Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich by Niven Bill

Author:Niven, Bill [Niven, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2003-09-02T07:00:00+00:00

A gullible public?

Given these weaknesses, given the fact, moreover, that the German public's attention had been drawn to them long before the book appeared in German translation, it was surprising that it refused to side with its own historians. In fact when today's 'ordinary Germans' entered the auditoria at the podium discussions in September 1996, they were determined to support Goldhagen against their historians. Journalist Elisabeth Bauschmid reported that, wherever these discussions took place, whether in Hamburg, Berlin, Aschaffenburg, Frankfurt or Munich, the public was on Goldhagen's side, 'ready to defend him […] with boos and applause' (SZ, 12 September 1996). Negative explanations for this public disobedience were quickly to hand; so were positive ones. Both have to be taken seriously.

To begin with the negative ones. CSU politician Peter Gauweiler, not known for mincing his words, argued that the real executioner was Goldhagen. He also believed that the 'sucking-up' which Goldhagen ostensibly enjoyed was symptomatic of an 'irrational trait in the German character'. 'It is the done thing, between a glass of prosecco and a mouthful of quail breast, to react to Goldhagen's insults with delight' (Bayernkurier, 9 October 1996). Gauweiler thought he could identify a penchant for a trendy indulgence in frissons of masochism. Other conservative politicians pointed to a sado-masochistic symbiosis between Goldhagen and the public. On this view, many Germans were willingly exposing themselves to verbal flagellation in order to expiate a sense of guilt induced in them by the moralizing left.

Perhaps it was even more complicated than that. In a much-discussed footnote to his book, Goldhagen claimed that the Germans in the west of the country had changed after 1945, largely overcoming their anti-semitism: 'that absurd beliefs can rapidly dissipate is well known' (Goldhagen 1996a:594). In interviews prior to and during his visit to Germany in 1996, Goldhagen reiterated this point (see, for instance, Goldhagen 1996c:13). There appeared to be a contradiction here. How could eliminationist anti-semitism, inherent as it was to the German national psyche, itself be largely eliminated in such a short space of time? In his speech in receipt of the Blätter Democracy Prize in Bonn on 10 March 1997, Goldhagen eulogized both West Germany's post-war evolution into a model democracy, and the rewriting of national history to take account of German responsibility for the holocaust. He explicitly put these developments down to the impact of internationalization, a term he understood to mean westernization and Americanization (Goldhagen 1997a). Goldhagen's eulogy of West Germany was thus, indirectly, a eulogy of the Western Allies, and particularly the USA. At no point did he address developments in the GDR, or the impact of revisionism on the FRG. Nothing, it seemed, was to detract from the impression of an astonishing transformation at the hands of the USA.

Goldhagen even went so far as to suggest that the current German model of national history construction should be internationalized (Goldhagen 1997a:80). Thus Germany was as much of a positive role model now as it had been a negative

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