[4][5] 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.
[5] Stürmer has 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.
[5] 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.
[5] In the mid-1980s Stürmer 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.
[12] 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".
[12] 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".
[4] 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.
[15] 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.
[16] Habermas accused Stürmer on marching to a "geopolitical drumbeat" with his depiction of German history determined by geographical factors requiring authoritarian government.
[22] Stürmer charged that Habermas was guilty of misquotation, and of making confusing statements such as his claim that he was working to create a "NATO philosophy" while seeking to bring Germany closer to the West.
[11] In response to Stürmer's geographical theories about how Germany's "land in the middle" status had forced authoritarianism on the Germans, Kocka argued in an essay entitled "Hitler Should Not Be Repressed by Stalin and Pol Pot" published in the Frankfurter Rundschau on September 23, 1986, that “Geography is not destiny”[23] Kocka wrote that both Switzerland and Poland were also "lands in the middle", and yet neither country went in the same authoritarian direction as Germany.
[28]Habermas accused Stürmer of believing that "a pluralism of values and interests leads, when there is no longer any common ground...sooner or later to social civil war".
[28] Hans-Ulrich Wehler called Stürmer's work "a strident declaration of war against a key element of the consensus upon which the socio-political life of this second republic has rested heretofore".
Stürmer argues repeatedly that too much pluralism of values and interests, unchecked by a unifying national consensus, destabilized Wilhelmine Germany and helped overthrow the Weimar Republic, once it got into economic difficulties.
Thus for today he seeks nothing less than the creation of a substitute religion, a nationalist faith held by all, which will lend calculability to West Germany's foreign policy by providing its citizens with a new sense of identity held together by patriotism, and resting on a unitary, undisputed, and positive consciousness of German history, unsullied by negative guilt feelings about the German past".
[35]Along the same lines, Evans criticized Stürmer for his emphasis on the modernity and totalitarianism of National Socialism, the role of Hitler, and the discontinuities between the Imperial, Weimar and Nazi periods.
[36] In Evans's view, the exact opposite was the case with National Socialism as a badly disorganized, anti-modern movement with deep roots in the German past, and the role of Hitler much smaller than the one Stürmer credited him with.
[41] Stürmer argued that traditions were tolerance for religious minorities, civic values, federalism and striking the fine balance between the peripheries and the center.
[41] In a July 1992 interview, Stürmer called his historical work a "bid to prevent Hitler remaining the final, unavoidable object of German history, or indeed its one and only starting point".