appeals for national willingness to make sacrifices and of sentiment against national pathos and national emblems has its roots in the political sobering up that arose from the experiences of the Third Reich. Whoever wants to see in this a lack of patriotic sentiment should be clear once and for all that there is no lack of willingness for democratic participation, although this frequently takes place outside of the corrupt apparatus of the large parties... It is therefore absurd to want to rehabilitate older authoritarian attitudes through historical relativizing. It is a mistake to characterize as a wrong path the consequences of action inferred from the flawed developments of the period between the wars". Mommsen accused the Kohl government of seeking to revive German nationalism "via a detour" of "strengthening national consciousness" through the planned German Historical Museum in West Berlin. Mommsen wrote the purposes of the German Historical Museum together with the House of History in Bonn was to "make us forget the Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa under the slogan of "normalizing". This intention has nothing to do with the understanding of history that has grown stepwise in postwar Germany, an understanding that has come about apart from the classical monumental history and frequently independently of the scholarly discipline". "The New Historical Consciousness" In another essay first published in the Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik magazine in October 1986, Mommsen was to call Nolte's claim of a "causal nexus" between National Socialism and Communism "not simply methodologically untenable, but also absurd in it premises and conclusions". Mommsen wrote in his opinion that Nolte's use of the Nazi era phrase "Asiatic hordes" to describe Red Army soldiers, and his use of the word "Asia" as a byword for all that is horrible and cruel in the world reflected racism. Mommsen wrote:"In contrast to these irrefutable conditioning factors, Nolte's derivation based on personalities and the history of ideas seems artificial, even for the explanation of Hitler's anti-Semitism…If one emphasizes the indisputably important connection in isolation, one should not then force a connection with Hitler's weltanschauung, which was in no ways original itself, in order to derive from it the existence of Auschwitz. The battle line between the political right in Germany and the Bolsheviks had achieved its aggressive contour before Stalinism employed methods that led to the death of millions of people. Thoughts about the extermination of the Jews had