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The first version of this essay was presented to Rhetorics of Culture: A Conference on Historical Anthropology in Honor of S.C. Humphreys at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, September 24-26, 1999. With thanks to the staff of the Landesarchiv in Linz, Upper Austria, and to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for generous research assistance. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for opening a different course for my argument.
Daniel Goldhagen's much-debated explanation of Germans' criminal imposition of the Holocaust on Europe's Jews was grounded in a culturally embedded German hatred for Jews, carried forward with varying degrees of intensity, itself unchanged for centuries by historical experience, until it was mobilized by the rise to political power of Nazi exterminism and was acted out in labor and death camps and in ad hoc, open-air sites where frontline perpetrators killed, willingly, millions of Jews.1It does not diminish the central significance of Jewish victims to say that they were murdered alongside millions of non-Jews. One snag in any exclusive antisemitism narrative is what to do about those others who were also explicitly targeted in an arguably unique and unprecedented German escalation of mass murder. By taking up the exterminist aspects of this civilizational collapse, this article wants to explore the possibility of an alternative long-duration narrative that draws on a historical anthropology that does not require a transhistorical cultural formation and leaves room for an enlarged identification of victims, including victims of antisemitism.2
Beginning with his title, Goldhagen is concerned throughout to point repeatedly to "ordinary Germans" and their will-formation for the killing. Christopher Browning also echoes this ordinariness of the perpetrators in his examination of comparable mass murders taking place elsewhere under the General Plan for the East.3For both analysts, ordinariness is a quality necessary for each of their, at first sight, divergent explanations for perpetrators' motivations. Ordinariness allows Goldhagen to characterize "the Germans" according to a model from cognitive anthropology by which one can purport to scale groups' socially acquired performance models as these are embedded in a continuously reproduced everyday culture, focusing in particular on the mobilizing capacity of a culture's central "stable source...