Michael Stürmer

Michael Stürmer (29 September 1938 – 13 July 2026) was a German conservative historian who specialised in the history of the German Empire (1871–1918). He is best known for his role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, for his geographical interpretation of German history and for an admiring 2008 biography of Vladimir Putin.

Early life and education Stürmer was born in Kassel, Germany, to , a Hitler Youth prize-winning composer who wrote and performed music for the city's Nazi events, and Ursula (née Scherbening), a violinist. His maternal grandfather was , the chief of general staff in the Imperial Schutztruppe for German South West Africa from 1905 to 1908.

He attended a Waldorf gymnasium in Kassel (graduating in 1956), followed by a technical internship. Supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, he received his education in history, philosophy and languages at the University of Marburg, at the Free University of Berlin as a student of Gordon A. Craig, and at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the military historian Michael Howard. He returned to Marburg to complete his doctoral dissertation Koalition und Opposition in der Weimarer Republik 1924–1928 under the supervision of (a former Wehrmacht lieutenant and a student of Werner Conze) in 1965.

Academic career Stürmer was initially employed as a research assistant for his supervisor at the University of Mannheim (1966–1970). The turning point occurred in 1974 when the Social Democratic Party of Germany Land government of Hesse attempted to abolish history as a subject in the Hesse educational system and to replace it with "social studies".

In the 1980s Stürmer worked as an advisor and speech-writer to the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In the mid-1980s he sat on a committee – together with Thomas Nipperdey and Klaus Hildebrand – in charge of vetting the publications issued by the Research Office of the West German Ministry of Defense. The committee attracted some controversy when it refused to publish a hostile biography of Gustav Noske.

Death Stürmer died on 13 July 2026, at the age of 87.

Work and reception Views Stürmer has argued that "the future is won by those who coin concepts and interpret the past".

He is arguably best known for his advocacy of a geographical interpretation of German history. In a geographical variant of the Sonderweg theory, he has argued that what he regards as Germany's precarious geographical situation in Central Europe has played the deciding role in the course of German history, and that coping with this has left successive German rulers no other choice but to engage in authoritarian government. In Stürmer's opinion, the "belligerence" of the Reich came about through a complex interplay of Germany's location in the "middle of Europe" surrounded by enemies and of "democratic" forces in the domestic sphere. He argued that Germans were suffering from a "loss of orientation" caused by the lack of a positive view of their history. In his view, the fall of the Weimar Republic was caused by "loss of orientation" due to the secularization of a previously religious country.

Stürmer argued that West Germany had an important role in the world to play, could not play that role because the lack of a past to be proud of was "seriously damaging the political culture of the country" and wrote that it was "morally legitimate and politically necessary" for Germans to have a positive view of their history. In his view, what was needed was a campaign by the government, the media and historians to create a "positive view" of German history.

In Stürmer's opinion, the Nazi era was a major block towards a positive view of the German past, and what was needed was a focus on the broad sweep of German history as opposed to the 12 years of Nazi Germany as a way of creating a national identity that all Germans could take pride in. He wrote that the "loss of orientation" caused by the absence of a German national identity led to a "search for identity". In his opinion this search was crucial because West Germany was "now once more a focal point in the global civil war waged against democracy by the Soviet Union". Likewise, he argued that the legacy of 1960s radicalism was an over-emphasis on the Nazi period in German history. At the same gathering, he spoke of "the deadly idiocies of the victors of 1918", which led to a loss of a German national identity, and to the collapse of the Weimar Republic as Germans, confronted with the crises of modernity without a positive national identity, opted for the Nazi solution. When it became time to print the proceedings of the Colloquia, he refused to allow his contributions to be published, complaining of the "defamations and denunciations" he alleged to have been subjected to. When his contribution, the essay "Weder verdrängen noch bewältigen: Geschichte und Gegenwartsbewusstein der Deutschen" was published in the Swiss journal Schweizer Monatshefte, he edited it heavily to remove many of his more controversial statements about the need for Germans to forget about Nazi crimes in order to feel good about their past. Despite his editing of his essay, he refused to allow it to be published in an anthology about the Historikerstreit out of the concern it might damage his reputation as a historian. Stürmer's critic, the British historian Richard J. Evans stated that the remarks he quoted Stürmer as making at the 1986 Römerberg Colloquia came from a tape-recorded record at the Colloquia, and not from the edited version provided by Stürmer.

Jürgen Habermas began his article "A Kind of Settlement of Damages" in the Die Zeit newspaper on July 11, 1986, with an attack on Stürmer. He took Stürmer to task for his statement that history served the purpose of integrating the individual into the wider community, and as such history had the need to provide a "higher meaning" to create the proper national consciousness in the individual, who otherwise would lack this national consciousness. Habermas accused Stürmer on marching to a "geopolitical drumbeat" with his depiction of German history determined by geographical factors requiring authoritarian government. He wrote Stürmer was trying to create a "vicarious religion" in German history intended to serve as a "...kind of NATO philosophy colored with German nationalism".

In response to Habermas’s essay, Stürmer in a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on August 16, 1986, wrote that Habermas was confusing the “national question” with the “German question”, and argued that the German predicament was due to Germany’s geographical situation in the heart of Europe. He denied seeking to “endow” history with a "higher meaning", accusing Habermas of seeking to do that. and quoted from Stürmer's book Dissonanzen des Fortschritts to support his contention. In response to Habermas, Stürmer in his "Postscript" of April 25, 1987, accused Habermas of being a Marxist who was responsible for "the invention of fact-free scholarship". Stürmer claimed that Habermas had played an "obscene role" in the West German election of 1987 by labeling anyone he disliked as a Nazi, and that the reasons for Habermas's attack on him were to help the SPD in the election. Kocka wrote that both Switzerland and Poland were also "lands in the middle", and yet neither country went in the same authoritarian direction as Germany. Hans Mommsen wrote Stürmer's attempts to create a national consensus on a version of German history that all Germans could take pride in was a reflection that the German rightists could not stomach modern German history, and were now looking to create a version of the German past that German rightists could enjoy. Mommsen charged that to find the "lost history", Stürmer was working towards "relativizing" Nazi crimes to give Germans a history they could be proud of.

However, Mommsen argued that even modern right-wing German historians might have difficulty with Stürmer's "technocratic instrumentalization" of German history, which Mommsen claimed was Stürmer's way of "relativizing" Nazi crimes.

Stürmer was attacked by Habermas and Wehler for writing the following: quote|"A pluralism of values and interests, when there is no longer any common ground, when it is no longer bunted by economic growth, no longer subdued by the acceptance of responsibility, leads sooner or later to social civil war, as at the end of the Weimar Republic... Social conflicts, competition regarding the values of our communal order, the heterogeneity of goals and the multiplicity of answers to the question of the meaning of life: all of these are a constitutive part of a pluralistic, free society. The market economy is not only its economic basis, it is also a metaphor for its political existence. But conflicts must be limited: through the legal order, through the values of the constitution, through a consensus about the past, present and future. When conflicts do not remain within these boundaries, they shatter the communal order". Hans-Ulrich Wehler called Stürmer's work "a strident declaration of war against a key element of the consensus upon which the socio-political life of this second republic has rested heretofore".

In response to his critics, Stürmer in an essay entitled "How Much History Weights" published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 26, 1986, wrote that France was a major power in the world because the French had a history to be proud of, and claimed that West Germany could only play the same role in the world if only they had the same national consensus about pride in their history as did the French. As the example of the sort of history that he wanted to see written in Germany, Stürmer used Fernand Braudel's The Identity of France volumes. Stürmer wrote that Braudel and the other historians of the Annales School had made geography the centre of their studies of French and European history while at the same time promoting a sense of French identity that gave the French a history to be proud of. Meier argued that Habermas was correct in expressing his concerns about Stürmer’s work, but asserted that Habermas had wrongly accused the Atlanticist Stürmer of seeking to revive the original concept of the Sonderweg, that of Germany as a great Central European power that was neither of the West nor of the East. Imanuel Geiss wrote that Stürmer was acting within his rights in expressing his right-wing views, and arguing against Habermas claimed there was nothing wrong in claiming that geography was a factor in German history.

The British historian Richard J. Evans who was one of Stürmer's fiercer critics accused Stürmer in his 1989 book In Hitler's Shadow of being an apparent believer that:

Along the same lines, Evans criticized Stürmer for his emphasis on the modernity and totalitarianism of National Socialism, the role of Hitler, and the discontinuities between the Imperial, Weimar and Nazi periods. In Evans's view, the exact opposite was the case with National Socialism as a badly disorganized, anti-modern movement with deep roots in the German past, and the role of Hitler much smaller than the one Stürmer credited him with. Evans accused Stürmer of having no real interest in the collapse of Weimar, and only using the Nazi Machtergreifung as a way of making contemporary political points. Evans denounced Stürmer for writing a laudatory biography of Otto von Bismarck, which he felt marked a regression to the Great man theory of history and an excessive focus on political history. In Evans's opinion, a social historical approach with the emphasis on society was a better way of understanding the German past.

Post-1980s work Much of Stürmer's work since the Historikerstreit has been concerned with creating the sense of national identity he feels Germans are missing. In his 1992 book, Die Grenzen der Macht, Stürmer suggested that German history be viewed in the long-term starting from the 17th century to the 20th century to find the "national and trans-national traditions and patterns worth cherishing". Stürmer argued that traditions were tolerance for religious minorities, civic values, federalism and striking the fine balance between the peripheries and the center.

Stürmer's last book, a biography of the Russian Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin, appeared in 2008. A British reviewer praised Stürmer for his refusal to hold Putin's KGB background against him and for his willingness to accept Putin for who he was. Much of Stürmer's biography was based upon his interviews with Putin during the annual meetings of the Valdai group.

Publications Putin and the Rise of Russia: The Country That Came in From the Cold, London: Orion 2008 "Balance from Beyond the Sea", pages 145–153 from The Washington Quarterly, Volume 24, Number 3, Summer 2001 The German Empire, 1870–1918, New York : Random House, 2000 ; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000 (editor) The German Century London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999 . (co-edited with Robert D. Blackwill) Allies Divided : Transatlantic Policies for the Greater Middle East, Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT Press, 1997 . "History in a Land Without History" pages 16–17; “Letter to the Editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 16, 1986” pages 61–62; "How Much History Weighs" pages 196–197; and "Postscript, April 25, 1987" pages 266-267 from Forever In The Shadow of Hitler? edited by Ernst Piper, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993. Dissonanzen des Fortschritts, Piper Verleg, Munich, 1986. Die Reichsgründung: Deutscher Nationalstaat und europäisches Gleichgewicht im Zeitalter Bismarcks, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984 . Das ruhelose Reich: Deutschland 1866–1918, Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1983 . Die Weimarer Republik : belagerte Civitas, Königstein/Ts. : Verlagsgruppe Athenäum, Hain, Scriptor, Hanstein, 1980 . “An Economy of Delight: Court Artisans of the Eighteenth Century” pages 496-528 from The Business History Review, Volume 53, No. 4 Winter 1979. “'Bois des Indes' and the Economics of Luxury Furniture in the Time of David Roentgen” pages 799-807 from The Burlington Magazine, Volume 120, No. 909, December 1978. “Caesar's Laurel Crown--the Case for a Comparative Concept” pages 203-207 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 49, No. 2 June 1977. Regierung und Reichstag im Bismarckstaat 1871–1880: Cäsarismus oder Parlamentarismus, Düsseldorf : Droste, 1974 Bismarck und die preußisch-deutsche Politik, 1871–1890, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1970. (Editor) Das kaiserliche Deutschland; Politik und Gesellschaft, 1870–1918, Düsseldorf, Droste 1970.