3:15-5:00 pm Sunday, January l6, 2005 - Congregation Beth Israel
Understanding the Limits of Representations of Catastrophe: The Case of the Holocaust: Panel Discussion
Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners
Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader
Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Golems of Gotham and Second Hand Smoke
Richard Weisberg, author of Failure of the Word, and Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France
Ed Rothstein, N.Y. Times Critic at Large - "The Role of Literary and Artistic Works on the Holocaust"

5:00-6:00 pm Sunday, January l6, 2005 - Congregation Beth Israel
Cocktail Hour: Keynote Speaker: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
"On Producing An Accurate Narrative of the Holocaust and Other Genocides"

Associate Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University

Associate of Harvard's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies

author of Hitler's Willing Executioners:Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

Hitler's Willing Executioners is based upon his doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics.
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. We hope they will enrich your understanding of this revolutionary new analysis of the Holocaust, which has riveted thousands of readers and provoked impassioned discussion in both America and Europe.

It is a question that has haunted the world for the last half-century and produced a host of theories: How could the Holocaust happen? In Hitler's Willing Executioners, the product of years of studying the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen gives a radical new answer: Germans degraded, brutalized, and slaughtered Jews not, as has previously been asserted, because Germans were coerced, because of irresistible social or psychological pressure, or because they were slavishly obedient to their Führer and merely following orders, but because a virulent form of antisemitism that had been generations in the making permeated German society, leading Germans to believe that the extermination was justified and necessary.

By the time Hitler came to power, Goldhagen attests that the hatred of Jews was a fully accepted, even institutionalized element of the culture; hence he found no shortage of willing executioners among ordinary Germans with whom to implement his terrible "final solution." Chillingly, Goldhagen uses the killers' own words to describe their actions and the mental world that made such actions possible.
Hitler's Willing Executioners is a devastating portrait of a deluded society as well as a provocative work of scholarship that challenges fifty years of conventional wisdom.

click here to purchase Hitler's Willing Executioners:Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust