The Goldhagen controversy: One nation, one people, one theory?

Foreign Affairs

Volumn 75, Issue 6, 1996, Pages 128-137

  Stern, Fritz ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039862397     PISSN: 00157120     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20047834     Document Type: Article

References (4)

1. A sample of Goldhagen's modus operandi is his only reference to Thomas Mann: "Thomas Mann, who had already long been an outstanding opponent of Nazism, could nevertheless find some common ground with the Nazis . . . 'it is no great misfortune that . . . the Jewish presence in the judiciary has been ended.' The dominant cultural cognitive model of Jews and the eliminationist mindset that it spawned was dominant in Germany." A note indicates that he takes the citation from an essay of mine in which I quoted passages from Mann's journal. I consider Mann, married to Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, perhaps the best example of the ambiguity and complexity of German antisemitism, and I cited this passage, written in the early months of the regime, precisely because of its fascinating vacillation of tone and meaning. The very next - indeed, inseparable - sentence, which Goldhagen omits, suggests Mann's own distaste at his thoughts, which he characterizes as "secret, disquieting, intense," but the passage concludes with his musing that the process of historical change, just recently initiated by the Nazis, had in it "nonetheless things that are revoltingly malevolent, base, un-German in the highest sense. But I am beginning to suspect that their process could well be of that kind that has two sides." Another example: he mentions the late Israeli scholar Uriel Tal's comment on liberal disappointment with Jews in the late nineteenth century but omits that Tal observed in the same context: "Political and racial antisemitism during this period [the Second Reich] failed to exert any appreciable public influence, and whatever effectiveness it had was limited to short intervals and restricted regions." Such procedures from someone who can be so censorious of others. In 1989 Goldhagen reviewed an earlier thesis-driven book on the Holocaust saying: "But it is itself an artful construction of half-truths, itself in the service of an ideology. And it is riddled with extraordinary factual errors which amount to a pattern of falsification and distortion."
2. In an extremely odd note, Goldhagen dismisses Browning, saying that the plausibility of "his explanation depends upon a person's own understanding of the cynicism of people. Scholars who believe that for a promotion or for a few marks, these Germans were willing to slaughter Jews by the thousands should also believe that for tenure at a university . . . virtually all their colleagues today, and they themselves, would mow down innocent people by the thousands."
3. The first book about the book has just appeared, a collection of critiques published in Germany, also with a provocative title: Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Ein Volk von Mördern? Die Dokumentation zur Goldhagen-Kontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust (A people of murderers? Documentation concerning the Goldhagen controversy about the role of the Germans in the Holocaust), Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1996.
4. According to German press reports, he did so triumphantly. In my brief visit to Germany in early October, I was told that his charm, telegenic presence, and conciliatory manner enthralled his public and bested his critics. German commentators remained puzzled, as I am, by the discrepancy between the public acclaim and the scholarly criticism, coming especially from the liberal side, and by the discrepancy between the writer's arrogance and the speaker's appealing modesty.