Hardly any Germans have read Goldhagen’s book, which was published in America just a few weeks ago and made its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list last Sunday. It didn’t much matter that Goldhagen’s clumsy and jargon-filled English often reads as if it were translated from German in the first place. The publisher of Der Spiegel, Rudolf Augstein, called the book’s key assertions “pure nonsense” and “ignorant, if not malicious.” Josef Joffe, foreign editor of the Munich daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, describes the book’s reception as “strong, shrill and contemptuous”–in part, perhaps, because it is appearing less than a year after the arduous 50th-anniversary commemorations of World War II. Even the great majority of Germans who agree that the Holocaust must never be forgotten must wonder whether they will be required to examine it from a fresh historical perspective with every publishing season. One German psychoanalyst says he is seeing more and more patients struggling with long-repressed memories of the Holocaust. The last thing they want is a 619-page reminder from an American Jew that the most infamous genocide in human history was carried out by hundreds of thousands of “ordinary Germans,” with the knowledge and tacit approval of millions more.
This is not to say that today’s Germans deny it. Few historians dispute Goldhagen’s empirical research, which convincingly demonstrates that you didn’t have to be a fanatic to commit genocide. For every jackbooted storm trooper, bound by a personal oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, there was a squad of common soldiers and policemen doing the everyday work of the Holocaust. This observation, which created such a stir among American reviewers, is regarded in Germany as settled historical fact. Accordingly, what irritates German intellectuals about Goldhagen’s book is summed up right on the jacket flap, which pronounces itself “a work of the utmost originality and importance.” “Goldhagen,” says Michael Wolffsohn, a German Jew and a historian at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, “acts as if he just discovered the wheel and America at the same time.”
It might help if the Germans understood that an American publisher would make the same claim if Goldhagen had written a new biography of Dolly Parton. Even so, German commentators are baffled by the respectful reception the book has received from American publications, including NEWSWEEK. New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal compared his discovery of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” to the moment when he first laid eyes on Auschwitz. Remarks such as these tend to make Germans wonder how many times Americans plan to rediscover the Holocaust. In the liberal weekly Die Zeit, columnist Volker Ullrich suggested that the American enthusiasm for Goldhagen’s book reflects American discomfort with “a reunited Germany.”
But Goldhagen’s book is also controversial for its conclusions. To say that ordinary Germans participated in the “final solution” invites the question of what motivated them, if not fanaticism. He concludes that on the subject of Jews, and Jews only, for ordinary Germans the difference between fanaticism and common sense had broken down. The Holocaust, he asserts, was the culmination of a 400-year history of culturally sanctioned Jew-baiting, dating to the father of German anti-Semitism, Martin Luther himself. The soldier who shot the woman could send his picture home to Mama, Goldhagen implies, precisely because Mama would be so proud.
To Germans, these arguments approach a kind of reverse racism. Goldhagen makes the Holocaust “practically a necessity of German history,” writes Johannes Heil of the Center for Anti-Semitism Research in Berlin. “He sees the causes of the murder of 6 million Jews lying not in concrete conditions and the objectives of German policy, but grounded in the “German character’.” “I’ve been called a racist,” Goldhagen acknowledged last week, before leaving on a book tour in Britain (he will visit Germany in August, when “Willing Executioners” is published there). “But this is not a book about the eternal German national character or the so-called German race. Anyone who says that is misreading the book.”
Well, misreading history is a practice every nation indulges in at one time or another; readers will have to draw their own conclusions about Goldhagen’s thesis. Already, though, he has proven one important corollary to Santayana’s observation that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Those who remember it, clearly, will get into a lot more arguments.
