past: "Didn't Stalin..."; in Cambodia, didn't they..." These are sad , which in a strange way have propagated themselves into the political view of the present". "The Search for the 'Lost History'?" Hans Mommsen in an essay first published in the September 1986 edition of Merkur accused Nolte of attempting to "relativize" Nazi crimes within the broader framework of the 20th century. Mommsen asserted that by describing Lenin's Red Terror in Russia as an "Asiatic deed" threatening Germany, Nolte was arguing that all actions directed against Communism, no matter how morally repugnant, were justified by necessity. Mommsen wrote that the problem with German conservatives after 1945 was lack of a "reservoir of conservative values to which it could connect without interruption". Mommsen wrote the theory of totalitarianism served Cold War needs so "that could not only decorate itself with the epithet "anti-Fascist" but could also rule out and criminalize leftist efforts" and for the "bracketing out the period of the Third Reich from the continuity of German history". Mommsen argued this "bracketing out" was necessary because of the continuity of the German bureaucracy from the Weimar to Nazi to post-war periods, which required a "psychological repression of the criminal politics of the Third Reich". In this regard, Mommsen wrote: "It is significant that the Weimar Republic was viewed in the years immediately following 1945 as an experiment failed from the onset; not until the success of the chancellor democracy did this image brighten. Then the Weimar experience could be trotted out for the additional legitimization of the Federal Republic and the fundamental superiority the Federal Republic assured". Mommsen wrote that the Bitburg controversy of 1985 had "made surprisingly clear that the burdens of the Second World War now as before possess traumatic meaning. These burdens disturbed the dramaturgy of the Bitburg spectacle, which, under the fiction of final reconciliation among friends, was supposed to replace the idea of a crusade by the Allies against the Hitler dictatorship with the idea of a crusade against Communist world dictatorship". Mommsen wrote it was a reaction to the Bitburg controversy that led historians like Michael Stürmer to insist that the Germans needed a positive history to end what Stürmer called the "collective obsession with guilt". Mommsen praised what Stümer deplored, writing the "prevailing mistrust in the Federal Republic, independent of every party affiliation of any cult of community, organized by the state, of