If one takes the effort …

If one takes the effort to systematically look through the university libraries one will be surprised about the many boring books that had been written. But on the other hand one might discover some peculiar and interesting books as well. For example the language-history-books of the 17th century. The authors of these books of the 17th century (Spaten, Schottelius, Lambeck etc.) do not know anything about the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century. They do not know anything about the Roman Empire (Rise or Fall) as well. They don't know anything about the Greek-Roman Antiquity that we learn and teach in school and university. This fact is (as strange as it is) undiscussed in the learned world of historiography.

And if you take the effort to look through economic libraries as well you will be even more surprised to find in the „Hamburger Weltwirtschaftsarchiv“ the first book of the legendary master-head of the concept of the so called „Welfare State“ (Soziale Marktwirtschaft) in Germany: Dr. Müller-Armack. This book (published in 1933 !) portrays him as an enthusiastic Nazi-fascist. He writes about the Nazi-movement:

„The movement is radical and yet with an inner balance. (..) It is revolutionary, but .. it is revolution from the right.“ „It fights the liberal democracy.“

We discovered this book in the late 1980s and of course contacted the ZEIT. Because this paper (DIE ZEIT) claimed and still claims (together with the FAZ) to be the best intellectual paper of Germany. The chief-editor of economics was at that time Mr. Roger de Weck. He was very impressed by our research and could not believe it,  - because Müller-Armack was and is still today seen as the great innovator of modern economic thinking. The Max Weber of the Federal Republic of Germany  so to speak.

Roger de Weck invited me for coffee to the ZEIT-office, (a great honor for every freelance journalist). He congratulated me again, but wanted to read the book himself before publishing my article. A few weeks later he told us that everything was right with our article. He would not publish it though, as his bosses in DIE ZEIT had advised him so. The reason: The Nazi-past of Dr. Müller-Armack is (allegedly) well known to everyone in the business and thus of no interest to the readership of DIE ZEIT.

Wow. I was impressed and my view of German quality-journalism changed forever.  

It was a shock to see that it is not the truth that German journalism is searching for. What is the use of reading and writing, discussing and criticizing if the truth is of so little importance? Why can't we use this book of 1933 to understand the history of ideas of the 20th century? And why didn't anyone else but me discover this book? What about our excellent economic professors at university? Why do they ignore the history of their own department as much as the professors of history?

Is historiography a rational science or as dogmatic as religion?

I grew to believe that it is in fact a sort of modern religion. Let us just look at the sad case-study of Dr. Lüling. In the year1970 he had submitted his thesis (Dissertation) in which he could prove that early Islam has to be understood as a development out

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 06.07.2014
ISBN: 978-3-7368-2425-6

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