Page "Daniel Goldhagen" Paragraph 9

The 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.

The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote about Goldhagen :" Here Goldhagen stumbles badly.

He does not seem to be acquainted with some basic developments in German society in the nineteenth century.

Certainly, there was what he calls eliminationist antisemitism and its impact increased as the century matured ... But antisemitism came in different forms, and Goldhagen puts all antisemitism in the same basket, including the liberal type that wanted to see the Jews disappear by assimilation and conversion ... The vast majority of German antisemitics did not wish to abolish formal Jewish emancipation.

Goldhagen makes much of the radical antisemitism of the Conservative Party in Germany ; but in 1893 it obtained less than 10 percent of the votes, whereas the National Liberals, among whom there were a number of former Jews, were much more numerous.

Goldhagen ignores this and makes the counterfactual statement that " conservatives and völkish nationalists in Germany ... formed the vast majority of the population ".

By 1912, the Social Democrats, with an explicitly anti-antisemitic program, were the largest party in the German Reichstag, and the Progressives ran very strongly as well ... Formally, at least, the Jews had been fully emancipated with the establishment of the German Empire, although they were kept out of certain influential occupations, enjoyed extraordinary prosperity ... Germans intermarried with Jews: in the 1930s some 50, 000 Jews were living in mixed German-Jewish marriages, so at least 50, 000 Germans, and presumably parts of their families, had familial contact with the Jews.

Goldhagen himself mentions that a large proportion of the Jewish upper classes in Germany converted to Christianity in the nineteenth century.

In a society where eliminationist norms were universal and in which Jews were rejected even after they had converted, or so he argues, the rise of this extreme form of assimilation of Jews would hardy have been possible.

" Bauer argued that: " There simply was no general murderous, racist antisemitic norm in Germany in the nineteenth century.

There was a strong and growing antisemitic influence among the elites, but even here it is difficult to speak of unanimity ... But to speak of an eliminitionist norm is wrong.

Goldhagen's thesis does not work ".

The American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia.

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.