Wehler had gone too far in attacking Hillgruber with the line about "tested senior officials". In a 1989 essay, the American historian Jerry Muller criticised Wehler as a "leading Left-Liberal historian" who used the Historikerstreit to smear neoconservatives unjustly by the Nazi tag Muller went on to write of the "interesting peculiarity of the political culture of German Left-liberal intellectuals" such as Wehler, who referred to Stalinist repression in the Soviet Union as "the excesses of the Russian Civil War" and argued that there was no comparison between Soviet and German history. Instead, Wehler suggested that the only valid comparisons were between the history of Germany and that of other Western nations. Muller criticised Wehler for his lack of interest in Soviet history and his unwillingness to engage in a comparative history between Eastern and Western nations, instead of just Western nations. Along somewhat-similar lines to the stance that he had taken during the Historikerstreit, Wehler in September 1990 strongly condemned a newspaper opinion piece by Harold James, who suggested national legends and myths were needed to sustain national identity. Criticism Wehler's work has been criticized. By right-wingers From the right, Otto Pflanze claimed that Wehler's use of such terms as "Bonapartism", "social imperialism", "negative integration" and Sammlungspolitik ("the politics of rallying together") went beyond mere heuristic devices and instead become a form of historical fiction. The German conservative historian Thomas Nipperdey has argued that Wehler presented German elites as more united than they were, focused too much on forces from above and too little on forces from below in 19th-century German society and presented too stark of a contrast between the forces of order and stabilization and the forces of democracy with no explanation for the German Empire's relative stability. Nipperdey thinks that Wehler failed to explain how the Weimar Republic occurred since Wehler considered that prior to 1918, the forces of authoritarianism were so strong and those of democracy so weak. In a 1975 book review of Wehler's Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, Nipperdey concluded that a proper history of the German Empire period must be written by placing German history in a comparative European and trans-Atlantic perspective, which might allow the end of "our fixation on the struggle with our great-grandfathers". By left-wingers From the left, Wehler has been criticized by two British Marxist historians, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley. Their 1980 book Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung (translated into English