A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth [Paperback]

Norman G. Finkelstein (Author), Ruth Bettina Birn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 1998

No recent work of history has generated as much interest as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Purporting to solve the mystery of the Nazi holocaust, Goldhagen maintains that ordinary Germans were driven by fanatical anti-Semitism to murder the Jews. An immediate national best-seller, the book went on to create an international sensation.

Now, in A Nation on Trial, two leading critics challenge Goldhagen's findings and show that his work is not scholarship at all. With compelling cumulative effect, Norman G. Finkelstein meticulously documents Goldhagen's distortions of secondary literature and the internal contradictions of his argument. In a complementary essay, Ruth Bettina Birn juxtaposes Goldhagen's text against the German archives he consulted. The foremost international authority on these archives, Birn conclusively demonstrates that Goldhagen systematically misrepresented their contents.

The definitive statement on the Goldhagen phenomenon, this volume is also a cautionary tale on the corruption of scholarship by ideological zealotry.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners was one of the most acclaimed nonfiction books of 1996 ... in the mainstream press, that is. Some historians who specialize in World War II-era Germany and the Holocaust have had considerably less kind things to say about Goldhagen's hypothesis that, rather than an aberrant anomaly perpetrated by Nazi archvillains, the Holocaust was an atrocity in which ordinary Germans at all levels of society, motivated by underlying anti-Semitic cultural assumptions, willingly took part. A Nation on Trial is a reprinting and expansion of two scholarly articles published in 1997 which directly challenged Goldhagen's thesis and research techniques.

Norman Finkelstein considers Goldhagen's book "a monument to question-begging" that is "worthless as scholarship." He attacks what he describes as Goldhagen's overemphasis on "eliminationist antisemitism," which raises every anti-Semitic sentiment in German history to murderous intent. "How many white Americans do not harbor any negative stereotypes about black people?" Finkelstein asks rhetorically. "If Goldhagen is correct, we are all closet racial psychopaths." To debunk that notion, Finkelstein analyzes at length Goldhagen's consideration of the pre-Holocaust social segregation of the Jews, which Goldhagen identifies as "the maximum feasible eliminationist option possible given the existing opportunities and constraints," ultimately concluding that it "barely differed from the Jim Crow system in the American South." Although this is clearly intended to undermine Goldhagen's argument about the intensity of Germany's desire to kill the Jews in its midst, it is not exactly reassuring. One can easily flip the idea around so that "the Jim Crow system barely differed from pre-Holocaust Germany's treatment of the Jews," and while that might not make America precisely a nation of "closet racial psychopaths," it certainly does not--and should not--provide any comfort for American readers.

Ruth Bettina Birn pronounces an equally harsh verdict: "His treatment of these matters is naïve and does not meet accepted scholarly standards." At one point, she even accuses him of deploying irony in a sarcastic manner "wholly undignified" in an academic work. Like Finkelstein, she raises important questions about the methods by which Goldhagen selected the source material from which he extrapolated his conclusions, and about the risk Hitler's Willing Executioners runs of succumbing to the pornography of violence to drive home its theoretical points. And Birn shares Finkelstein's conclusion that "Goldhagen wants to graft an ahistorical and monocausal thesis onto a body of historical and multicausal scholarship."

One of the most important questions A Nation on Trial must address is why Hitler's Willing Executioners was able to capture so much attention. Birn is content to credit the "professional American marketing strategy" behind the book for its public success. Finkelstein jumps into a much more dangerous minefield by delineating a distinction between "holocaust scholarship" and "Holocaust literature," identifying the latter as "in effect the Zionist account of the Nazi holocaust," a genre of writing that positions the Holocaust as a historically unique incident in which only the suffering of the Nazi's Jewish victims merits substantial consideration. In making this categorization, he essentially labels Goldhagen's work an act of propaganda, "touted as the ultimate testament to the Nazi Holocaust... [which] fundamentally diminishes its moral significance."

Goldhagen does have a tendency toward the hyperbolic, as indicated in statements such as, "The extent and virulence of the verbal violence assaulting the Jews from their own countrymen have no parallel in modern history," a point which African Americans, Pakistanis in England, and a host of others might care to debate. But while he argues that "Germans' antisemitic beliefs about Jews were the central causal agent of the Holocaust," he also freely admits, in the introduction to the German edition, that "[n]o adequate explanation for the Holocaust can be monocausal," and that anti-Semitism accounts only for the motivation of "the will to kill Jews." And while both authors accuse Goldhagen of blaming the entire German nation for the Holocaust, Goldhagen (again, in the German edition) explicitly rejects collective guilt, stating that "we must recognize that individual Germans were not will-less cogs in a machine, were not automatons, but were responsible actors, were capable of making choices, and were ultimately the authors of their own actions." The debate certainly does not end with this book; both Goldhagen and Finkelstein have created Web sites to which they routinely post responses to the ongoing criticism of their work. If you want to understand the controversy surrounding Hitler's Willing Executioners, however, A Nation on Trial is a necessary point of reference. --Ron Hogan

Review

"All readers of Goldhagen's controversial book should take note of these much-needed studies which authoritatively dismantle its arguments." --Eric Hobsbawm

"Finkelstein's contribution is more than a dessection: it tells us something about where we are." --Raul Hilberg

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; 1 edition (March 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805058729
• ISBN-13: 978-0805058727
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #418,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A NATION ON TRIAL, April 18, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (Paperback)

Life need not be an experience shrouded in mystery and confusion. If something appears to be out of synch or puzzling, one has only to examine the details more closely. This idea could also be applied to the cloak of uniqueness which has been draped around the holocaust. It seems Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" only adds to the murkiness. "A Nation on Trial" illuminates the scene by pointing out contradictions and inconsistencies in Goldhagen's arguments, and citing accounts from post-war documents which show that Jews were certainly not the only victims to suffer. As "A Nation on Trial" reveals, the holocaust is not the only atrocity in the world to occur against groups of people. The ability to research and investigate without distortion should be traits of any individual in an institution of higher learning, especially when the character and reputation of an entire nation is at stake. It's a good thing that Finkelstein and Birn have written this book because it affirms that the truth really does matter.

68 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book but a style that could rub some the wrong way, March 17, 2002

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Timothy P. Scanlon (Hyattsville, MDUSA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (Paperback)

Two means are primary in infuriating a critic: (1) stating facts that the critic doesn't want to admit and (2) a style that feels like salt in a wound even if the facts comply with the critic's need. Unfortunately--though sometimes amusingly too--Professor Finkelstein practices both.

The book is a response to Goldhagen's Harvard dissertation--which certainly challenges Harvard's academic credibility in my book--which asserts that the "ordinary Germans," a phrase frequently used by Goldhagen, though not defined by him, knew of and actively endorsed the mass slaughter of particularly Jews throughout the Third Reich. It consists of two separate essays, the first by Finkelstein and the second by Birn, the former the son of concentration camp survivors and the latter a professional in investigating crimes against humanity.

Both authors challenge Goldhagen's use of evidence. Finkelstein offers more "commentary," some essentially calling Goldhagen silly and inept. Finkelstein himself offers reams of contradictory evidence to the meager claims suggested as proof of Goldhagen's thesis. Many even of the Nazi officers were perfect bureaucrats more than they were ideologues. Anyone who has worked in a partisan political environment knows the tendency of many a staffer to do that. It's how promotions are allocated more than on the basis of competence or capability! So, because such and such an officer did what the Fuehrer said, didn't make him an inherent anti-Semitic, mass murderer.

And both authors criticize Goldhagen's contention that the "Holocaust" was unique in human history, and particularly suited to German brutality. Both offer several examples of similar activities undertaken throughout history.

As for the average German, there is more evidence of their helping out victims of the Reich than of their active complicity in the slaughter. Of course, these are petty items Goldhagen didn't use because they would have contradicted his angle.

Finkelstein has had a bone to pick with Goldhagen, and to some other hyper-Zionists for some time. His "The Holocaust Industry" showed something he reiterates more briefly in this text that "The Holocaust," while of less major political note before then became a veritable industry after the 1967 war. At that point to challenge anything about the Israeli state or about Judaism in general--even by Jews!--was proclaimed to have an anti-Semitic motive. Finkelstein, offering countless examples of that by "writers" such as Elie Wiesel, accuses Goldhagen of capitalizing off that sentiment and blatantly political motive.

Birn's is a very sober analysis of Goldhagen's selective use of evidence--pieces chosen simply because they fit his thesis. She even credited an earlier critique of Goldhagen of her work in which Goldhagen disputed her statements; apparently the quotation marks weren't in the right places. Her fine summary comments on the "trivialization" of the holocaust, which seems to be happening now that the number of actual survivors of that catastrophe dwindles.

I have a weakness for Finkelstein's matter-of-fact style. But if I were to be in a privileged enough position to have my work criticized by either Finkelstein or Birn, I would prefer Birn's criticism. My ego would be less bruised.

This book is important for those who have read Goldhagen's book and wonder about Goldhagen's--or Harvard's--integrity. It is important for those interested in the critical thinking process, and how someone of ostensible credibility, an Ivy League doctoral student, can make some awfully weak arguments in defense of his claims. And it is very important for those who want to keep contemporary politico-Zionism in context. Read it. But don't expect any soft pedaling by Finkelstein.

By the way, I would not have granted Goldhagen his Ph.D. for the sloppy, ideological work in his book. As Birn points out, his thesis is fit for those who want a simple answer to a more complex situation. I add that it resembles hate literature, that "those Germans" were like that. It is, therefore, a mirror image of what Goldhagen claims to despise: propaganda. I would not enroll in a course he teaches, or spend a minute reading anything he'd written.

44 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, July 18, 2003

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Srebrenica Forever (Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (Paperback)

Arguing that much of the Holocaust literature contains gross misinformation and sheer lies, Finkelstein provides an important insight into Goldhagen's insidious attempt to distort historical facts. According to Finkelstein, Goldhagen's book is characterized by numerous contradictions, exaggerations and serious misrepresentation of the facts. For example, Goldhagen asserts in his book that all Germans were belligerent anti-semitists who when given the chance tortured every Jew they could come across. This of course is a gross overgeneralization given that the majority of serious historians agree that many Germans did not commit any enormities against Jewish people. Having said that, Finkelstein does not claim that they were not anti-semitists. On the contrary, many Germans were anti-semitists but they still chose not to take part in the extermination of Jews. Goldhagen however asserts that being a passive observer automatically makes you a perpetrator who is as guilty as the person committing the actual atrocities. If this is the case, then most people are perpetrators because we all sometimes witness heinous crimes and gross injustices not being able to stop them. Goldhagen further holds that the Holocaust was a unique event. Note that a unique event must contain unique victims. Thus, according to Goldhagen, Jews were unique victims. What about the gypsies who were murdered during the Holocaust? Why aren't they the unique victims? Why aren't they included in the history books? Distorting the history in this cynical way as Goldhagen does is morally reprehensible. Not all Germans actively participated in the Holocaust. Blaiming the entire nation is preposterous and indicative of spurious scholarship.