Karl Dietrich Bracher
Karl Dietrich Bracher (13 March 1922 – 19 September 2016) was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. He was then held as a POW in Camp Concordia, Kansas. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951 Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two children.
Karl Dietrich Bracher
In the "Historikerstreit", Bracher mostly stayed on the sidelines, and took a pox-on-both-houses approach. Writing on 14 March 1987, Bracher stated he regarded the "Historikerstreit" as typical of the "Doppelbödigkeit" (ambiguities) that Germans felt towards their recent history. Bracher argued that the Federal Republic was one of two rival German states competing for the loyalty of the German people, the successor state to two regimes that failed, and inhabited by two generations with different memories of the past. Bracher wrote that for Germans: "The present dispute concerns not only the orientation and the meaning of a totalitarian "past", which is not easy to historicize, but does not simply pass away despite temporal distance". Bracher argued that given the "burden of the past", West Germany could all too easily slide into dictatorship Bracher saw the major threat to West German democracy as coming from the left. Bracher accused the peace and Green movements as hovering "in the borderline between democracy and dictatorship", and warned that the radical left-peace-Green movements could easily become the instruments of a "pseudo-religious concepts of salvation" that would lead to a return to totalitarianism in West Germany. Bracher claimed that the situation in the late 1980s was the same as in the late 1960s "when we critics of an all-too-general concept of fascism were opposed by a front from Nolte via Habermas to the extraparliamentary opposition".