between fascism and communism. The debate had started with a footnote in Furet's book, Le Passé d'une illusion (The Passing of an Illusion), in which Furet acknowledged Nolte's merit of comparatively studying communism and Nazism, an almost-forbidden practice in Continental Europe. Both ideologies typify in a radical way the contradictions of liberalism. They follow a chronological sequence: Lenin predates Mussolini, who, in turn, precedes Hitler. Furet noted that Nolte's theses went against the established notions of culpability and apprehension to criticize the idea of anti-fascism common in the West. This prompted an epistolary exchange between the two of them in which Furet argued that both ideologies were totalitarian twins that shared the same origins, but Nolte maintained his views of a kausaler Nexus (causal nexus) between fascism and communism to which the former had been a response. After Furet's death, their correspondence was published as a book in France in 1998, Fascisme et Communisme: échange épistolaire avec l'historien allemand Ernst Nolte prolongeant la Historikerstreit (Fascism and Communism: Epistolary Exchanges with the German Historian Ernst Nolte Extending the Historikerstreit). It was translated into English as Fascism and Communism in 2001. While pronouncing Stalin guilty of great crimes, Furet contended that although the histories of fascism and communism were essential to European history, there were singular events associated with each movement which differentiated them. He did not feel there was a precise parallel, as Nolte suggested, between the Holocaust and dekulakization. Nolte often contributed Feuilleton (opinion pieces) to German newspapers such as Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He was often described as one of the "most brooding, German thinkers about history". The historical consciousness and self-understanding of the Germans form a major theme of his essays. Nolte called the Federal Republic "a state born of contemporary history, a product of catastrophe erected to overcome catastrophe" In a Feuilleton piece published in Die Welt entitled “Auschwitz als Argument in der Geschichtstheorie” (Auschwitz as An Argument in Historical Theory) on 2 January 1999, Nolte criticized his old opponent Richard J. Evans for his book In The Defence of History, on the grounds that aspects of the Holocaust are open to revision and so Evans’s attacks on Nolte during the Historikerstreit had been unwarranted. Specifically, citing the American political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Nolte argued that the effectiveness of the gas chambers as killing instruments was exaggerated, more Jews were killed by mass