to the United States and the Soviet Union as: ...historically hopeless because of the way the Second World War ended. To want to develop such a projection now would mean to bring the powers in the East and the West together against the Germans. I cannot imagine that anyone is earnestly striving for that. Reminiscences of good cooperation between the Germans and Slavic peoples in the middle of Europe before the First World War, and in part also still between the wars, are awakened whenever journalists or historians travel to Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary. In that atmosphere it seems imperative to express how closely one feels connected to representatives of these nations. This is understandable, but it cannot all merge into a notion of "Central Europe" that could be misunderstood as taking up the old concept again, which is, as I have said, no longer realizable. In a word, I think the effort to latch on to the connections torn apart in 1945, because of the outcome of the war, and then in turn because of the Cold War, is a sensible political task, especially for West Germans. In another essay first published in the Die Zeit newspaper on 7 November 1986, Habermas wrote that: "This longing for the unframed memories from the perspective of the veterans can now be satisfied by reading Andreas Hillgruber's presentation of the events on the Eastern Front in 1944-45. The 'problem of identification', something that is unusual for an historian, poses itself to the author only because he wants to incorporate the perspective of the fighting troops and the affected civilian population". In a newspaper 'feuilleton'''' entitled "Not a Concluding Remark", first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 20 November 1986, Meier wrote that: What moved Hillgruber to "identify" with the defenders of the front in East Prussia will probably have to remain a mystery…But however that may be, and whatever other weaknesses his book contains, it cannot be accused of trivializing National Socialism. In this respect, Habermas's concerns are certainly without foundation. The political scientist Kurt Sontheimer, in an essay entitled "Makeup Artists Are Creating a New Identity" first published in Rheinischer Merkur newspaper on 21 November 1986, accused Hillgruber of being guilty of "revisionism" (by which Sontheimer clearly meant negationism) in his writings on German history. In another essay entitled "He Who Wants to Escape the Abyss" first published in Die