File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9712, message 8


Date: Mon, 1 Dec 1997 22:59:34 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: A Goldhagen disciple (of relative sorts)


        

Just received Jeffrey Herf's new book, *Divided Memory: The Nazi past in the
two Germanys*, which purports to be the definitive history of
"de-Nazification" in both the FRG and the GDR.  Like Goldhagen, whom he
obviously admires, and who served the book as a reader for Harvard
University Press, Herf is much concerned not only with Germany, but, to an
equal or perhaps greater extent, with the Jews and with the state of Israel,
itself.

Herf discerns a split of sorts within the ruling circles of the GDR during
the early days of the new republic.  Those Communists who had spent the war
years in exile in Mexico, Herf asserts, were profoundly more sensitive to
the anti-Semitic nature of the German people, and promoted a policy of
generous restitution, both to Holocaust survivors and, later, to the State
of Israel itself.  Such policies, however, did not long survive the revival
of anti-Semitism in Stalin's Russia, and its advocates were subsequently
purged by those who insisted on an anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli policy that
simultaneously erased the Holocaust from East Germany's official memory.
This basic fact of political denial was further augmented by a salient
feature of German Communist thinking; the German people had overwhelmingly
supported the Hitler regime, and "deserved" a dictatorship over a population
that, in essence, could not be trusted.

Herf's "thesis" -- gleaned, admittedly, from a quick reading of key chapters
-- is that, while each Germany differed radically in its assessment of its
Nazi past, as well as the steps both took to vitiate it, each achieved
curiously analogous results.  "De-Nazification" in the FRG, however, clearly
comes out the winner in Herf's book, largely as a result of the actions of
that government (a result, clearly, of domestic US pressure), including the
payment of reparations and the fashioning of a "decent" policy regarding
Israel.  According to Nerf, the east Germans were just too wrapped up in
associating Jews with "imperialist, capitalist America" to make a clean
break with their anti-Semitic past.

Thus, Herf takes the Goldhagen thesis beyond 1945.  Attitudes toward the
Jews, and the State of Israel is the ultimate litmus test of the worthiness
of one's beliefs, as an individual or as a nation fighting to overcome a
sordid past while struggling to build a new society based on justice,
equality and peace.  Germans, it seems, are just incorrigible anti-Semites,
and being Communist only makes it worse.

Herf ostensibly spent a good deal of time in recently opened GDR archives,
but much of his work -- like Goldhagen's -- is based on secondary sources
long available to historians, though with an "original" document being used
from time to time in some insignificant, anecdotal fashion.  

Has anyone else seen it?  And what did you think?

Louis Godena 
    



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