© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved.
Generations, Emotion and Critical Enquiry: A British View of Changing Approaches to the Study of Nazi Germany*
University of Edinburgh
jill.stephenson@ed.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The only ‘mission statement’ that an academic discipline requires is that its purpose is the pursuit of critical enquiry. In history, as with some other disciplines, this means adducing evidence in order to test hypotheses. Yet, in some recent approaches to the history of Nazi Germany, this has seemed not to be enough. Reasoning on the basis of evidence has been displaced by what one can only call emotion—the movement of feelings. The emotion that is most evident is a desire, even a visceral need, to affirm the Germans’ ‘collective guilt’ for the Holocaust; in some cases this appears to be driven by another emotion, anger. The desire and the need entail holding virtually everyone living in Germany under Hitler's regime responsible for the maintenance of the dictatorship and, especially, for sustaining policies of racial discrimination and murder. This was at the core of the debate over Daniel J. Goldhagen's