| Daniel Jonah Goldhagen | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1959 |
| Occupation | Political scientist, author |
| Nationality | United States |
| Notable work(s) | Hitler's Willing Executioners, A Moral Reckoning, Worse Than War |
| Spouse(s) | Sarah Williams Goldhagen |
|
www.goldhagen.com |
|
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959) is an American author and former Associate Professor of Political Science and Social Studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of 2009's Worse Than War, which examines the phenomenon of genocide.
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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1959 to Norma and Erich Goldhagen. He grew up in nearby Newton.[1] His wife Sarah (née Williams) is an architectural historian, and critic forThe New Republic magazine.[2]
Goldhagen's father, retired Harvard professor Erich Goldhagen, is a Holocaust survivor who lived in a Romanian–Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz (present-day Ukraine).[1] He credits his father as a "model of intellectual sobriety and probity".[3] Goldhagen has written that his "understanding of Nazism and of the Holocaust is firmly indebted" to his father's influence.[3] In 1977, Goldhagen entered Harvard and remained there for some twenty years, first as an undergraduate and graduate student, then as an assistant professor in the Government and Social Studies Department.[4][5]
During early graduate studies, he attended a lecture by Saul Friedländer, in which he had what he describes as a "lightbulb moment": the functionalism versus intentionalism debate did not address the question, “When Hitler ordered the annihilation of the Jews, why did people execute the order?” Goldhagen wanted to investigate who were the German men and women who killed the Jews, and their reasons for killing.[1]
As a graduate student, Goldhagen did research in the German archives.[1][6] The thesis of Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust proposes that, during the Holocaust, many killers were ordinary Germans, who killed for having been raised in a profoundly antisemitic culture, and thus were acculturated — "ready and willing" — to execute the Nazi government’s genocidal plans.
Goldhagen’s first notable publication was the New Republic magazine book review “False Witness” (1989) of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988), by Princeton University professor Arno J. Mayer.[7] Goldhagen said that “Mayer’s enormous intellectual error” is in ascribing the cause of the Holocaust to anti-Communism, rather than to anti-Semitism,[8] and criticized Prof. Mayer’s saying that most massacres of Jews in the USSR, during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa (1941) in the summer of 1941, were committed by local peoples, with little Wehrmacht participation,[9] and accused him of traducing the facts about the Wannsee Conference (1942), which was meant for plotting the genocide of European Jews, not (as Mayer said) merely the resettlement of the Jews.[10] Goldhagen further accused Mayer of obscurantism, of suppressing historical fact, and of being an apologist for Nazi Germany, like Ernst Nolte, for attempting to “de-demonize” National Socialism.[11] In 1989, Lucy Dawidowicz reviewed Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988) in Commentary magazine, and praised Goldhagen’s “False Witness” review, identifying him as a rising Holocaust historian who formally rebutted “Mayer's falsification” of history.[12][13]
In 2003, Goldhagen resigned from Harvard to focus on writing. His work synthesizes four historical elements, kept distinct for analysis; as presented in the books A Moral Reckoning: the Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (2002) and Worse Than War (2009): (i) description (what happens), (ii) explanation (why it happens), (iii) moral evaluation (judgment), and (iv) prescription (what is to be done?).[14][15] According to Goldhagen, his Holocaust studies address questions about the political, social, and cultural particulars behind other genocides: “Who did the killing?” “What, despite temporal and cultural differences, do mass killings have in common?”, which yielded Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, about the global nature of genocide, and averting such crimes against humanity.[16]
Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) posits that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were as the title indicates "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argued that this "eliminationist antisemitism" was the cornerstone of German national identity, that this type of antisemitism was unique to Germany and because "eliminationist antisemitism", ordinary Germans killed Jews willingly and happily. Goldhagen asserted that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.
The book, which began as a doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning's publication on the holocaust, Ordinary Men. It won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics and the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics, for helping to sharpen public understanding about the past during a period of radical change in Germany.[17] Time magazine reported that it was one of the two most important books of 1996,[18] and The New York Times called it "one of those rare, new works that merit the appellation ‘landmark’".[19]
The book sparked controversy and debate both inside and outside Germany, in the popular press and in academic circles. Some historians have characterized its reception as an extension of the Historikerstreit, the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history. The book was a "publishing phenomenon",[20] achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians,[21][22][23][24][25] who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and,[26] in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless".[27][28] The text, for its alleged "generalizing hypothesis" about Germans, has sometimes been characterized as anti-German.[29][30][31] Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia.[32] Hilberg summarised the debates, "by the end of 1996, it was clear that in sharp distinction from lay readers, much of the academic world had wiped Goldhagen off the map."[33]
In 2002, Goldhagen published A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, his account of the role of the Catholic Church before, during and after World War II. A Moral Reckoning was the subject of considerable controversy involving allegations of anti-Catholic bias.[34] In the book, Goldhagen acknowledges that individual bishops and priests hid and saved a large number of Jews,[35] but also asserts that others promoted or accepted anti-Semitism before[36] and during the war,[37] and some played a direct role in the persecution of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust.[38]
The book was criticized as being a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his] anti-Catholic agenda", and of poor scholarship, by David Dalin[39] and Joseph Bottum,[40] both of The Weekly Standard.[41]
Goldhagen noted in an interview with The Atlantic, as well as in the book's introduction, that the title and the first page of the book reveal its purpose as a moral, rather than historical analysis, asserting that he has invited European Church representatives to present their own historical account in discussing morality and reparation.[42]
Goldhagen's analyses of Nazism and the Holocaust progressed to analysis of what he characterizes as “eliminationist assaults”, and in 2009 he published Worse Than War, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (2009). He reports having considered writing it for some twenty-six years, intermittently working on it for perhaps a decade, by interviewing genocide perpetrators and victims in Rwanda, Guatemala, Cambodia, Kenya, and the USSR, and politicians, government officers, and private humanitarian organization officers. Goldhagen states that his aim is to help "craft institutions and politics that will save countless lives and also lift the lethal threat under which so many people live”. He concludes that "eliminationist assaults" are preventable, because "the world's non-mass-murdering countries are wealthy and powerful, having prodigious military capabilities (and they can band together)", whereas the perpetrator countries "are overwhelmingly poor and weak."[43][44]
The book was cinematically adapted, and the documentary film of Worse than War was first presented in the U.S. in Aspen, Colorado on 6 August 2009 — the sixty-fourth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.[45] In Germany, the documentary was first broadcast by the ARD television network 18 October 2009,[46] and was to be nationally broadcast by the PBS in 2010.[47]
The text has drawn criticism for some of its conclusions. David Rieff, characterizing Goldhagen as a "pro-Israel polemicist and amateur historian", writes that the subtext of what Goldhagen deems "eliminationism" may be his own view of contemporary Islam. Rieff writes that Goldhagen's website states that the author "speaks nationally ... about Political Islam's Offensive, the threat to Israel, Hitler's Willing Executioners, the Globalization of Antisemitism, and more."[44] Rieff questions Goldhagen's equating the "culture of death" of Nazism with that of "political Islam", as well as Goldhagen's conclusion that, in order to prevent "eliminationism", the United Nations should be remade into an interventionist entity focusing on "a devoted international push for democratizing more countries".[44] Adam Jones, who praised this book for its fluid style and commendable passion, concludes however, that the book is undermined by a casual approach to basic research, and by the author’s tendency to overreach and overstate his case.[48]