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Riemer and Markovits comment on the work by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen on the role of the Germans in the Jewish Holocaust. They examine Goldhagen's views in his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust."

It has been two years since the publication of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, and the controversy seems as fierce today as when his book first engendered passionate debate in Germany, the United States, Britain, and Israel. Readers unfamiliar with these controversies might wonder what is so radical about a scholar claiming to show, as Goldhagen does, that anti-Semitism was the driving force behind the Holocaust? Does Goldhagen really need to emphasize the originality of what many observers (and certainly most victims of the Holocaust) would regard as obvious?

Second, those new to the controversy may be surprised to discover that, apart from the predictable reactions by conservative German papers, the Goldhagen controversy has mostly been a fight among the "good guys" of German historical studies. Goldhagen's typical detractor has not been a Holocaust denier or someone incapable of acknowledging Germany's anti-Semitic tradition, though such deniers have eagerly joined the argument against him. Some of his most vociferous opponents in Germany have been leading left-liberal protagonists on the winning side of Germany's last major controversy about the Holocaust, the "historians' dispute" (Historikerstreit) of the Eighties. One of the sources of this animosity derives from the fact that these "good guys" wrote nothing about the actual perpetrators in their analysis of the Holocaust. They did not deny the Holocaust, like neo-Nazis; they did not relativize it, like the Right; but they were masters of "structuralizing" the Shoah, talking about the social, economic, and/or social psychological conditions that would produce a Shoah rather than focusing on the actual motives of the participants.

Where liberal historians of Germany's past and Goldhagen part company is over how to interpret the essentially voluntary character of the killings. Both Goldhagen and his chief interpretive rival, Christopher Browning, agree that no German was ever seriously punished for refusing to participate in the genocide. Browning insists on locating the men's motives within a social psychology that is simultaneously situational and universal. The environment of the Nazi dictatorship and killing fields turned these men into killers, Browning argues, but the factors pushing them to genocide (peer pressure, authoritarian upbringing, fatigue, alcoholism, stress) belong to the emotional repertoire of many cultures. Browning concludes his book with the rhetorical question: "If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?"

Against Browning and most other students of the Holocaust, Goldhagen argues correctly that the perpetrators did not have to overcome "our" kind of moral scruples in order to kill; they had to act upon their beliefs that this was the right thing to do. The Nazi regime's role was to mobilize this preexisting sentiment, not to force the members of its national community to overcome some more charitable moral code. Goldhagen also insists that the usual appeal to Nazi "authoritarianism" will not do as an explanation. The history of Weimar Germany provides too many examples of Germans who were willing to resist what they regarded as unjust authority. Even the

Nazi dictatorship was vulnerable to public pressure and protest (it curtailed its euthanasia program, and it preferred to arrive at a modus vivendi with the two Christian churches rather than paganize German society immediately); the point is, there was precious little such protest when it came to measures against the Jews. Since Goldhagen argues that a virtually unchallenged image of Jews as "metaphysical" enemies of Germany could be readily mobilized against unarmed men, women, and children, group psychology has no place in his explanation.

There is one respect, however, in which Goldhagen, like Browning et al., does suggest Germans acted in a conformist manner. Goldhagen often writes as though the Germans who voluntarily killed Jews had little choice about the views they entertained regarding their victims. There is a significant difference, however, between Goldhagen's view of what compelled the perpetrators and the Browning version. For Browning, conformity sets in at the very brink of the killing trenches. It is conformity at the point of murder, in the forests, fields, and camps of Poland and Ukraine. To Goldhagen, the onset of conformity is prior to the killing, because it occurs at the level of political socialization. More than anything else, Hitler's Willing Executioners is a book about political culture, about what members of communities are educated to believe.

This interpretive difference over the meaning of conformity has resonance for the way Germans view themselves today. During the Bitburg controversy ( 1985), the liberal historians were keen on resisting a conservative backlash symbolized by Chancellor Kohl's remark that his generation of Germans were blessed by "the grace of late birth." In objecting to this statement, the "good guys" of the Historikerstreit were refuting the notion that post-War Germans no longer had any past to confront-or that, if Germany did have a shameful past, it could be "relativized" by comparing it with those "Asian" totalitarian states where it was said, incorrectly, that genocide "originated." It was important for the liberal historians to beat back this apologist conservative offensive. But in defeating "the grace of a late birth" theory, the liberal historians may have overlooked an opposing and equally disturbing view implicit in their own comparative perspective on the Holocaust. This view, congruent with Browning's interpretation, might be labeled: "There but for the grace of God go I, the genocidal killer."

Oddly, Goldhagen has received a lot of criticism in Germany (mostly from the left) for shifting the focus of political psychology in modern Germany from coercion to education, from the intractable "authoritarian personality" to the willing exemplar of the regnant political culture. Many German leftists have mocked his contention that post-War Western Germany became a different country because of "re-education" and "generational replacement." Parodying this truth has typically taken the form of two false accusations against Goldhagen: one, for buying into the myth of 1945 as Germany's "zero hour," when Germany supposedly shed its entire political heritage overnight for Western values, and two, for overstating the influence of the Western occupying powers on political re-education in the Federal Republic. Goldhagen has never subscribed to either one of these legends. But-most notably in his acceptance speech for the Democracy Prize-he has paid tribute to postwar Germany's effort at democratic self-re-education. Whatever one may think of Goldhagen's characterization of the Federal Republic as a model of democratic transition worth emulating, there can be little doubt that no country has done more to transform itself via political education.

If Goldhagen has faced vehement opposition from Germans, he has also faced just as much antipathy from Jewish intellectuals (Raul Hilberg, Fritz Stern, Peter Gay, Alfred Grosser) who have devoted their scholarly careers to the German past. To them, Goldhagen's book isat best-far too Judeocentric; at worst, simp]istic in its emphasis on the Jews as victims and in its putative demonization of the Germans as a people. To this group of often distinguished intellectuals, Goldhagen's focusing on Jews is somehow a crude reminder of an explanatory mode of the Shoah and of National Socialism that they always found somehow embarrassing. To these people, National Socialism-though a terrible tragedy, to be sure-involved much more than just the Jews. To them, Goldhagen seems to be arguing that to be a Jew in Germany prior to Hitler's rise to power was tantamount to being politically naive, socially blind-almost foolish (because if the anti-Semitism was as pervasive as Goldhagen argued, why didn't they notice it and leave, as the Zionists were urging them to do?) But this is a misreading of Goldhagen's intentions and a mischaracterization of his book. He argues instead that Germany could and did accommodate both an "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that was growing exponentially with the Nazis' assumption of state power and a culture that offered Jews as individuals (though hardly as a collective) opportunities to attain amazing heights in the arts, journalism, medicine, commerce, and the law. Goldhagen's thesis need not be read as an assault on the intelligence or common sense of pre-1938 Germany Jewry.

Finally, what of the charge that Goldhagen is using or abusing the memory and reality of the Holocaust for a political agenda? If anything, this accusation is better redirected at many of the critics who hurl it. Norman Finkelstein, the co-author of A Nation on Trial, sees Goldhagen's insistence on the very specific German context of the Shoah as the latest example of liberal American Jewry's abandonment of universalist commitments, which started during the Six Day War when progressive intellectuals like Michael Walzer became preoccupied with Israel's survival. Finkelstein accuses Goldhagen-and Holocaust studies in general-of being little more than apologies for Israel's existence and its repressive policies towards the Palestinians. While it is undoubtedly true that a number of Jewish right-wingers have used the tragedy of the Shoah to justify Israel's reckless behavior towards the Palestinians, Goldhagen most certainly does not. Indeed, by precisely focusing on the Nazi period and by submitting a cultural argument that highlights the Shoah's uniqueness in the context of Germany's history at that particular time, Goldhagen makes certain that his book never generalizes about any people ("Germans" or others) at all times. Goldhagen's book in no way renounces universalism in favor of a Manichean "us-versus-them" outlook on the world. If this is what Goldhagen were up to, why has his only intervention in the Berlin Holocaust memorial debate been in favor of commemorating the persecution of homosexuals and Roma and Sinti gypsies alongside Jews?

With Hitler's Willing Executioners, Goldhagen has redefined an entire field of study in one fell swoop. No matter how his work is criticized, even vilified-it cannot be ignored: anybody working on the Holocaust from now on simply has to deal with Goldhagen's thesis and work. Some young scholars are damned with faint praise; in Goldhagen's case, the honor of loud condemnation and admiration has been showered on a thought-provoking work.