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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Very much so, yes. possibly...the most legit. Go read it.
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Jun 29, 2015 07:42
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'll do the write up tomorrow but goldhagen is a laughing stock in historical circles. There is also strong evidence he willfully misrepresented some of the evidence in Executioners. It's one of the books that are more important for the discussions that they triggered.
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Jun 29, 2015 08:38
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Kazak_Hstan posted:Welp that was 500 some pages of misplaced Don't kick yourself over having read it. It is kind of a crappy book but it's an important one because . . . . JaucheCharly posted:It's one of the books that are more important for the discussions that they triggered. If you ever wan to get into the historiography of the Holocaust at the end of the 20th century you really have to be aware of the Goldhagen controversy and all the responses that it sparked. I should also note that Goldhagen's book is basically a love letter to the Sonderweg Thesis. Most scholars had rejected the most extreme versions of it long before he published and even those who held to it took a much more nuanced approach than had been common in the 50s-70s. Reading Executioners will give you a pretty firm grasp on what that argument is. Since you already read Goldhagen I can't recommend enough that you pick up Browning's Ordinary Men. He and Goldhagen do a lot of work on the same police unit so it's really interesting to see the different interpretations. Browning's book is also much thinner. You could bang it out in a weekend if you wanted. He also has an absolutely masterful tearing down of Goldhagen in the 2nd edition (and subsequent ones - cna't remember how many it's gotten), mostly because Goldhagen attacked him directly.
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Jun 29, 2015 14:09
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I'd prefer my bogus nazi history to involve wonder weapons, the occult, and ancient pagan rituals.
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Most of the time, if you read something that's bad in some way (refuted or patently untrue) you might still learn something about the historiography. That's why I slogged through David Irving's Hitler's War at some point.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:32
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:It's a real shame that Hitler's Willing Executions was on the loving New York Times bestseller list while Ordinary Men is obscure outside of people who study history. It's a useful reminder of what the typical reader actually wants and expects from a history book. Aside from stuff extraneous to the texts themselves, like how they were promoted by the publisher or how they fit into political affairs of the day, I think the "problem" with Browning is that his thesis is paradoxically more challenging than Goldhagen's. Willing Executioners has kind of a just-so explanation for the Holocaust. There was an evil antisemitism at large in the German national psyche and they acted on it when the Nazis called on them. Ordinary Men instead shows that the men Browning studies understood what they were doing was abhorrent, but they were easily convinced to act against their natural inclination. The consequences of refusal were very minor, it was just that very few men were willing to take responsibility for themselves, and most preferred to just go along. I was also struck by the fact that the best defense against being pressured into murder wasn't courage or emotional strength, because IIRC there's only one or two examples of men who just took a stand and refused. Rather, men who opted out of the killing usually did so because they were too weak to participate. I guess what I'm saying is that Ordinary Men is more challenging because it makes a point about people in general, that the reader has to confront in himself--under the right (wrong) conditions, you or I could also have done this thing. I think Goldhagen's argument that there was something special in the German national character--echoing the Sonderweg thesis--comes too close to letting the reader off the hook.
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Jun 29, 2015 22:13
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/w...WT.nav=top-news
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Jul 1, 2015 19:04
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Maybe the most mad thing about him is he kept it secret for so long
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Jul 1, 2015 20:04
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Just finished Wages of Destruction. It was very good, even without much formal economics coursework. I think I only took micro and macro in undergrad. I definitely appreciated that he didn't spend much time rehashing the 'coming to power' or 'origins' narrative. However, the time he did send on it was pretty insightful; I was vaguely aware that the various rationales the Nazis used to gain power (reparations, etc.), and mythology of Nazi accomplishments (stabilizing the Mark, economic recovery, etc.) were exaggerated at best, however Tooze's account of just what the later Weimar governments did was instructive. Some of the inter party power struggles between industrialists and various schemes of industrial control were pretty interesting. It definitely cracks the notion of some kind of Nazi monolith. Picked up Ordinary Germans, will probably read it during my next field stint. Any recommendations for a post-war account of German industry? At one point near the end of the book Tooze listed the biggest firms in the reich and noted they comprise the nucleus of Germany's high quality manufacturing industry. It would be interesting to read an account of how they negotiated the post-war devastation, the Marshall Plan, how the various Nazi collaborators in industry fared, etc. I read the Wikipedia on IG Farben and its breakup into several well-known companies today, which was fairly interesting, particularly that you can still buy (in some countries) Zyklon B insecticide from one of them. One comment in the later chapters spurred a question: Tooze noted the tension between ideologues murdering skilled Jews and industrialists who wanted to use the skills of those Jews, and included a shout out to Oskar Schindler. How much of the Schindler story as popularly understood is true? I assume much of it is, given Schindler's involvement in Yad Vashem, but I also assume pretty much any popular hero narrative is overblown.
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Jul 12, 2015 03:12
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He did a lot of good but the movie version glosses over a lot of flaws. He was an industrialist who had no problem profiting off slave labor and military contracts. To his credit he grew a conscience when he realized how myrderous the system was and spent a lot of his [arguably I'll gotten] wealth in saving lives.
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Jul 12, 2015 05:11
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