The success of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners(1997) and the heated debates that followed its publication exposed once again Germany's long tradition of anti-Semitism as a major cause of the Holocaust. Goldhagen, like many before him, drew a direct and irresistible line from Luther's pamphlets against the Jews to Hitler's attempted annihilation of European Jewry. This collection of new essays examines the thesis of a universal anti-Semitism in Germany by focussing on its greatest author, Goethe, and seeing to what extent some scholars are justified in accusing him of...

With a few exceptions the essays in this volume are versions of papers presented at a conference on -Responsibility and Commitment: The Ethics of Cultural Mediation, - which occurred at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in March of 1995. Held in honor of Jost Hermand, whose sixty-fifth birthday we were celebrating, the conference brought together Jost's friends and students to discuss issues central to his intellectual concerns. The title and themes of the conference were selected to characterize and to highlight Jost's contributions to intellectual life here and abroad.
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