Michael Stürmer (born September 29, 1938) is a conservative German historian 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 the Russian politician Vladimir Putin.
Life and work
Born in Kassel, Germany, Stürmer received his education in history, philosophy and languages at the University of Marburg, at the Free University of Berlin and at the London School of Economics. From 1973 to 2003 he held a professorship at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and at various times has served as a guest lecturer at the Sorbonne, Harvard University, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Also, he is on the advisory board of OMFIF where he regularly participates in various meetings regarding the financial and monetary system.
In the 1980s Stürmer worked as an advisor and speech-writer to the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Stürmer works as chief correspondent for the newspaper Die Welt, published by the Axel Springer AG publishing group.
Stürmer specializes in the history of the German Empire (1871–1918). He began his career on the political left in the 1960s, but shifted rightward during the course of the 1970s. 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". Stürmer played a major role in campaigning for the defeat of the SPD government in the 1974 elections. Starting in the early 1980s Stürmer became a well-known figure in the Federal Republic, with frequent contributions to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, his editorship of a number of popular book series entitled "The Germans and their Nation" and holding a series of lectures for the general public.
Stürmer argues that "the future is won by those who coin concepts and interpret the past". In a series of his essays published in book form in 1986 as Dissonanzen des Fortschritts (Dissonances of Progress), he claimed that democracy in West Germany cannot be taken for granted; that though Germany does have a democratic past, the present system of the Federal Republic developed in response to past totalitarian experiences of both left and right; that geography has played a key role in limiting the options of German governments; and that given the Cold War, the ideas of neutrality for the Federal Republic or reunification with East Germany were not realistic.
Stürmer 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.
Stürmer has asserted that Germany - confronted with dangers from a revanchist France and an aggressive Russia, and as the "country in the middle" - could not afford the luxury of democracy. He regards Imperial Germany as more democratic and less "Bonapartist" than historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler have claimed, and that these democratic tendencies came to the fore during the Revolution of 1918–1919. In Stürmer's view, it was too much democracy rather than too little that led to the end of the Kaiserreich as the "restless Reich" collapsed because of its internal contradictions under the pressures of World War I.
In the mid-1980s Stürmer 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.
