The Goldhagen Controversy: One Nation, One People, One Theory?

Holocaust literature abounds, as survivors seek to bear witness and historians try to understand. So far the very magnitude of the satanic murder has inspired a kind of awed reticence about pronouncing overarching explanations. Now a 37-year-old political scientist from Harvard claims: "Explaining why the Holocaust occurred requires a radical revision of what has until now been written. This book is that revision." Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, published in this country in April and in Germany in early August, has become an international sensation, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.

The book is a deliberate provocation -- I consider this a neutral judgment. Provocations can shock people out of their settled, comfortable views; they can also be self-promoting attacks on earlier work and professional standards. Goldhagen's title is provocative and delivers his thesis: the executioners of Jews were willing murderers, who willingly chose to torment and kill their victims; they were ordinary Germans, not Nazi monsters, not specially trained or indoctrinated by party membership or ideology, but simply acting out of what Goldhagen calls the common German "eliminationist mind-set." And being "ordinary" Germans responding to a common "cognitive model" about Jews, their places could have been taken by millions of other ordinary Germans.

Goldhagen's book comes in two related parts: the explanatory model, or "the analytical framework," as he also calls it, and the empirical evidence. The parts are joined by a single intent: the indictment of a people. The duality of presentation marks the style as well. Goldhagen depicts horror and renders judgment in evocative and compelling phrases. He bolsters polemical certainty with concepts drawn from the social sciences, relying on the vaporous, dreary jargon of the worst of academic "discourse." Unintelligible diagrams distract, even as horrendous photographs confirm. "The book's intent is primarily explanatory and theoretical," he notes. Theory explains and, as there is a persistent mismatch between the powerful, unsparing description of Holocaust bestiality and simplistic theoretical explanation, theory triumphs. Astoundingly repetitive, the book has 125 pages of notes but, regrettably, no bibliography.

To say it at once: the book has some merit, especially in the middle section, which depicts three specific aspects of the Holocaust, and it has one overriding defect: it is in its essence unhistorical. It is unhistorical in positing that one (simplistically depicted) strain of the past, German antisemitism, explains processes that the author strips of their proper historical context; it is unhistorical in over and over again presenting suppositions as "incontestable" certainty. Sir Lewis Namier, a great English historian, once remarked that " . . . the historical approach is intellectually humble; the aim is to comprehend situations, to study trends, to discover how things work: and the crowning attainment of historical study is a historical sense -- an intuitive understanding of how things do not happen. . . . " Goldhagen's tone mocks humility, and he seems to lack any sense "of how things do not happen," of how complex human conduct and historical change really are.

THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY

Goldhagen begins with a disquisition of some hundred pages on what he believes is the peculiar character of German antisemitism, emphasizing medieval Christian hostility to Jews and concluding that in the largely secularized Germany of the nineteenth century this doctrinal hostility sharpened into a racial one, demonizing Jews as alien, as the enemy that needed to be eliminated. This version is of course dangerously close to the old clichŽ that a clear line of authoritarian, antisemitic thought runs from Luther to Hitler and was largely responsible for the triumph of Nazism.

Goldhagen draws on the rich literature about German antisemitism even as he dismisses it, distills what is useful for his thesis while ignoring whatever might contradict or complicate it, and then celebrates the originality of his own version. The result is a potpourri of half-truths and assertions, all meant to support his claim that German antisemitism was unique in its abiding wish to eliminate Jews, its "eliminationist mind-set." He suggests that one needs to look at Germans as anthropologists look at preliterate societies; they are not like "us," meaning Americans or Western Europeans.

He considers but dismisses the need to compare German antisemitism to other varieties, although we know that antisemitism was endemic in the Western world. Some scholars, including George L. Mosse and Zeev Steinhell, have plausibly argued that before 1914 French antisemitism was more pervasive and more aggressive than German antisemitism (on the other hand, French defense of Jews was more vigorous than similar efforts in Germany). Or take a perhaps even more revealing comparison: a leading historian of Germany, James J. Sheehan, wrote in 1992 that "animosity towards Jews [in the pre-1914 era] was substantially stronger in Austria than in Germany," and estimated "that whereas Austrians made up less than 10 per cent of the population of Hitler's Reich, they were involved in half the crimes associated with the Holocaust." Goldhagen certainly knows that thousands of non-Germans were willing executioners, willing auxiliaries to the Holocaust. But their motivation or, indeed, their historical role, is of no interest to him.