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

Even in his discussion of German antisemitism he fails to make the necessary distinctions. There was a wide range of attitudes toward Jews, from those few who did indeed see them as the enemy and chief corrupters of their society -- as "vermin" to be exterminated -- to those men and women who welcomed Jews but regretted what they saw as Jewish "pushiness" or preeminence in some realms. Goldhagen takes remarks out of context and treats almost equally the ranting of the rabble-rouser and the private musings confined to a writer's diary. Everything is grist for his mill.[1]

A Goldhagen version of antisemitism in twentieth-century America might lump Eleanor Roosevelt's early remarks about "Jew-boys" in Franklin's law school class with Henry Ford's championing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Father Coughlin's tirades. Only by summary judgment and indifference to nuance can Goldhagen contend that in the nineteenth century "German society . . . was axiomatically antisemitic." And hence, "It is thus incontestable that the fundamentals of Nazi antisemitism . . . had deep roots in Germany, was part of the cultural cognitive model of German society, and was integral to German political culture . . . It is incontestable that this racial antisemitism which held the Jews to pose a mortal threat to Germany was pregnant with murder" (my italics). Incontestable? I would say unprovable and implausible.

GERMAN JEWS

The very Germany Goldhagen discusses was the country in which Jews had made the most extraordinary leaps to cultural and economic prominence. But Goldhagen omits this integral element of history. After emancipation and after legal equality was decreed in 1869, German Jews began their astounding ascendancy. Their achievements were the envy of Jews elsewhere. It is perfectly true that any hope they had for complete acceptance remained unfulfilled. They knew that they were being treated as second-class citizens, and their very successes heightened their vulnerability. But this was a society at once dynamically expanding and severely weakened by internal strains; it seems odd to single out "eliminationist antisemitism" as the key social dynamic and say nothing of the still sharp antagonisms between Protestants and Catholics, or the intense class conflict that Germans called "the social question" and that weighed on them far more than "the Jewish question" did.

The salience of German antisemitism varied with the mood and condition of German politics. During the Great War these politics became radicalized, and by 1917, when hope for total victory turned to apprehension of defeat, an enraged right wing fastened on violent, chauvinist, antisemitic beliefs; but for many other Germans defeat was the result of internal enemies, the Weimar Republic was a Jewish excrescence in German politics, and both Marxism and Bolshevism were Jewish machinations. Men and women on the left or liberal end of the German political spectrum rejected these delusions and defended the Republic, in which Jews had achieved a certain political prominence. Of all this Goldhagen says very little; the Great War, during which both Jewish patriotism and German antisemitism flourished as never before, is mentioned in only one paragraph. This distorted view of German political culture is unconvincing in its simplicity.

HITLER AND ANTISEMITISM

Scholars have long debated whether Hitler's antisemitism was central to his electoral victories at the end of the Weimar years. It is generally accepted that the more the National Socialists tried to widen their appeal, the more they muted their antisemitic theme. In one of Hitler's key addresses in 1932, for example, he hardly alluded to Jews at all. Yet Goldhagen insists: "The centrality of antisemitism in the Party's world, program and rhetoric -- if in a more avowedly elaborated and violent form -- mirrored the sentiments of German culture." Actually, it exposed the sentiments of only some Germans. In the last free elections in 1932, some 67 percent of the German electorate did not vote for Hitler, although no doubt even among these there were groups that harbored suspicion and dislike of Jews. Perhaps many Germans had some measure of antisemitism in them but lacked the murderous intent that Goldhagen ascribes to National Socialism. Put bluntly: for Goldhagen, as for the National Socialists, Hitler was Germany.

But was antisemitism the sole or even the most important bond between Hitler and the Germans? Was it responsible for the failure of Germans to protest the first terrorist measures of the regime, the suppression of civil rights, the establishment of concentration camps in March 1933? The existence of the camps was made public specifically because they were intended to destroy political enemies and to intimidate potential opposition. From the very beginning the Nazis used every vicious means of humiliation and terror -- in public sometimes, within the insulated realm of the camps always -- against all opponents, real and imagined, German or German Jew, man or woman. They unleashed their pent-up savagery on Socialists and Communists (with the greatest brutality if they happened to be Jews as well). Men were beaten in these camps, and murdered -- yet silence was pervasive among the Germans, who had begun to exult in their society's outward order and slowly returning prosperity and power. Would Goldhagen not acknowledge the likelihood of some link between Germans so sadistically falling upon their fellow Germans and their treatment of people whom they came to demonize -- Jews and Slavs in particular?