Copyright German Life Nov 30, 1996Library: Interview with Daniel Goldhagen.
Daniel Goldhagen's Holter's Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Alfred A. Knopf) exploded onto the scholarly scene this past spring.
An assistant professor of government and social studies at Harrvard University, Goldhagen argues that not Nazi zealots but ordinary German men and women enthusiastically participated in Hilter's plan to annihilate the worlds Jews.
Goldhagen's book, originally a prize winning Ph.D. thesis, has been greeted in scholarly circles by some as a welcome impetus for new discussion and research on the topic of the Holocaust. Yet, in the introduction, Goldhagen indicates the purpose of his work to be more radical, encompassing a through revision of exiting explanations for why the Holocaust occurred. This assertion is based generally denied or obscured by academic and non-academic interprets alike: Germans antisemitic beleiff about Jews were the central causal agent of the Holocaust." To reach this conclusion, Godhagen eschews all other reasonings, including "economic hardship...the coercive means of a totalitarian state,... and social psychological pressure" that Germans experienced during the time of Hitler's reign.
To be expected, the book has sparkled a furious debate; but whether this signifies that it is accepted as the revision Goldhagen claims it to be is still up to question. He has been criticized for espousing his scholarly premise as original, which critics, including Yehuda Bauer, who teaches at Herbrew University in Israel and is a leader of the world's Holocaust scholars, charge it is not.
Goldhagen obviously intended to reach a far wider audience than academe; rather than an academic publisher, Hitler's Willing Executioners was published by the commercial house Alfred A. Knopf.
Though the Geraman edition was not published until August (by Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag GmbH in Berlin), Goldhagen's book nevertheless found much response in the German press. At the time of this GL issue's release, Goldhagen was in Germany on tour, participating also in various panel discussions. The December/January issue of German Life will include coverage of reaction in the German press.
Readers here are invited to hear from Daniel Goldhagen himself. The following interview about Hitler's Willing Executioners and its reception was conducted by GL-writer Carol Bergman, herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
GL: You came to the subject of the Holocaust much younger than I did But, of course, your father is an academic.
Goldhagen: What is far more relevant for my intellectual biography is not that I'm Jewish or the son of a survivor but that I'm the son of a scholar who has worked on the subject. [Daniel's father, Erich Goldhagen, and his family were interned at the Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz, Romania. After being liberated to Canada. Erich came to the United States for graduate school. Now retired, he was a professor for 25 years, also at Harvard.] My awareness of this period was part of my mental landscape from the time I began to think about and become aware of serious things. And in my home, the approach to the subject matter was always one of understanding and explanation. It was not merely a tale of woe, though it is that well to tell, but something to understand.
GL: Your book is both scholarly and impassioned. There are several passages, for example, in which you use fictional devices in an attempt to get into the minds of the killers.
Goldhagen: Much of the book is an attempt to get people to put themselves, more generally, in the position of the killers, to behold what they behold and to ask themselves what could have moved people to do all these things. This is the question which, I think, has not been sufficiently addressed.
GL: How do you answer this criticism that the books is not objective because you are the child of a survivor?
Goldhagen: We al try, as scholars, to give as dispassionately objective an account as possible. In writing the book, I tried to be extremely open and honest about what I was doing. I lay out my assumptions, I discuss how I did the research, my interpretive framework, and how I reasoned to my conclusions. This is what social scientists - I'm a political scientist - are trained to do, to put everything there, to make it clear exactly how we've done our research and constructed our study precisely so that people can take issue with us at every point. So this is why my background is really irrelevant to the evaluation of this book.
GL: Regarding methodology, some of your critics have asked why you exclude exculpatory evidence.
Goldhagen: One of the striking thing in the literature on the Holocaust is that there is almost no discussion on methodology among those who write. So, I'm particularly happy to have this discussion. Every person who uses this material tries in one way or another to figure out what is trustworthy, what is useful, and what isn't. The difference is that I have adopted a methodological principle based on my assessment of the bias that is inherent in the testimony. If we were to ask someone, what would you expect people who are being charged with complicity in one of the greatest crimes in human history to say when interrogated by police and judicial interrogators, the most naive person would say, you'd expect them to say they didn't do it, or that they didn't want to do it or they were forced to do it, or, in one way or another, distance themselves from it. This is what we know would happen. So, for this reason, we have to exclude this testimony.
GL: Is it your hope, then, that readers will grapple with your interpretation, engage in dialogue, and move our understanding of the Holocaust forward?
Goldhagen: Sure. And grapple with the evidence as well. The critics have not at all addressed the evidence. If there are ways in which my book falls short, let them point to it, and we can all go from there.
GL: You debunk the myth of the reign of terror as an explanation for lack of resistance to the genocidal killing. Do you completely rule out the cumulative psychological effect of witnessing killing at close range?
Goldhagen: The assumption of what you just said is the assumption that many make, which is that Germans naturally, or on their own, would have disapproved of what was happening; and it was through various mechanisms of terror, coercion, brainwashing, propaganda, that they abandoned their natural sympathy for the Jews. The argument that I am making - and I think the evidence is really overwhelming - is that there was no such sympathy to begin with... If Hitler had been deposed in 1939 and the systematic extermination of the Jews had never occurred, we would [still] look back on the persecution of the Jews in the 1930s as one of the most radical persecutions in European history. This was done in full view of the German people with the acquiescence and complicity of large numbers of Germans. We have virtually no record of dissent, no principled opposition to what was happening. This shows what the majority - not every German's attitude was toward Jews. They shared the Hitlerian image of Jews.
GL: What you call hallucinatory eliminationist antisemitism?
Goldhagen: Right.
GL: In your view, were Germans more prey to these radical antisemitic beliefs than other nations?
Goldhagen: Cultures bear certain views that people growing up in these cultures naturally imbibe because this is what they've been taught. There was a view developed in Germany in the 19th century, for complicated reasons that I go over in the book, that Jews were different from Germans, that the difference resided in their biology, which was conceptualized as race; therefore this meant that the nature of Jews could not change, that they were powerful, that they were evil, that they were responsible for much of the harm that had befallen them.
GL: But didn't countries have these notions?
Goldhagen: Yes, there was antisemitism elsewhere, but it had a more central place in the German ideational life than most places, and really only in the moral structure of society, and in the political discourse of the society and in the latter part of the 19th century.
GL: What about Germany today? Is the Jew as subhuman "Other" still part of the societal consciousness?
Goldhagen: Germany is a very different country today. After the war, all of a sudden you have no publicly presented antisemitism; a democratic system is installed; new beliefs and values are taught in the schools and in the public sphere, which is, essentially, that all people are created equal. With each new generation, we see a general decline in antisemitism, just as one would expect. My book, whatever it say about Germany [in the past] is in no sense about contemporary Germany. The critics in Germany have made it into that, which is a willful misreading of the book. Cultures can change, and Germany has changed.
GL: I understand that you have written a new preface for the German edition of the book in which you discuss some of these issues.
Goldhagen: Yes, I have because I felt it was important. Many have said that I am raising the scepter of collective guilt. This is simply nonsense. The only people who are guilty are those who actually committed crimes. My whole book is about individual responsibility. And, certainly, anyone born after World War II is in no way responsible for the commission of the deed. There may be some arguments to be made for making amends to the victims, but that's different issue.
Photo (Cover of the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Daniel Goldhagen)
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