Daniel Goldhagen

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959) is an American political scientist most famous for his controversial book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, which posits that ordinary Germans not only knew about but were actively in favour of the Holocaust because of a supposedly unique and virulent "eliminationist" antisemitism in the German identity, which developed in the centuries preceeding the event. Goldhagen claims that this special mentality cannot be fully understood by non-Germans and is unique to Germany, where it grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis but was eventually secularised.

Goldhagen's book, which began as his Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely to rebut the claims of Christopher Browning as to Germans motives. The dissertation won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics. The book, published in 1996, met with a great deal of media interest and often scathing scholarly responses. It was commercially and popularly successful by most standards and has been widely translated, leading to additional bitter complaints from some scholars, among them the objects of Goldhagen's harshest criticisms, that Goldhagen's work was marketable at the expense of academic quality if not integrity. Relatively more charitable but still negative critics have charged that Goldhagen is derivative where he is right and wrong where he attempts original analysis. Some of the most prominent contemporary scholars of the Holocaust have questioned Harvard's dissertation supervision. Perhaps the most radical criticism of Goldhagen is that his understanding of German antisemitism is largely informed by an implicit desire to apologise for Zionism. Conversely Goldhagen has won acclaim in some circles, particularly in Germany and the United States, for his ability to make harsh historical analysis accessible to a large public.

Contents

1 Critical reception of work

2 Criticisms of dissertation supervision

3 Polemical political critcism

4 Acclaim

5 External links

Critical reception of work

Debate about his theory has been intense, with most historians of the subject rejecting Goldhagen's scholarship. The most common general complaints are that his primary hypothesis is simplistic and either unprovable or ill-formed, that he must rely on substantial factual errors and misrepresentations of primary and secondary sources to demonstrate it, and that his methodology requires unjustifiably selective analysis. Exemplary factual errors imputed to him are those supporting claims about the favorable attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward the Nazi party. An exemplary methodological complaint is that its prospectively determining pre-history of Holocaust stops at 1914. (Given the that Holocaust did not emerge as a phenomenon of mass murder until around 1941 and an explicitly genocidal program until 1942, a large period of potentially determinative events are thereby precluded from consideration. By this reasoning, Hitler, Himmler, the T-4 Euthanasia Program, and activities surrounding the invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union are thus exluded from consideration as decisive to the emergence of the Holocaust — in subsequent debates Goldhagen characterised functionalist claims associated with the period of 1938-1942 as "ahistorical". Even among scholars who reject functionalist argument, Goldhagen finds virtually no support in excluding examination of this period to understand why antisemitism, "eliminationist" or otherwise, became actively genocidal as and when it did.)

There are also critics who claim that Goldhagen is not internally consistent in advancing his "eliminationist" hypothesis. Goldhagen repeatedly claims that the average German was full of murderous antisemitism endemic to German culture. If this were true, it would imply that there were no further fundamental distinctions to be made among Germans as far as their susceptibility to participate in the worst crimes of the Holocaust, which begs questions of individual morality and therefore answerability. The men who became the killers profiled in Goldhagen's book only killed because it was part of their German identity. Had they grown up in some other culture, they presumably would not have became killers. Such a notion of motive would therefore be available as an excuse. As some critics would have it, Goldhagen recognised this and therefore repeatedly moralises about evil choices — if choices were available, any hypothesis of cultural determination would be sharply mitigated to the point of losing the explanatory power with which Goldhagen invests it. Critics taking this approach contend that Goldhagen is therefore ambivalent about his own conclusions.

More generally, Goldhagen's research quality has been excoriated by many contemporary prominent Holocaust historians, among them Raul Hilberg, Yehuda Bauer, and Ruth Bettina Birn. Setting aside criticism of specific claims from Goldhagen, the three historians just mentioned have independently claimed that Goldhagen lacked adequate familiarity with primary source research and secondary literature in the field and therefore frequently misrepresented sources, often polemically. Broadly speaking, whatever assessment scholars with primary research experience and broad familiarity with secondary works may make of Goldhagen's thesis, criticisms of the level of his research, methodology, and accompanying analysis have been at least as pointed as those of his conclusions.

Criticisms of dissertation supervision

Both Hilberg and Bauer have questioned whether, given that the Department of Political Science at Harvard lacked faculty familiar with research materials for the dissertation topic, it was appropriate for it to accept Goldhagen's dissertation proposal and further remarked that Goldhagen's level of research ought not have been accepted by any dissertation advisor possessed of such competence. It should be noted that Bauer and Hilberg are generally on opposite sides of the general hypothesis of Goldhagen's work, Bauer generally advancing a Sonderweg or unique path analysis where Hilberg has advanced a Functionalist analysis and that their assessment of his research is therefore evidently not determined by their assessment of his basic analytic framework.

Bauer has further observed that Goldhagen lacked familiarity with sources not in English or German, which thereby excluded research from Polish and Israeli sources writing in Hebrew, among others, all of whom had produced important research in the subject that would require a more subtle analysis. Bauer also argued that these linguistic limitations substantially impaired Goldhagen from undertaking broader comparative research into European antisemitism, which would have demanded further refinements to his analysis. Lack of comparative analysis is a methodological fault more generally identified by critics, who draw particular attention to neglect of France, Hungary, and Romania, which were also violently antisemtitic, albeit in different ways, from the period emphasised by Goldhagen's book as determinative to the Holocaust.

Polemical political critcism

Perhaps the most publicised critic of Goldhagen was Norman Finkelstein, himself a controversial author. Finkelstein's remarks about Goldhagen had two aspects: one was generally scholarly and the other was politically anti-Zionist and polemically charged. These appeared together in Finkelstein's contribution to A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth, which he co-authored with Birn. While much of his scholarly criticism was commended by scholarly peers, Finkelstein polemical argument and what he takes to be the contemporary political implication of Goldhagen's work is that its characterisation of "eliminationist" antisemitism is an apology of militant Zionism and therefore conservative Zionism in the United States and Israel. Finkelstein claims that Goldhagen advances the view that virulent German anti-semitism is intended to be generalisable to most other national groups ("The subtitle of Goldhagen's book is "Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," but the subtext is "Ordinary Gentiles and the Holocaust") and that by implication Jews require a state of robust military capability to protect themselves from the enduring threat this engenders. Finkelstein's scholarly criticism is generally favorably reviewed (for example by Ian Kershaw and Pierre Vidal-Nacquet). Not all of those accepting Finkelstein's scholarly remarks appeared willing to endorse this polemic, such that commendations of his criticsms are sometimes qualified. Charging the issue with polemics about Zionism did, however, serve to displace the issue into a counter-polemic: the possibility of equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, which in turn served to blunt broader acceptance of Finkelstein's scholarly objections.

Acclaim

Among the public at large, however, his book has been fairly well received, both in the United States and Germany, and it remained a best seller for many months. Goldhagen was awarded the prestigious Democracy Prize by the German Journal for German and International Politics, on the basis that his work forced Germans to reckon with the phenomenon of pervasive and violent antisemitism as the result of long-standing historical tendency and a necessary prerequisite to the Holocaust and as such provided a corrective to any notion that an end to the Sonderweg of modern German history was at an end. The laudatio given by Jürgen Habermas. Goldhagen's acceptance speech, which has been understood to argue that such an end was at hand if not accomplished, is often therefore viewed as a contradicting the case for the award.