Lars Rensmann

14:00 Workshop 2 September 1999

From Goldhagen towards Walser and back again

"Hitler's Willing Executioners", academic historians and recent conflicts in connection with the Holocaust and the German public. Was Goldhagen´s study "just a bad book" (Eberhard Jäckel), or were there other reasons for the massive rejection of the author and his work by German historians and public? How is the "Goldhagen-debate" to be interpreted against the context of the ongoing debates around the politics of history and commemoration?

Lars Rensmann, born 1970, studied political science, German philology and sociology in Germany and the US. Since 1996 he teaches political science at the Freie Universität Berlin, since 1999 he is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. Presently, he is working on a comparative study on anti-Semitism and Holocaust commemoration in public conflicts in Germany and the US. He published on anti-Semitism and public conflicts around memory of the Holocaust in Germany, including: Kritische Theorie über den Antisemitismus. Studien zu Struktur, Erklärungspotential und Aktualität. Berlin und Hamburg 1998; Umkämpfte Erinnerung: Die Walser-Kontroverse, die Debatte um das Holocaust-Mahnmal und die politische Psychologie des Gedenkens. Berlin 1999. He also published in various journals including the Psychohistory Review, Patterns of Prejudice, Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie, Allgemeine jüdische Wochenzeitung.