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Daniel Goldhagen
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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959) is an American political scientist and former Associate Professor of Political Science and Social Studies at Harvard University. After having taught political science and social studies at Harvard University for many years, Goldhagen reached international awareness as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002).
hagen is the son of retired Harvard professor Erich Goldhagen, who survived the Holocaust in a Romanian–Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz, and credits his father with creating a framework for intellectual discussion about the subject.
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Encyclopedia
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959) is an American political scientist and former Associate Professor of Political Science and Social Studies at Harvard University. After having taught political science and social studies at Harvard University for many years, Goldhagen reached international awareness as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002).
Background
Goldhagen is the son of retired Harvard professor Erich Goldhagen, who survived the Holocaust in a Romanian–Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz, and credits his father with creating a framework for intellectual discussion about the subject. Goldhagen spent his youth in Newton, Massachusetts before entering Harvard, where his interest in the origins of the Holocaust was sparked by a lecture in 1983 given by Saul Friedlander. Goldhagen told The New York Times in 1996 that "everyone was talking about why the order was given, but not about why it was carried out." His research on the question led him to spend 14 months in Ludwigsburg, Germany, examining relevant documents, before returning to Harvard to draw the material together in the first of his books.
Books
Hitler's Willing Executioners
In Hitler's Willing Executioners, Goldhagen posited that ordinary Germans not only knew about, but also supported, the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist" antisemitism in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries. This book, successful but controversial, began as Goldhagen's Harvard doctoral dissertation, which won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics.
According to The New York Times, Hitler's Willing Executioners, met with widespread hostility in Germany at its debut, has been credited for launching national discussion on the topic in that country. In late 1996, Goldhagen visited Berlin to participate in the debate on television and in lecture halls before capacity crowds. Goldhagen was awarded the prestigious Democracy Prize in 1997 by the German Journal for German and International Politics, which asserted that "...because of the penetrating quality and the moral power of his presentation, Daniel Goldhagen has greatly stirred the consciousness of the German public." The laudatio, awarded for the first time since 1990, was given by Jürgen Habermas and Jan Philipp Reemtsma.
Hitler's Willing Executioners also drew controversy with the publication of two critical articles: "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis", written by political science professor Norman Finkelstein and initially published in UK political journal New Left Review, and "Historiographical review: Revising the Holocaust", written by historian Ruth Bettina Birn and initially published in the Historical Journal of Cambridge. These articles were later published as the book A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. In response to their work, Goldhagen sought a retraction and apology from Birn, according to Salon declaring Finkelstein "a supporter of Hamas".
A Moral Reckoning
Goldhagen's second book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, an account of what he maintains was the Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust, has also been controversial, garnering both praise and strong criticism. Goldhagen wrote the book following a request by The New Republic to review several books concerning Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. The book has been criticised as being a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his] anti-Catholic agenda" and as being poor scholarship, including a lack of any primary sources and being riddled with factual errors. Because of these criticisms and because he says the recommendations of the book 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 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.
Works
- Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. ISBN 0-679-44695-8.
- A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 2002). ISBN 0-375-41434-7.
- The “Willing Executioners/Ordinary Men” Debate: Selections from the Symposium, April 8 1996, introduced by Michael Berenbaum (Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 2001).
External links
Critical analyses
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