Daniel Goldhagen
Encyclopedia
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author
and former Associate Professor of Political Science
and Social Studies at Harvard University
. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism 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
.
historian, and critic forThe New Republic magazine.
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
. He credits his father as a "model of intellectual sobriety and probity". Goldhagen has written that his "understanding of Nazism and of the Holocaust is firmly indebted" to his father's influence. 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.
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.
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
. Goldhagen said that “Mayer’s enormous intellectual error” is in ascribing the cause of the Holocaust to anti-Communism
, rather than to anti-Semitism
, 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, 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. 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. 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.
In 2003, Goldhagen quit his Harvard academic job to focus on writing. 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?). 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.
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. Time magazine reported that it was one of the two most important books of 1996, and The New York Times called it "one of those rare, new works that merit the appellation ‘landmark’".
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", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg
, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless". The text, for its alleged "generalizing hypothesis" about Germans, has sometimes been characterized as anti-German.
Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern
denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia.
As Raul Hilberg summarised the debates, "by the end of 1996, it was clear that in sharp distinction from lay readers, much of the academic world had wiped Goldhagen off the map."
. A Moral Reckoning was the subject of considerable controversy involving allegations of anti-Catholic bias. In the book, Goldhagen acknowledges that individual bishops and priests hid and saved a large number of Jews, yet he asserts that others promoted or accepted anti-Semitism before and during the war, and some played a direct role in the persecution of Jews in Europe during the time of the Nazis.
The book has been criticized as being a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his] anti-Catholic agenda", and as being poor scholarship. 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".
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.
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."
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. In Germany, the documentary was first broadcast by the ARD
television network 18 October 2009, and was to be nationally broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service
(PBS) Public television in the U.S. in 2010.
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." 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." Adam Jones
, who praised this book for its fluid style and commendable passion, concludes however, that the book is undermined by a casual approach to basic research, and by the author’s tendency to overreach and overstate his case..
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
and former Associate Professor of Political Science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
and Social Studies at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
, Hitler's Willing Executioners
Hitler's Willing Executioners
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen that argues 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"...
(1996) and A Moral Reckoning
A Moral Reckoning
A Moral Reckoning, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who also authored Hitler's Willing Executioners, is a 2003 American non-fiction book examining the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust...
(2002). He is also the author of 2009's Worse Than War, which examines the phenomenon of genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
.
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. His wife is Sarah Williams Goldhagen, an architecturalArchitecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
historian, and critic forThe New Republic magazine.
Goldhagen is the son of retired Harvard professor Erich Goldhagen, a Holocaust survivor who lived in a Romanian
Romanians
The Romanians are an ethnic group native to Romania, who speak Romanian; they are the majority inhabitants of Romania....
–Jewish ghetto
Ghetto
A ghetto is a section of a city predominantly occupied by a group who live there, especially because of social, economic, or legal issues.The term was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. The term now refers to an overcrowded urban area often associated...
in Czernowitz
Chernivtsi
Chernivtsi is the administrative center of Chernivtsi Oblast in southwestern Ukraine. The city is situated on the upper course of the River Prut, a tributary of the Danube, in the northern part of the historic region of Bukovina, which is currently divided between Romania and Ukraine...
, now in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. He credits his father as a "model of intellectual sobriety and probity". Goldhagen has written that his "understanding of Nazism and of the Holocaust is firmly indebted" to his father's influence. In 1977, Goldhagen entered Harvard College
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...
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.
During early graduate studies, he attended a lecture by Saul Friedländer
Saul Friedländer
Saul Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli historian and currently a professor of history at UCLA.-Biography:...
, in which he had what he describes as a “lightbulb moment”: the functionalism versus intentionalism
Functionalism versus intentionalism
Functionalism versus intentionalism is a historiographical debate about the origins of the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy...
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.
Career
As a graduate student, Goldhagen did research in the German archives. 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
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
professor Arno J. Mayer
Arno J. Mayer
Arno Joseph Mayer is a United States Marxist historian originally from Luxembourg, who specializes in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, and is currently Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.-Early life and academic career:Mayer was born into a...
. Goldhagen said that “Mayer’s enormous intellectual error” is in ascribing the cause of the Holocaust to anti-Communism
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
, rather than to anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
, and criticized Prof. Mayer’s saying that most massacres of Jews in the USSR, during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
(1941) in the summer of 1941, were committed by local peoples, with little Wehrmacht
Wehrmacht
The Wehrmacht – from , to defend and , the might/power) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer , the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe .-Origin and use of the term:...
participation, and accused him of traducing the facts about the Wannsee Conference
Wannsee Conference
The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior officials of the Nazi German regime, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference was to inform administrative leaders of Departments responsible for various policies relating to Jews, that Reinhard Heydrich...
(1942), which was meant for plotting the genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
of European Jews, not (as Mayer said) merely the resettlement of the Jews. Goldhagen further accused Mayer of obscurantism
Obscurantism
Obscurantism is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two, common, historical and intellectual, denotations: 1) restricting knowledge—opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the...
, of suppressing historical fact, and of being an apologist for Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
, like Ernst Nolte
Ernst Nolte
Ernst Nolte is a German historian and philosopher. Nolte’s major interest is the comparative studies of Fascism and Communism. He is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 to 1991. He was previously a Professor at the University of Marburg...
, for attempting to “de-demonize” National Socialism. In 1989, Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz was an American historian and an author of books on modern Jewish history, in particular books on the Holocaust.-Life:...
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.
In 2003, Goldhagen quit his Harvard academic job to focus on writing. 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
A Moral Reckoning
A Moral Reckoning, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who also authored Hitler's Willing Executioners, is a 2003 American non-fiction book examining the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust...
(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?). 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
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
, and averting such crimes against humanity.
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 "eliminationistEliminationism
Eliminationism is the belief that one's political opponents are "a cancer on the body politic that must be excised — either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination — in order to protect the purity of the nation"....
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
Christopher Browning
Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian of the Holocaust.-Education:Browning received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1968 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975. He taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999, eventually becoming...
's publication on the holocaust, Ordinary Men. It won the American Political Science Association's
American Political Science Association
The American Political Science Association is a professional association of political science students and scholars in the United States. Founded in 1903, it publishes three academic journals...
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. Time magazine reported that it was one of the two most important books of 1996, and The New York Times called it "one of those rare, new works that merit the appellation ‘landmark’".
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
Historikerstreit
The Historikerstreit was an intellectual and political controversy in late 20th-century West Germany about the historical interpretation of the Holocaust. The German word Streit translates variously as "quarrel", "dispute", or "conflict"...
, the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history. The book was a "publishing phenomenon", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless". The text, for its alleged "generalizing hypothesis" about Germans, has sometimes been characterized as anti-German.
Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern
Fritz Stern
Fritz Richard Stern is a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history, and historiography. He is a University Professor Emeritus and a former provost at New York's Columbia University...
denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia.
As Raul Hilberg summarised the debates, "by the end of 1996, it was clear that in sharp distinction from lay readers, much of the academic world had wiped Goldhagen off the map."
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 IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. A Moral Reckoning was the subject of considerable controversy involving allegations of anti-Catholic bias. In the book, Goldhagen acknowledges that individual bishops and priests hid and saved a large number of Jews, yet he asserts that others promoted or accepted anti-Semitism before and during the war, and some played a direct role in the persecution of Jews in Europe during the time of the Nazis.
The book has been criticized as being a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his] anti-Catholic agenda", and as being poor scholarship. Because he believes the book's recommendations would mean the end of the Church as it has been for two millennia, William A. Donohue
William A. Donohue
William Anthony "Bill" Donohue is the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the United States, a position he has held since 1993.-Life and career:...
, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has labeled Goldhagen an "anti-Catholic bigot".
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.
Worse Than War
Goldhagen’s analyses of NazismNazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
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."
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
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
During the final stages of World War II in 1945, the United States conducted two atomic bombings against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the first on August 6, 1945, and the second on August 9, 1945. These two events are the only use of nuclear weapons in war to date.For six months...
in 1945. In Germany, the documentary was first broadcast by the ARD
ARD
Ard, ARD, Ards or ARDS may refer to:Ard:*Ard or scratch-plough, a type of plough consisting of a simple spike dragged through the soil*Ard, alternate name of Arad, Iran, a city in Fars Province...
television network 18 October 2009, and was to be nationally broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
(PBS) Public television in the U.S. in 2010.
The text has drawn criticism for some of its conclusions. David Rieff
David Rieff
David Rieff is an American polemicist and pundit. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism...
, 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." 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." Adam Jones
Adam Jones
Adam Jones may refer to:*Adam Jones , also known as Pacman Jones, current NFL cornerback*Adam Jones , baseball outfielder*Adam Jones , English auto racing driver...
, who praised this book for its fluid style and commendable passion, concludes however, that the book is undermined by a casual approach to basic research, and by the author’s tendency to overreach and overstate his case..
Awards
- The ForwardThe ForwardThe Forward , commonly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, is a Jewish-American newspaper published in New York City. The publication began in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily issued by dissidents from the Socialist Labor Party of Daniel DeLeon...
, 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 ExecutionersHitler's Willing ExecutionersHitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen that argues 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"...
: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, ISBN 978-0-679-44695-8 - 2002: A Moral ReckoningA Moral ReckoningA Moral Reckoning, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who also authored Hitler's Willing Executioners, is a 2003 American non-fiction book examining the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust...
: 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
Further reading
- Bauer, YehudaYehuda BauerYehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-300-08256-2 - Eley, GeoffGeoff EleyGeoff Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He received his D.Phil from the University of Sussex in 1974, and has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor since 1979...
(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.Michael F. FeldkampMichael F. Feldkamp, is a German historian and journalist.-Career:Feldkamp was born in Kiel. After completing his high school studies at the Gymnasium Carolinum in Osnabrück, he studied history, Catholic theology, teaching, and philosophy at the Rhineland Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn...
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 - FinkelsteinNorman FinkelsteinNorman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
, 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, FritzFritz SternFritz Richard Stern is a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history, and historiography. He is a University Professor Emeritus and a former provost at New York's Columbia University...
. "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, PBSPublic Broadcasting ServiceThe Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
- German lessons, Goldhagen authored article at The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
- Articles by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen at Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles TimesThe Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
- 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