wide margin. If the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was justifiably drawn to oppose the planned performance of Fassbinder's play, then why did it choose to publish Nolte's letter [A reference to the play The Garbage, the City, and Death by Rainer Werner Fassbinder about an unscrupulous Jewish businessman who exploits German guilt over the Holocaust that many see as anti-Semitic]...The Nazi crimes lose their singularity in that they are at least made comprehensible as an answer to the (still extant) Bolshevist threats of annihilation. The magnitude of Auschwitz shrinks to the format of technical innovation and is explained on the basis of the “Asiatic” threat from an enemy that still stands at our door”. In particular, Habermas took Nolte to task for suggesting a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge genocide. In Habermas's opinion, since Cambodia was a backward, Third World agrarian state and Germany a modern, First World industrial state, there was no comparison between the two genocides. Habermas then linked what he called the revisionism of Nolte, Hillgruber and Stürmer with the planned German Historical Museum in Berlin and the House of History in Bonn, which he criticized for a nationalistic view of German history. Habermas accused Stürmer of subordinating history to politics and of attempting to strangle the emergence of individualistic society with his demand for "historical consciousness as vicarious religion". Habermas wrote: "The unconditional opening of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West is the greatest intellectual achievement of our postwar period; my generation should be especially proud of this. This event cannot and should not be stabilized by a kind of NATO philosophy colored with German nationalism. The opening of the Federal Republic has been achieved precisely by overcoming the ideology of Central Europe that our revisionists are trying to warm up for us with their geopolitical drumbeat about `"the old geographically central position of the Germans in Europe" (Stürmer) and "the reconstruction of the destroyed European Center" (Hillgruber). The only patriotism that will not estrange us from the West is a constitutional patriotism." "The New Myth of State" The sub-title of Hillgruber's book drew controversy with the Swiss historian Micha Brumlik in an essay entitled "New Myth of State" first published in Die Tagezeitung newspaper on 12 July 1986, commenting that the use of the word Zerschlagung (destruction) for the Germans indicated that an act of extreme violence was