Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

[Democracyinkind]

5. Depends.

My first assertion is based on all those conference lunches, book opening buffets, etc., that I had to attend over the years. Bring up Goldhagen at such a venue and you're guaranteed to have fun. Additionally, I was already living in Europe when the book came out. Naturally, it was a bit more controversial here. My coming of age coincided with the Goldhagen wars, I therefore remember them vividly, I also quite disticntly remember it being the first time that I'd perceive this diffuse wish within me to actually know about that stuff; I remember that that was one of the first times that I'd actually wished I had an opinion of my own.

As to the second part, about the writing, I should have left that out. Among the many things to criticize in Goldhagen's book, language is about the last thing I really care about. The main criticism is methodological. My boss used to cite Goldhagen and another book... called, "other losses" as examples of what happens when historians don't give a crap about methodology. Other losses is that 80ish book (can't remember the author) about how the Americans allegedly starved millions of German POW's after the Second World War (which is simply not true).

That would be my answer, then. Though I'm not completely sure that you were serious in asking - I'm surely no zealot or anything like that (arguing for the truth, which in this case is anti-Goldhagen, can make for some strange bedfellows - that Goldhagen wrote a piss poor book was about the only assesment I shared with the holocaust deniers that I loved to engage back then.)