| Abstract | [Geoffrey H. Hartman]'s view that public memory, with its overwhelming information and incessant images, is eroding personal and collective forms of remembrance too easily replicates the modernist trope of denouncing mass culture, without inquiring into the specific character of how public memory has altered and transformed collective memory. But his analysis is correct insofar as it is itself symptomatic of the "discontent" with public memory that I have tried to assess. The controversies that accompanied the "Americanization" of the Holocaust and the difficulties of establishing a consensus in the institutions of public commemoration occurred in the atmosphere of the post-Bitburg era. Bitburg accelerated the imperative to fit the Holocaust to a universal commitment of Americans to civic responsibility needed to go beyond the ethnic requirements of a Judeocentric remembrance and establish a Holocaust for all Americans. This is not in itself disreputable nor is it necessarily the "wrong" message. In fact, just as conservatives have charged that universalism effaces the affirmation of Jewish identity contained in the story of Jewish oppression, some liberal critics have argued that the universalism of the U.S. Holocaust Museum is not universal enough: "in putting the Holocaust Museum on the Mall, we ask for a guarantee of safety based less on general principles than on a past history of special victimization."(86) But it is not the only message, and one of the "discontents" of universalization is to introduce a level of abstraction that has left many perplexed about its ultimate effects. Hence, we can begin to see some of the reasons for the unprecedented public success of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, a book which dramatically departs from that story by emphasizing precisely those elements that are left out by any universalizing narrative: it obsessively depicts not Nazi "evil," racism or intolerance, but murderers and perpetrators who are always given a name, the "Germans," a motive, the peculiarly German variant of anti-Semitism ("eliminationist"), and a unique sadism, evident in the pleasure with which they perpetrate their cruelty. Unlike the narratives we have just discussed, [Daniel Jonah Goldhagen]'s Holocaust is violent, demonizing, particularistic, Judeocentric and concrete, emphatically so. It reestablishes the hierarchy of hatred among the victims, thus overwhelmingly rejecting the pluralist inclusivity that is so manifest in the new public memory of the Holocaust. Many scholars may have found it inconceivable that after so much historiographical sophistication and nuanced debate there should be a return to a simplistic portrayal of these matters in terms of the stark juxtaposition of Germans against Jews, ordinary Germans as opposed to "ordinary men," and in terms of a univocal murderous anti-Semitism embraced by a nation of "willing executioners." But against the background of the institutionalization of an "authoritative" narrative in America, Goldhagen's version of the story has a transgressive dimension that restores many of the motifs that prevailed when Jewish memory did not yet have to contend with its public presence or its universalist instrumentalization. The impact of Goldhagen's book therefore should be first and foremost considered an event in the public sphere, and as such serves as a counterdiscourse to the "Americanization of the Holocaust." It is perhaps for this reason that historians have found themselves so perplexed by the extraordinary public resonance of a book which represents for many of them "un succès de scandale."
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