While history has been subject to revision since times immemorial, the negative meaning of the term "revisionism" gained currency mainly in the years after World War Two. After all, no rational person today would pronounce Theodor Mommsen's Römische Geschichte as a definitive and non-ideological representation of the Roman era. Revisionism has been thus particularly connected to the denial of the Holocaust and the reinterpretation of the Nazi period of German history.
Holocaust deniers have, for the most part, remained on the lunatic fringe of both politics and historiography, with perhaps the exception of David Irving who was recently convicted to a jail term in Austria for "trivialising the Holocaust". However, what we might call a softer version of revisionism acquired a similarly ominous aftertaste in the light of the Historikerstreit of the late 1980s, a battle over the interpretation of not just "the course of German history" but of both National Socialism and Communism.
The last years of decaying Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe and their eventual collapse, provided another outlet for historical revisionists. New histories sprang up from the fertile ground of former Communist states, adjusted to the atmosphere of anti-Communism and/or nationalism. These histories tended to subscribe to simplified narratives and ahistorical concepts of "reawakened" and "liberated" nations. Thus they provided an ideological tool for the legitimisation of the new (and in some cases, old) political elites of these countries. In methodological terms, this kind of revisionism meant a return to pre-positivistic historical paradigms.
Nevertheless, while positioning a critique of revisionism, we should be careful not to lose sight of the necessary re-evaluation and re-questioning of historical paradigms. Here I shall concentrate on the fruitful results brought about by recent debates on German and Austrian history, particularly the Sonderweg thesis. I will accordingly attempt to show that not all re-evaluations of the past should be considered as "revisionist" in the above mentioned sense. Ultimately, the paper will consider some of the dangers posed by postmodernist approaches to historical research, which might in the worst scenario lead not merely to destruction of historiography as a discipline but also hinder a faithful and judicious sense of our past.
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