Michael Stürmer (29 September 1938 – 13 July 2026) was a German conservative historian who specialised in the history of the German Empire (1871–1918). He is best known for his role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, for his geographical interpretation of German history and for an admiring 2008 biography of Vladimir Putin.
Early life and education Stürmer was born in Kassel, Germany, to , a Hitler Youth prize-winning composer who wrote and performed music for the city's Nazi events, and Ursula (née Scherbening), a violinist. His maternal grandfather was , the chief of general staff in the Imperial Schutztruppe for German South West Africa from 1905 to 1908.
He attended a Waldorf gymnasium in Kassel (graduating in 1956), followed by a technical internship. Supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, he received his education in history, philosophy and languages at the University of Marburg, at the Free University of Berlin as a student of Gordon A. Craig, and at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the military historian Michael Howard. He returned to Marburg to complete his doctoral dissertation Koalition und Opposition in der Weimarer Republik 1924–1928 under the supervision of (a former Wehrmacht lieutenant and a student of Werner Conze) in 1965.
Academic career Stürmer was initially employed as a research assistant for his supervisor at the University of Mannheim (1966–1970). After a brief visiting position at the University of Sussex (1970/1971) he completed his habilitation at the Technische Universität Darmstadt under . From 1973 to 2003 he held a professorship at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.
He was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University (1976/1977), the Institute for Advanced Study (1977/1978), and the Sorbonne (1984/1985).
Public career and political involvement Stürmer began on the political left in the 1960s, but shifted rightward during the course of the 1970s.Muller, page 35. The turning point occurred in 1974 when the Social Democratic Party of Germany Land government of Hesse attempted to abolish history as a subject in the Hesse educational system and to replace it with "social studies". Stürmer played a major role in campaigning for the defeat of the SPD government in the 1974 elections. Starting in the early 1980s he became a well-known figure in the Federal Republic, with frequent contributions to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, his editorship of a number of popular book series entitled "The Germans and their Nation" and holding a series of lectures for the general public.Muller, page 36.
In the 1980s Stürmer worked as an advisor and speech-writer to the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In the mid-1980s he sat on a committee – together with Thomas Nipperdey and Klaus Hildebrand – in charge of vetting the publications issued by the Research Office of the West German Ministry of Defense.Evans 1989, page 44. The committee attracted some controversy when it refused to publish a hostile biography of Gustav Noske.
From 1987 to 1998 Stürmer was the director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in . In 2004 he became a founding member of the Valdai Discussion Club.
Stürmer worked as chief correspondent for the newspaper Die Welt, published by the Axel Springer AG publishing group. , he continued to serve on the political economy advisory board of OMFIF.
Death Stürmer died on 13 July 2026, at the age of 87.
Work and reception Views Stürmer has argued that "the future is won by those who coin concepts and interpret the past". In a series of his essays published in book form in 1986 as Dissonanzen des Fortschritts (Dissonances of Progress), he claimed that democracy in West Germany cannot be taken for granted; that though Germany does have a democratic past, the present system of the Federal Republic developed in response to past totalitarian experiences of both left and right; that geography has played a key role in limiting the options of German governments; and that given the Cold War, the ideas of neutrality for the Federal Republic or reunification with East Germany were not realistic.Muller, page 37.
He is arguably best known for his advocacy of a geographical interpretation of German history. In a geographical variant of the Sonderweg theory, he has argued that what he regards as Germany's precarious geographical situation in Central Europe has played the deciding role in the course of German history, and that coping with this has left successive German rulers no other choice but to engage in authoritarian government.Evans 1989, page 104Burleigh & Wippermann, page 19. In Stürmer's opinion, the "belligerence" of the Reich came about through a complex interplay of Germany's location in the "middle of Europe" surrounded by enemies and of "democratic" forces in the domestic sphere.
Stürmer asserted that Germany – confronted with dangers from a revanchist France and an aggressive Russia, and as the "country in the middle" – could not afford the luxury of democracy. He regards Imperial Germany as more democratic and less "Bonapartist" than historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler have claimed, and that these democratic tendencies came to the fore during the Revolution of 1918–1919. In Stürmer's view, it was too much democracy rather than too little that led to the end of the Kaiserreich as the "restless Reich" collapsed because of its internal contradictions under the pressures of World War I.
Involvement in the Historikerstreit During the late 1980s, Stürmer played a prominent role in the Historikerstreit. Left-wing historians criticized him for an essay he wrote entitled "Land Without History" published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on April 25, 1986, in which he had claimed that Germans lacked a history to be proud of, and called for a positive evaluation of German history as a way of building national pride.Stürmer, Michael. "History In a Land Without History", pages 16–17 from Forever In The Shadow of Hitler? edited by , Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993 pages 16–17. He argued that Germans were suffering from a "loss of orientation" caused by the lack of a positive view of their history.Stürmer, Michael. "History In a Land Without History" pages 16–17 from Forever In The Shadow of Hitler? edited by Ernst Piper, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993 page 16 In his view, the fall of the Weimar Republic was caused by "loss of orientation" due to the secularization of a previously religious country.Stürmer 1993, page 16
Stürmer argued that West Germany had an important role in the world to play, could not play that role because the lack of a past to be proud of was "seriously damaging the political culture of the country" and wrote that it was "morally legitimate and politically necessary" for Germans to have a positive view of their history.Stürmer, Michael. "History In a Land Without History" pages 16–17 from Forever In The Shadow of Hitler? edited by Ernst Piper, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993 page 17 In his view, what was needed was a campaign by the government, the media and historians to create a "positive view" of German history.
In Stürmer's opinion, the Nazi era was a major block towards a positive view of the German past, and what was needed was a focus on the broad sweep of German history as opposed to the 12 years of Nazi Germany as a way of creating a national identity that all Germans could take pride in.Kershaw, page 239. He wrote that the "loss of orientation" caused by the absence of a German national identity led to a "search for identity".Evans 1989, page 21. In his opinion this search was crucial because West Germany was "now once more a focal point in the global civil war waged against democracy by the Soviet Union". Because of the "loss of orientation", he argued that West Germans were not standing up well to the "campaign of fear and hate carried into the Federal Republic from the East and welcomed within like a drug". He claimed that Konrad Adenauer's policy in the 1950s of not prosecuting those responsible for Nazi-era crimes against humanity and war crimes was a wise one and that it was a huge mistake to begin prosecutions in the 1970s as it destroyed any prospect of positive feelings about the German past.
Writing in 1986, Stürmer complained that recent opinion polls showed 80% of Americans were proud of being American, that 50% of the British were proud of being British, and 20% of West Germans were proud of being German, and argued until national pride could be restored, West Germany could not play an effective part in the Cold War.
At the 1986 Römerberg Colloquia (a gathering of intellectuals held annually in Frankfurt), Stürmer argued that Germans had a destructive "obsession with their guilt", which he complained led to a lack of a positive sense of German national identity.Evans 1989, page 103. Likewise, he argued that the legacy of 1960s radicalism was an over-emphasis on the Nazi period in German history. He called for Sinnstiftung, to give German history a meaning that would allow for a positive national identity.
At the colloquia, Stürmer stated: "We cannot live by making our past...into a permanent source of endless guilt feelings".Evans 1989, pages 103–104. At the same gathering, he spoke of "the deadly idiocies of the victors of 1918", which led to a loss of a German national identity, and to the collapse of the Weimar Republic as Germans, confronted with the crises of modernity without a positive national identity, opted for the Nazi solution. At the same time he complained that the Allies had made the same mistake after 1945 as they had in 1918, laying a burden of guilt on Germans that prevented them from having positive feelings about their past. He complained that, "as Stalin's men sat in judgment in Nuremberg" proved, that what he regards as the self-destructive German obsession with Nazi guilt was the work of outsiders serving their own aims.
During the same session, Stürmer attacked those historians who argued that Germany started World War I in 1914, and instead blamed France and Russia for the First World War. Moreover, he argued that whatever Germany did to start the First World War was only a defensive reaction imposed by geography.
The sessions of the 1986 Römerberg Colloquia involving Stürmer were stormy.Evans 1989, page 173 When it became time to print the proceedings of the Colloquia, he refused to allow his contributions to be published, complaining of the "defamations and denunciations" he alleged to have been subjected to.Evans 1989, page 173 When his contribution, the essay "Weder verdrängen noch bewältigen: Geschichte und Gegenwartsbewusstein der Deutschen" was published in the Swiss journal Schweizer Monatshefte, he edited it heavily to remove many of his more controversial statements about the need for Germans to forget about Nazi crimes in order to feel good about their past.Evans 1989, page 173 Despite his editing of his essay, he refused to allow it to be published in an anthology about the Historikerstreit out of the concern it might damage his reputation as a historian.Evans 1989, page 173 Stürmer's critic, the British historian Richard J. Evans stated that the remarks he quoted Stürmer as making at the 1986 Römerberg Colloquia came from a tape-recorded record at the Colloquia, and not from the edited version provided by Stürmer.Evans 1989, page 173