‚Foreign Science Policy‘ : How a Concept (and Memory Politics) Fueled Debates on the Portrayal of German History Abroad

Temporal and semantic dimensions loomed large in Michael Strmer's assertion that "those who fill the memory, coin concepts and interpret the past" would be in an authoritative position to have a bearing on the figuration of the future.1The stakes were high in the 1980s, after the proclaimed 'spiritual-moral turn' (geistig moralische Wende) and, more particularly, during the public debate on the place of Nazism for the German self-image, a controversy commonly referred to as Historikerstreit.To "win the future", as the conservative political historian Strmer put it, would mean to wield first discursive and then consequentially political power in terms of acts in practice.Not for nothing, the notion of cultural hegemony in the nation state -one which Peter Glotz from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) declared as failed in terms of the envisaged reinterpretation of the Kohl administrationgained center stage for the Federal Chancellery (Bundeskanzleramt), which took an avid interest in the historian's dispute.2His emphasis on the semantic content of terms notwithstanding, Strmer can certainly not be considered a trailblazer for the kind of historical semantics that became increasingly influential in subsequent years.3He was also not alone in stressing the significance of concepts and its political relevance.More than a decade before, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) had actually established a project group tasked to study the semantics of political discourse and derive benefit from this for their campaigning.4Awareness of the bearing of coining terms upon political discourse only grew in subsequent years.5 Taking a similar line, that is, identifying the potential of the efficacy of concepts, albeit from a different perspective (both politically and academically), it was not by chance that Jrgen Habermas lambasted Strmer's statements.The social philosopher implied that the historian utilized history for identity-establishing purposes, engaging in the business of sense-making rather than critically investigating the past.The crafting of a historically distorted German identity was the ultimate goal, or so Habermas argued in his famous article which set off the Historikerstreit.6Endowing German history with added, and nuanced, meaning not solely resting on the Holocaust was in line with the politics of memory as promoted by Helmut Kohl.Somewhat consistently, Strmer had worked as foreign policy advisor to the Chancellor during the first half of the 1980s.It was this dual function that, in a sense, predestined him to be actively involved in the establishment of the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, which came into being in 1987.The discussions revolving around its inception mirrored the front