By the time of my meeting with Goldhagen several weeks later, what had begun as, if not a tempest in a teapot, then an academic furor had escalated even further, had begun to take on the dimensions of a transnational firestorm.
The book had provoked headlines in Germany as newspapers and magazines seized on Goldhagen’s book as an assault on the German national character. “EIN VOLK VON DÄMONEN?” (A people of the Devil?) asked the lurid headline of the cover story in Der Spiegel—it was the exact same epithet Hitler used to characterize the Jews—implying that Goldhagen was using the same rhetoric of collective intrinsic evil.
Meanwhile, Die Zeit, a leading German weekly, was serializing the critical attacks on Goldhagen made by Jewish scholars at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and calling the controversy another Historikerstreit, another battle over the German past, the German identity, the German “special path” as momentous as the one that convulsed German intellectuals in the eighties. But this was deeper and more divisive. It wasn’t German versus German, it was American versus German, Jew versus German (although at the Holocaust Memorial Museum it had been mostly Jew versus Jew). The American-German aspect of it (the German press implied) could result in a freeze, if not a breach, in relations between the two countries; Goldhagen’s book thus becoming more than a thesis about history but a fact of it.
In fact, American reverberations from the controversy in Germany disrupted my first scheduled meeting with Goldhagen. I had arranged with his publicist at Knopf to coordinate an interview session with his visit to New York to address German scholars and writers at New York University’s Goethe House about a month after the Holocaust Memorial Museum brawl. But at the last minute, Goldhagen abruptly canceled the NYU meeting and his New York trip; he’d learned that a substantial number of representatives of the German media would be present at Goethe House and he issued a statement saying he didn’t want to engage in further running discourse with the German press until his book was available in German translation for the German people to read and judge for themselves. The position had its merits, but tactically it might have given some the impression that he was avoiding critical scrutiny.
By the time Goldhagen did appear in New York, the following week, he looked somewhat shaken by the sudden international dimension of the controversy, although I didn’t realize how shaken until about a half hour into our talk, which took place in the cavernous main lounge of the Yale Club.
I also wasn’t aware at first of the source of his distress. It had seemed to me that the hostile German response should have been more predictable and less disturbing to him than the attack by Jewish scholars. But, as it turned out, it was not so much the general German uproar that was upsetting to him that day as one specific manifestation of it: one German writer’s intrusive psychological explanation of his thesis, an attempt to explain his explanation—to explain him—that had unsettled him. But I didn’t become aware of all that until he broke off the interview.
Our conversation began productively enough. I was curious to hear more from Goldhagen about a figure almost absent from his book: Adolf Hitler. In Goldhagen’s focus on Germans and Germanism, Hitler seemed to vanish from view. I wondered whether Hitler’s Austrian origin had something to do with it, whether it posed a problem to Goldhagen’s ascription of the genocidal impulse to a specifically German source.
Many scholars have argued that, in fact, Austrian anti-Semitism was something different from the German variety, that it was in many ways even more virulent. One estimate has it that Austrians made up a full 40 percent of SS officers assigned to death-camp command duty, and eight out of twelve concentration camps were headed by Austrians. And, of course, the man in charge of administering the entire extermination process was the other Austrian Adolf, Eichmann.
Sir Isaiah Berlin has written about the borderland effect in which those on the periphery of empires (as the Austrian Germans were on the periphery of the German Reich) often manifested more feverishly radical xenophobic hatreds than those securely within its borders. And Norman Cohn, the director of the International Research Project on Genocide at the University of Sussex and author of a study of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has written of the way “the völkisch-racist outlook was perhaps even stronger” in Austria, “on the periphery of the German-speaking world where, ever since the war of 1866, the German-speaking element had felt isolated and threatened by the preponderant Slav element” of the Hapsburg kingdom.
Indeed, Cohn defines Hitler’s Austrianness against his Germanness: “He embodied a whole century of [Austrian] frustration, disappointment and insecurity, and the boundless lust for revenge which possessed him was a magnified version of something which possessed a whole stratum of Austrian society.”
I asked Goldhagen if he regarded Hitler’s Austrianness as something that distinguished him from the mentality of “ordinary Germans” or if he saw it as all of a piece.
“There were regional variations in anti-Semitism even within Germany,” he said. “But Hitler’s exemplified and brought to an apotheosis the particular form of eliminationist anti-Semitism that came to the fore in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Whatever the variations, I think Austrian and German anti-Semitism can be seen of a piece, where there was a central model of Jews and a view that they needed to be eliminated.”
When he speaks of Hitler, it’s this “central model” Goldhagen returns to again and again, a model that, he believes, saturates German culture and Austrian culture, a model that explains Hitler more than any personal trauma or deformation of his personality. The central model takes on the aspect of a malign, personal, prompting evil, an irresistible compulsion, whose irresistibility in a way exempts the will it usurps, in effect exculpating the individual it acts upon, making an analysis of individual psyches of Germans, of Hitler himself irrelevant.
“I’m not persuaded by the arguments of the psychohistorians,” Goldhagen told me. “You understand Hitler better by seeing him as bred in a particular culture where these kinds of notions about Jews were quite common. That tells us why he became an anti-Semite better than looking at aspects of his personal biography. Now if you want to understand how he became as murderous as he did and why he took these ideas to their—in some sense—logical and most fatal conclusions, then of course we need to plumb the depths of psychology, and that is not my forte.”
I thought there were two important—and possibly contradictory—points in Goldhagen’s last remark.
“What you’re saying, then, is that psychohistorians are forever searching for some disorder, some trauma or abnormality as the source of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, when in fact to be an anti-Semite didn’t require a departure from the norm, it was the norm.”
“And to be willing to persecute Jews and to kill them systematically [was the norm], I think that Hitler’s decision to kill the Jews is derived logically from his belief structure,” he said. But he also seems to be saying that there was something about Hitler that exceeded the norm, that exceeds logic, that exceeds Goldhagen’s own capacity to “plumb the depths of psychology” for an explanation of that excess.
“Clearly there was something more than that [the logic of his ideology] driving Hitler on,” Goldhagen added, “because it was not just the Jews. There were many other people he killed. He was a man who leaped to murder to solve social problems biologically, by extirpating them. Of course, this is in accord with his view of the world, his racism, his social Darwinism, the general biologism with which he viewed the world. And so I agree with your point that it doesn’t require a psychological malformation. But this doesn’t of course rule out the possibility that in Hitler’s case there was something else driving him.”
Something more, something else: He does seem to be conceding here that something more than the “ordinary German character,” something more than the “central model” is required to explain Hitler, to explain why Hitler went beyond the relatively passive midwife role. Something to explain what made Hitler (to
adapt a Shakespearean birth metaphor) rip murder untimely from the womb.
I asked Goldhagen about his pregnant-with-murder metaphor in relation to Hitler. “It invites a characterization of Hitler as mere midwife, doesn’t it?”
“The analogy’s imperfect,” he concedes. “It implies the baby comes without the need for the midwife. But ‘No Hitler, No Holocaust!’” he says, repeating Milton Himmelfarb’s phrase, the rhetorical gauntlet Himmelfarb threw down before those who’d see the Holocaust as the inevitable product of abstract historical forces and ideologies rather than of Hitler’s individual will.
Goldhagen has an uneasy relationship to Himmelfarb’s formula. He wants to embrace it, but even as he expressed agreement, he seems inexorably to undermine it.
“So you would agree with Himmelfarb’s argument?” I asked him. “No Hitler—”
“Or if not Hitler, someone like Hitler,” he said. “If the Nazis had never taken power, there would not have been a Hitler. Had there not been a depression in Germany, then in all likelihood the Nazis wouldn’t have come to power. The anti-Semitism would have remained a potential, in the sense of its killing form. It required a state. Hatreds do not issue in systematic violence unless they’re organized by governments. At most, they will produce ethnic violence, pogroms. Hitler was a very powerful leader, and he certainly deepened and widened the existing current of anti-Semitism in Germany, further legitimizing that, and brought people with him.”
In other words, it was Hitler, but then again it could have been someone else, someone like Hitler. It was not Hitler so much as the party, not the party so much as the state; and the party took over the state because of the economy. It’s a revision of “No Hitler, No Holocaust” that is more like “No Hitler, maybe someone else.”
Goldhagen confirmed my feeling when he proceeded to attempt to recast Max Weber’s famous concept of “charismatic leadership”—the relationship between great men and those who follow them—in this light. “Charisma, as we know,” Goldhagen began, “although it’s not often treated this way, but as Max Weber first expressed it, it is not a property of leaders, it’s a property of the people really. The extent to which the leader is charismatic as Weber discussed it depends on the belief of the people in his infallibility and the prophetlike nature of the leader. They grant him his charismatic quality.”
Shortly after my talk with Goldhagen, I reread Weber’s famous essay, “The Nature of Charismatic Domination,” and saw the extent to which Goldhagen had recast Weber to shift the burden of responsibility for the phenomenon of mass hysteria from leaders to followers—that is, from Hitler to “ordinary Germans.” Yes, the belief, the credulity of his followers is necessary to certify, to recognize the special chosenness of a charismatic leader, Weber says. But “his right to rule,” Weber states explicitly, “is not dependent on their will, as is that of an elected leader; on the contrary, it is the duty of those to whom he is sent to recognize his charismatic qualification” (emphasis added).
There is an ambiguity or, more precisely, a dynamic in Weber’s account of charisma. The best analogy is the relationship between hypnotist and subject: The subject’s credulity, his willingness to submit to the mesmerist, is essential, but it is the subject who is being mesmerized and manipulated to the hypnotist’s will, not the other way around. It is the hypnotist’s commands that are obeyed, not the subject’s. Goldhagen is here skewing what Weber said to make it better reflect his view that it was the will of the German people in thrall to the “central model” of eliminationist anti-Semitism, the will of all the “little Hitlers” who drove, who created the big Hitler to serve their genocidal appetite. They were the ventriloquists; he was their dummy. Of course, it is not an either/or matter, not either Hitler or the German people; it is a matter of where one places the emphasis in the relationship between the two.
Goldhagen pressed his point about ordinary Germans being in the driver’s seat, rather than Hitler, when it came to choosing the targets of mass murder by citing the difference between the German people’s reaction to the Nazi euthanasia campaign and to the extermination of the Jews.
“Hitler certainly was a charismatic figure in the sense that people had a great deal of faith and belief in his extraordinary qualities and were willing to follow him—but not on all matters.” When the euthanasia program—the extermination of mental and physical defectives (regardless of religion), a program that may have resulted in one hundred thousand deaths in 1939 and 1940—became known to the German public, there were protests from churchmen, protests from ordinary Germans, and the program was halted. There were no such protests when news of the extermination of Jews began to spread. From this distinction, Goldhagen argues that it was the readiness, the willingness, the eagerness of the people to kill Jews that was at least, if not more, important than Hitler’s desire to kill them.
On the other hand, without Hitler’s summons, his bidding, neither program would necessarily have materialized. And, in fact, there is evidence of the difficulty some Nazi officials experienced in whipping up sufficient anti-Jewish hatred among the populace. It is rare to find any of the Nazi perpetrators complaining that the German people were pressing authorities to speed up the expulsion and extermination of the Jews because it was going too slowly. Rather, there are complaints that the populace is insufficiently motivated for total and final solutions. To cite one study on this point, not at random but close to home, Goldhagen’s own father, Erich Goldhagen, a refugee from wartime Europe, a Harvard Holocaust scholar and lecturer, published a 1972 essay called “Pragmatism, Function and Belief in Nazi Anti-Semitism,” which portrayed the demand for anti-Jewish action coming from the top down, from the Nazi Party to the German people, rather than from the bottom up.
Goldhagen père cites numerous instances of Goebbels and other propaganda officials of the Nazi Party feeling the need, in the midst of the war, to “increase and intensify the anti-Semitic ‘enlightenment’ of the populace.” Noting that the Jewish question had been rather neglected in propaganda, one of Goebbels’s ministry’s inner circle warned that such neglect was “false and dangerous.” Dangerous because there was a fear of a fatal slackening in the level of Jew-hatred, a level that needed constant bolstering.
Goldhagen’s father makes the same distinction as the son between the German populace’s reaction to the euthanasia program and to the genocide of the Jews. But the father describes the German people’s reaction to the knowledge of genocide in far milder terms than his son: He characterizes it as “widespread indifference, approval or only mild disapproval.” Even the strongest term there, approval, is reactive, a sharp contrast with the proactive alacrity of the “willing executioners” the son describes. In the father’s vision, anti-Semitic ideology conditioned ordinary Germans to not oppose the programmatic killing of Jews—they were a people who, they thought, deserved to perish. But the impulse to commence extermination did not issue from a public demand by ordinary Germans; rather, it was accepted (indictment enough!) when imposed from above. The father is closer to “No Hitler, No Holocaust” than the son.
Who was the master, who the servant, who the mesmerist, who the subject? Goldhagen the elder seems to see the bloodthirsty Hitler Party flogging the masses along to hate the Jews more than they do; Goldhagen the younger seems to see the evil eliminationist ideology permeating the hearts and minds of the German people, compelling Hitler and the party to carry out its collective genocidal wishes and dreams.
Disentangling individual elements of what is a dynamic, a folie à deux between Hitler and the German people, is a tricky business, and it can be said that father and son are looking at two faces of a single process, a dynamic in which Hitler exacerbated the already implanted seeds of hatred, removed the restraints, while the responsive chord he struck in the German people liberated Hitler from any need to restrain himself in turning a murderous fantasy into reality.
Similarly difficult to disentangle are the purely Christian and purely German strai
ns of anti-Semitism. Hyam Maccoby wants to condemn the Christian and exempt the German (cultural) aspects of the genocide. Goldhagen seems to want to find something intrinsically German. (Saul Friedländer has recently proposed a persuasive synthesis of the Christian, racist, and Wagnerian elements in Hitler’s ideology, one he calls “redemptive anti-Semitism.”) When I mentioned that the critics accused him of resurrecting the concept of a demonic German national character, Goldhagen bridled.
“I do not believe in German national character,” Goldhagen told me, quite emphatically. He was not an expositor, as some of his German opponents had implied, of an anti-Germanism to explain and replace anti-Semitism. Instead of German national character, he speaks of the character of German nationality, the precarious and insecure sense of national selfhood that Germany—a nation that did not come into existence in anything like its current form until after 1848—felt.
The newness, the precariousness, the easily threatened stability of German national identity, rather than its overweening strength, was what was crucial, Goldhagen argues. The precarious sense of self it afforded, the weakness of the new nation’s internal bonds, fed an appetite for an ideology in which all Germans could define who they were by who they were not—an Other, an inflammatory foreign body within (the Jews), a reaction to whose foreignness defined the body surrounding it.
If Goldhagen doesn’t believe in a German national character, he still seems to argue that there was a special German receptiveness to eliminationist anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century. If Germany was pregnant with murder by 1933, conception had taken place not when Hitler began speaking in Munich beer halls in the 1920s but when the poison was injected into German culture late in the previous century.
It is this aspect of his thesis that has come under the most persuasive attack. Yehuda Bauer had argued from firsthand acquaintance with the literature in several languages that Russian, French, Romanian, and Polish anti-Semitic literature was at least as virulent and violent as German. What’s more, Russian, Polish, and Romanian anti-Semitic literature had little trouble in directly and repeatedly inciting actual outbreaks of murder by the populace: pogroms that killed tens of thousands of Jews in the period when Germans were reading and discussing anti-Semitic literature, at most legislating separationist measures. Perhaps the most cogent summation of the difficulties Holocaust scholars have with the Germanness of Goldhagen’s thesis came from Professor Richard Breitman, Yehuda Bauer’s successor as the editor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, then chairman of the history department at Washington’s American University, and the author of a highly nuanced study of the Hitler/Himmler relationship, The Architect of Genocide, which focuses on the timing and motivation of the ultimate decision to execute the Final Solution.
Explaining Hitler Page 56