Structure and agency in the holocaust: Daniel j. goldhagen and his critics

History and Theory

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 194-219

  Moses, A D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002019533     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00049     Document Type: Article

References (154)

1. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). All references to this book will appear in parentheses in the text
2. see, above all, Michael Schneider, "Die 'Goldhagen-Debatte': Ein Historikerstreit in der Mediengesellschaft," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 37 (1997), 67-83
3. Kurt Pätzold, "Die verweigerte Herausforderung: Daniel J. Goldhagens Buch und seine Kritiker," Bulletin der Berliner Gesellschaft fur Faschismus- und Weltkriegsforschung 7 (1996), 26-67
4. And Briefe an Goldhagen, ed. Daniel J. Goldhagen (Berlin, 1997)
5. English-language accounts can be found in Josef Joffe, "Goldhagen in Germany," The New York Review of Books (November 28, 1996), 18-21.
6. and Amos Elon, "The Antagonist as Liberator," New York Times (January 26, 1997), 44.
7. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York, 1960); for the reception of this book.
8. see Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, "The Reception of William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and Germany," Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1984), 95-128
9. Andrei S. Markovits made this assessment as the commentator on a panel devoted to Hitler's Willing Executioners at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association held in San Francisco in August 1996
10. Robert Wistrich, "Helping Hitler," Commentary (July 1996), 27-32
11. Steven E. Aschheim, "Reconceiving the Holocaust?" Tikkun (July/August 1996), 62-65
12. Fritz Stern, "The Goldhagen Controversy," Foreign Affairs (November/December 1996), 128-138
13. Omer Bartov, "Ordinary Monsters," The New Republic (29 April 1996), 32-38
14. Peter Pulzer, "Psychopaths and Conformists, Adventurers and Moral Cowards," The London Review of Books (January 23, 1997), 20f.
15. Yehuda Bauer and Konrad Kwiet, Washington Holocaust Memorial Symposium (April 10, 1996)
16. Christhard Hoffmann, German Politics and Society 14 (Fall 1996), 108-115
17. Reinhard R̈rup, "Viel Lärm über Nichts? D.J. Goldhagens 'radikale Revision' der Holocaustforschung," Neue Politische Literatur 3 (1996), 357-363
18. Hans Mommsen, "Die dünne Patina der Zivilisation," Die Zeit (August 30, 1996), 14f
19. Henry Friedlander, German Studies Review 19 (1996), 578-580
20. Christopher Browning, Ulrich Herbert, Eberhard Jäckel, Moshe Zimmermann, Norbert Frei, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler in Ein Volk von Mordern?; a slightly expanded English version of Wehler's review can be found under the title of "The Goldhagen Controversy: Agonizing Problems, Scholarly Failure, and the Political Dimension," in German History 15 (1997), 80-91
21. Dieter Pohl, "Die Holocaustforschung und Goldhagens Thesen," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (January 1997), 1-48
22. Raul Hilberg, in an open letter to his colleagues, described the book as "worthless": cited in Steven E. Aschheim, "Archetypes and the German-Jewish Dialogue," German History 15 (1997), 242
23. Daniel J. Goldhagen, "Das Versagen der Kritiker," Die Zeit (August 2, 1996), 9-14
24. Goldhagen, "Die Antwort an meine Kritiker ist das Buch selbst," Der Tagesspiegel (September 6, 1996)
25. Goldhagen, "A Reply to My Critics: Motives, Causes, and Alibis," The New Republic (December 23, 1996), 37-45
26. Goldhagen, "Germans vs. the Critics," Foreign Affairs (January/February 1997), 163-166
27. See, for example, Wehler, "The Goldhagen Controversy," 89.
28. Zimmerman, "Die Fußnote als Alibi," in Ein Volk von Mördern?, 147-155
29. see also Joseph Croitorou, "Gegen Kitsch und Kommerz: Israelische Reaktionen auf Daniel Goldhagens Buch 'Hitlers willige Vollstrecker,'" Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (August 9, 1996), 30
30. Andrei S. Markovits, "Störfall im Endlager der Geschichte: Daniel Goldhagen und seine deutschen Kritiker," in Ein Volk von Mördern?
31. Rolf Breitenstein, "Unwillige Historiker," Liberal 3 (August, 1996), 93-95
32. Otto Köhler, "Der gewöhnliche Deutsche," Konkret 6 (1996), 14-16
33. Ingrid Strobl, "Die Flucht in die wissenschaftliche Abstraktion," Die Tageszeitung (September 6, 1996), 18
34. Susanne Miller, "Die Deutschen-ein Volk von Tatern?," Neue Gesellschaft-Frankfurter Hefte (October 1996), 891-893. In the wake of such support, the left-liberal journal Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik awarded Goldhagen its "Democracy Prize," with the country's most prominent postwar social philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, delivering the laudatio
35. See Jürgen Habermas, "Über den öffentlichen Gebrauch der Historic: Warum ein 'Demokratiepreis' für Daniel Goldhagen?," Die Zeit (March 14, 1997), 13f; the speeches of the occasion, including those of Habermas and Goldhagen, are collected in Blatter fur deutsche und internationale Politik 4 (April 1997).
36. Bartov, "Ordinary Monsters," 38.
37. Christopher Browning, "Bose Menschen, böse Taten," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (February 6, 1997), 42
38. for similar comments, see Aschheim, "Reconceiving the Holocaust?," 65.
39. Hans Mommsen, podium discussion, Die Deutschen-Ein Volk von Tätem?: Zur historisch-politischen Dehatte um. das Buch von Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, 'Hitlers willige Vollstrecker,' ed. Dieter Dowe (Bonn, 1996), 73
40. This is also a central theme of Bartov's recent collection of essays. Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation (New York, 1996). I have discussed this book in "Modernity and the Holocaust," Australian Journal of Politics and. History 43 (1997), 441-445
41. F. A. Krummacher (München, 1963)
42. Gertrude Ezorsky, "Hannah Arendt's View of Totalitarianism and the Holocaust," Philosophical Forum 16 (Fall-Winter, 1984-85), 63-81.
43. See Ulrike Weckel, "Hannah Arendts 'Eichmann in Jerusalem': Eine Tagung zur Historiographie des Holocuast," Werkstattgeschichte 18 (November, 1997), 101-106.
44. Wehler similarly warns his colleagues against stonewalling Goldhagen: "The Goldhagen Controversy," 80f
45. Ruth Bettina Birn, "Revising the Holocaust," Historical Journal 40 (1997), 195-215
46. charges Goldhagen with selectively using primary sources. Goldhagen responds to Birn in "The Fictions of Ruth Bettina Birn," German Politics and Society 15 (Fall 1997), 119-165. He also contends that Birn's article exceeds the bounds of fair academic criticism, and to the dismay of many historians, he took legal action against her
47. Götz Aly, "Streithansel Goldhagen," Berliner Zeitung (November 8/9, 1997), 9
48. Michael Jeismann, Der Schutz des allmächtigten Autors, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (November 4, 1997), 41
49. See, for example, George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York, 1966)
50. Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York, 1988)
51. James E. Young, Writing and Re-writing the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, Ind., 1990)
52. Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston, 111., 1991)
53. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)
54. Dominick La Capra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y, 1994)
55. Robert Braun, "The Holocaust and Problems of Historical Representation," History and Theory 33 (1994), 172-190.
56. For examples of the former, see Lucy S. Dawidowicz, What Is the Use of Jewish History?, edited and introduced by Neal Kozodoy (New York, 1992)
57. Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford, 1994).
58. Rainer Erb, "Unangenehme Fragen neu gestellt: Anmerkungen zur Goldhagen-Kontroverse," Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 44 (1996), 826-832.
59. Goldhagen, "A Reply to My Critics," 42
60. Aschheim, "Reconceiving the Holocaust?," 62
61. Finkelstein, "Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis," New Left Review 224 (July/August 1997), 39-88
62. Wehler in Ein Volk von Mordern?, 200; Diner cited in Thomas Assheuer, "Die Wiederkehr der Schuldfrage?," Frankfurter Rundschau (May 10, 1996), 10.
63. See also Diner, "Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: On the Banal and the Evil in Her Holocaust Narrative," New German Critique 71 (Spring-Summer, 1997), 177-190
64. And Peter Novick, "Holocaust Memory in America," in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. James E. Young (Munich and New York, 1995)
65. This typology is intended to include not only the superannuated intentionalist-functionalist opposition regarding the causation of the Holocaust, but also broader interpretive patterns of National Socialism in general, much along the lines suggested by Geoffrey Barraclough in "Mandarins and Nazis," New York Review of Books (October 19, 1972), 37-42
66. "The Liberals and German History," New York Review of Books (November 2, 1972), 32-36
67. On the controversy, see, for example, Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd ed. (London and New York, 1993), 88-107. For an overview of recent Holocaust research, see The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, ed. David Cesarini (London and New York, 1994)
68. Berel Lang, "The Concept of Intention and the Final Solution," in Remembering for the Future, ed.
69. Immanuel Kant, "An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?" in On History, ed.
70. L. W. Beck (Indianapolis, 1963), 141.I owe this reference to Hans Kellner, '"Never Again' Is Now," History and Theory 33 (1994), 127-144
71. Lucy Dawidowicz, "Perversions of the Holocaust," Commentary 88 (October 1989), 56-60
72. Karl Dietrich Bracher, "Holocaust-ohne Hitler?," Die Politische Meinung (February 1997), 45f
73. Joachim Fest, "Der Auftrag kam von Hitler," Die Woche (November 29, 1996), 38
74. Raul Teitelbaum, "Kofferträger der 'Endlösung,'" and Till Bastian, "Deutsche Duckmäuser," Die Woche (December 6, 1996), 38
75. Saul Friedländer, "From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical Study of Nazi Policies Toward the Jews and an Essay in Interpretation," Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984), 1-50
76. also see the lucid discussion in Michael Marrus, "Reflections on the Historiography of the Holocuast," Journal of Modern History 66 (1994), 92-116
77. For the cultural function of this interpretion in the USA, see Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, '"Great Men' and Postmodern Ruptures: Overcoming the Belatedness of German Historiography," German Studies Review 18 (May 1995), 253-273
78. Jarausch and Geyer were responding to Kenneth Barkin's views in "Bismarck in a Postmodern World," in the same issue, 241-251.
79. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (New York, 1975)
80. Karl Dietrich Bracher, "The Role of Hitler: Perspectives of Interpretation," in Fascism: A Reader's Guide, ed
81. Walter Laqueur (Berkeley, 1978)
82. Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley, 1984)
83. Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the 'Final Solution' (London, 1991)
84. Wolfgang Wipperman, Wessen Schuld?: Vom Historikerstreit zur Goldhagen-Kontroverse (Berlin, 1997), 103.
85. Hans Mommsen, "Zeitgeschichte als 'kritische Aufklä rungsarbeit': Zur Erinnerung an Martin Broszat," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2 (1991), 141-157
86. also see his comments in "Kein Auftrag zur 'Endlösung,'" Die Woche (December 13, 1996), 38: "It is still a taboo to question Hitler's power⋯ that for many years was used by the German nation as an alibi to diminish its own political and moral betrayal. "
87. Lang, "The Concept of Intention and the Final Solution," 2559, 2562.
88. Uwe-Adam Dietrich, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972)
89. Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policies Toward Jews, 1933-1939 (Urbana, 111. , 1970)
90. Martin Broszat, "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Thesis," Yad Vashem Studies 13 (1979), 73-125
91. Hans Mommsen, "The Realization of the Unthinkable: The 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' in the Third Reich," in The Policies of Genocide: Jewish and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany, ed
92. Gerhard Hirschfeld (London, 1986), 97-144
93. Martin Broszat, "Soziale Motivation und Führer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 18 (1970), 392-409.
94. Götz Aly, "Endlösung": Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden (Frankfurt am Main, 1995).
95. Hans Mommsen has claimed Aly's interpretation for the functionalist camp. See his "Spitze des Eisbergs," Die Zeit (May 26, 1995), 17, and Mommsen, "Umvolkungspläne des Nationalsozialismus und der Holocaust," in Die Normalität des Verbrechens, ed
96. Helge Grabitz et al. (Berlin, 1994), 68-84
97. Hans Mommsen, "Der Nationalsozialismus: Kumulative Radikalisierung und Selbstzerstörung des Regimes," Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon, (Mannheim, 1976), XVI, 785-790.
98. Christopher Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (New York, 1978), 184
99. Ian Kershaw has called this phenomenon "working towards the Führer. " See his '"Working Towards the Führer': Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship," Contemporary European History 2 (1993), 103-118
100. Mommsen, "Schuld der Gleichgiiltigen. " Emphasis added.
101. See, in particular, Hans Mommsen, "Kein Auftrag Hitlers zur 'Endlosung,'" Die Woche (December 13, 1996), 38.
102. See the discussion in Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt und the Jewish Question (Cambridge, Eng. , 1996), 137ff
103. see also Raul Hilberg, "The Bureaucracy of Annihilation," in Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, ed. François Furet (New York, 1989), 132
104. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992).
105. The telling title of Goldhagen's review of Browning is "The Evil of Banality," New Republic (July 13/20, 1992), 49-52
106. Browning, Ordinary Men, 189.
107. Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, transl. Richard Deveson (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 17
108. These issues came to a head nearly fifteen years ago in Saul Friedländer's well-known exchange with Martin Broszat over the "historicization of National Socialism. " In line with the universalism narrative, the functionalist Broszat recommended "de-demonizing" the scholarly study of the Nazi regime by approaching it like any other historical phenomenon, and especially under the aspect of modernization theory. By contrast, the intentionalist Friedländer articulated the particularism narrative by claiming that morality, not "historical understanding," must determine the historian's questions, and that in this case, the moral point of view was indentured to the victim's perspective. Their letters are collected, in translation, in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston, 1990). For a recent commentary, see Jöin Rüsen, "The Logic of Historicization," History and Memory 9 (Fall 1997), 113-146
109. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (Cambridge, Eng., 1991)
110. Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany, 1933-1945 (New York, 1988)
111. Ernst Klee, 'Euthanusie' im. NS Staat. Die Vernichtung 'lebensunwerten Lebens' (Frankfurt am Main, 1983)
112. Michael Kater, Doctors under Hitler: The German Medical Profession in Crisis during the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988)
113. Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge, Eng. , and New York, 1989)
114. Sybil Milton, "The Context of the Holocaust," German Studies Review 13 (1990), 269-283
115. Mario Biagioli, "Science, Modernity and the 'Final Solution,'" in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed
116. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)
117. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia'in Germany, 1900-1945 (Cambridge, Eng. , 1994)
118. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill and London, 1995)
119. Michael Zimmerman, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die Nationalsozialistische 'Lösung der Zigeunetfrage' (Hamburg, 1996)
120. Detlev Peukert, "Alltag und Barbarei: Zur Normalität des Dritten Reiches," in 1st der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte?, ed.
121. Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (New York, 1993), 234-252
122. Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine europäische Ordnung (Hamburg, 1991)
123. Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, "Sozialplanung und Völkermord" and "Wider die Unterschätzung der nationalsozialistischen Politik," Vernichtungspolitik, ed
124. Wolfgang Schneider (Hamburg, 1991)
125. Aly, " Endlösung. "
126. Lang, "The Concept of Intention and the Final Solution," 2562.
127. Saul Friedlander, "Introduction to the English Edition," Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust, transl. Peter Southgate (London, 1994)
128. Friedlander, "Hass war die treibende Kraft," Der Spiegel [special edition] (1992), 38ff.
129. Browning, "Bose Menschen, Bose Taten. " Emphasis added
130. Similar criticisms have been made by Ulrich Herbert, "Labour and Extermination: Economic Interest and the Primacy of Weltanschauung in National Socialism," Past and Present 138 (1993), 144-195
131. Jan-Philipp Reemtsma, "Nationalsozialismus und Moderne," in Vertuschte Vergangenheit: Der Fall Schwerte und die NS-Vergungenheit der deutschen Hochschulen, ed
132. Hermann Lübbe, "Rationalität und Irrationalität des Völkermords," in Holocaust: Die Grenzen des Verstehens, ed.
133. Hanno Loewy (Hamburg, 1992), 71-82
134. Daniel J. Goldhagen, "False Witness," New Republic (April 17, 1989), 44
135. Goldhagen does, to be sure, acknowledge his reliance on Clifford Geertz's method of "thick description," and it is discussed in Volker Pesch, "Die Künstlichen Wilden: Zu Daniel Goldhagens Methode und theoretischem Rahmen," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23 (1997), 152-162.
136. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 479: "An explanation of the Holocaust must⋯ ground the Holocaust as a development of German history. "
137. For behavioralism, see Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science: From Burgess to Behavioralism (Boston, 1967)
138. for rational choice theory, see John C. Harsanyi, "Rational-Choice Models of Political Behavior vs. Functionalist and Conformist Theories," World Politics 21 (1969), 513-538
139. James S. Coleman and T. J. Fararo (London, 1992)
140. M. Hechter, "The Role of Values in Rational Choice Theory," Rationality and Society 6 (1994), 318-333
141. For a nuanced account of the emancipation process, see Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur 'Judenfrage' der bürgerlichen Geselhchaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1987).
142. Goldhagen, "A Reply to My Critics," 41.
143. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 87: "Whatever else Germans thought about Hitler and the Nazi movement, however much they might have detested aspects of Nazis, the vast majority of them subscribed to the underlying Nazi model of Jews and in this sense (as the Nazis themselves understood) were 'Nazified' in their view of Jews. "
144. In relation to the conservative resistance, see Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, 'Um der Ehre willen': Erinnerungen an die Freunde vom 20. Juli (Berlin, 1994), in which she relates that some of the plotters decided to kill Hitler after witnessing mass shootings of Jews on the eastern front
145. See his "Die Mörder waren unter uns," Siiddeutsche Zeitung (August 24/25, 1996): feuilleton supplement, 1. Habermas, too, in a laudatory address about Goldhagen nevertheless rejected his inference that the Germans were a "people of murderers"
146. See Lübbe, "Rationalität und Irrationalität des Völkermords," 87.
147. William W. Hagen, "Before the 'Final Solution': Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland," Journal of Modern History 68 (June 1996), 351-381
148. See also Jörn Rüsen, "Den Holocaust erklären-aber wie?," Frankfurter Rundschau (June 25, 1996), 11, who objects that Goldhagen's argument makes "impossible" any connection between the Holocaust and modernity
149. For compelling arguments in this vein, see George M. Kren, review of Hitler's Willing Executioners, American Historical Review 102 (April 1997), 473; for non-Jewish victims of Nazism
150. see A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, ed. Michael Berenbaum (London, 1990)
151. Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903-1989 (Bonn, 1996)
152. Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany und the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-39 (London, 1997), 3-6.
153. Peter Longerich, "Das Portrait einer Generation?," Neue Politische Literatur 42 (1997), 11.
154. Gunnar Heinsohn, "Auschwitz ohne Hitler?," Lettre International (Summer 1996), 21-27.