Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective: An Intellectual Historian's Response to Goldhagen

100 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No.2 ANTISEMITISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORIAN'S RESPONSE TO GOLDHAGEN by Lawrence Birken Lawrence Birken is Associate Professor of History at Ball State University. He has published extensively in the area of modern European intellectual history and is now engaged in writing a new interpretation of that history. He taught at Hamilton College, the University of MinnesotaTwin Cities, and New York University, before coming to Ball State. While Daniel Goldhagen's controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners is ostensibly a monograph on the sociology of the Nazi police battalions in the Second World War, it is actually a study in the history ofideas. The central thesis underpinning the book is that "well before the Nazis came to power" German society was permeated by "a virulent ... variant of antisemitism" which not only "called for the elimination of Jewish influence or of theJews themselves from German society" but predisposed the great majority of Germans to actively endorse the genocidal policies of National Socialism.' "Had ordinary Germans not shared their leadership's eliminationist' ideals," the author argues, "it is hard to imagine that the Nazis would have proceeded, or would have been able to proceed, with the extermination of the Jews" (p. 418). It is this thesis, rather than the archival work on the German police battalions which attempts to illustrate it, that has become controversial. Nor is this controversy any accident. By Goldhagen's own admission, his "book's intent is primarily explanatory 'Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 23. Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective 101 and theoretical. Narrative and description ... are here subordinate to the explanatory goals" (po 463). Goldhagen's "explanatory goals" have generally met with scholarly disapproVal in both the U.S. and Germany-and for two reasons.2 On the one hand, those who might be sympathetic to his thesis have denied its originality. Orner Bartov thus argued that "there is nothing original in claiming that anti-Semitism was at the core of the Holocaust" since "this has always been the 'common sense' view".3 On the other hand, those who might have been willing to recognize its .originality have denied its validity. According to Richard Neuhaus, for example, Goldhagen not only thoroughly "misrepresents the pre-Nazi history of Germany" .but "inadvertently absolves Hitler and the Nazis of their crimes" by seeing them as an expression of an unavoidable predisposition."4 Perhaps the most comprehensive critique was advanced by Yehuda Bauer, who managed to denounce Goldhagen for both his lack of originality and his wrongheadedness at a symposium sponsored by the United States Holocaust Research Institute on April 8, 1996 and transmitted by C-SPAN to a national audience. Although Bauer attacked Goldhagen on a number of fronts, the central point of his critique was that Hitler's Willing Executioners failed to place German antisemitism in comparative perspective.5 Goldhagen himself is rather disingenuous about this issue, on the one hand arguing that "it is not essential to establish the differences between antisemitism in Germany and elsewhere" and on the other hand declaring (only a few lines later) that "the antisemitism of no 'Within a few months of the publication of the Goldhagen book, a vast literature appeared in response to it. Some of the more interesting commentaries include v. R. Berghahn's review in The New York Times Book Review (April 14, 1996), pp. 6-7; William Buckley, "Are All Germans Guilty?," National Review (May 20, 1996), p. 79; Gordon Craig, "How Hell Worked," The New York Review ofBooks (April 18, 1996), pp. 4-8; Thomas M. Disch, "A Nation and a People Accursed," The Nation (May 6, 1996), pp. 50-54; CliveJames, "Blaming the Germans," The New Yorker (April 22, 1996), pp. 44-50; Robert S. Wistrich, "Helping Hitler," Commentary Guly 1996), p. 31. For early German response to the Goldhagen book, see Alan Cowell, "HolocaustWriter Debates Irate Historians in Berlin," The New York Times (September 8, 1996), p. 2; "Goldhagen Diskutiert in Deutschland," DeutschlandNachrichten (September 13, 1996), p. 2. The interview with Goldhagen in Der Spiegel 33 (1996), pp. 50-56, as well as that issue's...