The Goldhagen Debates: A Consideratoin of the Discourse onHitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaustand National Identity in America and Germany.
Goldhagen Interview with Charlie Rose: April 5, 1996.
Introductoin:
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is: a former Harvard professor, the son of a Holocaust survivor and academician, and a shameless self promoter.
March of 1996 – Goldhagen publishes Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a book based on his doctoral thesis.
- Thesis itself already won Harvard’s Sumner Dissertation Prize --- the American Political Science Association’s Gabriel A. Almond Award.
- Book would go on to win the prestigious Democracy award from the Journal for German and International Politics(the first recipient since the Democratic of former East Germany in 1990)
Published by a Alfred A. Knopf (a commercial press).
- the book came out in a whirlwind of media activity, including a national book tour
-PR department of Knopf stages public debate on the book at the Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Washington DC – spurned by German historians, attended Christopher Browning and Yehuda Bauer
Hitler’s Willing Executioners, as well as Goldhagen’s public statements are consciously styled in opposition to the scholarly tradition on the Holocaust – positioning himself an “outsider” shaking up the field.
In his Op-Ed in the New York Times, published 12 days before his book hit the stores and ending with its title, Goldhagen talks in salacious language to describe his work and takes on historians for failing to consider implies that historians are lazy, limited by their disciplines.
Goldhagen, "The People's Holocaust", opinion article in The New York Times, March 17, 1996.
“A trove of articles confirms this fact. During postwar legal investigations, the West German authorities interrogated tens of thousands of former killers and put a few thousand on trial. These records have been used only selectively by scholars, in part because they are scattered throughout the justice system, and not stored in historical archives.”
“The Nazi authorities, apparently acting on the assumption that any able-bodied German would consent to kill Jews, assigned virtually anyone to the task. Their assumption was borne out.”
General Theory of Hitler’s Willing Executioners:
Research-agenda:
The personal responsibility of the Nazi perpetrators within an anti-Semitic cultural horizon
Theoretical concepts:
Goldhagen asks about the extent of anti-Semitism in German society. He explains anti-Semitism as an Axiom of the society. Thus, anti-Semitism was not just a personal ideology but also functioned as a cultural code, the essence of the German Volksgemeinschaft, which culminated in Auschwitz. He sees anti-Semitism in the horizon of Auschwitz. Furthermore, he claims that society is a transmitter of anti-Semitic attitudes, fitting these prejudices into the cognitive structures which inform public and interpersonal discourse. Thus, Goldhagen adapts Maurice Halbwach’s theory on collective memory to anti-Semitism, arguing that anti-Semitism was part of the shared code for conversations and interactions which constitute society---meaning that each German’s reality was formed by this cognitive frame of anti-Semitism. Thus, Goldhagen roots his explanation of Auschwitz in the history of German political culture before and during the third-Reich. In this environment, the Jews became the Volk’s antithesis. “Built into the concept of Volk was a deprecation of Jews, who embodied all the negative qualities and ideals which were absent from the Volk, including moral ones. Thus, the conceptual and moral foundation of German political existence incorporated the perniciousness of the Jews” (Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 77-78).
Definition of anti-Semitism:
Anti-Semitism is not the result of action or behaviour of concrete Jewish persons.
Anti-Semitism is an aspect of the Christian culture.
The expression and outbreak of anti-Semitism depends on political and social changes.
Eliminationist anti-Semitism:
While Goldhagen sees this type of anti-Semitism as unique to the German case, it lacks a cohesive definition in his work, a point which many scholars have criticized. However, it is primary expressed in:
1. The total assimilation of Jews, asks them to construct themselves in the image of Germans.
2. Laws which restricts rights of Jews
3. The desire to take back the Jewish emancipation from the beginning of the 19th century.
4. Forcing Jews out of the country.
5. Extermination.
American Debates:
Browning (in debate speech) criticizes Goldhagen for having a “keyhole” view of history: a tendency to over simplify and generalize (many times employing false dichotomies) not providing context or perspective.
“Goldhagen has gone about constructing his history of Germans and the Holocaust…. [it] is an example of what I like to call ‘keyhole history’; he views events though a single narrow vantage point that blocks out context and perspective.”
(Christopher R. Browning, “Ordinary Men or Ordinary Germans” given at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Memorial on April 8, 1996.)
- These reductions lead Goldhagen’s singular explication of genocide with German eliminationist anti-Semitism, ignoring even the physiological pressures of being under a dictatorship (65). Rather than allowing for a “combination of ideological and situational factors that allowed a popular, ideologically driven dictatorial regime and its hardcore followers to mobilize and harness the rest of society to its purposes”, an approach which includes but does not stop at anti Semitism (59)
- He ignores that many of the perpetrators of genocide were, in fact, not German (such as battalions from Luxemburg etc) and that they killed not only Jews and “subhuman” races like Slavs but also Italians and Greeks (60).
Similar to the “keyhole” view of history, Ruth Bettina Birn points out Goldhagen’s “keyhole” use of evidence – more moving from specific things that he finds and turning them into generalizations and transfomring any evidence to fit into his case:
“He seems to follow no stringent methodological approach whatsoever. This is the problem. He prefers instead to use parts of the statements selectively, to reinterpret them according to his own point of view, or to take them out of context and make them fit into his own interpretative framework” (Ruth Bettina Birn, “Revising the Holocaust” from The Historical Journal (40, 1, 1997)
Furhter, Finklestein points out that the book also is full of internal contradictions and takes issue with Goldhagen’s attempts to portray Nazi racism as absolutely unique – reminding us that at the same time in America people were supporting firebombing Japan until half of their civilian population was dead. Moreover, he sees the undifferentiated treatment of Germans, and the thesis, as simply confirm a tired stereotype about the particulat nature of the German main.
Goldhagen quotes pointed out by Norman G. Finkelstein in “Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Crazy Thesis’ A critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, in A Nation on Trial The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth:
“Germans’ anti-semitism was the basis of their profound hatred of the Jews and the psychological impulse to make them suffer” (HWE: 584)
And
“The motivational dimension is the most crucial for explaining the perpetrator’s willingness to act” (HWE: 20).
Browning’s criticisms not shows the scholarly shortcomings of Goldhagen’s book, but also goes towards explaining the extremely negative reaction of scholars in the United States. By engaging in this type of decidedly anti-academic “keyhole” history, Goldhagen writes a questionable book that becomes extremely popular due exactly to its flaws: it provides a clear and shocking thesis that is proved through the manipulation of history. To add insult to injury, the book is written in a way which harshly criticizes academia for failing to address the holocaust.
As a note, Goldhagen is also higly critical of Browning, who he claims “constantly plays up the reluctance and opposition of the men which he manages to read into the material”.
Have to see it as coming out of the intentionalist-functionalist debates which were much more academic and removed, which explains some of the appeal of the book (exciting!) about people and horrific acts, not just concepts!
Debate takes place in NYT, Washington Post, New Republic, Nation, and the scandal of it and academia’s response played into the popularity (no such thing as bad press)
Seen in American popular “quality” press as a masterpiece of the history, path breaking contribution to Holocaust studies.
One idea about why it is so popular is it offers U.S. readers a counter-image of themselves in the German population – especially important in the post-cold war context of loss of national identity
Book is written in the simplified way of treating all Germans as uniform and utterly different from the Western world – explicitly uses “us” “them” language – with the quote urging Americans to identify Germans as others – parallel to racial others. – as Browning points out you never have the urge to identify – (almost to say, thank God we did the Enlightenment right) (and, as Ruth Birn points out, all of these arose out of sectional conflicts. Illustrating Goldhagen’s love of the false parallel)
Goldhagen in New York Times:
Few people believe that the Serbs who butchered and brutalized Muslims in Bosnia were forced to do so. Few believe that the Hutus slaughtered Tutsis in Rwanda, the Turks who killed Armenians and the Khmer Rouge who decimated the Cambodian people thought that they were doing wrong.
Further, the book offers a sympathetic identification with the victims because of the vivid descriptions of their torture. And makes all of these academic tricks seem legitimate with pseudoscientific language. Thus, by describing aggressors that Americans could never be like, and victems they identify with through their pain, Goldhagen stes up an counter image of the United States identity. The book reinforces American culture's belief in itself as a democratic freedom loving people, all at the expense at these other strange Germans and the American academic community.
Birn, Ruth Bettina and Normang G. Finkelstein, A Nation On Trial The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth, New York: An Owl Book Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
Goldhagen, Daniel, iHHitler’s Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Afred E. Knopf press, 1996.
Eley, Geoff ed. The “Goldhagen Effect” History, Memory, Nazism—Facing The German Past, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Shandley, Robert R ed. Jeremiah Riemer trans., Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debates, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
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