Aly, Götz

Götz Aly

What are the unwritten laws that determine the ups and downs of academia? The German historian and journalist Götz Aly is one of those awkward intellectuals who, despite their innovative research, have never really been accepted by the academic establishment. Opinions differ over him and his theses about the Holocaust. But this outsider has now received backing from the very highest levels.

At first it all sounds like a perfectly normal academic career. Götz Aly was born in Heidelberg in 1947. After leaving school, he took a course at the German School of Journalism in Munich, then moved to Berlin to study history and politics. Once he had graduated in 1973, he was drawn in several different directions: he kept working on his doctorate, but also found employment as a journalist – on the left-alternative newspaper taz, as well as other publications – and took on a post as the warden of a children's home in Berlin-Spandau. Furthermore, he became involved in the radical left-wing group Red Aid, which provides support to people persecuted for their political activities. It was this commitment, in particular, that led to the first discontinuity in his career in 1976: under what was known as the "Radicals Decree", Aly was suspended from his job as a children's home warden for a year on account of his political sympathies. He did obtain his doctorate in 1978 with a piece of research in the field of political science, but from this point on it was impossible to ignore the gulf between him and "normal" academic life. Although he subsequently gained the qualification required in Germany in order to hold tenured lecturing posts, neither this nor the prizes he has received for his historical works, the Heinrich Mann Prize in 2002 and the Marion Samuel Prize in 2003, have done anything to alter the situation. To the present, he continues to be denied a full professorial chair.

"Because we are only aware of things we are interested in as well."

Götz Aly wrote his way to recognition as a freelance author outside the university sector. It was his new questions about the well known past for which he was to become well known himself. Although he has said that there is "no topic in the 20th century that has been researched with greater sophistication than the murder of the European Jews during the Second World War" (Der Spiegel, 20 January 2006), it was precisely this topic to which he was to devote himself.

In Vordenker der Vernichtung (Architects of Annihilation), he investigated the role of the technocratic experts who served the Nazis. In Endlösung ("Final Solution"), he analysed the direct linkage between the extermination of the Jews and the Nazis' "population movements". Das letzte Kapitel (The Last Chapter) dealt with the Holocaust in Hungary and demonstrated how closely the National Socialists' mass murder was intertwined with Hungarian administrative structures.

Then, in 2005, Götz Aly caused a big stir with Hitlers Volksstaat (Hitler's Beneficiaries) – both in historical circles and among an international public. Anyone who had thought that every last detail of the darkest chapter in German history had already been picked over was now forced to revise their opinion. Aly focussed his attention on the welfare state elements in National Socialism. The Nazi regime, Aly believes, cannot be explained adequately if we only look at its authoritarian aspects and the mass hatred it propagated when we attempt to answer the question of how state-organised mass murder could become possible. Rather, the great majority tolerated this and looked away because they had been systematically corrupted. In Aly's words, "Human beings are made in such a way that they do not want to be aware of things they would prefer to suppress and consequently fail to be aware of them as well." (ORF, 21 March 2005)

The "dictatorship of favours"

From the beginning, Hitler's regime took a concerted interest in keeping the Germany people happy. Aly finds proof of this in the far-reaching processes that redistributed resources to socially weak strata of the population: funds to compensate parents for earnings and social insurance contributions lost while bringing up children, subsidised loans for married couples, increased tax-free basic allowances, etc. In return, a greater burden was placed on better earners. Nevertheless, the average German profited materially under the Nazi regime. And not just from the domestic policies of the early years. According to Aly, the extensive expropriations of the war of conquest unleashed after 1939 directly benefited the German lower-middle classes. Aly sees the whole German people as profiteering from the National Socialists' policies of mass expulsion and extermination. In an allusion to Horkheimer, Aly sums up his view of the matter in the sentence: "Those who do not wish to speak of the advantages enjoyed by millions of ordinary Germans should be silent about National Socialism and the Holocaust." (Hitler's Beneficiaries)

Aly's critics make the accusation that, with his thesis of the dictatorship of favours, he is merely reviving the much older thesis of the collective guilt borne by all Germans. And Aly certainly has some notable critics!

Support from the top

Aly gives no consideration to Daniel Goldhagen's central argument – that the anti-Semitism permeating the whole of German society was an essential driving force in the Holocaust. Nor does the significance of the charismatic leader-figure emphasised so much by Ian Kershaw, among others, play any role as far as Aly is concerned. While Hans-Ulrich Wehler called Hitler's Beneficiaries the product of an "anachronistic vulgar materialism" and a retrograde step from the latest developments in the research (Die Welt, 6 May 2005). These were harsh words, particularly coming from the grand old man of German social history.

One person refused to be influenced by these attacks, formed his own judgement and came to other conclusions: the German Federal President, Horst Köhler, who recently appointed Götz Aly to the board of trustees of the Jewish Museum Berlin. In response to our inquiries, the Office of the Federal President confirmed that the nomination was to be understood as a deliberately granted honour. There had been personal contact, Köhler had examined Aly's views and had reached his decision quite consciously. It was made clear that this backing for someone who is used to falling between several stools had been absolutely intentional.

Selected bibliography Volkes Stimme: Skepsis und Führervertrauen im Nationalsozialismus, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2006 Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2005; translation: Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2007 Im Tunnel: Das kurze Leben der Marion Samuel 1931-1943, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2004 Rasse und Klasse: Nachforschungen zum deutschen Wesen, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2003 Macht, Geist, Wahn: Kontinuitäten deutschen Denkens, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Verlag, 1999 Endlösung: Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1999; translation: "Final Solution": Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, translated by Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown, Arnold, London, 1999 Vordenker der Vernichtung (with Susanne Heim), Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1991; translation: Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, translated by A.G. Blunden, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2003