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the psychoanalytic inquiries into the motivations of Hitler's henchmen,
and into the victims, no longer have the resonance they once had. Since
all these theories, to some extent, were based on social psychological sup–
positions, mostly psychoanalytic, and on some sort of fusion with
Marxism, it was assumed that a combination of better insights into indi–
vidual character - together with more equitable societal arrangements -
would provide the tools, also, to prevent future genocidal crimes.
Such laudable humanitarian approaches currently are pursued by a
number of professors of English, to some extent influenced by literary
fashions, and informed by sociological findings. Ultimately, they are ap–
pealing to the humanity we all share. A few political historians are
assuming that Hitler's ascendance to power, and with him the Holocaust,
would have been stopped had Stalin not engaged in manipulation behind
the scenes. Some sociologists are exploring and explaining the rationales
and methods of murder in terms of quantitative criteria, while others do
so via comparative, historical analyses. The memoirs are the most perspi–
cacious and touching - whether written as testimony or to record the
horror of these inhuman deeds, whether intended to finally bury the Nazi
past or to make sure similar events will never again recur. Yet none of
these treatments, ultimately, can answer what for twelve years turned Go–
ethe's Germany into Hitler's. But Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's
Hitler's
Willing Executioners
and Victor Klemperer's diary are causing much tur–
moil in Germany, because they both are reopening some aspects of this
past by pointing out that many Germans participated in the killings, or
looked the other way.
Goldhagen attempts to come to grips with the Holocaust by focusing
on the role of the perpetrators. He holds that they could not have so
brutally murdered Jews if a malignant and vicious, and mythical, anti–
Semitism had not been dormant in millions of German minds; that they
would not have acted on it, had Hitler and his leadership not organized
and poured sufficient resources into the machinery that was to accomplish
the Jews' annihilation; that by blaming all of Germany's economic and
social problems on the Jews, Hitler had managed to convince his listeners
- to begin with unemployed workers and an impoverished petit bour–
geoisie - that the Jews' elimination would cure the ills of the country. All
these arguments had been made before. Esssentially, Goldhagen summa–
rizes the scholarship on German anti-Semitism, (endemic in Central
Europe for nearly two centuries) and argues that this deep-rooted preju–
dice eventually enabled Hitler to enlist at least 100,000 ordinary Germans,
and most likely half a million, to participate in the butchering ofJews - in
cold blood and in the presence of local populations, and sometimes even
