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survivor, has been repeatedly mentioned in Germany as part of the pub–
lic debate, so that reviewers could discredit and disqualify his book. In
this context, to argue that the author lacked objectivity followed
directly from the arguments put forward during the Germans' "His–
torikerstreit" of
1987-88.
At the time, Martin Broszat argued in the
course of the correspondence between himself and Saul Friedlander that
his generation, the Hitler Jugend generation, was better qualified than
the generation of the victims and their children to write objectively
about the period. In any case, members of the German academic estab–
lishment found it difficult to digest Goldhagen's book, which clearly
rejected their own scientific work and made sweeping claims about the
historical nature of German anti-Semitism. The writer's identity, as an
American, a Jew, and a political scientist, provoked many negative emo–
tions, both relevant and irrelevant.
However, among the young third generation of German academics,
Goldhagen's book enjoyed a particularly sympathetic reaction; and it
was used as a way of arousing the anger of Germany's academic estab–
lishment and the parental generation. The book's contents, and the elo–
quent style of its author, who came to Germany to promote his book,
provided the German third generation with more satisfactory answers
to
some of the questions raised by the extermination of the Jews than
the answers by German academics. The sympathetic reaction to Gold–
hagen's book in Germany expresses dissatisfaction with the professional
approach to the study of the Holocaust, with its emphasis on pedantic
structural models and its inability to deal with the emotional motivation
of the murderers.
Its constant addressing of the murderers' motivation, plus its fresh
focus on the emotional and ideological background made Goldhagen's
book so successful in Germany. In turn, this may be precisely why it is
not particularly attractive to Israelis. Bartov, in an article comparing the
reception of
Hitler 's Willing Executioners
in the United States, Ger–
many, France, and Israel, notes with a certain degree of irony:
Since the book's main thesis was so familiar to Israelis, it could not
but appear banal; people simply could not understand what was
innovative about an argument that presented the Germans as anti–
Semitic murderers of Jews. This was what they learned in school,
read in books, heard on the radio, watched on television, heard
from relatives. Israelis might be curious about German reactions to
this statement; but as for the persoll
011
the street, this was simply
obvious.
