Contesting Histories: German and Jewish Americans and the Legacy of the Holocaust (review)

I have never been one who believes that objectivity is an essential requirement for “good history,” and as I am reviewing Michael Schuldiner’s Contesting Histories: German and Jewish Americans and the Legacy of the Holocaust, this is probably just as well. Having made his dedications for family members lost in the Holocaust, Schuldiner goes on to outline the personal motivation behind the book: as a University of Alaska lecturer, he encountered students of German American descent who trivialized, relativized or disputed the Holocaust. These students were even supported by distinguished German American historians at Alaska who told Schuldiner that “we protect our students” (xvii).

What follows is a familiar history of dispute with a less familiar history embedded within. The larger history known to many academics is the fundamental debate about the root causes of the Holocaust, various efforts to assign blame, Holocaust denial, and the resulting embittered struggles between those who wish to remember and those who wish to forget. This history in itself is provocative and informative and would provide valuable background material for undergraduates and general readers, particularly the section focused on the “Historians’ Debate” covering the controversy over Reagan’s visit to Bitburg and the clash between Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning over whether or not those who murdered innocent Jews could be considered “ordinary men.”

However, it is the smaller history that I found more intriguing. This aspect covers the interaction between groups who represented ethnic Germans such as the Steuben Society of America and the Society of the Friends of the New Germany (also known as “the Bund”), on the one hand, and Jewish American groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on the other. What Schuldiner uncovers is a history which reflects academic debates that seemingly come to a head every time the Holocaust is publicized, such as during a presidential visit or the opening of the National Holocaust Memorial.

Beginning with the years of World War II, Schuldiner recounts the story of Senator Gerald Nye, a North Dakotan of German origin, attempting to take Harry Warner of Warner Brothers to task for misrepresenting Germans in general as evil Nazis. The positions taken by Senator Nye and his supporters range from fear that innocent German Americans would be persecuted because of generalizations, to an attempt to play down the Holocaust through denial or relativization, to outright affirmation of anti-Semitic Nazi ideologies. These positions repeated themselves at the time of Reagan’s visit to Bitburg, in the “Historians’ Debate” and at other moments of heightened sensitivity.

Schuldiner’s method, throughout, is one of forthright honesty and commitment. There is never any denial that he himself writes from a position of strong conviction, and this is particularly evident in his open support of Daniel Goldhagen’s argument, that Germans of the Nazi era were not ordinary men and that the Holocaust was the culmination of decades of anti-Semitism that erupted in a highly pressurized political environment. He supports, in other words, Goldhagen’s thesis over Christopher Browning’s assertions that “ordinary” men could and would act in ways similar to those who perpetrated the most appalling crimes.

Inevitably, this book makes clear that this is a history that needs to be told. I had never given much thought to the German American population as a specific ethnic group (although in some accounts it constitutes a quarter of the US population, the same number as those who qualify as “Anglo-American”). Nor have I previously read in as much length about the victimization that ethnic Germans have endured historically, both in terms of internment during the world wars and in terms of negative stereotyping and representations in films and the media, simply for sharing a heritage with people who have committed diabolical acts. This observation leads to Schuldiner’s final conclusion that most histories of the Holocaust are driven by an empathy with the victims...