁵⁰ as a teacher without pedagogical training, and as an academic with a PhD in ancient history among colleagues whose profession was contemporary history. On the other hand, he succeeded in putting down roots and establishing himself, in particular in the Catholic milieu in Ingolstadt, which adopted and supported him until the final years of his life. Here his marriage in 1968 to the niece of the bishop of Eichstätt, Joseph Schröffer, who later became curial cardinal, may have been an advantage.⁵¹ This also applied to academic journalism, where Schickel was able to make a certain name for himself, and not just at the (right-wing) conservative end of the spectrum of opinion.

However, in the 1970s a process of alienation and radicalization began, which could also be observed in the case of Hellmut Diwald. The reason was not least the new Ostpolitik of the social-liberal coalition, which left many of the expelled Germans and their political representatives voiceless. The coordinates of the politics of memory were also redefined, so that expellee Landsmannschaften were increasingly sidelined or even found themselves confronted with previously barely uttered questions about the responsibility of their own ethnic group for Nazi rule and the war of extermination.⁵² In the sometimes heated public debates, Schickel and Diwald spoke out. The pair jointly led the [End Page 177] ZFI until Diwald's death in 1993, even though Diwald was unable to devote much time to it after his wife became seriously ill.⁵³ While Diwald gave vent to his feelings of anger, frustration, and grief in his Bericht zur Klage der Nation (Report on the Nation's Lament),⁵⁴ Schickel undertook a detailed examination of the Munich Agreement. In 1971 his assessment of the latter was still rather restrained,⁵⁵ but later he openly defended it as lawful in order to lend weight to the Sudeten Germans' claims to their homeland and property.⁵⁶ By then he already counted himself among the "revisionist outsiders" who "had to endure a pluralistic liberal society" and were liable to be suppressed "through censorship or by being blacklisted."⁵⁷ From this position as a (self-proclaimed) fearless fighter against the establishment, the decision to set up an institution like the ZFI was no longer a major step. Later, Schickel repeatedly framed this initiative as an act of resistance against an unscholarly and biased, even distorted, portrayal of recent German history. In his opinion, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich stood pars pro toto for a contemporary historiography in tune with a zeitgeist that served Germany's desire to come to terms with its past.⁵⁸

Historians at a Crossroads

Diwald and Schickel shared a deep unease regarding the shift in German historiography, which in the 1970s was increasingly interpreting the history of the nation(-state) as problematic.⁵⁹ They, on the other hand, were convinced that only a brand of historiography that conferred a German national identity could save the "epoch of contemporaries" from chaos,⁶⁰ and they shared the distrust of many conservatives toward the increasing individualism of West German society.⁶¹ Their way of writing and interpreting history was not without consequence. At the German Historians' Conference in Mannheim in 1976, Diwald called for a uniform, cohesive, and clearly contoured view of history in order to hinder the "disintegration" of West German society.⁶²

Despite harsh criticism, Diwald was not to be deterred, and two years later he upped the ante with his Geschichte der Deutschen (History of the Germans) published by Propyläen. Here he chose an "anti-chronological approach,"⁶³ starting his account with the era of the two world wars and then going back to the early Middle Ages. The year 1945 thus assumed central importance in the book, which can be seen as a milestone in Diwald's journey to the margins of scholarship. He believed that the "historical continuity of the Germans" had been severed, that history was no longer "accepted as an ingenious process," and that historiography had degenerated into a "coming to terms with [End Page 178] the past." Diwald saw the reason for this in a kind of "inner rewiring of the German nation by the victors of World War II," who had "put into practice" a "radical clean sweep" of German history. The "main function in the complete moral vilification of the Germans" had been assigned to Auschwitz, "the German stigma" of the twentieth century. The conclusions resulting from a rejection of these assertions were obvious: the Germans were to be liberated from the shadow of reeducation, their history reclaimed, and the fragmentation of the German nation thus overcome.

With this narrative, which could not be called anything but apologetic, Diwald left the realm of serious scholarship. Back in 1980, the assessment of Hermann Graml, the managing editor of the VfZ, had been that Diwald had "essentially [presented] a political pamphlet disguised as a portrayal of history in order to propagate an extreme form of nationalism."⁶⁴ And years later his colleague Jürgen Zarusky added that, with his theories, Diwald had formed a revisionist "bridgehead in the camp of academic historiography."⁶⁵ And indeed acclaim was not long in coming, both from the New Right⁶⁶ and from the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft, which awarded Diwald the Kulturpreis Wissenschaft in 1979. The laudatory speech was delivered by none other than Alfred Schickel, who emphasized that Diwald had been "the first historian of note to have undertaken to view German history not as a predominantly criminalized past" and had dared "to place question marks where the literature of the victors had passed blanket judgments and other German contemporary historians had timidly remained silent."⁶⁷

This attack on the contemporary history establishment was followed by a second in January 1980 in the FAZ,⁶⁸ in which Schickel wrote of "blocked access, prejudices, profiteers, and political interests." He saw academic German "contemporary history at a crossroads," which he cum grano salis accused of making itself the lackey of Allied propaganda, thus hindering the ascertainment of the truth. Schickel did not provide evidence for these accusations, but instead was unsparing in his attacks on the Institute for Contemporary History. He claimed that the "Munich institute in question" was a "monopoly enterprise" that tolerated no contradiction to its dubious interpretation of National Socialism, which engaged in "impudent withholding of information," and which displayed an exclusionary "manner of dealing with dissenters."⁶⁹

The article, which Schickel had hawked around the media⁷⁰ and which had a long, very personal backstory, caused something of a stir, especially as it appeared prominently in West Germany's leading liberal-conservative newspaper. The Institute for Contemporary History took note of this article "with its primitive insinuations" but refrained from offering a public riposte, citing its [End Page 179] "remarkably poor content."⁷¹ However, the exponents of the New Right saw their chance and could barely believe their luck. As they saw it, the "revisionists […] had broken out of their ghetto" and were now "officially recognized as dialogue partners."⁷²

And that was not the end of the matter. Gerhard Frey's National-Zeitung, the journalistic flagship of German right-wing extremism, called Schickel to the witness box as an allegedly neutral source vouching for the falsification of history.⁷³ The Klüter Blätter, another right-wing extremist mouthpiece, put him on a par with the famous Holocaust denier David Irving.⁷⁴ It is hard to say how close Schickel was to the extreme right or to what extent he shared its convictions. However, he did not resist its attempts to co-opt him, showed no fear of being associated with it, made good use of the journalistic platforms of the organized right, and clearly enjoyed the goodwill shown toward him by these platforms. The encouragement from the far right boosted Schickel's self-confidence as well as his non-academic assumptions and political convictions, which predetermined his selection of topics, lines of argumentation, and findings. However, he did not burn his bridges but instead sought more or less successfully to keep the different worlds in which he moved apart from one another.⁷⁵ He therefore continued to cultivate his roots in the Catholic milieu—he only retired from the chairmanship of the Katholisches Bildungswerk Ingolstadt (Catholic Education Center Ingolstadt) in July 1990 after sixteen years⁷⁶—moved in the network of traditional associations and reservist comradeships closely connected to the Bundeswehr,⁷⁷ and maintained contact with the Ingolstadt CSU, in particular with Horst Seehofer and the city's mayors Peter Schnell and Alfred Lehmann, who for their part saw no reason to distance themselves from Schickel. On the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary in November 2006, Seehofer, at the time federal minister of agriculture, wished the ZFI "a prosperous future,"⁷⁸ and on the same occasion Lehmann honored the history association—and its chairs—with a welcome address, albeit one that brought him harsh criticism.⁷⁹ However, Schickel's balancing act was only partly successful, and its limits had been reached by the late 1990's at the latest, when in several reports the Verfassungsschutz categorized him, as chair of the ZFI, as a revisionist.⁸⁰

The ZFI—A Pier in the "Bridge Spectrum"

But let us return to the founding period of the ZFI. In the years 1980/81, Schickel had every reason to be satisfied. He had found an audience and had been able to place his views in serious print media with a long reach. In this regard, [End Page 180] the FAZ was of particular importance, giving space to this history teacher from the Bavarian provinces⁸¹ surprisingly often during these months as a reviewer in the "political books" section, as the author of articles on history in the political section, and as a contributor to the features section.⁸² Schickel's journalistic success fired his ambitions to play in what might be termed the premier league of contemporary history research, although ultimately he was not up to the challenge. Nevertheless, it seemed to be an opportune moment to create his own independent platform in association with high-profile figures, such as Diwald and Seidl, in order to proactively contribute to shaping the debates over contemporary history and the politics of history at the interface of democratic conservatism, the New Right, and völkisch nationalism. There was major public interest in historical topics, the social-liberal reform policy had lost much of its shine, and the "intellectual-moral turn" was looming.⁸³ In short, the time appeared to be ripe to give the "silent majority"⁸⁴ a voice and to permanently change the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany. Schickel's quest was to initiate "an unbiased discussion of our past" in order to overcome the burden of the "Hitler syndrome," which, according to him, was blocking "the way to an impartial reflection on the most recent German and international history."⁸⁵

Schickel and his colleagues were not prepared to settle for anything less when they created the ZFI. The Institute for Contemporary History served them both as a role model and as a target for their negative projections. Schickel had started by courting the institute, but after a vitriolic correspondence with Ino Arndt, Martin Broszat, and Hermann Graml, his association with it became one of profound aversion.⁸⁶ This association was reflected both in the ZFI's semiofficial name and its letterhead, which likewise bore a striking resemblance to that of the Institute for Contemporary History. In organizational terms, too, the ZFI founders borrowed ideas from the Institute for Contemporary History, deciding in November 1981 to form an "academic board" similar to the latter's academic advisory board.⁸⁷

The board was actually formed in 1982, and it is worth taking a brief look at its four members, none of whom were leading representatives of West German historical scholarship.⁸⁸ It is presumably no coincidence, but rather a result of the weak institutional role of the ZFI, that the two younger members, lawyer and legal historian Wilhelm Brauneder⁸⁹ and historian Wolfdieter Biehl, were lecturers at the University of Vienna, which suggests that no suitable professors could be found at a West German university. The remaining two members were Gerhart Binder, professor of science policy at the School of Education Weingarten and author of fairly successful overviews of recent history,⁹⁰ and [End Page 181] Erich Schwinge, who from the winter semester 1946/47 until his retirement was on the law faculty at the University of Marburg. The presence of two lawyers on the board is presumably not least a reflection of the ZFI's research program, in which questions such as war guilt, war crimes, and international law played an important role. Admittedly, Schwinge was not just any lawyer. Rather he was considered "one of the leading military law experts" of the Third Reich and a "politically motivated criminal" who had been involved in passing down numerous death sentences without even having been a fanatical Nazi.⁹¹ His book Bilanz der Kriegsgeneration (Taking Stock of the War Generation), which appeared in 1978, would have been very much to Schickel's taste, representing as they did the views of an apologist who sought to settle scores and endeavored to endow Germany with a national identity.⁹² Nevertheless, this board, which sat until November 2000 (with the exception of Schwinge, who died in 1994),⁹³ provided little impetus for the work of the ZFI; nor was it suitable as a figurehead, since its members were not famous enough.

In the late 1970s/early 1980s, initiatives like the foundation of the ZFI were not unusual. Another example was the Institut für Demokratieforschung (Institute for Democracy Research) in Würzburg, which was established by the CSU-affiliated sociologist Lothar Bossle and had already published some of Schickel's work.⁹⁴ The contemporary history working group of the Katholisches Bildungswerk Ingolstadt,⁹⁵ which Schickel had led since 1974, provided a certain organizational basis for the new project, as well as a small team of activists. Furthermore, the initiators could count on a core audience with an interest in history who had barely any alternatives in a city lacking academic historical scholarship. Initially the ZFI became visible by staging regular events, including autumn and spring meetings, which were to grow into small conferences. One of the first events in this format was held on November 12/13, 1982 in the conference room of the municipal theater. A welcoming speech by Mayor Schnell was followed by three presentations on World War II, occupation policy, and expulsion. The first was given by former federal minister Theodor Oberländer, who had been repeatedly harshly criticized on account of his Nazi past.⁹⁶ The annual program for 1985/86 included an autumn event on "German-Soviet relations, 1939–1969" and a spring conference on "Germany and her neighbors on the eve of World War II"; in addition, there were several individual presentations and a "symposium" in February 1986 on "contemporary history and television: experiences and opportunities."⁹⁷

Furthermore, Schickel and his ZFI secured the publication of essays, papers, presentations, and smaller studies, which they either placed in obscure venues [End Page 182] or published privately. In 1985, an opportunity apparently arose for the ZFI to publish its own series with Ullstein, or rather Herbig. The person behind this project, which caused "open rebellion" among Ullstein employees and was also anxiously followed by the Institute for Contemporary History, was the publisher Herbert Fleissner.⁹⁸ The latter was connected to Schickel through the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft. Since the ZFI did not see itself as capable of regularly publishing "Materialien zur Zeitgeschichte" (Materials on Contemporary History), this series was neither successful nor long-lived. The volume of source material Aus den Archiven (From the Archives), an unannotated and poorly introduced collection of documents of US origin from the years 1939 to 1945 published by Herbig, with which the ZFI wanted to present itself as an "unbiased institute of historical scholarship," was likewise a flash in the pan.⁹⁹

Although a friend of the institute bragged that the ZFI was well on the way to "growing into a serious rival" to the contemporary history establishment,¹⁰⁰ the reality was different. At its core the ZFI was a one-man operation without an infrastructure. For years its registered office was located in a building next to Schickel's home and it had no further facilities, so it had to rely on event venues owned by the municipality or the Catholic Church. The ZFI's "research associates," of whom there were at least twenty-two, according to an overview from 1985, could hardly reckon with any remuneration for their work, which in any case was generally limited to individual projects. Nevertheless, it is worth taking a brief look at this list.¹⁰¹ A noticeable concentration on the military and diplomatic history of World War II (with contributions by Dietrich Aigner, Hans Heinrich Düsel, Heinz Magenheimer, Timothy P. Mulligan, and Hans Roschmann) comes as no surprise in light of the importance the ZFI attached to these topics. Neither does the inclusion of the history of displacement and expulsion represented by Heinz Nawratil, who would later join the executive board of the ZFI. In contrast, one would not necessarily expect to find Fritz Tobias, the militant publicist on matters concerning the Reichstag fire, among the supporters of the ZFI.¹⁰² Like Schickel, Tobias was an intractable outsider. The ZFI also attracted ethnonationalist German activists such as Andreas Wesserle from Milwaukee,¹⁰³ as well as former Nazis such as Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, SD) employee and SS-Hauptsturmführer Helmut J. Fischer¹⁰⁴ and medical doctor and chemist Ernst-Günther Schenck. To put it bluntly, Schenck was a Nazi perpetrator. He had worked as a food inspector in the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office and as an inspector for troop catering and nutrition in the armed forces high command. He had also participated in experiments on humans in concentration camps. As a Soviet [End Page 183] prisoner of war, he was initially given the death sentence and then condemned to twenty-five years in a labor camp. He only returned to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955.¹⁰⁵ However, it was no secret to the responsible parties in the ZFI with whom they were dealing, as Schenck pursued an intensive publication program and justified his past publicly, and indeed in a manner that was entirely in keeping with the ZFI's line.¹⁰⁶

Until now little was known about how many members the ZFI had,¹⁰⁷ but if the sources are to be believed, in the 1980s and 1990s the history association and its leaders exerted an appeal that should not be underestimated. Thirty-four people participated in the founding meeting in November 1981.¹⁰⁸ Just under a year later the membership had grown to a still modest forty-nine men and women.¹⁰⁹ Yet by December 1987, Schickel was already hoping that the following year he would be able to welcome the 200th member,¹¹⁰ and by the time the ZFI celebrated its tenth anniversary, in May 1991, the chair announced that its membership "had exceeded 500."¹¹¹ It continued to grow markedly until the end of the decade. The report for the years 1997 to 1999 recorded "approx. 750 members."¹¹² These can be roughly classified into three groups. The first was recruited from Schickel's network in the Ingolstadt region and was rooted in the Catholic-conservative milieu in which the historian was well known, not least as head of the Katholisches Bildungswerk Ingolstadt. This group not only comprised Schickel's reliable local followers, but also constituted something akin to the respectable face of the ZFI. The second group came from the ranks of the expellees and their associations, while the third was formed by activists and supporters from all over West Germany, who in particular shared the ZFI's apologetic-revisionist stance, sympathized with the New Right, or even subscribed to right-wing extremist ideology. This structure was not accidental. Schickel was eager to cultivate his "fellow sufferers,"¹¹³ and during the ZFI's founding phase he was already corresponding with the lawyer and long-term member of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany) Wilhelm Stäglich, who is considered to be "one of the first Holocaust deniers" in the Federal Republic of Germany, and who had already been forced into early retirement in 1975 from his position as a judge at the fiscal court of Hamburg.¹¹⁴

Organized as a charitable registered association,¹¹⁵ the ZFI relied on membership fees and donations. Heretofore it has not been possible to arrive at a reliable estimate of this income, but the financial reports for the years 1981 to 1992,¹¹⁶ which are evaluated for the first time in this article, shed some light on this. According to these reports, the ZFI's income ranged between approximately 43,900 DM in 1982, the first full year of business, and approximately [End Page 184] 125,750 DM in 1991. But it fluctuated wildly, making planning and projects difficult. The expenses ranged correspondingly between 33,300 DM in 1982 and 115,100 DM in 1991, whereby it is striking that the costs of administration, office supplies, academic literature, advertisements, paperwork, and business trips were considerably higher than the expenses for speakers or educational grants. In 1984, of a total expenditure of 53,000 DM, the ZFI spent only 3,900 DM on these items. Even considering that the majority of ZFI writings were self-published, which had an impact on the expense and cost structure that should not be underestimated, it is clear that the rudimentary setup in Ingolstadt consumed so much money that there was comparatively little left to support academic work, such as scholarships or project grants, or to stage events.

Initially the annual membership fee was 60 DM, later 80 DM,¹¹⁷ but even in 1991, its best year, when the income from membership fees was 26,000 DM, these fees accounted for no more than 21 percent of the ZFI's total income. Where did the remaining money come from? Since the token fees for its publications generated barely over 10,000 DM, the remaining income must have been provided by donations, and these flowed abundantly from the very beginning. For 1982, the financial report recorded donations of 40,395 DM, which represented 92 percent of the ZFI's total income. In 1991, the peak year, the ZFI received donations of nearly 90,000 DM, and even in lean years, such as 1989, it never received less than 26,000 DM. To answer the question of where the donations came from, we are reliant on guesswork. However, one trail leads to Günther Kissel, a building contractor from Solingen and ZFI member from the very beginning.¹¹⁸ Kissel was not just wealthy but was also considered a "right-wing extremist string-puller" who had contacts with David Irving. He was also a donor to right-wing extremist parties and revisionist history projects. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that Kissel was similarly generous to the ZFI.¹¹⁹

Apart from an annual grant of 2,000 DM received from the city of Ingolstadt until the 1990s,¹²⁰ the ZFI received no public money. However, this 2,000 DM was not just a welcome boost to the association's bank account, it also had highly symbolic value for the ZFI and lent credibility to its respectable conservative facade. Gerda Büttner, a Social Democratic councillor in Ingolstadt, put it in a nutshell: "As far as I can tell, the ZFI with its 600 members and no doubt powerful supporters doesn't need our money. Our grant serves solely as a respectable-democratic alibi that it can use for external promotion."¹²¹

Therefore, the ZFI, while more than just a Potemkin village, was still far from a viable academic institution. However, Schickel knew how to gloss over this fact. He made waves in the journalistic community, got the ZFI attention [End Page 185] in the national press,¹²² argued with prominent opponents (revealing an arrogant and aggressive self-assurance), cited employees who in practice only existed on paper, and did not shy away from making political threats that had varying degrees of impact.¹²³

The "findings" of Schickel and his ZFI have already been critically assessed in other places.¹²⁴ They can be summarized as follows. Although his manifest efforts to reinterpret recent German history and to construct a "counter-narrative"¹²⁵ went far, at times even very far, they nearly always maintained links to established historiography. In the 1980s, the speakers and authors at the ZFI tested the limits of what could be said, for example when they attempted to question the authenticity of the Wannsee Protocol¹²⁶ or to underestimate the number of murdered Jews.¹²⁷ However, they never openly denied the Holocaust and avoided the danger of "such a rampage against reality."¹²⁸ Therefore, Schickel never made use of texts like the Leuchter Report by the American Holocaust denier Fred A. Leuchter. The ZFI was thus a hybrid, which remained compatible with both the New Right and the extreme right, without drifting all the way in the direction of the latter. For a long time that is where its significance lay.

Of the publications by the ZFI, only one was of historiographical value. Wolfgang Hänel's critical investigation of the sources, published in 1984, revealed Hermann Rauschning's Gespräche mit Hitler (Conversations with Hitler) to be a fake. This assertion had been presented to the public one year earlier at the invitation of the ZFI.¹²⁹ Despite this success, the ZFI never broke free of its image as a pariah among professional historians, eyed critically by the academic community and occasionally drawing political opposition, but not taken seriously academically.¹³⁰ Yet Schickel desired nothing more fervently than recognition, to be treated on equal terms, and to receive applause.¹³¹ Since, however, his colleagues from the historical establishment denied him all of this, his need for admiration tended to be expressed in the form of combative and bitter rhetoric. At the same time, he was growing more susceptible to flattering advances from the revisionist right, to which he repeatedly proffered himself as an ally. In 1981/82, when the famous BR journalist Franz Schönhuber came in for increasingly harsh criticism on account of his autobiographical book Ich war dabei (I Was There), in which he described his time as a soldier in the Waffen SS far too defiantly and uncritically,¹³² Schickel wrote a letter to BR's director Reinhold Vöth in which he expressed his concern over the "intensifying smear campaign" against Schönhuber. Schickel, on the other hand, as a "historian of contemporary German history," considered the book to be "one of the most revealing contemporary testimonies from that time."¹³³ [End Page 186]

Schönhuber returned the favor by allowing Schickel to speak at length on Bavarian television, where he sought to drum up support for his work.¹³⁴ The tone of the seven-minute interview between the BR journalist and his guest was decidedly respectable-conservative, avoided the kind of vociferous or even polemical statements that they had both been known to make in other contexts, and clearly addressed the mainstream audience of the series Land und Leute. It is striking that Schickel did not mention the ZFI in a single word and instead presented himself as a modest but eager worker in Clio's vineyard, pointing the way to new topics and sources for his somewhat lethargic and self-satisfied colleagues. Only at two points in the interview might critical viewers have pricked up their ears. The first was when Schickel, quoting an eyewitness, praised how well Polish officers had been treated while being held as POWs by the Germans, thus furthering the cliché of the "clean" Wehrmacht. The second was at the end of the interview, when he spoke of his fate as an expellee. Neither of these topics was controversial for a large part of the audience. On the contrary, Schickel could count on precisely these two points being received with sympathetic interest by the viewers.

Although Schönhuber and Schickel largely shared a common approach to contemporary history, Schickel did not align himself politically with Schönhuber, who in 1983 was one of the most prominent founders of the far-right Republikaner party. Schickel remained rooted in the CSU milieu in Ingolstadt and, unlike his colleague Diwald, did not become involved in the New Right's "Deutschlandrat" (Council of Germany) or in any party-political organization to the right of the right-wing fringe of the CSU. Not that this prevented Schickel's books from being advertised in the Republikaner party newspaper or his being co-opted as an ally for a cultural struggle under right-wing auspices.¹³⁵ Throughout his life, Schickel insisted (even to himself) that the ZFI and his own speeches and writings served only the noble goal of scholarship, refusing to admit that, in their genetic matrix, historiography and an apologetic-revisionist politics of history were inextricably interwoven. This propensity to engage in self-deception sometimes even led him to deny reality, for example, when he declared that he had never written for right-wing extremist journals.¹³⁶ This was plainly untrue. Since the mid-1980s, he had, in fact, published his essays almost exclusively in New Right and extreme right-wing periodicals, such as Criticón, Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, MUT, and Junge Freiheit, or else in books published by the infamous Hohenrain publishing house.¹³⁷ This development was, if nothing else, a consequence of the fact that Schickel's publication options had markedly decreased following his full-blown attacks on the historical establishment and following [End Page 187] the foundation of the ZFI. Even the Bayernkurier, which was notorious for its crude views on the politics of history, now rejected his articles, as did political education media, in which as a history teacher he previously always had been able to publish.¹³⁸ Moreover, the Donau-Kurier, the newspaper published in his hometown, likewise ceased to provide a publication platform after the political shift of the late 1980s/early 1990s.¹³⁹ The most painful blow, however, came when newspapers such as the FAZ and the Rheinische Merkur/Christ und Welt began to give him the cold shoulder, having previously offered him a broad audience, renown, and self-confidence in equal measure. Yet it did not come out of nowhere that Schickel was largely finished by 1983. Institutions, historians, and archivists whom he had attacked, or whose reputations he had damaged, were now defending themselves both openly and behind the scenes, and this was what brought about his decline.

A Form of Love-Hate Relationship: Schickel and the Institute for Contemporary History from 1968 to 1981

Schickel's complicated relationship with the Institute for Contemporary History began shortly after he had completed his doctorate and gone into teaching. Within ten years, his hopes had given way to a deep-seated aversion, which was restoked many times by his bitterness at being ignored by his colleagues in Munich. It all began with a manuscript for the VfZ about the "Comintern and Germany" that Schickel offered the journal, at the same time implying that he could also provide other contributions, for example on the role of treason in World War II or on the relationship between the Wehrmacht and the SS in the Nazi state.¹⁴⁰ When the editors told him the essay did not satisfy the academic standards of the journal, Schickel refused to be discouraged.¹⁴¹ Instead, he used the opportunity to initiate contact with Helmut Krausnick, who had become director of the Institute for Contemporary History in 1959,¹⁴² and through this channel attempted to place an essay about the Munich Agreement in the VfZ, which was likewise rejected.¹⁴³

A pattern was already becoming clear, one that was repeated regularly in the correspondence over the following years. Regardless of whom Schickel was dealing with at the Institute for Contemporary History, he used an inappropriately familiar tone, took it for granted that he was on a par with his interlocutor, contacted the institute's employees in writing to solicit one-on-one conversations, and sought to shine by name-dropping or providing minor tidbits of information. He frequently enclosed offprints of his writings, copies of his newspaper articles, or positive reviews of institute publications, seeking [End Page 188] to present himself in a favorable light even when communications with the institute had clearly deteriorated.¹⁴⁴ However, more than anything, he asked questions—questions which those to whom they were addressed often found odd or embarrassing because of the naive ignorance they revealed. His questions were generally very broadly formulated, concerned complex matters, or sought clear answers to specific problems that researchers had yet to clarify. Answering them thus required a great deal of time and effort. What is more, Schickel's questions about history were increasingly politically loaded, for example, when he sought to enter into an exchange with Hermann Graml about the number of Jewish victims of National Socialism. Graml replied that he did not want to sink to the depths of "the artistry of subtraction."¹⁴⁵ Regarding the number of Polish victims of World War II, Martin Broszat had already cautioned against making the "mistake of apologetic number reduction, at almost any price."¹⁴⁶

Schickel had hoped for considerably more from his repeated advances than a casual correspondence that failed to advance beyond polite, businesslike answers and more or less detailed factual information, especially as he is unlikely to have missed the tone of mild condescension that could frequently be read between the lines. However, the break did not come until 1978/79. The starting point was a correspondence between Schickel and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer that discussed, among other things, the treatment of Polish prisoners of war in German custody. Jacobmeyer warned Schickel against using individual, inadequately documented cases as counterarguments to disprove or to relativize the Nazi policies of Germanization and extermination in occupied Poland.¹⁴⁷ Yet Schickel did exactly that after finding the biography of former marine officer and electrical engineer Jerzy Lubelfeld. How could it be, Schickel asked, that Lubelfeld had taught at a "camp university" when it was otherwise always maintained that "the Polish intelligentsia had been persecuted and liquidated?"¹⁴⁸ From then on Schickel used the ploy of hyping actual or alleged contradictions, or triumphantly insisting that the opposing side had got its facts wrong, in order to cast doubt on research findings regarding the military and extermination policy of the Nazi regime and to discredit the Institute for Contemporary History, which he "no longer [regarded as] an infallible authority."¹⁴⁹

In the late 1970s, the world of contemporary history research was still small, so Schickel's attempts to play off institutions and colleagues against each other quickly became known.¹⁵⁰ Therefore, Ino Arndt, a research associate at the Institute for Contemporary History, took the first opportunity to tell him that the institute "would not have time [to answer] his queries in the future," [End Page 189] no matter whether Schickel asked them in a private capacity, via the Catholic education center, or through his contemporary history working group.¹⁵¹ She enclosed a leaflet advising him that the Institute for Contemporary History reserved the right to answer queries of a particular character only partially or simply by pointing to the pertinent research literature; in certain circumstances it could also fully refrain from "answering queries."¹⁵² Schickel was not prepared to accept this brusque rejection, which became the subject of a heated correspondence with the director of the institute, Martin Broszat.¹⁵³

Nevertheless, despite all his accusations, invectives, and threats, Schickel always tried to keep his options open, hoping that he might still receive the accolade of collegial acceptance. However, his aggressive language and both publicly and privately voiced accusations against the "Institute for Contemporary History" (which he had been writing in quotation marks since 1978) meant that his attempts to restore communication with Martin Broszat¹⁵⁴ and Hermann Graml were doomed to fail from the start. It was Graml, the managing editor of the VfZ at the time, who finally drew the line in October 1980, when he confronted Schickel with his publications in right-wing extremist periodicals and asked him bluntly to comment on them before a further exchange of opinions would be possible.¹⁵⁵ This unmasking prompted Schickel, who had long since become aligned with Hellmut Diwald's revisionist positions, to launch an even more furious campaign against the Institute for Contemporary History, which Schickel regarded as a bastion of a politically motivated historiography beholden to the victors of World War II. From this campaign it was then just a small step to the foundation of the ZFI. Schickel's attacks, which could be read in the FAZ, for instance, remained without a public riposte. Those in charge at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich thought the best strategy to put Schickel, the high school teacher from Ingolstadt, in his place was to ignore him and not to give his crude theories (which were certainly deemed dangerous) any more publicity than absolutely necessary.¹⁵⁶

Interventions from the Federal Archives

The Institute for Contemporary History was not Schickel's only port of call¹⁵⁷ and not the only institution with which he acquainted himself using a mixture of courtship and aggressive communication. It was no coincidence that he contacted the Federal Archives (alongside the Military Archive), but simply a logical step. The document repositories in Koblenz and Freiburg, containing the historical memory of the Federal Republic, and as the institutions where [End Page 190] official documents of the National Socialist era and World War II were housed, exercised an almost irresistible allure over Schickel. The Federal Archives and the Institute for Contemporary History had been linked for a long time, not only through joint projects but also institutionally through the Federal Archives president's membership on the Academic Advisory Board of the institute. In addition, the heads of both establishments—Martin Broszat and Hans Booms—had both completed their PhDs under Theodor Schieder and had a close personal relationship.¹⁵⁸ However, to the uninitiated, including Schickel, this network of collegial contacts and friendly connections was usually not evident, at least at first glance.

Schickel initially sought contact with the Federal Archives at a time when his conflict with the Institute for Contemporary History was heading toward its first climax. Even a brief examination of the Federal Archives' correspondence with and about Schickel reflects Schickel's familiar methods of argumentation and patterns of behavior, but also differences in the dynamics of the communication, owing not least to the missions of the Federal Archives and the Institute for Contemporary History. While the institute could not permanently avoid a dispute with Schickel over substantive issues, the Federal Archives had the option of withdrawing from such a dispute with the excuse that the "interpretation" of the "archival materials" held there was "a matter for the user and not for the archivists at the Federal Archives."¹⁵⁹ In fact, the tone between Schickel—who could initially have been mistaken for just one, rather quirky, user among many—and his interlocutors remained businesslike or even friendly for a long time. However, it did not alter the fact that here, too, Schickel was also trying to take a mile when given an inch, and that he was clearly seeking material to support his apologetic-revisionist theories. He even managed to arrange a meeting with President Booms and Josef Henke, the department head responsible for written and printed Nazi Party material. This meeting took place in Koblenz on July 18, 1980.

It was only then that the wind started to change direction, for a number of reasons. First, Schickel's behavior was found to be presumptuous and overbearing, and his writings were now being followed increasingly critically.¹⁶⁰ Moreover, his attempts to portray colleagues from the Institute for Contemporary History, such as Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, in a bad light backfired. Second, Schickel did not make any friends with his emphatic reports from the US National Archives in Washington that explicitly or implicitly portrayed contemporary historians and archivists in the Federal Republic as ignorant or at least unprofessional.¹⁶¹ And third, requests from Schickel (and after May 1981 from the ZFI) to the Federal Archives for information, research, and copies of [End Page 191] files became increasingly detailed, complex, and demanding in tone. By October 1981 the point had been reached when the Federal Archives not only referred Schickel to the rules set out in the user regulations, which applied to both him and the ZFI, but also explained that "elaborate searches" could "not be performed as part of the [Archives'] normal service" but would have to be "carried out by your employees or you yourself."¹⁶²

This response was clearly such an affront to Schickel that he did what until then he had only threatened to do: he played the political card and got Horst Seehofer to intervene. In 1980, Seehofer (a future Minister-President of the State of Bavaria) had been elected to the Bundestag for the first time as a CSU candidate for the Ingolstadt constituency, and Schickel nonchalantly declared him to be an "employee of our research center."¹⁶³ However, Booms, the top archivist in the Federal Republic, did not allow himself to be intimidated by an inexperienced member of the Bundestag. It was with clear pleasure that Booms gave him a lesson in archival practice, and even after Seehofer tried several times, both in person and in writing, to intercede on behalf of his party colleague from his home town, the archivist refused to budge from his decision not to grant Schickel and the ZFI preferential treatment.¹⁶⁴ Ultimately, Schickel achieved the opposite of what he had set out to accomplish: he turned the person whom he had wanted to instrumentalize for his own purposes against him. Although his queries were still processed in Koblenz and Freiburg, he could no longer count on active support, and the motto was "he should kindly perform his own searches."¹⁶⁵

Furthermore, publications by and about Schickel were now watched with closer attention, and his connection with periodicals on the right of the spectrum of opinion was now becoming increasingly noticed.¹⁶⁶ His articles about contemporary history in leading newspapers, such as the FAZ, were a particular thorn in the side of the Federal Archives' directors. When in a letter to the editor the young historian Rainer A. Blasius harshly criticized Schickel's FAZ article on how the Roosevelt administration had dealt with the secret additional protocol to the Hitler-Stalin Pact and accused the author of ignorance regarding the state of research, of obvious methodological deficits, and of a not particularly subtle tendency to relativize the responsibility of the Nazi regime for unleashing World War II,¹⁶⁷ it was decided in Koblenz that the time had come to take action. Josef Henke noted on a newspaper cutting that the FAZ would have to "consider the question" of when it would "finally" stop "granting the at best fourth-rate Mr. Schickel valuable space in its so renowned paper." And he added, "Marcel Reich-Ranicki on literature, Mr. Schickel on contemporary history … a greater discrepancy could not be imagined."¹⁶⁸ [End Page 192]

One of Hans Booms's closest colleagues, archive director Klaus Oldenhage, thereupon put pen to paper and not only intimated what those at the Federal Archives thought of Schickel but also quietly informed Günter Gillessen at the FAZ of how American colleagues saw the history teacher from Ingolstadt, who repeatedly referred to them in his criticism of contemporary history research and archival practice in the Federal Republic of Germany.¹⁶⁹ When Gillessen thanked Oldenhage for his efforts on December 15, 1982, it was already known in Koblenz that Schickel's days as a writer for the FAZ were numbered. Andreas Hillgruber, a professor from Cologne, had intervened with the editorial committee of the FAZ, and written a "frank" letter to Joachim Fest, an editor of the newspaper, of which Hillgruber informed Henke, who also received a copy of Fest's answer from Frankfurt. The content of Fest's response was met with satisfaction in Koblenz. In the meantime, Fest explained, it had been possible to "adopt a formal publisher's resolution that in the future, articles by Alfred Schickel would not be published in any part of the newspaper." As a result, "this matter, which was both annoying and tiresome for the newspaper," was hopefully "finally over and done with."¹⁷⁰

A few months later, the Federal Archives enjoyed another success that followed a similar pattern. This time it was occasioned by a review by Schickel in the weekly Rheinischer Merkur/Christ und Welt of the 1982 book Vertreibungs-Verbrechen an Deutschen (Expulsion Crimes Against Germans) by the lawyer, publisher, and ZFI activist Heinz Nawratil.¹⁷¹ Schickel presented the familiar mélange of distorted facts, exaggerated claims, half-truths, victim narratives, and interpretations that could be read as apologetic-revisionist. This discussion caught the attention of Josef Henke, who ridiculed the fact that Schickel had accused the Federal Archives of keeping documents under wraps, and who also saw a need for action. President Booms was likewise of this opinion and directly approached Rheinischer Merkur editor-in-chief Alois Rummel with the objective of undermining Schickel in this case as well. In fact Rummel was contrite and declared that Schickel's assignment to review this book had been "a one-off."¹⁷² And with that another door closed for Schickel and his ZFI, further limiting their sphere of action, visibility, and reach. It was only a few months later that Schickel learned what had gone on behind the scenes. He complained bitterly to the FAZ that the newspaper had dropped him and hushed up the work of the ZFI. In a more threatening tone, he announced that the paper would "in a few years regret" its change of course "toward fossilized contemporary history." Needless to say, Schickel's angry protest remained without consequence.¹⁷³ [End Page 193]

The Institute for Contemporary History and the Overrated History Association from the Provinces, 1981 to 1989

While the Federal Archives' victory over Schickel, and therefore also over the ZFI, was a source of satisfaction in Koblenz, at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich worries and misgivings were growing. This was not even necessarily because Alfred Schickel had let the whole world know how little he thought of the work of the "monopoly establishment" in Munich,¹⁷⁴ or because he was making life hard for its staff with his polemical letters. The reactions of the IfZ's employees differed depending on their temperament and degree of responsibility for the institution as a whole. The combative Ino Arndt, for example, repaid Schickel in kind with a good deal of irony.¹⁷⁵ Hermann Graml no longer deemed Schickel worth a response, which made the latter so angry that he once again threatened to pass "the whole correspondence to a member of the Bundestag" if the managing editor of the VfZ continued to remain silent.¹⁷⁶ Hermann Weiß, the deputy director of the IfZ archive, defended himself in his own way. He countered Schickel's attempts to play German and American archivists off against each other with a long letter to Robert Wolfe, the head of the Modern Military Branch of the US National Archives, whom Schickel was trying to co-opt for his own purposes. In his letter, Weiß condemned Schickel's "denunciation-like method" of inflating the importance of individual sources in order to fundamentally question research findings on Nazi military and extermination policy, and to create the impression that studies by "German contemporary historians had been drawn from a completely inadequate source base and were therefore probably even wrong."¹⁷⁷

On behalf of the institute's management, Martin Broszat exercised patience for a long time and above all refrained from publicly countering Schickel's accusations, even though he was sometimes active behind the scenes.¹⁷⁸ But by May 1982, the point had been reached where Broszat not only began to defend himself brusquely against the shrill talk from Ingolstadt, but openly reproached Schickel for his publications in disreputable periodicals, as Graml had done two years prior. Broszat thus made it unmistakably clear that a dialogue of any kind was impossible.¹⁷⁹ Schickel and his ZFI had now been consigned to the ranks of right-wing extremist hardliners and revisionist history stooges. This was a subject of intense discussion at the Institute for Contemporary History in the early 1980s, as reflected, not least, in an attempt to establish a department at the institute devoted to studying right-wing extremism.¹⁸⁰

Once this line had been drawn, the two parties spoke less with each other than about each other. Nevertheless, for a period of time in the first half of [End Page 194] the 1980s, Schickel and his ZFI progressed from revisionist nuisances to apparent giants in the politics of history, giving rise to what at first glance was a surprising degree of uncertainty at the Institute for Contemporary History. If one looks more closely, however, this temporary uncertainty becomes more understandable, and is attributable to three main factors. The first was the general sociocultural climate during this period of transition, when the new federal chancellor Helmut Kohl launched an offensive in the field of the politics of history that appeared to shift West Germany's contemporary history coordinates toward the national-conservative end of the spectrum.¹⁸¹ Were there not forces at work here that, when push came to shove, would have placed the construction of a German identity above considerations of academic integrity? Did this not benefit revisionist upstarts à la Schickel, who under different auspices, and at the cost of established research institutions like the Institute for Contemporary History, could count on political support, financing, and public attention? The nascent alliance between Schickel's ZFI and Herbert Fleissner's publishing empire, which ultimately failed, appeared to confirm such fears in early 1985.¹⁸²

Second, there was also the perceived party-political congruence among the most important financiers of the foundation that supported the Institute for Contemporary History. A Christian Democrat-Liberal coalition government was in power at the federal level, while in Bavaria the CSU ruled with an uncontested absolute majority. In particular, the "CSU state"¹⁸³ under Franz Josef Strauß, with his "modern combat unit of aggressive national conservatism" behind it,¹⁸⁴ was considered to be capable of getting away with pretty much anything. This sentiment was felt not just at the Institute for Contemporary History, but also among civil servants in the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, who dealt with the institute and were well disposed toward it. The fact that Schickel used every opportunity to show off his political contacts, and that Alfred Seidl, a former top politician in the Bavarian CSU, was clearly a supporter of the ZFI only served to increase these fears. In March 1983, Ministerial Councilor Helmut Kreutzer made it plain to Martin Broszat that "something [must] happen" in the "Schickel case," especially given that, as a history teacher, Schickel was relentlessly urging school textbooks to be rewritten according to his beliefs.¹⁸⁵ However, since the Ministry of Culture did not have any leverage (Schickel was not working for the state), the Institute for Contemporary History was urged to "take the initiative" and publicly "shred to pieces" Schickel's theories from an academic point of view, and Broszat was urged to intervene with the Ministry of Culture. At the same time, the CSU "needed to [End Page 195] be brought to the realization that it would be backing the wrong horse" were it to award money to Schickel and the ZFI.

In fact nothing came of this offensive, not only because Broszat remained true to his strategy of keeping "the competing establishment in Ingolstadt" small by ignoring it,¹⁸⁶ but also because the Institute for Contemporary History felt exposed, vulnerable, and structurally weak, which is the third factor that might explain its insecurity. This feeling of vulnerability helps explain Broszat's repeated campaigns during the early years of the Kohl era against the "forced enthusiasm for history in the conservative camp of the Federal Republic of Germany," which he saw as having a whitewashing and exonerating function with regard to the Nazi period.¹⁸⁷ For Broszat, the spokesman "for the 'liberal' faction of German historians," the fear of strong political headwinds did not appear unfounded, since it might have had an impact not only on him personally but also on the institute.¹⁸⁸ This went hand in hand with a feeling of structural weakness. The IfZ had grown vastly since the 1970s, but it had not yet completed its "second formative phase."¹⁸⁹ The necessary "goodwill from the supervisory committees" regarding decisions on budget and staff could not be taken for granted. Furthermore, in a time of funding shortages, there was growing competition from universities, which one by one were establishing chairs for contemporary history.

Klaus-Dietmar Henke has described the Institute for Contemporary History of those years as a "family business," also referring to the flat hierarchies and the relatively undifferentiated structure of the institute's management level. For example, public relations work, which was of particular significance in the dispute with Schickel and the ZFI, was dealt with on the side, so to speak. By contrast, the Federal Archives as a government authority had formed a different self-understanding and a different organizational culture, which also allowed a more decisive reaction to the challenge from Ingolstadt.

However, by a certain point Broszat had also had enough. This point was reached in summer 1987, when there were rumors that Schickel was to receive the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Initially Broszat rejected a request from the government of Upper Bavaria to provide an opinion regarding this possibility, citing his own partiality.¹⁹⁰ However, he did answer a second request from the Bavarian Ministry of Science and Arts, and this time his evaluation was more than clear. He stated it was downright "irresponsible" to honor a man who espoused "clearly apologetic tendencies bordering on far-right extremism."¹⁹¹ However, these warnings went unheeded, especially as the Ministry of Science did not offer any institutional leverage for an intervention, and the initiative for the award had not originated there. On April 13, [End Page 196] 1989, at the suggestion of Bavarian minister-president Max Streibl, Schickel did, in fact, receive the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his alleged services to research in contemporary history and to political education.¹⁹² The laudatory speech was delivered by the Bavarian minister for labor, family, and social order, whose ministry was traditionally particularly closely connected with the concerns of expellees and had therefore suggested the award. That a doctor of history, Gebhard Glück,¹⁹³ should have honored Schickel for his contribution "to seeking historical truth" and highlighted Schickel's attempts "to counter ignorance, prejudice, and disinformation"¹⁹⁴ is, in retrospect, hard to bear.

At the time the Order of Merit was awarded, in the final year of the Bonn Republic, the momentum that Schickel and his ZFI had attempted to use (ultimately in vain) was now almost gone. "Schimanski's decade"¹⁹⁵ (as the 1980s were known with reference to the most famous police inspector in the cult German crime series Tatort) had begun with a "wave of nostalgia," which was considered the "source of [this] political conservatism."¹⁹⁶ This type of nostalgia proved to be "politically explosive when it was directed toward the National Socialist period," as was shown, for example, in the politically charged debate around the meaning of the sudden growth of interest in Adolf Hitler.¹⁹⁷ This applied to the so-called New History movement, which was closely linked to alternative milieus and touched a sore spot in the superficially healed wounds of German historical memory. However, it also applied to Alfred Schickel and his ZFI, who, in the interest of national identity, wanted to avoid touching these wounds, particularly when it came to the Nazi war of extermination and genocide, and instead advocated "disposing of the German past."¹⁹⁸

Admittedly these voices were finding fewer and fewer listeners, although even in 1989 Hermann Graml pessimistically noted that it was "unmistakable" that the "susceptibility of the Germans to apologetics" had increased "the more time having elapsed since the Third Reich."¹⁹⁹ Yet even then there were indications pointing in a different direction. A nascent generational change was responsible for this, as was the scandal about the fake Hitler diaries, the debate about the historical importance of May 8, 1945, and even the so-called Historikerstreit (historians' debate), which was not so much academically productive as it was "of considerable importance for public historical consciousness in the latter years of the Bonn Republic."²⁰⁰ Research in contemporary history thereby successfully insisted "on its public competence over interpretation and production of meaning."²⁰¹ It did so at the expense of members of the generation who lived through Nazism and World War II who had their own opinions about history, representatives of the media, or ideological historians, [End Page 197] such as Alfred Schickel, who found himself more and more on the far right of the discourse about contemporary history. In addition, remembering the Holocaust was increasingly becoming a matter of transnational importance,²⁰² with research and debates that influenced and changed the (West) German viewpoint in a sustained way. The hopes and fears that had been generated by Helmut Kohl's alleged "turn in the politics of the past" at the start of the 1980s "ultimately did not prove justified."²⁰³ However, a point had been reached where established institutions, such as the Institute for Contemporary History and the Federal Archives, could draw a line under the history of the ZFI. Whatever direction the history association from Ingolstadt might have taken subsequently is another story that does not need to be told here.