Steiner’s ideas about the triumphalist character of the Chosen People concept constitute another trap Maccoby believes Steiner’s fallen into. I told Maccoby about my conversation with Steiner in which Steiner had steadfastly, repeatedly insisted that the questions he raised in his fictive Hitler’s speech are questions he thought were valid, questions he wanted answers to. The question, for instance, about whether Hitler’s racist doctrines were “a hungry imitation” of the alleged racism of the Chosen People idea in Judaism.
“Actually, the doctrine of the chosen race is fundamentally different from a racialist doctrine,” Maccoby says. “The Jews don’t say we are the chosen race because we are inherently better than other people, because of some racist characteristics. On the contrary, what is said is that the Jewish people were chosen not for any qualities that they had but because of the mission: that it was given that the Jews actually come up short all the time. The whole story is about the defects of this people. The whole story is about the backslidings, and it’s not a glorification of the Jews at all. It’s a history of how they failed on the whole to live up to the mission entrusted to them. It was the story of a failure. And you can’t imagine Hitler talking about the failings of the Nordic race; on the contrary, the only failures are not their fault but the fault of traitors who are plotting against them. Whereas Jews came to be evil in the sight of the Lord: Most people turned away from God and had to be upbraided by the prophets. So it’s entirely different from a racist concept. It’s the story of a totally degraded people, a slave people who were chosen to develop a concept of freedom. The idea of election is at opposite poles from being a superior race.”
Opposite poles from being a superior race, perhaps, but still chosen in the sense of “chosen to develop a concept of freedom.” This might often have been a freedom to fail, a freedom to choose wrong, but a freedom, a power to choose that was especially important to God, even if as an object of his wrath. Maccoby might be strictly right in rejecting the notion that chosenness represents “superiority” in the sense of intellect, beauty, or nobility—the kinds of claims made for the Nordic race by Hitler—but it does reflect a perhaps even more special moral significance or responsibility.
There are two better arguments against Steiner’s position than the one Maccoby advances. First, all religions have ways of conferring upon some of their initiates some sense of superiority over the rest of mankind: the Elect and saved in some versions of Christianity, the Enlightened of Buddhism, the Brahmans of Hinduism, the man who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca in Islam. To single out this aspect of Jewish belief as somehow implicating Jews in their own murder is uncalled for.
Another argument against Steiner (or Steiner’s Hitler) is that there is little evidence that Hitler did adapt his doctrine of Aryan superiority from the Chosen People concept of the Jews. In fact, there’s more evidence that he adapted it from an abundance of tracts and treatises available to him on the mystical superiority of the Aryan race, ones that ranged from the semipornographic Ostara magazine in Vienna to the multivolume “scholarly” works of Wagner’s “scientific” race guru Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Maccoby is more persuasive, I believe, in his attack on the assertion Steiner puts in the mouth of his Hitler that the source of the success of Hitler’s anti-Jewish crusade was the threefold “blackmail of transcendence”—the invention of conscience by Moses, the impossible injunction to perfect love by Jesus, the impossible injunction to perfect justice by Marx.
“I disagree with this whole idea of his [Steiner’s] that Judaism differs from other religions in that it sets a high moral standard which is so impossible that people have to resent it. This is a theory about anti-Semitism, that anti-Semitism consists of the resentment of Christians being forced to live up to the Judaic standard of morality. I don’t think that’s the case. I think, on the contrary, what is resented in Judaism is people saying morality is possible. That it’s not all that hard, and, therefore, all the excuses people make for avoiding morality don’t work. Because what the Bible says is it’s not in the heavens, it’s not beyond the seas, it is there before you. Morality is easy; the only thing that makes it difficult are all the excuses people make. One of those excuses is to say that morality is so difficult that the only virtue is total humility—that we cannot possibly be good people, so therefore we need a savior to come from heaven in order to suffer death on our behalf. So what’s resented is not the difficulty of Jewish morality but more a notion that morality is a possibility.”
It was strange, the week I spent going from Steiner to Maccoby: both brilliant, impassioned intellects; both utterly at odds; both playing with fire. While Maccoby clearly regards Steiner as having done something dangerous in giving birth to an intellectual rationale for Hitler that blames his victims, Maccoby might, in fact, be doing something equally dangerous: telling the overwhelmingly dominant Christian majority within which diaspora Jews live that its faith bears within it—inextricably entangled at its very heart—the murderous evil seeds of genocide. And that to truly exorcise the guilt of their faith, they must radically transform it or abandon it.
They’re both playing with fire with their Hitler explanations, but they both also, in very different ways, could be seen as absolving Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust. They’re both shifting the focus from Hitler himself to abstract ideological and anthropological forces of which Hitler is at most a pawn, a boil, a mouthpiece. In Steiner’s view, Hitler merely serves and exploits the widespread animus against Jews for the torments of conscience they invented. In Maccoby’s view, it was not Hitler so much as Judas—not the real Judas but the hateful Christian representation of Judas as archetypal Jew—who is responsible for the slaughter of the Jewish people. The image of Judas made Hitler’s crimes possible, fertilized the field of blood Hitler harvested. Hitler was merely the catalyst for the inevitable crystallization of Christian hatred.
And the other thing that Steiner and Maccoby might seem to do is to remove, if not completely exculpate, Germany from explaining Hitler. While Steiner mused about some potential for violence in the German language, he was emphatic about it being just “Germany’s bad luck” that Hitler came along “with his peculiar genius,” because, Steiner believed, France would have been more naturally receptive, more anti-Semitic at the core than Germany and the German culture of Goethe and Heidegger, which Steiner still cherishes, despite his distrust.
Maccoby’s exemption of Germany or at least of German culture is even more heartfelt. At the close of our conversation, as Maccoby was gathering his papers to hurry off to a lecture he was to deliver, I raised a question I’d hesitated to ask because I sensed it might be troubling, if not offensive. A question about Leo Baeck, the tragic luminary of the German Jewish community, the Berlin rabbi Maccoby’s institute is named after. It was a question raised by Richard Rubenstein, the American rabbi and one of the most outspokenly heretical of post-Holocaust Jewish theologians. Rubenstein had argued that Jews must hold God to account (if not to blame) for the Holocaust, that to worship him without questioning his silence and passivity in the face of the death camps is virtually an insult to the Jewish victims.
Rubenstein has also raised questions about the silence and passivity of some leaders of the German Jewish community in the thirties who, trusting in God, urged Jews to go about business as usual despite the fate being prepared for them. Rubenstein singled out Rabbi Leo Baeck, the revered leader of the sophisticated, cosmopolitan, assimilated Berlin Jewish community, for Baeck’s final act before he was dragged off to Theresienstadt concentration camp in the final evacuation of German Jews in 1942.
What stunned Rubenstein was an apparently trivial gesture Baeck made in the moments before he went off with the SS: He paid his electric bill. Think about it, Rubenstein says: He’s joining the rest of the Jews in death camps run by the Nazi regime, but he pays his electric bill to that regime before he leaves.
“For Rubenstein,” I said to Maccoby, “this em
blematizes Jewish passivity in the face of the Holocaust. What’s your response to that?”
I was surprised at the eloquence—and the direction—of his reply.
“What he [Rubenstein] wants Baeck to do is to be a kind of token rebel against the whole system,” Maccoby told me. “The point [of Baeck’s act] is that Jews are always expecting decency from people around them. That’s our trouble, really. This is really why so many Jews failed to leave Germany. They really couldn’t believe that this Germany, which they loved, felt obligations toward—professionals, for instance, felt gratitude toward Germany [for giving them more opportunity for advancement and fulfillment than any other European country]. And they wanted nothing more than to express this gratitude by being good citizens.”
At that point, an assistant came in and whispered something in Maccoby’s ear, probably about his being late for his lecture.
“Yes, yes, we’ve just finished,” he said. But he had something more he wanted to add, something about Baeck and his electric bill. “I’d say that Leo Baeck never lost that feeling of love for Germany, that sense of obligation toward Germany, as a place to which he had obligations. And he expressed that by acting as an obedient citizen as far as he possibly could, even at the time when Germany was taken over by someone who he felt to be against the whole spirit of Germany.”
Was Hitler contrary to the spirit of Germany—if so, why did he strike such a receptive chord in Germans?—or was he an expression of that spirit? Maccoby’s Leo Baeck Institute is devoted to the principle that there is a spirit of Germany Jews can still love. “Even today,” he says, “you’ve got German refugees who have a whole German Jewish culture still going outside Germany. The Leo Baeck Yearbook [of scholarly articles on German Jewish culture] is an expression of the love of Jews for Germany. And that’s a very real thing.”
And then he returns to the culture he regards as far more responsible for the Holocaust than Germany. “Germany’s one thing. The Christian side of Germany is another thing. I don’t blame Germany for the Holocaust; I blame Christendom for the Holocaust.” (Cynthia Ozick, an admirer of Maccoby’s work, stressed to me her belief that Maccoby is not exculpating Germans—the German perpetrators—by blaming “Christendom” because the Holocaust was executed largely by German Christians.)
Still, it was interesting, two Jews, Steiner and Maccoby, going to great lengths to absolve Germany (if not Germans) from guilt. Two intellectuals who go to great lengths to shift responsibility from Hitler to Great Abstractions such as “the blackmail of transcendence” and “Christendom.” Why are so many so reluctant to find the obvious suspects guilty or at least responsible? In fact, the argument over the centrality of Hitler’s responsibility and over the proportion of that responsibility shared by the German people as a whole is one of the most contentious and unresolved disputes in the whole field of Hitler explanation. One that, not long after my encounters with Steiner and Maccoby, turned into a bitter and divisive battle of scholars over the work of Daniel Goldhagen.
CHAPTER 19
Daniel Goldhagen: Blaming Germans
In which we witness a scholarly wilding and explore explanation as revenge
By the time I had my first encounter with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the young scholar had already suffered much for his attempt to explain the Holocaust, and I did not wish to add to his distress. Although as it turned out, judging from the abrupt way in which Goldhagen broke off our conversation about Hitler, I must have.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at this development; I’d been witness to the first act of Goldhagen’s ordeal about a month before we met: a wild and unruly symposium of scholars at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington that turned into an impromptu tribunal—with Goldhagen on trial. It became an unrelenting assault on his thesis and even his character that was shocking to many who witnessed it, almost akin to a scholarly wilding.
The occasion was a four-hour-long panel discussion of Goldhagen’s just-published book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in early April 1996, an event that attracted a capacity crowd to the museum’s Meyerhoff auditorium. More than capacity: There were long lines long before the doors opened and considerable anxious pushing and shoving to secure seats. While there were scholars and academics in the audience, most appeared to be the kind of devoted admirers among the book-buying public who had just propelled Goldhagen’s book onto the national bestseller lists, a rarity for a scholarly work (the book was an expansion of Goldhagen’s doctoral thesis at Harvard). Many of them had brought copies hoping to get them autographed, many crowded around him before and after the proceedings remarking on his youth (he looked younger than his thirty-five years), on his dark-haired good looks.
Few were prepared for what was to come, for the ferocity of the assault on Goldhagen by fellow scholars, a ferocity made all the more surprising and shocking by contrast with the almost unanimous acclaim by reviewers in the mainstream media who had hailed Hitler’s Willing Executioners as an important new way of looking at the Holocaust. Yes, it was true there had been an uproar in the German press by some historians and intellectuals who accused Goldhagen of reinventing a demonic “German national character” to explain the Holocaust as an inevitable product of an intrinsically flawed Teutonic essence. But that night in the Holocaust Memorial auditorium, Goldhagen’s scholarly accusers were mainly fellow Jews.
The first short, sharp, shocking hint at the tone of the proceedings that night came in the “strangling” reference. That the strangling allusion came from the evening’s moderator, Lawrence Langer, made it all the more jolting. Langer is the author of a study of Holocaust literature and testimony I’d particularly admired because of its eloquently and scrupulously argued injunction against the consolation response: the tendency to take the horrifying raw material of Holocaust-survivor testimonies and attempt to find in them glib, consoling morals about the triumph of the human spirit over adversity—the kitsch sentimentality the moralizers use to console themselves—a betrayal, Langer argues, of the inconsolable horror of those who underwent the actual experiences.
Langer struck an ominous note in his opening remarks by calling upon the panelists to observe the “canons of civility” in their discussion, hinting there were those who thought the whole occasion ill-advised because passions ran too high and too deep to hope for civility. But it was Langer, too, who first signaled the tenor of the rhetorical violence to follow when—after Goldhagen had run a few minutes over his allotted time for an opening statement—Langer not only upbraided the young scholar for his time-limit transgression but indulged in a peculiar aside to the audience to the effect that, when students in his college courses transgressed in that fashion, he “often thought of strangling them.”
The pointed strangling fantasy—pointed at Goldhagen—brought an audible intake of breath from the audience. It seemed rather disproportionate to the nature of the offense. But in fact, the image of strangling an impertinent, overzealous student might have inadvertently figured forth the true agenda of the evening: the attempt by some of his more senior colleagues to strangle Goldhagen’s impertinent student’s pretensions—if not the student himself—in the cradle.
There was more direct abuse to follow, and afterward I wondered why Goldhagen provoked such an intemperate and seemingly disproportionate response from his older colleagues. Henry Kissinger once remarked that the reason academic infighting is so bitter is that “the stakes are so small.” But here I think it can fairly be said that—although professional jealousy over a younger scholar’s sudden media stardom might have been a factor—the stakes in fact were not small; the stakes were very high. Goldhagen claimed to have explained the Holocaust, Hitler, the entire tragedy, in a way no one else had before, to have corrected errors, to have demolished myths unthinkingly accepted for generations.
Implicit in his claims was his belief that if he was right, then the best and brightest scholars and thinkers before him were wrong.
And what was
it that made them wrong? What made Goldhagen’s explanation so unique? At the heart of Goldhagen’s argument is a single striking and strikingly graphic metaphor, in which can be found compressed the whole vision of his thesis: By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, he argues, the racial anti-Semitism of Germany was already “pregnant with murder.”
It’s a metaphor itself pregnant with implications: murder, the mass murder of the Jews, had been gestating within Germany (meaning within the German people and their culture) long before Hitler emerged or the Nazi Party came to power. The conception of mass murder, the seeds of genocide had been sown in the German psyche by centuries of hate literature of a peculiarly German variety, Goldhagen argues. He gives that strain of literature a name, “eliminationist anti-Semitism.” He defines it as a variety of Jew-hating that goes beyond the traditional Christian antagonism toward the people who were said to have rejected or killed Jesus, beyond the hatred Hyam Maccoby sees gestating for eighteen centuries before bringing forth its murderous issue.
No, Goldhagen says, a different kind of hatred superseded Christian anti-Semitism in Germany, one whose character crystallized in the nineteenth century, one characterized first by a focus on Jews as a racial and biological evil and second by an insistence that no internal restrictions but only total elimination, either expulsion or murder, could solve or cure the Jewish problem in Germany.
It is this hatred that impregnated Germany, to use Goldhagen’s metaphor, with murder, long before Hitler, that made Germans “willing executioners” of the Final Solution when they were given a chance by Hitler. Germans were thus not merely followers of orders, not colorless paper shufflers exhibiting Hannah Arendt’s famous “banality of evil,” but rather viciously, joyously, cruelly, zealously willing torturers and murderers who did not need to be whipped into a frenzy by Hitler or Nazi propaganda. It wasn’t Hitler’s willingness to murder the Jews that was crucial, Goldhagen implies, it was Germany’s—Germans’—willingness.
Explaining Hitler Page 54