Language:
German
Year of publication:
1998
Titel der Quelle:
Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht
Angaben zur Quelle:
49,2 (1998) 80-95
Keywords:
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah.
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
Abstract:
Discusses Goldhagen's book and its critics, as well as the role it plays in Jewish-American and in German self-perception. The book was celebrated in the mass media and almost unanimously disqualified by scholars. Remarks on the difference between survivors' complex, differentiated descriptions of the Holocaust and the one-sided view of young American Jews, who count themselves among the "victims", and for whom the Holocaust is often the only source of their Jewish identity; Goldhagen's book gratified this group. It also gratified ordinary Germans, because Goldhagen, in a footnote, exonerates present-day Germany; and also because he presents the perpetrators of the Holocaust - without any consideration of the circumstances, the gradual habituation, the potential for evil in all human beings - as acting out of a single-minded "eliminationist antisemitism". The reader who is not an eliminationist antisemite can thus feel secure that he himself would never have perpetrated such crimes.
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