ABSTRACT
In early 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s doctoral thesis was published in the USA under the title Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Goldhagen 1996a). The book, built on the generalizing hypothesis that the vast majority of Germans during the Third Reich shared Hitler’s paranoic hatred of Jews, became a bestseller. By spring 1997, sales had topped 350,000 in the United States. The German translation of the book, published in early August 1996, had sold 180,000 copies by March 1997. It soared to the top of the bestseller list, relegating Chancellor Kohl’s I wanted German Unity (Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit) to third place (Spiegel, 16 December 1996). This was an astonishing achievement for a young scholar. What made it even more astonishing was that the book was for the most part dismissed by historians. They protested at the use of what were perceived to be dubious marketing techniques by Goldhagen and his publishers, who had supposedly hoodwinked the public into believing that the book broke radically with traditional holocaust studies. The press, for its part, was blamed for broadcasting this claim to the world at large: the helpless public had fallen victim to sensationalist media hype. Critics of the book in the USA put down its success to its ‘implicit political agenda’, an agenda which confirmed American anti-German prejudice while glorifying the American democratic and moral tradition. Goldhagen was charged with peddling an emotive, prejudice-driven Zionism. In Germany, there was a considerable degree of helplessness as German historians struggled to explain the positive impact of a ‘bad book’ on the German public. When Goldhagen toured Germany in September 1996, he was hailed as a star. Was it his handsomeness? The fact that, for some, he looked like Tom Hanks? Was it his engagingly polite, well-educated and discrete manner? His suave, well-dressed appearance? Was his popularity linked to
German masochism? A reaction against the commemorative rituals of 1995, which for some at least represented the drawing of a line under the past? With not a little arrogance, most German historians dismissed the notion that Goldhagen’s appeal might be connected to any substantive merits in his arguments. They argued that the ordinary Germans of today were too naive to understand the holocaust as it really had been: hence their enthusiasm for Goldhagen’s ‘fantasy version’.
