SLOW MOTION PUTSCH FORESEEN?
Written by David Fetherolf to
The New York Review of Books,
November 20, 1998.

To the Editor:
In his preface to Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness, Martin Chalmers attacks Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Gordon A. Craig’s uncritical quote of Chalmers’ attack, reproduced in his review of 3 December, leaves me baffled. Chalmers and Craig have either misread Goldhagen’s basic thesis or share an unspoken agenda. A clue in Chalmers’ preface, left out of Craig’s review, is the line, “Goldhagen’s book is symptomatic of a tendency to search for simple, unambiguous, single-cause explanations for the mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany.” Chalmers, and perhaps Craig, have entirely misunderstood Goldhagen’s thesis, which deals with the complexity and ambiguity of human nature. Furthermore, the idea that the diary of a single individual could negate analysis of a societal nature is, in itself, not simple but simplistic.

Putting aside his assimilationist and anti-Zionist beliefs, Klemperer’s eyewitness account is necessarily biased. He is a man who was daily in fear of his life. This colored his perception indelibly. His very human way of dealing with his circumstances, evident on 12 April, 1933, is to marvel not once, but twice, at the politesse of two SA officials. He is already grasping at straws. If Chalmers and Craig are unaware of this most common defense mechanism, Klemperer is not. On 17 June, 1933, he begins, “Dialectic of the soul. During the day I now forcibly cling to some relatively pleasant event or other, even the most trivial thing.”

Klemperer’s diary supports Goldhagen’s thesis that people who behave in one way, on a personal level, behave in an entirely different way in societal groups. This is a common human phenomenon; witness the racist who, when confronted with his own bigotry replies, “Some of my best friends are [insert ethnicity or religion here.]”

This dichotomy between the micro and the macro is a large part of Goldhagen’s important work. That “ordinary” Germans were kind to a Jew they knew, but participated in the horrors of The Final Solution is exactly what Goldhagen was getting at. The butcher who was kind to Klemperer may have gone out on Kristallnacht to toss stones through the window of the Jewish tailor down the street. There were those who opposed the Nazis, but oh so quietly, giving a kind word of encouragement to the poor Jew in the street. This is the very crux of Goldhagen’s thesis. The existence of kind “ordinary” Germans—even those who remained visibly righteous in the face of their government’s atrocities—and the existence of organizations such as Die Weisse Rose do nothing to mitigate Goldhagen’s indictment of a complex, ambiguous societal construct. None but the most obtuse would take Goldhagen’s thesis to posit that every single German individual who drew breath between 1933 and 1945 is equally culpable.

The lesson of Goldhagen’s thesis is important to us today. Tyranny creeps in while the populace sleeps. Since the beginning of the 1980s, Americans have been steadily losing their basic rights under the Constitution. They have happily ceded these rights at a faster and faster pace (more quickly under the Clinton Administrations than ever before) in the name of “security.” Security from what? Why, security from “them”—the criminals, the indigent and yes, the immigrants. This goes largely unnoticed because the majority of Americans have yet to be adversely affected by the loss of these rights, and there appear to be tangible benefits.

By the time that we, the people, are adversely affected, it will be too late to turn back. Since the majority of Americans are “law-abiding,” it won’t even be seen as a problem, but as a solution. If we slide from our Federal Republic through the Parliamentary Democracy favored by those who have organized the slow motion putsch of the past year to a “benign” dictatorship, we will need another Goldhagen to wonder what complexities and ambiguities led us to that point. The fact that there are individuals alive today who speak and write about the diminution of our rights and the possible consequences will not serve to excuse our society at large from having allowed it to happen.

—David Fetherolf
—Composer