Submitted by:   Jeremiah Riemer
                jriemer@erols.com

In the matter of Goldhagen vs. Birn and H-GERMAN's discussion of this
dispute, I find myself 1) much less worried about the global "chilling
effect" most H-GERMAN subscribers automatically assume to have emanated
from Goldhagen's demand for a retraction and 2) much more concerned with
how H-GERMAN members have completely avoided very specific issues of
substance and interpretation raised by this episode. Most of the messages
on "Criticism in Jeopardy" are alarmist flights of speculation about
questions we cannot answer until we have more facts in front of us.  At
the same time, more central problems for which we already have plenty of
evidence are being skirted left and right.

By reminding subscribers that "the content of Goldhagen's book was
discussed thoroughly over a year ago and is not really the issue now,"
H-GERMAN has in effect bracketed further discussion about the very issues
that go to the core of Goldhagen's dispute with Birn. Goldhagen (in "The
Fictions of Ruth Bettina Birn," _German Politics and Society_ 15, 3, Fall
1997, p. 156) has accused Birn of a "wholesale misrepresentation of my
book's contents." Whether one regards Birn's article as a devastating blow
against Goldhagen or a self-inflicted wound (or none of the above), her
claim to have said something new and significant in the _Historical
Journal_ is not devoid of content either. For better or worse, form and
substance cannot be so easily separated here.

Goldhagen's response to Birn in _German Politics and Society_ was
mentioned twice in the first H-GERMAN posting. One historian, Jorg
Bottger, says he has read it, but only to pronounce that "It's getting
pretty ugly!" and to repeat unverified speculation that Goldhagen's aim is
to "silence a critic with legal means." Neither the editors nor subsequent
contributors give any indication of having compared Goldhagen's reply
against Birn's arguments and evidence in the _Historical Journal_.
Virtually the entire debate on H-GERMAN is proceeding on the basis of an
implicit agreement with the assessment made by the FAZ reporter (and
highlighted by the first H-GERMAN message on this subject): "Das Neuartige
und Ungewoehnliche dieses Vorgangs liegt darin, dass hier ein Autor
versucht, wissenschaftliche Kritik nicht durch Argumente zu widerlegen,
sondern mit dem Hinweis auf ein eventuell einzuleitendes Gerichtsverfahren
zu unterbinden.  Dergleichen ist in der 'scientific community' unueblich."

What is wrong with this statement? Quite apart from the _editorial_
implication that Goldhagen has forfeited his right to membership in the
community of scholars, it is the _empirical_ assumption that argument and
evidence do not matter to this particular author, since he can always
resort to the legal system as an alternative. Whatever one may think about
the wisdom or fairness of Goldhagen's demand for a retraction by Birn,
what FAZ maintains here (and with which H-GERMAN seems to concur) is
precisely _not_ what Goldhagen is doing: He is not using legal
communication as an alternative to debate. Rather, arguments and evidence
of the kind he marshals in _German Politics and Society_ form the basis
for his legal action. Goldhagen wants a retraction based on scholarly
reasoning, not as an alternative to the same. Whether law and scholarship
can or should be linked this way is a point very much worth debating, but
it is not the same as a pseudo-debate over the supposed use of legal
threats as a way of avoiding debate. On the other hand, H-GERMAN's
pronouncement of closure on substantive matters and its contributors'
numerous protestations of offense at the disrespectful attack-dog methods
Goldhagen allegedly uses against reputable rival scholars (a charge he
answers in _German Politics and Society_) do distract from real debate.

Much has been made of documents in the Birn-Goldhagen affair. What do the
publicly available documents tell us, and on what issues are they silent?

First, what we know: Anyone can read Birn's review and Goldhagen's
response. In my initial reading of Birn's review, I was struck by two
aspects of her argument -- one somewhat intriguing, the other quite
disconcerting, neither very satisfying. First of all, Birn advances a
number of methodological objections to Goldhagen's use of archival
evidence and judicial testimony. For example, she puts forth the
interesting notion that war crime defendants' expressions of Nazi
ideological zeal should not be taken at face value because appearing
fanatical was often part of an exculpatory defense strategy. Birn's
methodological views are radically different -- indeed, often the very
reverse -- of Goldhagen's, and certainly worthy of debate. Secondly,
however, Birn also makes a number of assertions about Goldhagen's book
that any careful reader should immediately recognize as distortions of his
arguments. Most dramatically, there is her claim that Goldhagen has denied
"the possibility that the crimes committed during the Holocaust are within
the scope of human behavior" (p. 213).

Nothing in Birn's essay persuaded me that the documents prove Goldhagen
wrong. I found no archival "smoking gun." While the article piqued my
curiosity about what those papers in the Ludwigsburg Zentralstelle (ZStL)
actually say, and how I might be able to test both Goldhagen's and Birn's
interpretations against them, Birn offered nothing more conclusive than
footnotes at the bottom of the page and interpretive assertions in the
body of the article. By my count, there are just two actual quotes from
ZStL documents that allow any reader to see who is being more forthright
about this evidence. In one case, where the issue is whether a Police
Battalion medical orderly expresses shame about killing Jewish patients in
a hospital or merely about "this way of acting" ("diese Handlungsweise"),
it appears that Goldhagen has given us the fuller citation (see Birn _HJ_,
p. 199 & fn. 6; Goldhagen, _GPS_, p. 135 and p. 161, fn. 17). In the other
case, where the issue is whether one word ("Nuessknacken)" in a song about
teaching Jews a lesson refers metaphorically to the cracking of skulls,
Goldhagen concedes that he may have misread this one word in the poem, but
rejects Birn's claim that his is a "blatantly false rendering of original
text" and points out how Birn neglects to mention the contexts (Christmas
and one other "social gathering of the killers") in which this poem
celebrating the humiliation of Jews was recited (see Birn, _HJ_, p. 211,
and fn. 41; Goldhagen, _GPS_, p. 163, fn. 27). In both cases,
incidentally, the more complete record of information is to be found not
only in Goldhagen's _GPS_ response to Birn, but also in _Hitler's Willing
Executioners_.

In his response to Birn in _GPS_, Goldhagen makes the effort
(successfully, in my view) to tell us what is wrong with what I have
called the second aspect of Birn's review. Through a meticulous
reconstruction of her rhetorical devices, he shows how Birn arrives at a
picture of _Hitler's Willing Executioners_ bearing little resemblance to
the book he actually wrote. The major distortion, he argues, comes from
the way Birn turns carefully argued statements Goldhagen makes into wild
generalizations out of context. It is insufficiently appreciated in the
community of historians -- and it will no doubt shock many H-GERMAN
subscribers to hear me say this -- how carefully and contextually
Goldhagen has stated his case. As I wrote in _die tageszeitung_ over a
year ago, the interpretive problems arising out of his book are not due to
"simplification," but to Goldhagen's "different appreciation of
complexity." If H-GERMAN members can suspend their aesthetic judgment on
how "ugly" the debate is getting, they will find the _German Politics and
Society_ piece a useful reminder of this point.

Goldhagen does not (in my view) deal exhaustively with the first aspect of
Birn's review, her methodological differences with his manner of
evaluating testimony. He argues that Birn's entire explanatory edifice
collapses under the weight of her misreading of his book, that her
"attacks on my use of archival sources are rendered moot because their
basis -- without which they do not even make sense -- is her fictional
positions that she falsely attributes to me" (Goldhagen, _GPS_, p. 156). I
remain to be convinced that this disposes of every last methodological
objection Birn entertains. However, Goldhagen does make a very convincing
case that their dispute cannot now be settled by discussing "archival
material to which people do not have ready access" (Goldhagen, _GPS_, p.
156). And, even if the specific misrepresentations Goldhagen answers
constitute only a sample of her method, it is a large and representative
sample.

This exchange of arguments is what we know from the public record. But
there is much that we do not know, mostly about Goldhagen's demand for a
retraction and Birn's response. Birn is our major source for this, since
she has expressed her anxieties and speculated on the background to
Goldhagen's action in both FAZ and Spiegel. To the press she has made the
odd and disturbing remark that Goldhagen's book "zeichnet, boese gesagt,
den Holocaust als Andachtsbild fuer den reichen nachgeborenen Spender in
Amerika, fuer alle, die Betroffenheit, aber keine Selbstzweifel mehr
spueren sollen" (Spiegel, November 10, 1997, p. 267.) (This remark is an
answer to _Spiegel_'s leading question about whether Goldhagen's book
"placates the victims' and the perpetrators' side alike," so one can only
hope Birn is not implying that American Jewish philanthropists ought to
feel "self- doubt" about the Holocaust.) Goldhagen responded to the FAZ
story in a letter published on November 12 (p. 15) saying that the
retraction of proven error is the only issue here and that he welcomes
debate. But here is what we do not know: Although Birn expresses amazement
(Spiegel, p. 266) that Goldhagen did not publish his response in the
_Historical Journal_, we do not know whether the _Historical Journal_, a
journal supposedly committed to scholarly debate rather than self-
aggrandizing exposes, offered Goldhagen equal time to answer her serious
charges. Though many statements from FAZ, Der Spiegel, and H-GERMAN urge
us to feel sorry for Birn and blame Goldhagen for making her feel
"eingeschuechtert" (_Spiegel_, p. 266), we do not know everything about
the sources of her nervousness. We do not know how Cambridge University
Press or her employer at the Canadian Justice Ministry are now
(re)assessing her scholarly and professional work, nor do we know if the
prospect (undoubtedly humiliating) of having to issue a retraction
admitting that there are distortions in her review might be properly
creating "Selbstzweifel" of her own. Although Ken Ledford blankly asserts
that "one purpose of suing an historian . . . MUST be the financial ruin
of that historian," we do not know (and I personally doubt) that this is
Goldhagen's goal. The legal and journalistic communications at issue here
have been going on within a "black box." Not even the parties immediately
affected know everything that's going on. What purpose is served by
amplifying the noises in these vacuum tubes?

Ken Ledford's learned speculation about "forum-shopping for the defamation
law that is MOST restrictive of free scholarly exchange and EASIEST to use
to inflict punishment through legal defense costs" strikes me as highly
implausible. My skepticism goes to another unstated confusion pervading
H-GERMAN's discussion of this dispute: Why is it being assumed that
Goldhagen can combine the British standard making defamation actions
easier with the American penchant for frivolous lawsuits? In a British
suit, the burden of proof standard may favor plaintiff over defendant, but
it is my understanding that as a safeguard against suing lightly the
British impose trial costs on the loser. Neither comparative legal
analysis nor trans-Atlantic legal strategy is a game of mix and match.

The widespread speculation -- by Birn, the German media, and now H-GERMAN
-- about how either Goldhagen's action or his book is connected to some
wider trend (whether among American Jews, as both FAZ and Spiegel prefer,
or among multinational corporations, as David Crawford ruminates) -- would
not be worth commenting on if it were not such a prominent part of what
Goldhagen rightly identifies as a Vermeidungsdiskurs. How Goldhagen
functions as an agent of big publishing companies or an
identity-crisis-ridden Jewish community remains a mystery; neither the
mechanisms nor the direction of influence are ever specified. Is Goldhagen
manipulating PR resources at his special command, or is the corporate
apparatus using him? How widely should we cast this net of corporate
manipulation of history? Should we include _Historical Journal_ consulting
editor Paul Kennedy's _The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers_ --
commercially published with Random House, heavily promoted on TV and radio
talk shows, and giving its author celebrity status in _Spiegel_ and other
news weeklies? Or conclude that the persistent German interest in what
Kennedy has to say in his post-Cold-War sequel merely reflects a stubborn
European resentment at America's sole-superpower status? In place of all
this vague and silly conspiratorial conjecture, I prefer what might be
called the "single bulletin theory" of Goldhagen:  Whatever the resources
at his disposal (and whatever the broader social sources of his lay
audience's fascination with this academic book), he is acting alone.

The most disturbing of these "contextual" interpretations is the ill-
informed yet sanctimonious conclusion FAZ draws (November 4, 1997, p. 41):
"Dieser ganze Vorgang, Goldhagens freundliche, aber stahlharte
Intransigenz als 'Bote' bestaetigt den Befund der israelischen
Historikerin Gulie Neeman Arad. Sie analysierte die Goldhagen- Kontroverse
im kulturellen Kontext der Vereinigten Staaten und sah in ihr den Ausdruck
einer tiefgreifenden Verunsicherung der amerikanischen orthodoxen Juden."
Whatever else Goldhagen may be, he is certainly not a spokesman for
America's Orthodox Jews. Furthermore, anyone halfway familiar with the
sociology and public debates of American Jews would know that it is
secular and non- Orthodox Jews who are expressing more concern about
assimilation and cultural identity, whereas the Orthodox (with higher
birthrates, lower rates of intermarriage, and greater certainty about
religious dogmas) are confident about their future (and even begrudgingly
admired for this by their secular and Reform opponents). Even if FAZ and
Arad had correctly analyzed the relationship between the Holocaust and
American Jewish identity, it would have no bearing on the validity of
Goldhagen's scholarship. It would be too embarrassing even to mention this
if it were not essential to illustrate the direction Spiegel and FAZ are
taking the Vermeidungsdiskurs once more. Playing upon ignorance and
suspicion of the most prominent Diaspora community, they are turning the
Goldhagen debate into a Jewish problem.

I concur wholeheartedly with Ken Ledford's sentiment that "we should write
the truth in our criticisms of each other, fearlessly and openly" and "be
cautious as well." These are (by no means abstract) sentiments with which
Goldhagen agrees (indeed, he says as much in his letter to FAZ), though he
obviously thinks British laws about truth in publishing are preferable to
what the ACLU and probably most American scholars think about the exercise
of these liberties. I see no harm in taking up a collection for Ruth
Bettina Birn, though I detect no urgency to do so either. (In his letter
to the FAZ, Goldhagen says it is the _Historical Journal_ that he has
asked for a retraction. Does Cambridge University Press not have lawyers
as competent and pockets as deep as Goldhagen's?) Unlike Dan Rogers, I do
not feel that "a cold wind is blowing . . . as I am typing these words,"
nor am I going to change my insurance policy. But I can think of a more
fruitful collective action historians and other social scientists might
undertake to help resolve disputes like this (and which was hinted at in a
previous H-GERMAN discussion): Lobby for whatever changes in German
privacy and public information laws are needed to get documents on the
Holocaust into print, where every undergraduate can read them.

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