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. A Moral Reckoning was criticized as being riddled with errors and falsehoods and for failing to use any primary sources. In the Weekly Standard, Rabbi David G. Dalin, Ph.D. described it as slanderous bigotry which "fails to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship. That the book has found its readership out in the fever swamps of anti-Catholicism isn't surprising. But that a mainstream publisher like Knopf would print the thing is an intellectual and publishing scandal."[1] In the same review, Dalin accuses Goldhagen of engaging in a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his]...anti-Catholic agenda."
(In fact, no creditable scholar has attacked Goldhagen's book, the correct title of which is A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. The book was favorably reviewed in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic, 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.")
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
- ^ Dalin, David G., The Weekly Standard, February 10, 2003.
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
- Goldhagen in Germany: Historians' Nightmare & Popular Hero. An Essay on the Reception of Hitler's Willing Executioners in Germany
- Slate article on the dispute between Goldhagen and Finkelstein
- Discussion of Goldhagen by Various Scholars
- Goldhagen advocating an occupation of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis