Daniel Goldhagen

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Daniel Goldhagen, 2011

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born June 30, 1959 in Boston , Massachusetts ) is an American sociologist and political scientist . He became known through his book Hitler's willing executors , which sparked a public debate in 1996 .

Life

Goldhagen is the second oldest of four children. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts , a suburb of Boston. His father, the historian and survivor of the Holocaust, Erich Goldhagen , taught at Harvard University . Goldhagen jr. and was an assistant professor for several years. During this time he was engaged in research work on National Socialism and the Holocaust . His wife Sarah Williams Goldhagen is an architecture critic and taught at Harvard Design School from 1995 to 2006.

Goldhagen debate

With his book Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust - Hitler's Willing Executioners (dt. Hitler's Willing Executioners - Ordinary German and the Holocaust ) made Goldhagen 1996 in Germany for a renewed debate about the causes of the Holocaust: The book found a wide readership that the with clear dismay agreed with the theses widespread therein, but in science they were widely rejected as monocausal and erroneous.

Goldhagen's theses

Goldhagen explores the question of why and how the Holocaust happened and what made it possible. His answer: Hitler and the Germans vilified, persecuted and exterminated the Jews out of eliminatory anti-Semitism . There was anti-Semitism in other countries too ; But only in Germany were three conditions fulfilled: firstly, the most radical anti-Semites in history ruled there, secondly, the majority of the population thought badly of the Jews, and thirdly, as a result of the war, the state had military power and the majority of European Jews under its control bring to. By Goldhagen to society as a whole accounts for German anti-Semitism as a central driving force of the Holocaust, it contradicts the prevailing popular and scientific explanations.

"Why did Hitler find so many supporters for his goal - the extermination of the Jews - and why did he meet so little resistance? How could the Germans commit or allow such unprecedented crimes?" That was the question, and the answers so far are not convincing for Goldhagen: The alleged compulsion to command was a mere protective claim by the perpetrators; In the chaotic years between 1918 and 1933 little was felt of the alleged nationality of the Germans; the alleged peer pressure explains the behavior of individuals, but not that of the group as a whole, which itself creates this pressure; the alleged careerism of the perpetrators could only be satisfied in exceptional cases by particularly zealous participation in mass murder; the alleged ignorance of the murderous consequences of his actions could not affect anyone who tortured and shot his victims face to face. Goldhagen argues that the actions of the Germans did not stem from such external constraints or incentives, but from internal convictions. The Germans were not forced to kill Jews; they did it voluntarily, they were willing executors.

Goldhagen regards the view that Hitler's negative opinion about the Jews could not possibly have been shared by the Germans and that the persecution and extermination of the Jews could not have been approved by the Germans as an error. He comes to the conclusion that the seemingly unthinkable is in truth the only obvious thing: "A society that [like Germany between 1933 and 1945] is committed to anti-Semitism with heart and soul will probably also be anti-Semitic." claims Goldhagen, was one of the long-standing, almost completely unquestioned basic convictions of German culture. As early as the 19th century, the option of actually physically exterminating the Jews was discussed to a greater extent in Germany.

The core of his work, following on from Christopher R. Browning's investigations, is the description of a German police battalion ( Reserve Police Battalion 101 ) that tracked down the Jews living there in the Polish General Government, tortured them and finally shot them or deported them to the extermination camps. On the basis of trial files from later court proceedings against some battalion members, Goldhagen shows that these men did not commit their deeds reluctantly, shamefully and under duress, but voluntarily, extremely eagerly (sometimes beyond the express orders), with pride and conviction to do the right thing. They tortured and murdered their victims without compassion or moral scruples. Goldhagen attributes this astonishing fact to the ideas that men had of the Jews: They viewed their victims not as human beings, but as an evil that had to be removed, just as a malignant disease must be removed. And these men weren't die-hard Nazis right now. The battalions consisted of arbitrarily recruited average citizens who were too old to serve on the front and whose political socialization had accordingly taken place long before the seizure of power. They were neither ideological warriors nor deluded youngsters; they were (hence the subtitle of Goldhagen's book) quite ordinary Germans.

In the eyes of Goldhagen, the behavior of the battalion members shows how undisputed and pronounced the eliminatory anti-Semitism that had grown for centuries in Germany was, and how small the step was from the negative attitude towards Jews to the brutal murder of Jews. Without the willingness of hundreds of thousands of Germans who participated directly in the genocide or supported it in other ways, the extermination of European Jews could not have proceeded so smoothly. For Goldhagen, it is therefore not an act of the Nazis (or even just the SS), but of the Germans (which does not mean that every German was actually guilty to the same extent). German anti-Semitism, that is Goldhagen's central thesis and conclusion, was the main cause of the Holocaust.

Reactions

Goldhagen's thesis met with violent reactions internationally, especially in the German media and among German historians .

Even before the appearance of the revised German edition, the article sparked Hitler's willing murderers in Germany . A book provoked a new historians dispute by Volker Ullrich in the period of April 12, 1996, a lot of media coverage. Ullrich: "How his disturbing, disturbing book is received by us - it will reveal a lot about the historical consciousness of this republic."

The critics - like Ullrich - emphasize that in the 19th and early 20th centuries there were just as strong, and in some cases even stronger, anti-Semitic currents outside Germany. They refer, for example, to the events surrounding the Dreyfus affair in France and to the pogroms perpetrated against Jews in tsarist Russia since the 1880s with state tolerance or even support .

At the beginning of the debate, not only Goldhagen's theses were rated as unusual and provocative, but also his rejection of previous Holocaust research and the writing style of his book, which is based on “concern and identification” ( Michael Schneider ).

The main methodological objection to Goldhagen is that he is constructing an untenable thesis of eliminatory anti-Semitism, whose origins lie in the 19th century and which, like a programmed “code”, drove the Germans to exterminate the Jews. Goldhagen also does not compare the collaboration in the extermination of the Jews by the administration, the police and the population in the war-occupied countries, which in some cases comes considerably close to the German support, including the police battalion examined as an example. The most widespread accusation against Goldhagen is that he assigns the Germans collective guilt for the crimes of National Socialism. In the foreword to the German edition of his bestseller, Goldhagen unequivocally rejects this idea: “I categorically reject the idea of ​​collective guilt.” As far as individuals are concerned, however, he comes to the conclusion that “the number of Germans who commit criminal acts [d. H. Crimes against Jews] committed "enormously high".

Criticism of Goldhagen's theses can also be found in Christopher Browning's work Die Entfesselung der “Finallösung” (2003) and Stefan Kühl's Completely Normal Organizations (2014).

The fact that Goldhagen ascribes a special form of anti-Semitism to the Germans was used by Franz Graf-Stuhlhofer as an example of a “national classification of evil”. Because here appears "the evil moved into a close relationship to Germanness".

The renowned Jewish historian Eric Hobsbawm , who had witnessed the National Socialist takeover in Berlin, gave the brief comment on Goldhagen's theses: “Goldhagen does not count. I don't know any reputable historian who takes Goldhagen seriously. ”The Holocaust expert Raul Hilberg expressed himself even more firmly in an interview. Goldhagen, according to Hilberg, is “totally wrong about everything. Totally wrong. Exceptionally wrong ”.

Review by Ruth Bettina Birn

A Nation on Trial (1998)

The most direct attack to date on Goldhagen appeared in England in 1997. The Cambridge Historical Journal (CHJ) Cambridge University contains an article by Ruth Bettina Birn . Since the end of the 1970s, Birn conducted her research in the archive for National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg , from which Goldhagen took most of the evidence for his thesis that many “ordinary Germans” had devotedly participated in the mass murder of the Jews.

Birn explains about her article in the CHJ that she has known Goldhagen for a long time and that the attack on his book is “painful” for her, but “one is obliged to the truth”. Birn writes that Goldhagen clearly misrepresented original texts and spun a “web of fantasies”. In his book "everything is written in the subjunctive form as in bad historical novels". From the “tons” of material available in Ludwigsburg, he relied on 166 statements made before war crimes tribunals . “With Goldhagen's methods of dealing with evidence, one could easily find the necessary quotations from the Ludwigsburg material to prove the exact opposite of what Goldhagen claims.” He quoted selectively so that he actually falsified the documents: “He takes selective cutouts and inflates them disproportionately […]. He uses material as evidence of a preconceived theory. "

Hans Mommsen describes Birn's criticism as sharp; In an effort to refute Goldhagen's assertion of the completely different treatment of Jews and non-Jews, she went on the "ice" of Goldhagen's method, even "in the vicinity of a thoroughly unintended apologetics ". At the same time, he regrets that Goldhagen has reacted to Ruth Bettina Birn's criticism by threatening her and her editor with claims for damages, that he is treading “the path of legal pressure” “to silence his academic critics”.

Critique by Hans Mommsen

The Bochum historian Hans Mommsen points out the contradiction between the great public interest in Goldhagen's book and the low response in the specialist field. Almost all of the specialist historians who work in this area rejected Goldhagen's theses and methods. The book would address “deeper emotive layers” that are “not related to the need for rational clarification”. In the case of the USA, the enthusiasm for Goldhagen reflects anti-German resentment, as we know from trivial films about the Second World War. In Germany, Goldhagen serves as “a kind of catalyst for the middle generation (the children of the war generation) to break open this decades-old front of displacement”. Therefore, any criticism of the “substitute messiah” is condemned.

The well-known expert on National Socialism reports the criticism from the reviews that Goldhagen makes too high a claim (namely to have made the previous specialist literature to waste), presents a monocausal attempt to explain and thus falls back on the 1950s that the source base is far too narrow and the more recent secondary literature has not been used sufficiently.

Goldhagen's outline of the prehistory of the Third Reich is based on a “completely inadequate evaluation of secondary literature,” said Mommsen. Serious misunderstandings are only partially due to "that he did not understand the ambivalent language of the source texts sufficiently." This part of the book is "a faulty cliché of the real phenomena". The champions of Jewish emancipation, who were in favor of assimilation , portrayed Goldhagen as the forerunners of the Shoah , while Goldhagen ignored Hitler's actual anti-Semitic forerunners such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Paul de Lagarde .

Results

Over 80,000 copies were sold in just a few weeks, and the organizers of the “Reading Tour” could barely cope with the rush. A “kind of consensus” could be established in the professional world, namely “more about research tasks still to be solved than about Goldhagen's concrete research results”. One of these still open questions was the “question of the role of anti-Semitism in German history.” So far, Holocaust research has not yet had an answer. There was also agreement on one of Goldhagen's "core theses": "The perpetrators were Germans, and without Hitler and the Third Reich there would have been no final solution to the Jewish question ." The initially fundamental rejection of the historians - despite multiple overlaps in positions and less often in the Perspectives - was explained with the fundamental "historian scolding" Goldhagen. His other theses, such as that of a specifically German “eliminatory anti-Semitism” or the murderous attitude of the perpetrators as the most important factor in explaining their actions, did not prevail among Holocaust researchers. Reinhard Rürup formulated her majority viewpoint as follows: "What is correct in the theses of the book is not new, and what is new is not correct."

The debate itself was also perceived as a touchstone for the “ political culture ” of German society, which is seen as a willingness to deal with National Socialism. National “self-confidence” is also linked to this “political culture”. The debate could also be interpreted as a “functional equivalent for a discussion about the political self-image of the united Germany that did not take place” (Schneider).

more publishments

In his book Worse Than War: How Genocide Arises and How It Can Be Prevented , Goldhagen deals with genocide . In Germany, the book received cautious reviews; among other things, Goldhagen's suggestion to suspend bounties on genocide and to disregard the rule of law when persecuting them met with opposition.

Awards

On March 10, 1997 Daniel Goldhagen was awarded the Democracy Prize by the newspaper for German and international politics .

Works

Books

Press

  • What did the killers think? In: Der Spiegel . No. 33 , 1996 ( online - August 12, 1996 , interview with Rudolf Augstein ).
  • Daniel Jonah: The everyday abyss . In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1998, pp. 178-184 ( online - August 17, 1998 , In the ongoing historians' dispute over the causes of the Holocaust and the best way to find them, Saul Friedländer's study "The Third Reich and the Jews" carries great weight).
  • A “German solution” for the Balkans. To end the genocide, NATO must defeat, occupy and re-educate Serbia . In: SZ , April 30, 1999.
  • “The Bible is anti-Semitic.” Daniel Goldhagen on the role of the Catholic Church in the Nazi era (in conversation with Christian Böhme). In: Tagesspiegel , October 12, 2002.
  • Political Islam: The New Threat. In: Magazin der SZ , April 27, 2005. Abridged version online
  • "Hitler was popular" . Conversation with Stefan Wirner and Deniz Yücel about May 8th, German history politics and Germany 60 years later. In: Jungle World . May 4, 2005.

literature

Monographs

Essays

Press

  • YM Bodemann: The bad guys and the normal good guys. Goldhagen's book is pornographic, conservative, and eminently American. In: The daily newspaper . August 7, 1996.
  • Jan Philipp Reemtsma : The murderers were among us. Daniel Goldhagen's book "Hitler's willing executors" - a necessary provocation. In: SZ. August 24, 1996.
  • E. Roll: One thesis and three broken taboos. Goldhagen's discussion trip: The difficult dispute over the Germans and the Holocaust. In: SZ. September 9, 1996.
  • C. Jansen: The normal indulgence trade. Two years after the Goldhagen shock: The book "Hitler's willing executors" only sparked a flash in the pan for the media. It doesn't matter in historical research. In: The week. April 30, 1998.
  • Dagmar Pöpping : She should atone! Pope Pius XII and National Socialism: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen holds up the mirror to the Catholic Church. In: FR. September 30, 2002.
  • Christian Gerlach : Off to the modern age with her! Daniel J. Goldhagen knows how the Catholic Church should atone for the Holocaust. In: Berliner Zeitung . October 5, 2002.
  • Michael F. Feldkamp: Instructions for the hunt. The Catholic Church is complicit in the Holocaust, is Goldhagen's thesis. The author provides bad polemics for this, but no evidence. In: RM. No. 41, October 10, 2002.
  • Hannes Stein : "Then Thomas Mann was also an anti-Semite". A conversation with Daniel Goldhagen about his book about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust. In: The world. October 14, 2002.
  • Eva Horn : Does the New Testament have to be corrected? Daniel Jonah Goldhagen accuses the Catholic Church of anti-Semitism in his new book and demands redress. In: Badische Zeitung . October 14, 2002.
  • Eva Schweitzer : Fantasy by Goldhagen. The book on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust in American reviews. In: Berliner Zeitung . January 25, 2003, accessed June 15, 2015 .

Web links

Wikiquote: Daniel Goldhagen  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Smith, Dinita: "Challenging a View of the Holocaust." The New York Times. (April 1, 1996)
  2. ↑ Father and son Goldhagen - two generations preoccupation with National Socialism . In: The time . No. 32/1996 ( online ).
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Benz : Developments in anti-Jewish hatred: anti-Judaism - anti-Semitism - anti-Zionism. An overview . In: the same (ed.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Vol. 8: Supplements and registers . De Gruyter, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-037932-7 , p. 38 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  4. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust . From the American by Klaus Kochmann. Paperback edition. Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-15088-4 , p. 7.
  5. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust . From the American by Klaus Kochmann. Paperback edition. Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-15088-4 , p. 8.
  6. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust . From the American by Klaus Kochmann. Paperback edition. Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-15088-4 , p. 9f.
  7. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust . From the American by Klaus Kochmann. Paperback edition. Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-15088-4 , pp. 443-450.
  8. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust . From the American by Klaus Kochmann. Paperback edition. Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-15088-4 , p. 47f.
  9. ^ Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 an the Final Solution in Poland , New York 1992; German: Just normal men. The Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the “Final Solution” in Poland , Reinbek near Hamburg 1993.
  10. ↑ a b c d e f g h Michael Schneider: The "Goldhagen Debate". A historians' dispute in the media society . Research institute of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn 1997, ISBN 3-86077-669-X (Discussion Group History, Volume 17, full text online , first in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 37, 1997).
  11. ↑ Volker Ullrich: Hitler's willing murderers. A book provokes a new dispute between historians . In: Die Zeit , April 12, 1996, printed in Schoeps 1996, pp. 89-92.
  12. ↑ Frank Schirrmacher in the FAZ of April 15, 1996, in: Schoeps 1996, p. 99ff
  13. ↑ So refers Christopher Browning in his article in the period of 19 April 1996, reprinted in 1996 Schoeps, here p 123, Luxembourg to a battalion who would not behave differently than the Germans. Walter Manoschek in Profil 18 of April 29, 1996 speaks of the “compliant” “participation of Ukrainians, Latvians, Croats and Romanians in the murder of Jews”, in: Schoeps 1996, p. 158. Peter Glotz also said in the week of April 19, 1996 , in: Schoeps 1996, p. 128, names several Eastern European countries with strong anti-Semitism.
  14. ↑ For example Frank Schirrmacher in the FAZ of April 15, 1996, printed in: Schoeps 1996, p. 101. Likewise Julius H. Schoeps in Die Zeit of April 26, 1996, in: Ders. 1996, p. 135; and Moshe Zimmermann in Neue Zürcher Zeitung of April 29, 1996, in: Schoeps 1996, p. 147ff.
  15. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust . From the American by Klaus Kochmann. Paperback edition. Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-15088-4 , p. 11.
  16. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust . From the American by Klaus Kochmann. Paperback edition. Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-15088-4 , p. 12.
  17. ^ Franz Graf-Stuhlhofer: About simplifying attempts at a national classification of evil. Dealing with the topic of evil in the didactic communication of the Nazi era. In: Society & Politics. Journal for social and economic engagement, vol. 51, issue 4/2014 and 1/2015, pp. 31–34.
  18. ↑ Century witness Hobsbawm: "I am a travel guide to history."
  19. ↑ Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg, in: Logos 6.1-2 - winter-spring 2007 ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2012 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.logosjournal.com
  20. ↑ until 2005 chief historian of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Department of Justice, Canada
  21. ↑ Hans Mommsen: Introduction . In: Norman G. Finkelstein, Ruth Bettina Birn: A nation on the test stand. The Goldhagen thesis and the historical truth . Claassen-Verlag, Hildesheim 1998, pp. 9–22, here p. 17.
  22. ↑ Hans Mommsen: Introduction . In: Norman G. Finkelstein, Ruth Bettina Birn: A nation on the test stand. The Goldhagen thesis and the historical truth . Claassen-Verlag, Hildesheim 1998, pp. 9–22, here p. 14.
  23. ↑ Hans Mommsen: Introduction . In: Norman G. Finkelstein, Ruth Bettina Birn: A nation on the test stand. The Goldhagen thesis and the historical truth . Claassen-Verlag, Hildesheim 1998, pp. 9-22, here pp. 9ff.
  24. ↑ Hans Mommsen: Introduction . In: Norman G. Finkelstein, Ruth Bettina Birn: A nation on the test stand. The Goldhagen thesis and the historical truth . Claassen-Verlag, Hildesheim 1998, pp. 9–22, here p. 12.
  25. ↑ Hans Mommsen: Introduction . In: Norman G. Finkelstein, Ruth Bettina Birn: A nation on the test stand. The Goldhagen thesis and the historical truth . Claassen-Verlag, Hildesheim 1998, pp. 9–22, here p. 15.
  26. ^ Letters to Goldhagen. Introduced and answered by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen . Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1997
  27. ↑ Quoted from Jacob S. Eder and Christian Mentel: Goldhagen Debate . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Vol. 8: Supplements and registers . De Gruyter, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-037932-7 , p. 215 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  28. ↑ See reviews on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Schlimmer als Krieg. How genocide starts and how it can be prevented . In: Perlentaucher.de .
  29. ^ Sheets for German and international politics: Democracy Prize 1997 to Daniel Goldhagen ( Memento of August 4, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). (Press release on the 1997 Democracy Prize from January 7, 1997).
  30. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. From the American by Klaus Kochmann. Paperback edition. Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-15088-4 .
personal data
SURNAME Goldhagen, Daniel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sociologist, political scientist, and author
DATE OF BIRTH June 30, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts