(Third of three parts; click here to read Part 2)
Let me note here that there are good reasons to read Goldhagen’s book. One is negative-in order to learn how not to frame a work of history in a way that does a disservice to the complexity of the story one aims to tell. The other is positive-there are powerful stories here, worth the telling. Goldhagen’s insistent and boastful claims to originality aside, the chapters in the middle part of this overlong tome, chapters that embody Goldhagen’s own research on Police Battalions, life in “work” camps, and death marches, are often riveting. Why Goldhagen tethers this to nasty asides, especially against the distinguished historian Christopher Browning and his powerful book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, is a mystery to me.
What I want to do is to unpack a bit of Goldhagen’s conceptual apparatus, for that is the book’s big weakness. He is operating with too few and too simplistic concepts. First, he insists there must be one overarching explanation-not many overlapping, reinforcing, perhaps partially competing explanations, but an explanation.
Second, he sets up his thesis in such a way that it is unclear that he would countenance any compelling counterevidence.The way he presents the argument is along the lines of “When did you stop beating your wife?” Everything Germans did or did not do is accounted for by reversion to his reductionistic claim that they all embraced “eliminationist anti-Semitism.” (That this leads him to silence or to dismissal on the anti-Nazi resistance goes without saying, other than a few swipes at Martin Niemoeller for being an anti-Semite. It is also not clear to me that Goldhagen understands the difference between the Confessing Church and theDeutsche Christe, the pro-Nazi Protestants in the Third Reich who are the subject of Doris Bergen’s excellent work. If he does, he intentionally blurs it, for by acknowledging any such distinction he would be contradicting his steamroller of a thesis.)
Third, his false claims to originality-“My explanation-which is new to the scholarly literature” ad nauseum-sets up an artificial distinction between his work and that of others. To hear Goldhagen tell it, he and he alone has fingered “eliminationist anti-Semitism”; he and he alone “takes the actors’ cognition and values seriously,” and on and on.
Fourth, by moving from actions to a presupposition about motive, cast as an overarching “cognitive model” that drove all Germans to act or not to act, as the case may be, Goldhagen seriously distorts the complexity of human motivation; does violence to the nuances of all major historical events; creates a Manichaean universe in which the virulence of anti-Semitism in other countries is ignored (France, for example); reintroduces collective guilt; and, oddly, itself traffics in a dangerous essentialism that minimizes the ongoing cruelties perpetrated by some against others.
Here is how Goldhagen works. In setting up his conceptual framework, he dismisses any and all exculpatory evidence. He is the prosecutor. Thus, if we just read political statements by Germans and their letters or their texts or their creeds, “then we might have to conclude that most people are not among its subscribers” (that is, adherents of eliminationist anti-Semitism). But this would be wrong. Why? Because the cognitive model was so overwhelming that Germans need not express anti-Semitism at all-they just were anti-Semites. What is his evidence for this astonishing claim? He picks as a countermodel America and argues that we “could scour the utterances, both public and private, the letters, and the diaries of Americans, and . . . we would find comparatively few professions of their democratic temper. Why? Precisely because the views are uncontested, because they are part of the ‘common sense’ of the society.”
This claim is false. It is scandalously false, in fact, as any examination of American public and private documents attests. Has Goldhagen studied nothing of American history? From early Colonial documents, public and private, written by men and women, through letters written by wives to husbands on the front in World War II (a subject of which I know a good bit), from Abigail Adams to Jane Addams, the democratic temper and spirit is inescapable, it is rife, it is everywhere. If racist, biological, eliminationist anti-Semitism, by analogy, is everywhere, it should show up somewhere. Goldhagen here pulls a sleight of hand that permits him to claim that anti-Semitism is the invisible, unspoken, unstated motor that moves the German system, from individual souls to state organization. The proof of anti-Semitism lies in its absence; it simply was the “culturally shared cognitive model.”
A question: Could any German not be an anti-Semite for Goldhagen? Presumably not, for he moves from a cognitive model to a latent-manifest presupposition, rather like the Marxist notion of false consciousness, in arguing that if in fact anti-Semitism occupies a person’s conscious thoughts only rarely, “then he is at that moment a latent antisemite, or his antisemitism is in a latent state.” So if you are a German in l930 and you are not overtaken by anti-Semitism, your anti-Semitism is simply latent; therefore, you are, in principle, no different from someone whose anti-Semitism is, at that moment, manifest. This is a neat trick, for it means you can dismiss any and all arguments against your argument as expressions of ignorance or, even more sinister, as prompted by a latent version of the hideous ideology you have made the be-all and end-all of your explanatory framework.
Unsurprisingly, Goldhagen also goes after”the conception of Jewsin medieval Christendom,” wiping out any plurality or distinctiveness in conceptions. He insists that medieval Christians identified “Jews with evil,” presumably with the Antichrist. Here he would do well to read my colleague Bernard McGinn’s work,Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil, but I doubt he will because it complicates matters. Certainly, and deplorably, Jews were often identified asagentsof evil, as were heretics or, as I noted, the “papists” for Martin Luther. But Goldhagen has a stake in locating anti-Semitism as a “permament feature of Christian civilization.” Here one would wish for a differentiated account of anti-Semitisms, for there is more than one. Hannah Arendt, dismissed at various points by Goldhagen but never really discussed, insists that religious anti-Semitism and biological racism are not only not the same thing but are not even related. That is, the secular ideology of anti-Semitism is not derived from religious, creedal Jew hatred. There is, she argues, no “unbroken continuity of persecutions, expulsions, and massacres.” This, Arendt continues, is a fallacious view that does violence to historic complexity, particularly to the history of the Jewish people themselves. She argued this nearly a half-century ago, inThe Origins of Totalitarianism. How sad that Goldhagen’s book has garnered extraordinary attention despite the fact that it adverts to a simplistic narrative of the sort Arendt was always at pains to avoid.
Goldhagen, in representing Jews as always and everywhere victims, occludes the space for Jewish self-understanding. There is a “foundational Christian” cause and cognitive model. The Jews are its bete noire. It follows that anti-Semitism is “always present,” though at any given time it “becomes more or less manifest.” It never goes away. Like a Gothic horror, it seeps through every nook and cranny of life, or German life anyway. Any lull in the exterminationism is the calm before the next storm as “erstwhile antisemites” go about their business. There is a “slim chance that the erstwhile antisemities might turn themselves around,” but there is no evidence-none-that this ever happens, for “these sorts of oscillations” just do not occur. Once an anti-Semite, always an anti-Semite. Thus the reader is bludgeoned. “European antisemitism is a corollary of Christianity.” It was always thus; it will always be thus, from the “totalitarian control” of the medieval Church to the present. Jews are, quite simply, “creatures of the Devil.”
Goldhagen shows his hand in a way that may be inadvertently revealing in chapter 2, “The Evolution of Eliminationist Antisemitism in Modern Germany.” He writes that “From the time of John Chrysostom until the modern period, the attitudes and treatment of Jews in the Christian world underwent frequent adjustment, as did Christian doctrine and practice. Yet while all the changes in Christians’ theology and practice were taking place, theunderlying belief in the divinity of Jesus remained firm.So too was antisemitism.”So here we have it. If Christians, a stiff-necked people, persist in the delusion that Jesus is the Christ, so they persist in anti-Semitism. Clearly, the only way anti-Semitism can be made to disappear is for Christians to cease to be Christian.
Reading and rereading this I had the feeling that perhaps Goldhagen was being extraordinarily clever-that he was, in fact, engaged in a kind of mirror image of the anti-Semitism he decries; that he was displaying for all to see what happens when a monocausal, even obsessive, thesis is run into the ground. Perhaps he is showing Christians what it feels like to be told that the only way you can be free from a constitutive taint is to give up being what you, in some sense, are. Would that this were so. The truth, of course, is that Goldhagen clearly believes what he is saying, which means that he is prepared to pass judgment on millions of people of the sort he himself singles out as a pernicious example of the summary judgments such persons historically have passed against others. This is a sad, sad thing, and it mars what might have been a major contribution to our understanding.
That being said, I would nonetheless recommend reading the middle chapters even as I want, in concluding these remarks on Goldhagen, to warn the reader that there is a kind of escalation of brutality, horror piled upon horror, in which Goldhagen specializes. How can one talk about death camps and death marches save to do this? Fair enough. But the unadorned brutality speaks for itself. Goldhagen has so little faith in his readers that he cannot let the bare facts cry out in anger and anguish. He has to pepper everything with intensifiers and up the ante. He has to tell us that something is “sordid” or “incredible” or “hideous” or “execrable” or “immensely cruel.” Can we not see this? Are we so morally obtuse? This rhetorical overdrive, meaning that Goldhagen can leave no description of a terrible incident intact without his editorializing, is accompanied by mockery and sneers and sarcasm that ill befit the subject matter.
And lest any evidence, any at all, creep in that suggests a German was anything other than an enthusiastic perpetrator of violence or an approving colluder, Goldhagen reinterprets acts of refusal (to engage in killing) as without moral principle; rather, these were “aesthetic revulsion at the ghastliness of the scene.” And those Germans who did not kill would have if they could have. He administers the coup de grace: “Nearly all of the few protests and petitions of Germans that lamented or objected to their nation’s treatment of the Jews were themselves imbued with antisemitism.” I must note, finally, Goldhagen’s unfortunate concluding sentence, one that lifts up the crudity of anti-Semitic rhetoric by using the defamatory term “Der Jude.” His book ends with this. It is chilling in ways he perhaps did not intend, for this long book decrying anti-Semitism can think of no way to conclude itself save with a reconstruction of a crude artifact of anti-Semitism.
What a relief it is for me to recommend unhesitatingly Doris Bergen’sThe Twisted Cross,a powerful, modest work (in the very best sense, in refusing to claim more than the evidence warrants). Bergen comes from a family of ethnic German Mennonites from the Ukraine. She is, therefore, “wary of certain connections between religious and ethnic identities.” All the more reason, then, that she was “struck by what seemed contorted efforts to fuse Christianity with Germanness and purge it of Jewish influence.” It is a terrible story, in part because so few “took an active role in plans to overthrow the Nazi regime.” Bonhoeffer, of course, is cited for his insistence that “National Socialist ideology and Christianity were profoundly incompatible.” Bergen notes that “hard-core Nazi leaders” shared Bonhoeffer’s views-Christianity and Nazism were incompatible. Ultimately, Christianity itself must be destroyed. Notably, Weiss and Goldhagen ignore this, and Weiss even commits the blasphemy of calling Hitler “a Catholic.” In fact, Hitler and other Nazis boasted that they were no Christians. The Nazi was supposed to be a Gottglaubiger, an unbeliever. A terrible irony, then, lies in the fact that the enthusiasm of the Deutsche Christen to merge Christianity and Nazism was not met with enthusiasm by the Nazis themselves.
The German Christians built on theological and political foundations, argues Bergen, drawing on “a legacy of Christian antisemitism and a proclivity to disregard Scripture.” They were also opportunists currying favor, and they did this by joining the Nazi neopagans in Germany in reviling “Christianity for its Jewish roots, doctrinal rigidity, and enervating, womanish qualities.” The German Christians wanted a “people’s church” purged of impure elements, “not an assembly of the baptized but an association of ‘blood’ and ‘race.’ ” This pernicious attempt to fuse Nazism with the Protestant tradition represented “a cross section of society from every region of the country: women and men, old people and young, pastors, teachers, dentists, railroad workers, housewives, and farmers, even some Catholics.”
Bergen estimates that some half-million German Christians endorsed Nazi ideology explicitly. They precipitated the 1933 church struggle “and they pushed through the reorganization of German Protestantism under a Reich bishop, ending centuries of decentralized development in an effort to implement an ecclesiastic fuhrerprinzip.” Interestingly, the German Christian movement defined itself as “explicitly antidoctrinal.” They were syncretists, merging neopagan, racist, and other crackpot theories.
Bergen states her goal as presenting the “major ideas and consequences of the German Christian movement.” She succeeds admirably. She does so with verve and with real power. Most tellingly, she reminds Christians that they cannot be anti-Jewish and remain the church. By purging Jewish elements, the German Christian “heresy was obvious. By elevating Volkstum-race-to the level of God’s revelation, German Christians opened the floodgates to a torrent of non-Christian and anti-Christian beliefs, attitudes, and activities.” Concern with sin, for example, “was a Jewish element to be purged from Christianity.”
Unlike Weiss and Goldhagen, Bergen provides food for thought in the present-she shows the ways in which the contemporary reader may be implicated in certain dangerous trends or tendencies. In seeking to deny or to mitigate the scandal of the cross, of a Jewish messiah crucified, a moment of irreducible particularity, Christians open themselves up to being overtaken by passing enthusiasms that distort, bowdlerize, and dilute everything. For example, for German Christians, music had to be Aryan, free from Jewish elements. This led to a “systematic purge of Christian hymns.” On and on. Especially chilling are the ways in which women in the German Christian movement deployed a cult of motherhood in order to claim that they were somehow nearer to God, hence must act as “the religious conscience of the Volk.”
Bergen concludes: “Issues of race and church doctrine reveal the nihilism at the core of the German Christian vision of the people’s church. The anti-Jewish church was ultimately non-Christian; the church without rules was no church at all.” To which I can only add, Amen, and again, Amen.
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. She is the author, most recently, of Augustine and the Limits of Politics (University of Notre Dame Press.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
Mar/Apr, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 3
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