 As a result, he claimed that at present, the German people were living in historical "rubble", and that the Federal Republic was doomed unless the Germans once again had a sense of history that provided the necessary sense of national identity and pride

The classicist Christian Meier, who was president of the German Historical Association in 1986 wrote that Stürmer was seeking to make history serve his conservative politics by arguing that Germans needed a history capable of creating a national identity that would allow Germans to face the challenge of the Cold War with pride and confidence in their future.Meier argued that Habermas was correct in expressing his concerns about Stürmer’s work, but asserted that Habermas had wrongly accused the Atlanticist Stürmer of seeking to revive the original concept of the "Sonderweg", that of Germany as a great Central European power that was neither of the West nor of the East.That aside, Meier felt that Stürmer’s claim that the future belonged to those who controlled the past, and that it was the duty of German historians to ensure the right sort of future by writing the right sort of history was troubling.