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Holocaust author looking at other genocides of the 20th century
Tuesday, April 21, 1998 By Bob Hoover, Book Editor, Post-Gazette
Appearing two years ago, the book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," sparked a heated debate that still rages.
The continuing controversy has kept its author, Daniel Goldhagen, on the go ever since. The 38-year-old Harvard history professor now spends much of his time defending his thesis that anti-Semitism had become so ingrained in the culture of Germany that vicious persecution of Jews was willingly carried out by its citizens.
Goldhagen will speak here tomorrow at the Holocaust Commemoration sponsored by the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh's Holocaust Center. The free event will be held at 7:30 p.m. at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, Oakland. It's part of Pittsburgh's observance of Yom Hashoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The youthful Goldhagen, who calls himself "Danny," is at work on a new book, he said in a hurried phone interview from Harvard last week.
"It's a general study of genocide in the 20th century," he said. "There's been an enormous amount of literature on the Holocaust, but it's just been one incident in a century of atrocities.
"I think it behooves us to think more broadly about what engenders these incidents today in places like Rwanda and Bosnia as well as in the past."
Goldhagen agrees with another writer on genocide, Iris Chang, whose 1997 book, "The Rape of Nanking," argued that Western nations tended to overlook other mass killings because they weren't in Europe.
"In the west, there's an enormous selective perception of things which has skewed our understanding of 20th-century genocide," Goldhagen said. "The Holocaust conforms very much to other genocides and studying it helps us to understand the others."
Central to these atrocities was the "dehumanizing" of people, he said. "And, in that way, the Holocaust was really no different."
Despite Goldhagen's charge that the persecution of Jews was a German, rather than a Nazi-inspired occurrence, "Hitler's Willing Executioners" has been a best-seller in Germany and earned the American a major award there.
"My book has sold more copies in Germany than anywhere else. It's been embraced by the German people," he said.
The reason for the book's success, said Goldhagen, is because "there's such an acute interest in Germany in the past."
"Hitler's Willing Executioners" has its critics, most recently Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein, who collaborated on "A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth," published last month.
Birn is a war crimes historian for the Canadian government, and Finkelstein teaches political science at Hunter College. Both accuse Goldhagen of distortions and unfair generalizations.
In response, the Anti-Defamation League, which supports Goldhagen's thesis, sought a retraction and unsuccessfully asked Henry Holt and Co., the publisher of "A Nation on Trial," to drop the book. Goldhagen said he now has no comment on the matter.
The South Hills Interfaith Ministries brings Nick Del Calzo, author of "The Triumphant Spirit," as the speaker for its Interfaith Holocaust Observance Sunday at Temple Emanuel, 1250 Bower Hill Road, Scott. The UJF is the cosponsor of the event. Del Calzo's book for young adults is a blend of photos and accounts of Holocaust survivors. He'll also be at Borders Books and Music, Bethel Park from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Sunday.
Thirty years ago, Arthur Morse, a reporter and producer for CBS-TV shows such as "See It Now" and "CBS Reports," published "While Six Million Died," one of the first accounts of how the U.S. government failed to respond to Nazi persecution of Jews. Morse was also one of the first to reveal the role of Raoul Wallenberg in rescuing Jews.
The book is still in print. Originally published by the old Harper & Row, it's now in paperback from the Overlook Press for $16.95. Former New York Times writer Herbert Mitgang wrote a new introduction.
Morse, whose widow, Joan Morse Gordon, lives in Pittsburgh, was killed in a car accident in the former Yugoslavia in 1971. He was then the 50-year-old executive director of the International Broadcast Institute.
Cathedral Publishing, a new venture at the University of Pittsburgh, has published "How Beautiful We Once Were" by Marga Randall, a Holocaust survivor who now lives in Upper St. Clair. Randall not only recounts her experiences as a young Jewish child in Nazi Germany, but of her return to Germany as an adult.
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