especially will be strong, for in the past, the political middle has always been capable of providing reasonable solutions, results and maxims." In response to Meier's article, Nolte wrote in a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on December 6, 1986, that he did not “defuse” the thesis he presented in his essay “The Past That Will Not Pass”, but merely corrected a few mistakes in his essay "Standing Things On Their Head". “Makeup Artists are Creating a New Identity” The political scientist Kurt Sontheimer in an essay first published in the Rheinischer Merkur newspaper on November 21, 1986, accused Nolte and company of attempting to create a new “national consciousness” meant to sever the Federal Republic's “intellectual and spiritual ties to the West”. Sontheimer accused Hillgruber of being guilty of "revisionism" (by which Sontheimer clearly meant negationism) in his writings on German history. Sontheimer wrote it was impossible for historians to claim "pure and strict scholarly research" while at the same time engaging in a political project like attempting to shape national identity. Sontheimer wrote the political basis of the Federal Republic founded in 1949 was in the Western tradition of liberal democracy and without mentioning Stürmer by name declared that the search for some basis in German national identity in the Imperial period to provide a "unified an understanding of history as possible" was "dubious" because there was "so little to be found there" and "because every attempt to provide political meaning via our predemocratic national history threatens to end the consensus of the postwar era". Sonthemier wrote that the great achievements of German historians since 1945 was seeking to understand why the Weimar Republic failed and how Nazi Germany came to be, stating:"We were attempting to overcome the past, not to invoke it...I cannot see what better lesson those who are struggling to provide meaning through history can offer us". "He Who Wants To Escape The Abyss In another feuilleton entitled "He Who Wants to Escape the Abyss" first published in Die Welt on November 22, 1986, Hildebrand argued in defense of Nolte that the Holocaust was one of out a long sequence of genocides in the 20th century, and asserted that Nolte was only attempting the "historicization" of National Socialism that Broszat had called for Hildebrand accused Habermas of engaging in "scandalous" attacks on Hillgruber. Hildebrand claimed that "Habermas's criticism is based