The German Genius

phrase in quotes actually referred to “the cracking of nuts.” 48 Evans concluded—and he was just one among many—that Goldhagen’s book was disfigured by a “startling failure of scholarship,” that it was written in the “pretentious language of dogmatism,” and betrayed a “disturbing arrogance that is of a piece with the exaggerated claims for novelty.” 49
    Hitler’s Willing Executioners conforms exactly to what Novick is saying. Far from interest in the Holocaust declining in our (or Goldhagen’s) historical consciousness, its enormity—its singularity—has now grown in salience to the point where it was caused, not by Hitler alone, or his elite entourage, or the SS, but by all Germans, including the ordinary ones, and this was so because, throughout history, Germany has always been anti-Semitic, far more so than any other country. This comes close to making the Holocaust inevitable in Germany.
    It also alerts us to a phenomenon we shall have occasion to examine and criticize and where the Germans (among others) have been at fault: the writing of meta -history, by which I mean the attempt to understand the past via simple, all-embracing theories, the “dangerous simplifiers” as Jacob Burckhardt called them.
    The “Goldhagen affair” shows how history writing can be distorted. Given the distortions and omissions he employed, one is entitled to wonder whether he could not see past or around the Holocaust to begin with, and this author at least is prompted to suspect instead that he started with his conclusions and then found the “facts” to fit his theory. Goldhagen’s account is not so crude as that of the British tabloids, but it does have the same obsessive quality. As Fritz Stern saw it, “the book also reinforces and reignites earlier prejudices: latent anti-German sentiment among Americans, especially Jews; and a sense among Germans that Jews have a special stake in commemorating the Holocaust, thereby keeping Germany a prisoner of its past.” 50 As the German historian K. D. Bracher has said, all modern developments in Germany are inevitably linked back to events in the Third Reich. The Germany of before that time, for most people, simply does not exist.
    Dismaying as all this is, there is another perspective, put by two British observers, Ian Kershaw and Steve Crawshaw. History, particularly in the age of television, is almost as much about perception as about reality, and one of the misrepresentations about Germany in the world at large is the ignorance in other Western countries in regard to the events of 1968. The Prague Spring, the student riots in Paris and elsewhere in France in May 1968, and the student sit-ins at American universities are well remembered. Much less well remembered—hardly remembered at all, it seems—are the events in Germany in that same year. Those events are covered in more detail in Chapter 41, of this book. Here we need only say that 1968 in Germany saw a new generation of sons and daughters ( die Achtundsechsiger ) confront their fathers and mothers about their “brown” past, their involvement with the Nazis. This was a genuine upheaval in Germany, a searing and serious attempt by those born in the wake of the war to force the nation to confront its past. Many Germans believe they began to “move on” then and are now well past the traumas. Not everyone agrees that this has happened, of course: the Bader-Meinhof violence lasted through much of the 1970s, the historians’ dispute did not erupt until the 1980s, German novelists were still writing about the war in the early twenty-first century. Older Germans say the youthful rebellion was a myth, that the young were jealous of their elders—with a brown past or not—who had made such a success of the “economic miracle.” But Kershaw and Crawshaw believe this helps explain the “Goldhagen phenomenon”—that his book was welcomed by the public, despite being censured by more knowledgeable critics. The book, they say, helped a fresh generation, the grandchildren of the Nazis, come to terms with the past. “The acceptance of any and all attacks on the old Germany provided a yardstick for modern Germans to remind themselves that they had indeed confronted the terrible past, thus helping to neutralise its demons. Goldhagen became a player, at just one remove, in Germany’s own arguments with itself. The details of his arguments—untenable or otherwise—mattered less to the Germans than