Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  I met with Breitman the day following the Holocaust Memorial Museum fracas over Goldhagen’s thesis. Breitman suggested to me that what made German anti-Semitism turn to mass murder was not some special character it had in the nineteenth century but rather the special character of twentieth-century German history: the defeat in the First World War, the subsequent starvation, humiliation, and inflation, followed, after an all-too-brief interval, by a crushing depression. These national traumas that devastated the German populace banked a kind of desperation and rage that Hitler was able to channel against Jews once he gained control of the apparatus of state power. Breitman emphasizes the devastation in the twenties and the period of intense, murderous anti-Semitic propaganda Hitler saturated Germany with in the thirties as more decisive in moving the population from attitude to action than something peculiarly German about its nineteenth-century anti-Semitism.

  Goldhagen does not neglect twentieth-century factors, but he’s devoted enormous effort in his book to documenting the pervasiveness and unique virulence of nineteenth-century German anti-Semitism, of the pervasiveness of the eliminationist urge even among more liberal Germans who posed as friends of Jews (but who wanted them to assimilate themselves out of existence).

  It was over his emphasis on nineteenth-century origins, I believe, that our conversation broke up (although other factors entered in). “Germany really was different from other countries, particularly in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the beginning of the twentieth,” he told me, “when there was this vast outpouring of vituperative anti-Semitic literature and even the growth of avowedly anti-Semitic political parties.”

  There was something about that latter statement that I wanted to pursue: that remark about the “growth of avowedly anti-Semitic political parties,” in the latter part of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.

  I asked Goldhagen about Professor Richard S. Levy’s study, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany, a book which painted a picture of both those parties and the anti-Semitic political agitators behind them suffering setbacks, failures, and virtually disappearing from German political life by 1912. Which would seem to argue against a prewar triumph of eliminationist anti-Semitism.

  “You’re familiar with the Levy thesis, I’m sure—” I began.

  “Yes,” he said quickly. “But, you see, there’s a broader question there, which is, How do we read voting behavior?” He went into a long disquisition about voting behavior that attempted to demonstrate that the precipitous decline in voting for anti-Semitic political parties didn’t necessarily mean a decline in anti-Semitic feeling. All of which might have been more convincing had he not just cited a rise in anti-Semitic political parties as a sure sign of a rise in such feeling. One can’t have it both ways: If voting for anti-Semitic political parties means something, then a decline in voting means something, if not everything.

  But at that point a deeper problem made itself manifest. Whether it was my somewhat pointed question about the Levy thesis (a thesis that Goldhagen had omitted mentioning in his book) or whether this relatively mild query was the straw that broke the camel’s back after the onslaughts from both the German press and the Jewish Holocaust scholars, suddenly it seemed it was all too much for Goldhagen to take.

  I had just asked him my next question: What were his views of the Bullock/Trevor-Roper dispute over Hitler’s “sincerity”—Was Hitler a cynical manipulator of anti-Semitism or a possessed true believer?—when he suddenly interrupted his own answer in mid-sentence:

  “I need to interject something here,” he told me. “I didn’t realize it, but I have a reservation about this [meaning about speaking to me]. Actually, I have a contractual obligation to Knopf not to produce anything that will compete in some sense with my book for them.”

  I assured him this book was a couple of years from appearing, much less competing.

  “No, I know,” he said. “But I’m very legalistic in these matters, and I would actually like to talk to Knopf before going further with this.”

  “You really think your contract prohibits you from talking to anyone writing a book?”

  “No, I would just like to talk to my editor there, let her know what I’m doing.”

  “You know,” I said, “I’m interviewing a lot of people who have written or are writing books. This has never—”

  “I know, I go by the letter of the law.”

  “Have I said anything you objected to? Have my questions been belligerent?”

  “No, not at all,” he said. “I want to think through some of these issues. I . . . really would like to talk to her because it is actually part of the contract.”

  “It says you can’t do an interview with someone who’s writing a book?”

  “It doesn’t say that. It doesn’t say that. It’s just that Knopf has authorized this book and—”

  “But I went through the Knopf publicity department to arrange—”

  “I would like to talk to them about it.”

  The way we left things, Goldhagen was going to call me if there was some contractual problem in talking to me. He didn’t call, but I felt reluctant to pursue him for further reflections and risk further upsetting someone whose impassioned scholarship I had much respect for—particularly after Goldhagen told me a little more about what he’d been through in the weeks since the Holocaust Memorial Museum attacks and the German uproar. It had taken a toll on him, he said, the attacks, the heat of the spotlight. He was experiencing stress symptoms such as short-term memory lapses. There was one thing in particular that was upsetting him that day, he said, one specific aspect of the German uproar over his book that had shaken him. Something in the Der Spiegel story he regarded as an intrusive attempt to explain his explanation, to explain him by dragging in his father.

  I had come across the Der Spiegel cover story (“Ein Volk von Dämonen?”) the night before I met with Goldhagen but had not had a chance to look at the sidebar interview with Erich Goldhagen, the one headlined “I’m Very Proud.” It was a strange piece, one in which the author, Henryk Broder, seemed to be attempting to mask his hostility toward both Goldhagens in the guise of an elaborate, condescending psychological explanation of the son’s thesis as a sublimated expression of the father’s wishes and fantasies, the father’s love/hate affair with German culture.

  Broder (a German Jew) begins by placing the Goldhagen father/son relationship in the context of the much-discussed, highly charged paradigm of the relationship between Holocaust survivors and their children. Erich Goldhagen was in fact a Holocaust survivor born in the Ukraine. He escaped to America from wartime Europe and rose eventually to a position as a lecturer in history at Harvard, where he developed a following for his powerful and moving lectures on Holocaust issues. He’s also the author of a number of scholarly articles, some of which are cited in footnotes to his son’s book. Certain of these articles mention in their author-identification notes that Erich Goldhagen is working on a book on the ideology of genocide, a book that has yet to appear.

  The one aspect of the Holocaust Erich Goldhagen has not written about, has never spoken of in his lectures, is his own personal experience in surviving and escaping it. His son has said his father has never discussed the experience with him. And neither has wished to discuss the influence of the father’s survivor experience on the son’s thesis about Germany. Onto this virtual vacuum of actual information Broder projects his own grand theory: that the son’s book is a sublimation of the father’s unexpressed longings, the working-out of a curious personal agenda vis-à-vis German culture.

  Claiming to base his generalizations about Holocaust survivors and their children on “psychological literature,” Broder argues that survivor parents demand a “price from their offspring. Demand a kind of reparational devotion to their parents’ suffering.” He proceeds to speculate, apparently without much firsthand information (one can see why this upset Daniel Goldhagen), about the son’s chil
dhood. He envisions the father inculcating the son with the historic magnitude of the Holocaust experience, cramming his mind with details “so that as a child Daniel knew more about Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler than Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.” (There is a barely restrained suggestion of subtextual mockery in this line of Broder’s that I found disturbing.)

  Broder goes on to say that Daniel’s father instilled in him a “mission to revolutionize Holocaust scholarship, a mission the father began too late to accomplish himself.” Broder has a unique notion of what this mission was: It was not strictly a mission of revenge, he asserts, not “German bashing,” not an attack on German culture, but an attempt to become part of it.

  After Broder quotes Erich Goldhagen expounding at length to him on the best-selling success of his son’s book, after quoting him attacking those who attacked his son at the Holocaust Memorial Museum (Yehuda Bauer was “only jealous of Daniel’s success”), Broder quotes Goldhagen’s father speaking fondly of German culture: “The Jews were the German culture bearers in Eastern Europe. . . . For me, facility with the German language came as naturally as the use of French for Russian aristocrats. My mother knew Goethe and Schiller by heart.” Broder then records that (over the transatlantic phone line) Goldhagen the elder recited to him the first lines of Schiller’s “Die Glocke” in fluent German.

  All of which leads Broder to theorize, to explain the Goldhagen (father and son) mission as ultimately not the product of hostility to German culture but rather of a thwarted love: “an effort to get back in contact with a culture after fifty years’ absence, a culture from which the ‘German culture bearer’ had been expelled. . . . This contact can only be accomplished via the story of the Holocaust, the end point of German-Jewish history, which has now become the starting point of joined scholarly activity, the only thing that binds Germans and Jews existentially.”

  This is a remarkably self-satisfied Germam vision of Goldhagen’s thesis and of the Jewish relationship to German culture, this view of the Jews with their noses still pressed to the glass of the great German culture, using the Holocaust—their own tragedy—as a kind of ticket back to the mother ship.

  But the urge to explain Daniel Goldhagen’s thesis as somehow an expression of his father is not confined to Germans. I heard it the night after I spoke to Goldhagen from an American Jewish scholar, Richard S. Levy, distinguished professor of history at the University of Illinois and moderator of an Internet scholars’ group discussion of Holocaust issues that had taken up, mostly critically, the Goldhagen thesis. Levy was, of course, also the author of The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany, a study which at the very least casts doubt on Goldhagen’s thesis that anti-Semitism had been irrevocably implanted in the German psyche by the end of the nineteenth century. Levy told me that he thought Goldhagen’s book could be seen as the father using the son as vindication in the father’s struggle with the Holocaust-scholar establishment for recognition of his views—vindication for the big book on the “ideology of genocide” the father himself had not produced. And that as a survivor he was using his son to punish the German perpetrators, a kind of revenge for the mass murder he barely escaped from.

  One can understand how theories that depict him as a pawn of his father would upset Goldhagen. But the episode left me puzzled, wondering if in fact there might be something to the notion of explanation as revenge. It happened that shortly after I spoke to Goldhagen there arrived in the mail from Professor Berel Lang a copy of an essay he had written on “Holocaust Memory and Revenge” (for the quarterly Jewish Social Studies). It was an absolutely unique and fascinating exploration of a controversial and difficult theme, another example of the reason I find Lang’s work so valuable: His style is cautious, not flashy, his rhetoric scholarly, not sensational. But he is willing to take on and investigate some stark, radical, even sensational questions about how to envision and respond to evil. Here he undertakes an extremely careful and considered examination of a radical question: “How could it be that revenge was not an element in the [Jewish] reaction to the Shoah?”

  In fact, he says, there have been some isolated examples of direct vengeance—outbreaks of retaliation against German prisoners of war by Jews in charge of their camps. Then there was the ambitious plan by former Jewish partisans to poison the water supplies of German cities to punish collectively the German people for complicity in genocide, a plan that actually got as far as poisoning German prisoners’ food in one detention camp. And there were and are Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and the Klarsfelds, but Lang considers this more in the realm of justice and law rather than vengeance.

  He’s more interested in what he calls “displaced,” indirect, forms of revenge on Germans. There was wartime U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau’s ambitious plan to reduce postwar Germany to an agrarian economy to prevent a resurgence of the fevers that had twice brought the world total war in this century. There are the spontaneous, ad hoc individual boycotts of contemporary German products (such as Volkswagen and Mercedes cars) of German cultural figures (such as Wagner, whose works some Israeli orchestras refuse to play). Lang even sees Emil Fackenheim’s famous commandment enjoining Jews never to give Hitler any “posthumous victories,” which requires a vigilant monitoring of actions vis-à-vis contemporary Germans and Germany, as a kind of devotional, displaced revenge.

  Most surprising about Lang’s analysis, as I read it, is that he does not take the conventional route and disparage revenge outright. Rather, in his unique fashion, he scrupulously examines “the unusual allegiance between revenge and memory.” He even goes so far as to say that revenge “is useful for memory and identity” (emphasis added). He contrasts two kinds of memory: the commemoration of the Holocaust in memorials and museums, which tends to comfort the survivors and establish their memory in the minds of those who came after. And revenge, which reinforces the memory of the crime among the heirs and successors of the perpetrators and solidifies the identity of those enacting the revenge.

  Lang argues that, in effect, revenge is better if it comes out of the closet, so to speak, rather than disguise itself through displacements and sublimations, in which it might lose its impact and clarity for both the perpetrator of the crime and the perpetrator of revenge. But in his most cautious rhetoric, Lang asks us not to dismiss the notion of revenge as beyond the pale of legitimacy.

  Can Goldhagen’s thesis about the Germanness of the Holocaust be seen as a kind of displaced revenge in Berel Lang’s sense of the term? As an intellectual rationale of a vengeful impulse not quite conscious of itself? If it wasn’t intended vengefully, it came across that way, even to some of its most sophisticated readers, who believed Goldhagen was branding the German mind, character, and soul as irretrievably iniquitous.

  Are all these readers, as Goldhagen insists, reading into his thesis something that isn’t there, or are they reading in it something of which Goldhagen might not be completely aware?

  I know that when I first saw the headline in Der Spiegel about the Goldhagen controversy—“Ein Volk von Dämonen?”—I had two conflicting reactions. At first I felt somewhat disturbed by the apparent attempt to accuse Goldhagen, a Jew, of using the same kind of demonizing rhetoric about Germans that Germans used to demonize Jews. But I must admit that there was another dimension to my reaction to it: a certain satisfaction in thinking about ordinary Germans confronting that sensational headline on their newsstand, a headline whose primal accusatory power—A People of the Devil!—would, for many, transcend the irony intended.

  So much of recent German discussion of the Holocaust has been about how—not so much whether—one can “normalize” German history. How to see the Hitler years in the context of deeper, longer trends in Western history, how to contextualize its horrors in relative terms (compared, for instance, to the “Asiatic” horrors of Stalin). But here was a reminder that however much ordinary Germans might feel they’ve normalized, absolved themselves,
explained themselves to others, to many they still need to prove they’re not a people of the Devil.

  And so I suppose it could be said that part of the satisfaction I felt from that headline did arise from a vengeful or at least punitive impulse, what Berel Lang calls “displaced revenge.” A wish to impress upon ordinary Germans that even if they objected to the notion of a demonic national character, they shouldn’t be exempt from a continuing examination of demonic national behavior. That the responsibility for explaining Hitler was at least as much theirs as ours, and if they couldn’t explain Hitler, they ought not attempt to explain him away.

  Consequently, I found I couldn’t fault Goldhagen for his accusatory passion, though I also understood the irritation of some Jewish Holocaust scholars with him. They, the older generation of scholars, people like Yehuda Bauer, many far closer to the tragedy than Goldhagen, had gone to great lengths and perhaps great sacrifice to purge from their work any personal rage and vengefulness in their attempts to explain the Hitler regime’s crimes and the German people’s behavior. They’d held themselves to the self-effacing pursuit of the ideal of scholarly neutrality, a supposedly higher ideal. And then along comes a novice academic who restates what to them are obvious and well-known facts but casts them in the accusatory, emotionally charged tones of a new, vengeful indictment. And he’s acclaimed as a knight of Jewish truth telling, his book achieves the worldwide bestsellerdom few scholarly books attain, and he’s hailed for his courage in daring to say what others—what they—have not.