Holocaust Memory and Mass Media in Contemporary Germany: Reflections on the Goldhagen Debate

Abstract

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, provoked an unprecedented controversy in German society over the antisemitic origins of the Holocaust. The enormous publicity Goldhagen received in the German media, though, went along with almost unanimously hostile attacks against him and his work. Comparing the book's real content with the fierce rejection it received in the public sphere demonstrates that the nature of the debate is, first and foremost, an expression of the dynamics of Holocaust memory in present-day Germany. While Goldhagen's cultural-anthropological approach fails to grasp the complex origins of the Holocaust, he does legitimately focus on German political culture, antisemitism and 'ordinary' perpetrators. However, the mass media, scholars and politicians in Germany reacted by first projecting on to him their own accusations of collective German guilt, and then branded him a 'racist executioner'. In their portrait of Goldhagen's alleged anti-German hostility, many of the debate's actors slipped into anti-American as well as crypto-antisemitic prejudices. The Goldhagen debate demonstrates the psychodynamics of 'secondary antisemitism' in Germany today: unmastered guilt feelings which are often split from the self and turned outwards against 'imaginary accusers' who remind the public of the Nazi past. It should thus be interpreted in the context of recent efforts within German political culture to 'normalize' the Nazi past, and to recreate a positive national identity. The debate can be viewed as both the expression and the encouragement of a transgenerational defensive aggression towards any critical memory of the Holocaust. In relation to the unwanted memories, the American Jewish scholar Goldhagen might embody an externalized conscience, projected on to Jews in particular for they are, by their very existence, representatives of the atrocious past. The effects of the Goldhagen debate in Germany are two-fold. It has encouraged both a tendency among Germans to 'overcome' the memory of the Holocaust as well as latent anti-Jewish prejudices which are still widely shared. Simultaneously, the media's instigation of a broad public debate on the Holocaust has provided a new opportunity for dealing with the legacy of Nazism.