“HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?” - THE GOLDHAGEN DEBATE 25 YEARS LATER IN PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS, HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE CULTURE OF REMEMBRANCE

Abstract

In 1996, a book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, an American sociologist of Jewish origin, entitled “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust was published. In the book, Goldhagen does not essentially talk about war criminal Nazis, but about “war criminal Germans” related to a special type of eliminationist anti-semitism rooted in the “German cultural model”. On the basis of the book, an extensive theoretical debate developed on anti-semitism and the Holocaust, and the motivation of the perpetrators of ordinary people. The review of the development of the historiography of the Holocaust, from the mid-nineties of the 20th century until today, outlined in this paper, also served us to approximate the criteria and standards of the time before, during and after the Goldhagen debate. Its central themes show us the change when the historian, instead of asking how, asks why something happened. Placed in a certain theoretical, temporal, spatial and realpolitik context, this debate, in the new political framework after the unification of Germany and in the search for external and internal homogenizing elements at the beginning of the 21st century, was also brought up in Serbian historiography. We tried to see how the theoretical issues related to this debate influenced the observation of the Genocide against the Serbs in the NDH (Independent State of Croatia). The increasingly frequent collectivization of guilt, after the “wars for Yugoslav succession”, in the contemporary discourse of Germany and the West, in which this guilt is by rule attached to the Serbs, shows the devastating results of the weak influence of historiography on politics, but also the strong influence of politics on historiography.