But this article from the Aug/Sept 1996 issue of that journal, Daniel Goldhagen’s Holocaust, is one in which he basically gets things right. It's a review of Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), the best-selling but thoroughly odd book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
If Goldhagen's positions on Iran and "political Islam" in recent years are any indication, his worldview is thoroughly compatible with neoconservatism. And his 1996 book exhibited some of the worst characteristics of that current of thinking: dogmatism, self-righteous moralism, bitter attacks on the motivations of virtually any critic, a "postmodern" disdain for facts, and weak analysis.
Neuhaus' article cites the reaction of several leading scholars of the Holocaust to Goldhagen's book, of which there were many, though not many that were approving of his approach.
Neuhaus gets to some of the numerous problems of the book:
Goldhagen dismisses Hannah Arendt’s "banality of evil," with its depiction of Eichmann and other bloodless bureaucrats efficiently running the machinery of death. Just the opposite was the case, he says. The killing of Jews was a popular undertaking, almost a national sport. Hitler gave people the opportunity to do what they had wanted to do all along. Ordinary Germans revelled in the bloodbath of exterminating six million Jews. The subtitle is Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Goldhagen usefully highlights documents showing that some of those who did the actual killing did take pleasure and pride in their work. Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning studied the same documents and wrote a book called Ordinary Men. No, contends Goldhagen, they were not ordinary men, they were ordinary Germans. It is a German thing. You wouldn’t understand.Goldhagen surprised even his admirers when he seriously threatened to sue one of his scholarly critics, Ruth Bettina Birn, for an earlier version of the essay that makes up the second half of A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (1998). (See Goldhagen Tries To Quash Critic, Seeks Retraction by Darryl Li Harvard Crimson 01/21/08.)
Goldhagen’s thesis denies rational access to the Holocaust. He compares German anti-Semitism with Captain Ahab, who was possessed by the irrational passion to avenge himself against Moby Dick. He quotes Melville: “All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.” As with Ahab and the whale, so with Germans and the Jews.
In a typical assertion, Goldhagen says of the battalions that slaughtered Jews by the thousands on the death marches: “The conclusions drawn about the overall character of the members’ actions can, indeed must, be generalized to the German people in general. What these ordinary Germans did also could have been expected of other ordinary Germans.” (Emphasis his.) A long book closes with this sentence: "The inescapable truth is that, regarding Jews, German political culture had evolved to the point where an enormous number of ordinary, representative Germans became—and most of the rest of their fellow Germans were fit to be—Hitler’s willing executioners." This is collective guilt on a grand scale. His "most of the rest" includes just about everybody, for Goldhagen is loath to acknowledge any exceptions at all.
She had challenged his methodology in using testimony taken from perpetrators who took part in massacres of Jews, based on his expertise as an attorney with the Canadian government office in charge of investigating war crimes. As nasty as scholarly disputes often get, it's very rare for someone to go to court over a scholarly work of that nature. He brought suit in Britain, where the libel laws are more permissive for such suits, with the caveat that the loser has to pay the court costs of both parties.
Caution: If you're googling for information on Goldhagen's book, keep in mind that Holocaust-denier groups globbed onto the controversy over Goldhagen's book to use his book Hitler's Willing Executioners as a straw-man version of the Holocaust to debunk. Especially since virtually every historian of the Holocaust in the US, Israel and Germany criticized the book, often harshly, it was probably inevitable that Holocaust-denier groups would try to make use of some of the real scholars' work to give undeserved legitimacy to their own thoroughly dishonest pseudohistory. All this is to say: some of the stuff you'll find in a Web search is on Holocaust-denier sites. Because of the extreme dishonesty of their ideological pseudohistory, don't assume that their versions of articles by well-known scholars are complete or accurate without cross-checking to a legitimate source.
For instance, this article Holocaust Book Sparks Fresh Controversy by Dominique Vidal Le Monde Diplomatique October 1998 (translation by Barry Smerin) is an informative critical piece about Hitler's Willing Executioners. It's reproduced at a Holocaust-denier site with the date 08/18/1998. Now, that date may also be legitimate in some way, e.g., the date of the original French version. In a quick look at the first few paragraphs at the denier site, the introductory summary is included as the opening paragraph of the article. I did notice a difference in the text but I saw one paragraph break that was different. Those are not so much dishonest as sloppy, although quoting an editorial summary as though it were part of the article itself is real sloppy. My point is, don't rely on Holocaust-denier sites providing legitimate, complete texts of articles. I first came across this piece on the denier site via a Yahoo! search. But I wouldn't want to quote and would be very hesitant about even linking to it without checking it against a legitimate source.
Tags: daniel jonah goldhagen
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