The willing misinterpreter.

• Author: Rieff, David
• Position: Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity - Book review

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 672 pp., $29.95.

It is hard to believe that the erstwhile-Harvard political scientist turned fulltime moralist, pro-Israel polemicist and amateur historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen could have a more devoted admirer than, well, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. In his first book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, he stated baldly that explaining why the Holocaust occurred required a radical revision of "what has until now been written" and that his book was that revision. His next effort, A Moral Reckoning, claimed to expose the malign role of the Catholic Church not only during the Holocaust but pretty much from its inception, since, according to Goldhagen, the Church had been the central locus of Western anti-Semitism almost from its founding.

Having, by his own lights, first single-handedly rebutted what he called the "false paradigm" about the Holocaust, replaced its mendacities with his true rendering, before finally unmasking the Catholic Church and its clergy's enormous "crimes and transgressions," the historical contours of which, he has said, "no one can rightly deny," Goldhagen has now written Worse Than War, a book whose modest goal is to "reconceptualize, understand anew, interpret differently, explain adequately, and to propose workable responses to [the] catastrophic and systematic problem of eliminationism."

And on the seventh day, He rested.

Worse Than War is, depending on your point of view, either the logical conclusion of the path Goldhagen has been taking for the past fifteen years or its reductio ad absurdum. Despite Goldhagen's extraordinary claims, he himself concedes in his unwittingly revealing afterword that he is not presenting much in the way of original research. That, however, is just fine with him since, as he puts it, the book "is not meant to be an exhaustive documentation of any individual mass murderer, let alone a history of our time's sweep of mass murders, let alone eliminations."

Why his decision to write books that, to use a self-description he employed at the time of the publication of A Moral Reckoning in 2003, are "primarily about morality, not history," while simultaneously claiming for himself the authority to denounce or condescend to (condescension being a Goldhagen trope) the work of many of the finest historians working today should be just fine with us is another subject matter.

This pattern began with Hitler's Willing Executioners, where, when he wasn't busy laying down the moral law, Goldhagen was largely arguing against the historiographical consensus about the Holocaust (the great Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, drew his particular scorn). If he had an essentialist view of German history from the early nineteenth century to the fall of Berlin in 1945 (that essence, broadly speaking, being what he calls eliminationist anti-Semitism), Goldhagen felt equally confident in his ability to discern and lavishly praise the moral regeneration of the post-Nazi German state and society.

The problem, whether when he was doling out praise or blame, as the historian of Nazism Christopher Browning (Goldhagen's bete noire in Hitler's Willing Executioners) pointed out more than a decade ago, is that Goldhagen has shown a tendency in his work to claim to be blazing new trails in understanding when, in reality, his own views are not so far as he imagines from the conventional wisdom he so excoriates and about which he claims to be writing to correct and reform.

Despite what Goldhagen claimed, few historians before him had denied that "ordinary Germans" participated willingly in the murder of European Jewry. Nor did the scholars who came before him believe that those ordinary Germans killed out of fear of reprisal. In other words, the concept of Hitler's willing executioners was the consensus view of historians long before Goldhagen turned his Harvard dissertation into a global best seller.

His follow-up effort, A Moral Reckoning, was after bigger game than historians. For all intents and purposes, Goldhagen's claim in that book was that the Catholic Church and its clergy had done so much harm over the sweep of centuries--harm culminating in the ideological facilitation of the Holocaust--that collectively their duty was clearly to engage in the most urgent kind of what Goldhagen, echoing the catechism, called "moral repair," based on the history he, Goldhagen, had indisputably established with his book. But had he? Again, Goldhagen took something well-known--the accusations of the Vatican's complicity in the Holocaust--and married it to something far less debatable (and not disputed by most serious Catholic historians): the tragic strain of anti-Semitism in Church history. And, Unable to resist an essentialist reading, Goldhagen made the former the exemplification of the latter, which then became the central moral fact of Church history.

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Worse Than War has some of this same reinvent-the-wheel quality to it. In fact, while Worse Than War is both long and turgid, it is rather less of an accomplishment than either its length or Goldhagen's claims for the work might lead the reader to assume.

As with his analysis of what he called German, eliminationist anti-Semitism in Hitler's Willing Executioners and the...