 Stürmer's defenders such as the American historian Jerry Muller argued that Wehler and Habermas were guilty of misquoting Stürmer, and of unjustly linking him with Ernst Nolte as a sort of guilt by association argument.In response to his critics, Stürmer in an essay entitled "How Much History Weights" published in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" on November 26, 1986 wrote that France was a major power in the world because the French had a history to be proud of, and claimed that West Germany could only play the same role in the world if only they had the same national consensus about pride in their history as did the French.As the example of the sort of history that he wanted to see written in Germany, Stürmer used Fernand Braudel's "The Identity of France" volumes.