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Home , Christopher Browning

Introduction

Jürgen Matthäus and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan

“Book titles that claim to be ‘beyond’,” write the editors of a book to which this characterisation applies, “reveal two things: first, that the book in question is defined by a critique of the phenomenon or concept that it seeks to tran- scend, but second, that what is transcended – the thing the book is ‘beyond’ – is easier to define than the book’s ultimate destination.”1 This book raises the same question. Christopher R. Browning’s oeuvre, and specifically his ground- breaking Ordinary Men, provides a rich backdrop to diverse reflections on , its causes and consequences as well as the state of the field. Yet are the reflections assembled here cogent and coherent enough to allow the identification of a distinct objective of inquiry? Not all readers will come to the same conclusion. Most succinctly put, this volume explores a small section of the world that Jean Améry described as one in which “man exists only by ruining the other person who stands before him.”2 And while the Nazi regime embodies this world in all its enormity, the obsession with destroying the other as a person and as member of a group did not start or end with the Second World War. In their monographs and journal articles, many historians of the Holocaust, twentieth-century genocide, and modern European history as well as scholars of related disciplines have engaged the moderate functional- ist approaches of Ordinary Men or the interweaving of perpetrator and vic- tim histories with memory studies in Remembering Survival. Nevertheless, Browning’s critically important contributions so far have remained rather under-examined.3 Similarly, few essay collections combine methodological

1 Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard F. Wetzell, “Introduction,” in Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking , ed. idem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 23. 2 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 35. 3 For some important exceptions see Wulf Kansteiner, “Sense and Sensibility: The Complicated Holocaust Realism of ,” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, ed. Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Pressner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 79-103; Wulf Kansteiner, “From Exception to Exemplum: The New Approach to and the ‘,’” History and Theory 33 (1994): 145-71; Amos Goldberg, “One from Four: On What Jäckel, Hilberg and Goldhagen Have in Common and What Is Unique about Christopher Browning,” Moreshet: Holocaust Documentation and Research 3 (2005): 55-86; Daniel Fulda, “Ein unmögliches Buch? Christopher Brownings Remembering Survival

© Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783657792665_002 2 Introduction and theoretical approaches with more empirical endeavours in . Those volumes that provide a theoretical focus most often turn to specific aspects such as microhistorical, transnational, or representational readings.4 Contributors to these works frequently reference Browning’s argu- ments, demonstrating once more the impact of his work on the field. Previous book-length publications have critically discussed the impact of groups of historians or individual scholars.5 Still, no volume provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the field of Holocaust Studies with a focus on how Browning’s multilayered oeuvre has helped to reshape it. This book attempts to close a part of this gap. In more than one respect, Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) occupies a spe- cial place in the extensive, still-growing library of Holocaust-related books. First, even more than 25 years after its original publication and its subsequent translation into more than a dozen languages, few books occupy as prominent a place in the canon of Holocaust Studies, are as regularly assigned to students and as frequently cited. Second, in terms of empirical analysis, Ordinary Men marks the earliest, most impactful engagement of documentation assembled and generated by West German prosecutors after the war – a massive trove of material that, until Browning’s dive into it and his retrieval of sources on the violent crimes committed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 (RPB 101), had been largely ignored by historians. Third and most important, Browning’s discussion of how seemingly ordinary German men became efficient execu- tors of the “Final Solution” gave and continues to give crucial impulses for per- petrator study far beyond the Holocaust. Since ’s reflections on what she called, in application to , the “banality of evil,” no interpretative concept has had as broad and lasting an influence on the understanding of genocidal behaviour as that of “ordinary men.” Based on an in-depth, almost forensic study of mass killings committed by one German unit that can serve as pars pro toto

und die ‘Aporie von Auschwitz,’” in Den Holocaust erzählen: Historiographie zwischen wissen- schaftlicher Empirie und narrative Kreavität, ed. Norbert Frei et al. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 126-50. 4 See e.g., Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann, eds., Microhistories of the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn, 2017); Norman J. W. Goda, Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches (New York: Berghahn, 2014). 5 Nicolas Berg, The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretation and Autobiographical Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015; German ed. 2003); Philipp Stelzel. History After Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Christian Wiese and Paul Betts, eds., Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London: Continuum, 2010).