Daniel Goldhagen

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Born	June 1959
Occupation	Political Scientist, Author
Nationality	USA
Notable work(s)	Hitler's Willing Executioners, A Moral Reckoning, Worse Than War
Spouse(s)	Sarah Williams Goldhagen
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 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.

Early life

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was born in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., in June 1959, to Norma and Erich Goldhagen. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts.^[1] His wife is Sarah Williams Goldhagen, an architectural historian, and critic forThe New Republic magazine.^[2]

Goldhagen is the son of retired Harvard professor Erich Goldhagen, a Holocaust survivor who lived in a Romanian–Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz, now in 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 College and remained there for some twenty years, 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]

Career

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 quit his Harvard academic job to focus on writing.^{[citation needed]} 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 (judgement), 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]

Works

Hitler's Willing Executioners

Main article: Hitler's Willing Executioners

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]

Goldhagen's 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]

A Moral Reckoning

Main article: A Moral Reckoning

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.^[33] In the book, Goldhagen acknowledges that individual bishops and priests hid and saved a large number of Jews,^[34] yet he asserts that others promoted or accepted anti-Semitism before^[35] and during the war,^[36] and some played a direct role in the persecution of Jews in Europe during the time of the Nazis.^[37]

The book has been criticized as being a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his] anti-Catholic agenda", and as being poor scholarship.^[38][39][40] Because he believes the book's recommendations would mean the end of the Church as it has been for two millennia, William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has labeled Goldhagen an "anti-Catholic bigot".^[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]

Worse Than War

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 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' next to his author photo and alongside the jacket of Worse Than War."^[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]

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 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Public television in the U.S. in 2010.^[47]

Awards

• The Forward, named to Forward 50, 2002 and 1996
• Journal for German and International Politics Triennial Democracy Prize, 1997, with laudatio given by Jürgen Habermas.
• National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 1996
• Time, named Hitler’s Willing Executioners one of two best non-fiction books of the year, 1996
• American Political Science Association, Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics, 1994
• Harvard University, Sumner Dissertation Prize, 1993
• Whiting Fellowship, 1990–1991
• Fulbright IIE Grant for Dissertation Research, 1988–1989
• Krupp Foundation Fellowship for Dissertation Research, 1988–1989
• Center for European Studies Summer Research Grant, 1987
• Jacob Javits Fellowship 1996-1988, 1989–1990
• Harvard College, Philo Sherman Bennett Thesis Prize, 1982
• Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) Fellowship, 1979–1980

Selected works

• 1989: False Witness The New Republic, April 17, 1989, Volume 200, #16, Issue # 3, pp39–44
• 1996: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, ISBN 978-0-679-44695-8
• 2002: A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of RepairAlfred A. Knopf, New York, ISBN 978-0-375-41434-3
• 2009: Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault On Humanity, PublicAffairs, New York, ISBN 978-1-58648-769-0

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} Smith, Dinita (April 1, 1996). "Challenging a View Of The Holocaust". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/01/books/challenging-a-view-of-the-holocaust.html. Retrieved October 2, 2009. 
2. ^ "The New Republic Masthead". http://www.tnr.com/masthead. Retrieved 2009-10-02. 
3. ^ ^{a b} Goldhagen, Daniel (1997). page 616, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust. Alfred A. Knopf. 
4. ^ Ruber, Deborah Bradley (January 9, 1997). "Goldhagen Wins German Prize For Holocaust Book". The Harvard University Gazette. http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1997/01.09/GoldhagenWinsGe.html. Retrieved October 2, 2009. 
5. ^ "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Website". http://goldhagen.com/bio. Retrieved 2009-10-02. 
6. ^ Carl F. Lankowski, ed (August 1999). Breakdown, Breakup, Breakthrough: Germany's Difficult Passage To Modernity. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. ISBN 978-1-57181-211-7. http://books.google.com/?id=hb1KXgxs03UC&pg=PA214&lpg=PA214&dq=goldhagen+Ludwigsburg,+Germany&q=goldhagen%20Ludwigsburg%2C%20Germany. 
7. ^ Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial, New York: Norton, 2001 p. 74.
8. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel. "False Witness," The New Republic, 17 April 1989 p. 40.
9. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel. "False Witness," The New Republic, 17 April 1989 pp. 40-41.
10. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel. "False Witness," The New Republic, April 17, 1989 p. 43.
11. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel. "False Witness," The New Republic, April 17, 1989 p. 44.
12. ^ Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial, New York: Norton, 2001 p. 73.
13. ^ Dawidowicz, Lucy "Perversions of the Holocaust" pages 56-60 from Commentary, vol. 88, no. 4, October 1989 p. 58.
14. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel (2002). pp5-6,A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church In The Holocaust And Its Unfufilled Duty of Repair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-41434-3. 
15. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel (October 2009). p32,Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 978-1-58648-769-0. 
16. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel (October 2009). Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity. New York: Public Affairs. p. 631. ISBN 978-1-58648-769-0. 
17. ^ Harvard Gazette
18. ^ "Books: The Best Books of 1996". Time. December 23, 1996. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985753,00.html. 
19. ^ Bernstein, Richard (March 9, 1997). "Was Slaughter of Jews Embraced by Germans?". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/hitler.html. Retrieved October 2, 2009. 
20. ^ Crawshaw, Steve (2004). Easier fatherland. Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 136–7. ISBN 978-0-8264-6320-3. http://books.google.com/?id=W9TODKJGzjwC. 
21. ^ Shatz, Adam. (April 8, 1998) Goldhagen's willing executioners: the attack on a scholarly superstar, and how he fights back Slate. Retrieved January 4, 2008.
22. ^ Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation London : Arnold 2000, pp. 254-256.
23. ^ "The Past Distorted: The Goldhagen Controversy" in Einstein’s German World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 272-288.
24. ^ Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation London: Arnold 2000, p. 255.
25. ^ "The Goldhagen Controversy: Agonising Problems, Scholarly Failure, and the Political Dimension," in German History, vol. 15, 1997, pp. 80–91.
26. ^ "Ordinary People?" National Review, vol. 48 no. # 12, July 1, 1996, pp. 54–56.
27. ^ "RAUL HILBERG - IS THERE A NEW ANTI-SEMITISM? A CONVERSATION WITH RAUL HILBERG - LOGOS 6.1-2 WINTER-SPRING 2007". Logosjournal.com. http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_6.1-2/hilberg.htm. Retrieved 2011-01-06. 
28. ^ http://web.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/pdf/01_kwiet.pdf
29. ^ Bill Niven, William John Niven. Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich. 2004, page 116
30. ^ Robert R. Shandley. Unwilling Germans?: the Goldhagen debate. 1998, page 17
31. ^ Paul Gottfried. Multiculturalism and the politics of guilt. 2004, page 94
32. ^ Stern, Fritz "The Goldhagen Controversy: The Past Distorted", in: Einstein's German World, pp. 272-288, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-691-05939-X
33. ^ Riebling, Mark (January 27, 2003). "Jesus, Jews, and the Shoah". National Review. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_1_55/ai_96403717. ^{[dead link]} Accessed January 5, 2008.
34. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel (2002). pp50-51,A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church In The Holocaust And Its Unfufilled Duty of Repair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-41434-3. 
35. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel (2002). p226,A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church In The Holocaust And Its Unfufilled Duty of Repair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-41434-3. 
36. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel (2002). p227,A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church In The Holocaust And Its Unfufilled Duty of Repair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-41434-3. 
37. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel (2002). p60,A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church In The Holocaust And Its Unfufilled Duty of Repair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-41434-3. 
38. ^ Dalin, David G., The Weekly Standard, February 10, 2003. http://www.catholicleague.org/research/history_as_bigotry.htm
39. ^ Bottum, J. The Usefulness of Daniel Goldhagen The Weekly Standard 23 October 2002
40. ^ Fisher, Eugene J. Review of A Moral Reckoning Ethical Perspectives, Journal of the European Ethics Network
41. ^ 2002 Report on Anti-Catholicism, Executive Summary Catholic League
42. ^ Gritz, Jennie Rothenberg. (January 31, 2003) The Guilt of the Church. The Atlantic. Retrieved January 4, 2008.
43. ^ Worse than War. page 658
44. ^ ^{a b c} "Review: The Willing Misinterpreter". The National Interest. 2009-10-28. http://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/the-willing-misinterpreter-3290?page=4. Retrieved 2011-01-06. 
45. ^ "Worse Than War Screening". http://www.clal.org/sp183.html. Retrieved 2009-10-03. 
46. ^ "ARD Program Guide for October 18, 2009". http://programm.daserste.de/pages/programm/liste.aspx?datum=zUl3TVc2V8vXkRD8dRUdNQ%3d%3d. Retrieved 2009-10-02. 
47. ^ "PBS International: Worse Than War Documentary". http://www.wgbhinternational.org/index.php?sid=056qh7hz0p1hzjf9k87n51djmeozma8l&lang=english&page=programs&dle_pp=0&dle_od=asc&pr_act=details&pid=762. Retrieved 2009-10-03. 

Further reading

• Bauer, Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-300-08256-2
• Eley, Geoff (ed.) The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory, Nazism—Facing the German Past. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-472-06752-7.
• Feldkamp, Michael F. Goldhagens unwillige Kirche. Alte und neue Fälschungen über Kirche und Papst während der NS-Herrschaft. München: Olzog-Verlag, 2003. ISBN 978-3-7892-8127-3
• Finkelstein, Norman & Birn, Ruth Bettina. A Nation On Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. ISBN 978-0-8050-5871-0
• Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 978-0-393-02044-1
• Kwiet, Konrad: “‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ and ‘Ordinary Germans’: Some Comments on Goldhagen’s Ideas”. Jewish Studies Yearbook 1 (2000).
• LaCapra, Dominick. “Perpetrators and Victims: The Goldhagen Debate and Beyond,” in LaCapra, D. Writing History, Writing Trauma Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 114-140.
• Pohl, Dieter. "Die Holocaust-Forschung und Goldhagens Thesen," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997).
• Rychlak, Ronald. "Goldhagen vs. Pius XII" First Things (June/July 2002)
• Shandley, Robert & Riemer, Jeremiah (eds.) Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-8166-3101-8
• Stern, Fritz. "The Goldhagen Controversy: The Past Distorted" in Einstein's German World, 272-288. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-691-05939-6
• Wesley, Frank. The Holocaust and Anti-semitism: the Goldhagen Argument and Its Effects. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999. ISBN 978-1-57309-235-7
• The “Willing Executioners/Ordinary Men” Debate: Selections from the Symposium, April 8, 1996, introduced by Michael Berenbaum (Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 2001).

External links

• Goldhagen's new website.
• Goldhagen's old website.
• Daniel Goldhagen interview on Counterpoint Radio with Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities at the University of Memphis.
• Video: Goldhagen speaks about Worse Than War
• Interview, PBS
• German lessons, Goldhagen authored article at The Guardian
• Articles by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen at Los Angeles Times
• Daniel Jonah Goldhagen - The New York Review of Books
• Discussion of Goldhagen by Various Scholars
• Interview with Daniel J. Goldhagen: Deterrence as the Only Prevention for Genocide

Persondata
Name	Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah
Alternative names
Short description	political scientist and Holocaust historian
Date of birth	1959
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death