Germany and the Jews

摘要

For better or worse, noth-ing's been ordinary in Holocaust studies since 1996, when the young Harvard professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published "Hitler's Willing Executioners"-and even "ordinary" has become a fighting word. His subtitle, "OrdinaryGer-mans and the Holocaust," was a direct challenge to the influential "Ordinary Men" (1992) by the University of North Carolina's Christopher R. Browning. Browning had argued that such factors as peer pressure, ca-reerism and unquestioning conformity led large numbers of everyday people to participate in murdering the Jews of Europe. Goldhagen, on the other hand, blamed a long German tradition of "eliminationist" anti-Semitism-in his view, a uniquely German pathology. Scholars continue to disagree about Goldhagen's methodology and conclusions, but since his book was a best seller in both the United States and Germany, new books about the Holocaust seem obliged to take account of his thesis-and even a survivor's diary written before Goldhagen was born now seems to have retroactive relevance to the issues he raised.