丹尼尔·戈德哈根

丹尼尔·戈德哈根（德语：Daniel Jonah Goldhagen，1959年6月30日—）美国作家，曾任哈佛大学政府和社会研究副教授。他因为关于犹太大屠杀的两本具有争议的书《希特勒的刽子手》（1996年）和《道德的清算》（2002年）而受到国际关注和广泛批评。他还著有《比战争更糟糕》（2009年），探讨了种族灭绝的现象，以及《永不消逝的魔鬼》（2013年），其中他追溯了全球反犹太主义的上升趋势。

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born June 30, 1959) is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen received attention as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide, and The Devil That Never Dies (2013), in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism.

Biography

Daniel Goldhagen was born in Boston, Massachusetts in a Jewish family, to Erich, a retired academic lecturer then professor, and Norma Goldhagen. He grew up in nearby Newton. His wife Sarah (née Williams) is an architectural historian, and critic for The New Republic magazine.

Goldhagen's father was interned in Czernowitz (which later became part of Ukraine in 1991). Goldhagen has written that his "understanding of Nazism and of the Holocaust is firmly indebted" to his father's influence. In 1977, Goldhagen entered Harvard, and remained there for some twenty years - first as an undergraduate and graduate student, then as an assistant professor in the Government and Social Studies Department.

During graduate studies, he attended a lecture by Saul Friedländer, in which he had what he describes as a "lightbulb moment": The functionalism versus intentionalism debate did not address the question, "When Hitler ordered the annihilation of the Jews, why did people execute the order?". Goldhagen wanted to investigate who the German men and women who killed the Jews were, and their reasons for killing.

Academic and literary career

As a graduate student, Goldhagen undertook research in the German archives. The thesis of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust proposes that, during the Holocaust, many killers were ordinary Germans, who killed due to being raised in a profoundly anti-semitic culture, and thus were acculturated—"ready and willing"—to execute the Nazi government's genocidal plans.

Goldhagen's first notable work was a book review titled "False Witness" published by The New Republic magazine on April 17, 1989. It was one in a series of hostile reviews of the 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? by an American-Jewish professor of Princeton University born in Luxembourg, Arno J. Mayer. Goldhagen wrote that "Mayer's enormous intellectual error" was in ascribing the cause of the Holocaust to anti-Communism, rather than to antisemitism, and criticized Mayer for saying that most massacres of Jews in the USSR, during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, were committed by local peoples (see the Lviv pogroms and Babyn Yar for more historical background), with little Wehrmacht participation. Goldhagen accused him also of misrepresenting the facts about the Wannsee Conference (1942), which was meant for plotting the genocide of European Jews, not (as Mayer said) merely the resettlement of the Jews. Goldhagen further accused Mayer of obscurantism, of suppressing historical fact, and of being an apologist for Nazi Germany, like Ernst Nolte, for attempting to "de-demonize" National Socialism. Also in 1989, historian Lucy Dawidowicz reviewed Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? in Commentary magazine, and praised Goldhagen's "False Witness" review, identifying him as a rising Holocaust historian who formally rebutted "Mayer's falsification" of history.