Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate

ONE OF THE fortunate children who escaped was a boy named Peter Frohlich, who emigrated with his parents to the U.S. in 1939, when he was 16. He changed his name to Peter Gay and became a renowned psychoanalyst and historian, the author of several definitive books on Freud. An intriguing aspect of Gay's memoir is his analysis of his own early experiences. Gay describes his survival strategies: a passion for stamp collecting and soccer, retreating to the solace of his family's apartment--all part of what he describes as "mental escape routes" from the frightening world around him.

Those early years left Gay with an unresolved rage. In exploring this rage, he touches on his family history, but the political circumstances that led his family to emigrate are a significant part of the picture. He and his family were seldom direct targets of anti-Semitism, and they owed their lives to a man named Emil Busse, a colleague of his father who helped the family emigrate. Still, Gay confesses to a lasting ambivalence between his gratitude toward people like Busse and his animosity toward Germany and Germans in general. When he returned for the first time in 1961, he was stunned by the emotion he felt during even the simplest encounter with Germans. As Gay puts it, "Some traumas survive everything."

Those words could be the subtitle for Shandley's anthology, which documents the lengthy German debate about Daniel Goldhagen's controversial bestseller, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Goldhagen contended that the German people willingly and knowingly carried out the genocide of the Jews. Arranged chronologically, the essays in Shandley's book include responses from leading journalists and historians, including U.S. historian Christopher Browning, whose essay originally was published in the German periodical Die Zeit. Two replies from Goldhagen himself are interspersed among the other essays.

One of the most intriguing things about Goldhagen's book was its popular reception in Germany. As Shandley notes, the scholars and commentators who wrote about it before its German publication condemned it so unanimously that the German edition seemed doomed. Yet the book became a best seller in Germany, and the young author won much of his audience over during his public appearances.

One reason, I think, was that Goldhagen focused specifically on the issue central to all the books reviewed here: the significance of ordinary Germans' role in the Nazi movement and, finally, in the genocide. For years, German scholars avoided this issue, even while much of the world continued to confront Germany with its past. The debate that Goldhagen's book provoked in Germany was overdue, and Shandley's anthology (and his excellent introduction) is a valuable tool for understanding it. As Shandley notes, the debate went beyond Goldhagen's book, and "may have done much to prepare Germany for the roles it will be required to play in the future."

It is important for people of faith to follow this historical conversation because it touches on the fundamental issue of how we see and treat one another--and because the ethical and historical issues raised by the Holocaust are inseparable and still very much with us. It is not just a matter of clarifying what people did, what they knew, or who was on the side of the victims or of the perpetrators. To understand what happened, we must examine the full scope of ordinary life. Perhaps the most enduring ethical lesson the Holocaust teaches is that the violence done to victims corrupts perpetrators and bystanders alike.