i want to argue in the notes which follow that an attempt to ‘re-evaluate’ the Third Reich in the late 1980s ought to have space for a slightly longer historiographical perspective than was evident in most of the papers and much of the discussion at the Philadelphia conference. Many different points could be raised in this context. I want to confine myself to one because it seems the most difficult and the most problematic: that is, the disappearance of theories, or articulated concepts of fascism from research and writing about the Third Reich in the course of the past twelve years or so. If it is used at all, the term now appears in the new literature (outside East Germany) in a loosely descriptive sense, devoid of theoretical baggage.

I believe that this amounts to an enormous change, both in the conceptualization of National Socialism and in the directions of new research. This change should not be passed over in silence as though fascism theory just melted away, but calls for some kind of stocktaking, towards which these remarks constitute a first fragmentary contribution. My own position on the issues involved is sufficiently muddled for me to try to write about them without having axes to grind: while I felt that the fascism debates of the 1960s and 1970s brought enduring gains to the analysis of Nazism (see below), I never took a fully active part in them; I could never rid myself of basic conceptual doubts and confusions concerning capital, I always felt that a comparative dimension was missing from the writing on German fascism, and I thus usually preferred to use the terms National Socialism or Third Reich.