Ernst Nolte

Ernst Nolte (11 January 1923 – 18 August 2016) was a German historian and philosopher.

Nolte's major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism (cf. Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism).

In 1941, Nolte was excused from military service because of a deformed hand, and he studied Philosophy, Philology and Greek at the Universities of Münster, Berlin, and Freiburg.

At Freiburg, Nolte was a student of Martin Heidegger, whom he acknowledges as a major influence.

From 1944 onwards, Nolte was a close friend of the Heidegger family, and when in 1945 the professor feared arrest by the French, Nolte provided him with food and clothing for an attempted escape.

Eugen Fink was another professor who influenced Nolte.

After 1945 when Nolte received his BA in philosophy at Freiburg, he worked as a Gymnasium (high school) teacher.

In 1952, he received a PhD in philosophy at Freiburg for his thesis Selbstentfremdung und Dialektik im deutschen Idealismus und bei Marx (Self Alienation and the Dialectic in German Idealism and Marx).

Subsequently, Nolte began studies in Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history).

Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controversies related to the interpretation of the history of fascism and communism, including the Historikerstreit in the late 1980s.

In later years, Nolte focused on Islamism and "Islamic fascism".

Nolte received several awards, including the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize and the Konrad Adenauer Prize.

He was the father of the legal scholar and judge of the International Court of Justice Georg Nolte.

Nolte was born in Witten, Westphalia, Germany to a Roman Catholic family.

Nolte's parents were Heinrich Nolte, a school rector, and Anna (née Bruns) Nolte.

Nolte cited the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961 as an example of “practical transcendence”, of how humanity was pressing forward in its technological development and rapidly acquiring powers traditionally thought to be only the province of the gods.

Drawing upon the work of Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx, Nolte argued that the progress of both types of "transcendence" generates fear as the older world is swept aside by a new world, and that these fears led to fascism.

He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963.

He published his Habilitationsschrift awarded at the University of Cologne, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, as a book in 1963.

Nolte came to notice with his 1963 book Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Fascism in Its Epoch; translated into English in 1965 as The Three Faces of Fascism), in which he argued that fascism arose as a form of resistance to and a reaction against modernity.

Nolte's basic hypothesis and methodology were deeply rooted in the German "philosophy of history" tradition, a form of intellectual history which seeks to discover the "metapolitical dimension" of history.

The "metapolitical dimension" is considered to be the history of grand ideas functioning as profound spiritual powers, which infuse all levels of society with their force.

In Nolte's opinion, only those with training in philosophy can discover the "metapolitical dimension", and those who use normal historical methods miss this dimension of time.

Using the methods of phenomenology, Nolte subjected German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and the French Action Française movements to a comparative analysis.

Nolte's conclusion was that fascism was the great anti-movement: it was anti-liberal, anti-communist, anti-capitalist, and anti-bourgeois.

In Nolte's view, fascism was the rejection of everything the modern world had to offer and was an essentially negative phenomenon.

In a Hegelian dialectic, Nolte argued that the Action Française was the thesis, Italian Fascism was the antithesis, and German National Socialism the synthesis of the two earlier fascist movements.

Nolte argued that fascism functioned at three levels, namely in the world of politics as a form of opposition to Marxism, at the sociological level in opposition to bourgeois values, and in the "metapolitical" world as "resistance to transcendence" ("transcendence" in German can be translated as the "spirit of modernity").

Nolte defined the relationship between fascism and Marxism as such:

"Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy."

Nolte defined "transcendence" as a "metapolitical" force comprising two types of change.

The first type, "practical transcendence", manifesting in material progress, technological change, political equality, and social advancement, comprises the process by which humanity liberates itself from traditional, hierarchical societies in favor of societies where all men and women are equal.

The second type is "theoretical transcendence", the striving to go beyond what exists in the world towards a new future, eliminating traditional fetters imposed on the human mind by poverty, backwardness, ignorance, and class.

Nolte himself defined "theoretical transcendence" as such:

"Theoretical transcendence may be taken to mean the reaching out of the mind beyond what exists and what can exist toward an absolute whole; in a broader sense this may be applied to all that goes beyond, that releases man from the confines of the everyday world, and which, as an ‘awareness of the horizon’, makes it possible for him to experience the world as a whole."

He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973.

Between 1965 and 1973, Nolte worked as a professor at the University of Marburg, and from 1973 to 1991 at the Free University of Berlin.

Nolte married Annedore Mortier and they had a son, Georg Nolte, now a professor of international law at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Originally trained in philosophy, he was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement.

According to Nolte in a 28 March 2003 interview with a French newspaper Eurozine, his first encounter with communism occurred when he was 7 years old in 1930, when he read in a doctor's office a German translation of a Soviet children's book attacking the Catholic Church, which angered him.