Review: The Goldhagen Controversy "One Nation, One People, One Theory" Fritz Stern

The Goldhagen Controversy "One Nation, One People, One Theory" Fritz Stern

[Note: from Foreign Affairs, v. 75, no. 6, p. 128.]

[Fritz Stern is a University Professor at Columbia University, and, along with Gordon Craig, the dean of historians of Germany in this country.]

Holocaust literature abounds, as survivors seek to bear witness and historians try to understand. So far the very magnitude of the satanic murder has inspired a kind of awed reticence about overarching explanations. Now, a 37-year-old political scientist from Harvard claims: "Explaining why the Holocaust occurred requires a radical revision of what has until now been written. This book is that revision." Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust", published in this country in April and in Germany in early August, has become international sensation, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.

The book is a deliberate provocation-- I consider this a "neutral judgment. Provocations can shock people out of their settled, comfortable views; they can also be self-promoting attacks on earlier work and professional standards. Goldhagen's title is provocative and delivers his thesis: the executioners of Jews were willing murderers, who willingly chose to torment and kill their victims; they were ordinary Germans, not Nazi monsters, not specially trained or indoctrinated by party pronouncing over membership or ideology, but simply acting out of what Goldhagen calls the common German "eliminationist mind-set." And being "ordinary" Germans responding to a common "cognitive model" about Jews, their places could have been taken by millions of other ordinary Germans.

Goldhagen's book comes in two related parts: the explanatory model, or "the analytical framework," as he also calls it, and the empirical evidence. The parts are joined by a single intent: The indictment of a people. The duality of presentation marks the style as well. Goldhagen depicts horror and renders judgment in evocative and compelling phrases. He bolsters polemical certainty with concepts drawn from the social sciences, relying on the vaporous, dreary jargon of the worst of academic "discourse." Unintelligible diagrams distract, even as horrendous photographs confirm. "The book s intent is primarily explanatory and theoretical," he notes. Theory explains and, as there is a persistent mismatch between the powerful, unsparing description of Holocaust bestiality and simplistic theoretical explanation, theory triumphs. Astounding repetitive, the book has 125 pages of notes but, regrettably, no bibliography.

To say it at once: the book has some merit, especially in the middle section, which depicts three specific aspects of the Holocaust, and it has one overriding defect: it is in its essence unhistorical. It is unhistorical in positing that one (simplistically depicted) strain of the past, German antisemitism, explains processes that the author strips of their proper historical context; it is unhistorical in over and over again presenting suppositions as "incontestable" certainty. Sir Lewis Namier, a great English historian, once remarked that "... the historical approach is intellectually humble; the aim is to comprehend situations, to study trends, to discover how things work: and the crowning attainment of historical study is a historical sense--an intuitive understanding of how things do not happen. ... " Goldhagen's tone mocks humility, and he seems to lack any sense of how things do not happen," of how complex human conduct and historical change really are.

[concluding paragraph]

The astounding reception of so polemical and pretentious a book can hardly be attributed solely to its topic or thesis. Shrill and simplistic explanations of monstrous crimes obviously command attention. But there is more at work here: the author's ceaseless boast of radical originality was endorsed on the book's jacket by two well known scholars, both distinguished in fields other than German History -- and between them praising Goldhagen's work as "phenomenal scholarship and absolute integrity ... impeccable scholarship, a profound understanding of modern German history ... obligatory reading." The American and German publishers touted the book with all the great promotional power at their command. Perhaps Goldhagen's manipulated, public relations orchestrated success tells us more about the culture of the present than the book's substance tells us about the horrors of the past.

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