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studies have failed to do, namely, to integrate 'the micro, meso and macro levels' of the individual with the 'institutional and social context' (p. 266). For this purpose, Goldhagen examines a number of 'Daily Orders' [Tagesbefehle] issued by the Commander of the Order Police in Lublin in the years from 1942 to 1944, which are housed in the archives of the 'Central Agency'. These 'Daily Orders' communicate everyday events, like guard duties, sports events or movies or whatever the commander wants to be made public. Around the fifteen orders he selected, Goldhagen weaves a web of fantasies about the 'more conventional type of German cultural life' after the 'slaughtering [of] unarmed Jews by the thousands' (p. 263). He speculates on such questions as '... how many of the killers discussed their genocidal activities... when they went at night to their wives and girlfriends...' (p. 268), or as to 'whether they might have seen the irony in the title of a play "Man Without Heart"' (p. 270). Goldhagen has not one shred of a fact to rely on here. Everything is written in the 'if' style used in bad historical novels. This is not true historical research. The reason for the paucity of scholarly writing on the 'thick lives' of perpetrators, is not due to the lack of interest on the part of historians. Rather, it is a result of the fact that there is hardly any material available on which to base a study. Occasional finds in investigative files, for example, are so few and far between that the methodical research required would exceed the capacity of any researcher. Ordinarily, scholars accept the limitations that are imposed on them by the sources. 72 X [213] Goldhagen started out his book with some fundamentally disturbing questions: Why do we believe that Germans are like us? Why do we believe Germany was 'a normal society ... similar to our own' (p. 15)? Why assume the 'normalcy of the German people' (p. 31)? These remarks are made without any qualifiers as to a specific historical period. Goldhagen's recommendation is not to assume, but to review the Germans 'with the critical eye of an anthropologist' (p. 15), as if studying a foreign species. Goldhagen's book abounds with examples of his particular image of 'the Germans'. Suffice it to cite only a few here: the German is 'generally brutal and murderous in the use of other peoples' (p. 315), and is a 'member of an extraordinary, lethal political culture' (p. 456) whose cruelties stand out 'in the long annals of human barbarism' (p. 386). Similar expressions, as graphic as those cited, can be found on almost every page of the book, confirming Goldhagen's image of the counter-species his anthropological view has detected. Goldhagen's book is based on his Ph.D dissertation. Would someone receive a Ph.D. at Harvard who begins by posing the question whether blacks or women are human beings like 'us'? While the reader is not left in any doubt about 'the Germans', the more interesting question remains: Who are the normal 'we' referred to by Goldhagen in his book? The author never clarifies this explicitly. Instead the author offers his views on how people should normally react and hence how far outside normal human behaviour the perpetrators were. Normal people 'regard and respect' elders (p. 189), feel 'sympathy', pity (p. 357) and the 'instincts of nurturance' (p. 201) towards sick people, towards undernourished people, towards people lying in an exhausted condition on the street. 'After all, there is usually a natural flow of sympathy for people who suffer great wrongs' (p. 441). Goldhagen's concept of 'natural' human behaviour is striking. One glance at present day American social realities should be enough to raise doubt as to whether sick and weak people do necessarily arouse 'instincts of nurturance'. He ignores the equally evident human potential for evil and destructiveness. In a footnote (p. 581, n. 25) Goldhagen addresses this potential, but sees its acceptance as 'cynicism'. Hence he must attack any socio-psychological concepts that involve the allegedly 'universal psychological and social psychological factors' (p. 390, see also p. 409). He dismisses them as 'abstract, ahistorical explanations... conceived in a social-psychological laboratory' (p. 391, see also p. 389). Milgram's experiments on cruelty are brushed aside as providing 'untenable' (p. 383) explanations. By denying the possibility that the crimes committed during the Holocaust are within the scope of human behaviour, he places these crimes and its perpetrators outside the realm of human possibility open to others. Only the Germans could have behaved the way they did; nobody else. Their behaviour is 'unfathomable' and outside of 'our' world. As a consequence, it cannot be repeated by someone else. The Holocaust is reduced to a specific historical event, outside of 'our' world, separated from 'us'. The same can be said of Goldhagen's description of anti-Semitism. He insists that it is divorced from any real historical or social framework. On this basis, he rejects 73 explanations which equate economics or 'scapegoat strategies' with motives (pp. 39, 44). In his view, anti-Semitism is divorced from reality; it is irrational, wild, and hallucinatory. It is outside of the context of human interaction, and outside the context of human reason. He argues that there is a 'generally constant anti-Semitism becoming [214] more or less manifest' (p. 39) so that the observation of the decrease ... of anti- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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