Joachim Fest dies

Author Alexander Cammann pays tribute to journalist and Hitler biographer Joachim Fest who recently passed away. "With his death the Republic has lost one of its most influential conservative intellectuals who at the same time embodied the German bourgeois way of thinking after 1945 like no one else. Fest's obsessive preoccupation with the brown dictatorship in numerous books and essays was not the product of a strategy of exculpation but rather a kind of immunisation programme for the German bourgeoisie. It conjured up Hitler's image as an eternal warning not to give in to such opponents." Cammann also points to Fest's "immense contribution to the politicisation and improved status of the Feuilleton in Germany. His column in the German daily 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung' played an important role in shaping intellectual debate in Germany. The 'historians' debate' of 1986 over the comparison of National Socialism and Stalinism is the best-known example of this."

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