the German population did not rise up, he might consider the
manner in which those two brave young people perished. The guillotine is a big price to pay for a conviction.)
A necessary conclusion, about the large and well-informed German-speaking audience for the arts, would be that if they were all eliminationist anti-Semites, they must have been strangely ready
to sideline their otherwise overmastering prejudice when it came to matters of aesthetic enjoyment. It’s not a conclusion that Goldhagen feels bound to draw, because he doesn’t even
consider the matter. Nor does he consider that the abuse heaped on Jewish artists by the Nazi propaganda machine before the
Machtergreifung
was a measure of the success they had achieved
in becoming a part of the landscape. Finally and fatally, he doesn’t consider that the massive and irreversible damage done to German-speaking culture by the repression, expulsion and murder
of the Jews was the full, exact and tragic measure of how they had been vital to it. Once again it is an awful thing to find oneself saying, but it has to be said: the
Reichskültur-kammer
, if it were still in business, couldn’t have done a better job of treating the Jewish contributors to German culture as if they had been an irrelevance,
simply begging to be swept away.
But a young historian can be forgiven for lacking the kind of cultural information that would bring such questions to the forefront. The richness of what the German-speaking Jews achieved before
the Nazi era takes time to assess. Harder to understand is Goldhagen’s apparent supposition that nothing much has happened in Germany
since
the Nazi era when it comes to his own
field – history. You would never know, from his book, that whole teams of German historians, in the full knowledge that they are trying to make bricks from rubble, have dedicated themselves
to the study of the catastrophe that distorted their intellectual inheritance. As in any other country at any time, there have been a few historians who have devoted prodigious resources to missing
the point. Of the star revisionists mixed up in the
Historikerstreit
, Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber at least had the merit of being too blatant to be plausible: they pretty well
blamed the Holocaust on the Soviet Union. Klaus Hildebrand and Michael Stürmer were more insidious because there was nothing wrong with their facts: after the Red Army crossed the German
border, the retreating
Wehrmacht
really
was
fighting heroically for its country’s heritage. Unfortunately their suggestion that post-war German patriotism might thus claim a
solid base was hopelessly compromised by the consideration that part of the heritage was the Holocaust. In his various essays and open letters about the
Historikerstreit
, Jürgen
Habermas (who, it is only fair to concede, admires Goldhagen’s book) was marvellous on the equivocations and the delusions of the revisionists, but on the main point he didn’t need to
be marvellous: it was too obviously true. The revisionist historian can’t reasonably hope to have a Germany that is not obsessed with the past. There can be no putting off shame to achieve
maturity. The shame
is
the maturity.
Most of the German historians are well aware of this. The revisionists did not prevail, and the work entailed in rebutting them had already become part of the accumulated glory of
Germany’s indigenous historical studies as the terrible twentieth century neared its end. But if German culture really had been nourished at its root by eliminationist anti-Semitism, as
Goldhagen argues, it is hard to see why so many of today’s German historians should now be so concerned about the Holocaust. Very few of them are Jews, for sadly obvious reasons. Surely they,
too, are ‘the Germans’, as Goldhagen would like to put it. It can only follow that their culture has other continuities apart from the one that Goldhagen picks out. Their urge to
comprehend,
manner in which those two brave young people perished. The guillotine is a big price to pay for a conviction.)
A necessary conclusion, about the large and well-informed German-speaking audience for the arts, would be that if they were all eliminationist anti-Semites, they must have been strangely ready
to sideline their otherwise overmastering prejudice when it came to matters of aesthetic enjoyment. It’s not a conclusion that Goldhagen feels bound to draw, because he doesn’t even
consider the matter. Nor does he consider that the abuse heaped on Jewish artists by the Nazi propaganda machine before the
Machtergreifung
was a measure of the success they had achieved
in becoming a part of the landscape. Finally and fatally, he doesn’t consider that the massive and irreversible damage done to German-speaking culture by the repression, expulsion and murder
of the Jews was the full, exact and tragic measure of how they had been vital to it. Once again it is an awful thing to find oneself saying, but it has to be said: the
Reichskültur-kammer
, if it were still in business, couldn’t have done a better job of treating the Jewish contributors to German culture as if they had been an irrelevance,
simply begging to be swept away.
But a young historian can be forgiven for lacking the kind of cultural information that would bring such questions to the forefront. The richness of what the German-speaking Jews achieved before
the Nazi era takes time to assess. Harder to understand is Goldhagen’s apparent supposition that nothing much has happened in Germany
since
the Nazi era when it comes to his own
field – history. You would never know, from his book, that whole teams of German historians, in the full knowledge that they are trying to make bricks from rubble, have dedicated themselves
to the study of the catastrophe that distorted their intellectual inheritance. As in any other country at any time, there have been a few historians who have devoted prodigious resources to missing
the point. Of the star revisionists mixed up in the
Historikerstreit
, Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber at least had the merit of being too blatant to be plausible: they pretty well
blamed the Holocaust on the Soviet Union. Klaus Hildebrand and Michael Stürmer were more insidious because there was nothing wrong with their facts: after the Red Army crossed the German
border, the retreating
Wehrmacht
really
was
fighting heroically for its country’s heritage. Unfortunately their suggestion that post-war German patriotism might thus claim a
solid base was hopelessly compromised by the consideration that part of the heritage was the Holocaust. In his various essays and open letters about the
Historikerstreit
, Jürgen
Habermas (who, it is only fair to concede, admires Goldhagen’s book) was marvellous on the equivocations and the delusions of the revisionists, but on the main point he didn’t need to
be marvellous: it was too obviously true. The revisionist historian can’t reasonably hope to have a Germany that is not obsessed with the past. There can be no putting off shame to achieve
maturity. The shame
is
the maturity.
Most of the German historians are well aware of this. The revisionists did not prevail, and the work entailed in rebutting them had already become part of the accumulated glory of
Germany’s indigenous historical studies as the terrible twentieth century neared its end. But if German culture really had been nourished at its root by eliminationist anti-Semitism, as
Goldhagen argues, it is hard to see why so many of today’s German historians should now be so concerned about the Holocaust. Very few of them are Jews, for sadly obvious reasons. Surely they,
too, are ‘the Germans’, as Goldhagen would like to put it. It can only follow that their culture has other continuities apart from the one that Goldhagen picks out. Their urge to
comprehend,
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