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<blockquote>In ''A Moral Reckoning,'' Goldhagen now turns from nation to religion, and indicts the Roman Catholic Church in comparable terms. Both as an international institution under the leadership of Pope Pius XII, and at national levels in many European countries, the church was deeply implicated in the appalling genocide. Nor was it merely a question of complicity. Just as Germans had been carefully taught to hate the Jews, to the point that they could readily torment and kill them, so had Catholics, Goldhagen believes. He does not accept the idea that National Socialism was more pagan than Christian in its inspiration; he sees a deep vein of Jew-hatred ingrained within Catholic tradition; and he does not think that there was any difference of kind between that old religious Jew-hatred and the murderous racial anti-Semitism of the 20th century. <ref>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04E4DC1730F937A15752C1A9649C8B63</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>In ''A Moral Reckoning,'' Goldhagen now turns from nation to religion, and indicts the Roman Catholic Church in comparable terms. Both as an international institution under the leadership of Pope Pius XII, and at national levels in many European countries, the church was deeply implicated in the appalling genocide. Nor was it merely a question of complicity. Just as Germans had been carefully taught to hate the Jews, to the point that they could readily torment and kill them, so had Catholics, Goldhagen believes. He does not accept the idea that National Socialism was more pagan than Christian in its inspiration; he sees a deep vein of Jew-hatred ingrained within Catholic tradition; and he does not think that there was any difference of kind between that old religious Jew-hatred and the murderous racial anti-Semitism of the 20th century. <ref>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04E4DC1730F937A15752C1A9649C8B63</ref></blockquote>


The book was favorably reviewed in ''The New York Review of Books'', ''The New York Times'', ''The Los Angeles Times'' and ''The Atlantic''<ref name=Atlantic>[http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200301u/int2004-01-31 "The Guilt of the Church"]</ref>, among many others. While serious critics agreed that the book is written with a high degree of scholarship and poses vital questions, they also agreed that Goldhagen's tendency to polemics does not always serve his cause. From an interview with Goldhagen in ''The Atlantic'': "The book does not seek to unearth new information about the past—Goldhagen draws most of his historical material from the works of the authors he reviewed. What he undertakes, rather, is exactly what the title suggests: a consideration of culpability and repair. He lays out a set of moral principles and applies them to the Catholic Church, judging its past actions, examining its present shortcomings, and suggesting reforms for its future. He does not cushion his criticisms of the Church in diplomatic language. Even philosophy professor John K. Roth, who gave ''A Moral Reckoning'' one of its most positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times, wryly conceded that "'unpretentious,' 'indecisive,' 'moderate' and 'patient' are not words that come to mind when reading Goldhagen."<ref name=Atlantic></ref>
The book was favorably reviewed in ''The New York Review of Books'', ''The New York Times'', ''The Los Angeles Times'' and ''The Atlantic''<ref name=Atlantic>[http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200301u/int2004-01-31 "The Guilt of the Church"]</ref>, among many others. While serious critics agreed that the book is written with a high degree of scholarship and poses vital questions, they also agreed that Goldhagen's tendency to polemics does not always serve his cause. From an interview with Goldhagen in ''The Atlantic'': "The book does not seek to unearth new information about the past—Goldhagen draws most of his historical material from the works of the authors he reviewed. What he undertakes, rather, is exactly what the title suggests: a consideration of culpability and repair. He lays out a set of moral principles and applies them to the Catholic Church, judging its past actions, examining its present shortcomings, and suggesting reforms for its future. He does not cushion his criticisms of the Church in diplomatic language. Even philosophy professor John K. Roth, who gave ''A Moral Reckoning'' one of its most positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times, wryly conceded that "'unpretentious,' 'indecisive,' 'moderate' and 'patient' are not words that come to mind when reading Goldhagen."<ref name=Atlantic>


=Criticism=
=Criticism=

Revision as of 19:54, 20 November 2007

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959) is an American political scientist. He is best known for his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), which posits that ordinary Germans not only knew about, but also supported, the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist" antisemitism in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen writes that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis but was eventually secularized.

Goldhagen's book, which began as his Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely to rebut the claims of Christopher Browning as to perpetrator motives. The dissertation won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics.

Goldhagen has won acclaim for his ability to make harsh historical analysis interesting to a large public. He was awarded the prestigious Democracy Prize by the German Journal for German and International Politics, in that his work forced Germans to reckon with the phenomenon of pervasive and violent antisemitism, and as such it provided a corrective to any notion that an end to the Sonderweg of modern German history was at hand. The laudatio was given by Jürgen Habermas and Jan Philipp Reemtsma.

Hitler's Willing Executioners was commercially and popularly successful and has been widely translated, prompting two of its most visible academic critics, Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, to publish an extensive joint critique of the book purporting to debunk its scholarship.

A Moral Reckoning

Goldhagen has written a book about the Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust, A Moral Reckoning. According to Geoffrey Wheatcroft, reviewing the book in the New York Times:

In A Moral Reckoning, Goldhagen now turns from nation to religion, and indicts the Roman Catholic Church in comparable terms. Both as an international institution under the leadership of Pope Pius XII, and at national levels in many European countries, the church was deeply implicated in the appalling genocide. Nor was it merely a question of complicity. Just as Germans had been carefully taught to hate the Jews, to the point that they could readily torment and kill them, so had Catholics, Goldhagen believes. He does not accept the idea that National Socialism was more pagan than Christian in its inspiration; he sees a deep vein of Jew-hatred ingrained within Catholic tradition; and he does not think that there was any difference of kind between that old religious Jew-hatred and the murderous racial anti-Semitism of the 20th century. [1]

The book was favorably reviewed in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic[2], among many others. While serious critics agreed that the book is written with a high degree of scholarship and poses vital questions, they also agreed that Goldhagen's tendency to polemics does not always serve his cause. From an interview with Goldhagen in The Atlantic: "The book does not seek to unearth new information about the past—Goldhagen draws most of his historical material from the works of the authors he reviewed. What he undertakes, rather, is exactly what the title suggests: a consideration of culpability and repair. He lays out a set of moral principles and applies them to the Catholic Church, judging its past actions, examining its present shortcomings, and suggesting reforms for its future. He does not cushion his criticisms of the Church in diplomatic language. Even philosophy professor John K. Roth, who gave A Moral Reckoning one of its most positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times, wryly conceded that "'unpretentious,' 'indecisive,' 'moderate' and 'patient' are not words that come to mind when reading Goldhagen."Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). In the same review, Dalin accuses Goldhagen of engaging in a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his]...anti-Catholic agenda." The Weekly Standard noted that the book is so "filled with factual errors, providing an opportunity for other anti-Catholic writers to claim the middle ground". [3] In the Weekly Standard J. Bottum wrote:

It is filled with so many simple errors of fact that it's positively embarrassing to read. These errors of fact combine to create a set of historical theses about the Nazis and the Catholic Church so tendentious that not even Pius XII's most determined belittlers have dared to assert them. And, in Goldhagen's final chapters, the bad historical theses unite to form a complete anti-Catholicism the likes of which we haven't seen since the elderly H.G. Wells decided Catholicism was the root of all evil... [4]

Another critic noted that Goldhagen "appears not to have done any original research for this book" and that "[s]uch methodological and factual considerations would definitely get in the way of the demonic portrait of the Church that he seeks to paint."[5] William A. Donohue president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights asserted that Goldhagen is "profoundly ignorant" of Catholicism and that his book is rank bigotry:

In Goldhagen's book, A Moral Reckoning, he separates himself from others by demanding that the Catholic Church implode: he wants the Church to refigure its teachings, liturgy and practices to such an extent that no one would recognize a trace of Catholicism in this new construction. That is why Goldhagen is not simply against Pope Pius XII: he is an inveterate anti-Catholic bigot.

[6]

Works

  • Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. ISBN 0-679-44695-8.
  • A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 2002). ISBN 0-375-41434-7.
  • The “Willing Executioners/Ordinary Men” Debate: Selections from the Symposium, April 8, 1996, introduced by Michael Berenbaum (Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 2001).

Notes

  1. ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04E4DC1730F937A15752C1A9649C8B63
  2. ^ "The Guilt of the Church"
  3. ^ Bottum, J. The Usefulness of Daniel Goldhagen The Weekly Standard 10/23/2002
  4. ^ Bottum, J. The Usefulness of Daniel Goldhagen The Weekly Standard 10/23/2002
  5. ^ Fisher, Eugene J. Review of A Moral Reckoning Ethical Perspectives, Journal of the European Ethics Network
  6. ^ 2002 Report on Anti-Catholicism, Executive Summary Catholic League

References

  • Bauer, Yehuda Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven [Conn.] ; London : Yale University Press, 2001 ISBN 0-300-08256-8.
  • Eley, Geoff (editor) The Goldhagen Effect : History, Memory, Nazism--Facing The German past, Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2000 ISBN 0-472-06752-4.
  • Feldkamp, Michael F. Goldhagens unwillige Kirche. Alte und neue Fälschungen über Kirche und Papst während der NS-Herrschaft, München : Olzog-Verlag, 2003 ISBN 3789281271
  • Finkelstein, Norman & Birn, Ruth Bettina A Nation On Trial : The Goldhagen Thesis And Historical Truth, New York : Henry Holt, 1998 ISBN 0-8050-5871-0.
  • Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial, New York : Norton, 2001 ISBN 0-393-02044-4.
  • Kershaw, Sir Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives Of Interpretation, London : Arnold ; New York : Copublished in the USA by Oxford University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-340-76028-1
  • Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler : the search for the origins of his evil New York : Random House, 1998 ISBN 0-679-43151-9.
  • Sereny, Gita Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995)
  • Shandley, Robert & Riemer, Jeremiah (editors) Unwilling Germans? : The Goldhagen Debate, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1998 ISBN 0-8166-3101-8.
  • Stern, Fritz "The Goldhagen Controversy: The Past Distorted" pages 272-288 from Einstein's German World, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-691-05939-X.
  • Wesley, Frank The Holocaust And Anti-semitism : the Goldhagen Argument And Its Effects, San Francisco ; London : International Scholars Publications, 1999, 1998 ISBN 1-57309-235-5.
  • Kwiet, Konrad: “‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ and ‘Ordinary Germans’. Some Comments on Goldhagen’s Ideas,” Jewish Studies Yearbook 1 (2000) (online at http://www.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/pdf/01_kwiet.pdf)
  • LaCapra, Dominick: “Perpetrators and Victims: The Goldhagen Debate and Beyond,” in LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (= ch. 4) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), 114-140.
  • Pohl, Dieter: "Die Holocaust-Forschung und Goldhagens Thesen," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997).

External links

Critical analyses

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source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daniel_Goldhagen&diff=prev&oldid=172760756

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