many Germans found that so difficult. Citing a novel by a French industrialist Alain Minic, Le Syndrome Finlandais, Stürmer warned that German "ecological pacifism" would lead to West Germany and hence all of Western Europe being "Finlandized" if the Germans did not have a national identity that inspired pride in being German. As the example of the sort of history that he wanted to see written in Germany, Stürmer used Fernand Braudel's The Identity of France volumes. Stürmer wrote that Braudel and the other historians of the Annales School had made geography the centre of their studies of French and European history while at the same time promoting a sense of French identity that gave the French a history to be proud of. Stürmer went on to argue that the German people had not had a really positive view of their past since the end of the First Reich, and this lack of a German identity to be proud of was responsible for all of the disasters of German history since then. Stürmer asserted "All of our interpretations of Germany had collapsed". As a result, he claimed that at present, the German people were living in historical "rubble", and that the Federal Republic was doomed unless the Germans once again had a sense of history that provided the necessary sense of national identity and pride Stürmer warned that the West Germans would face a "Communist future" if the German people did not have a history that provided for a self-confident national identity . Hillgruber's letter to the FAZ, 29 November 1986 Responding to Meier's comment about what why he chose to "identify" with German troops in a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 29 November 1986, Hillgruber wrote:Is it really so difficult for a German historian (even if he is, like Meier, a specialist in ancient history) to realize why the author of an essay about the collapse in the East in 1944-45 identifies with the efforts of the German populace? I identified with the German efforts not only in East Prussia, but also in Silesia, East Brandenburg and Pomerania (Meier's homeland) to protect themselves from what threatened them and to save as many people as possible. Löwenthal's letter to the FAZ, 29 November 1986 The German political scientist Richard Löwenthal noted that news of Soviet dekulakization and the Holodomor did not reach Germany until 1941,