http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/goldhagen/gold5.html
Kwiet was succeeded by Yehuda Bauer, who began by asserting that Goldhagen's thesis is simply a re-warmed _Sonderweg_ argument, one that was widespread in the decades after World War II. This interpretation, Bauer maintained, was in fact the very one that he, Bauer, had been arguing for the last thirty years, although in a much more sophisticated form. His own work, Bauer asserted, explored political and cultural structures as well as contesting voices and institutions in German society. It also relied on work that Polish and other Israeli scholars have produced for the last several decades, work to which Goldhagen, according to Bauer, had no access to because he didn't read those languages. The fact that Goldhagen's argument rested on German and English-language sources represented a serious problem, continued Bauer; among his few non-German/English sources was one in Czech - "probably copied from me", said Bauer.
Goldhagen's lack of comparative research was problematic not only in terms of other secondary material, according to Bauer, but also in terms of his very thesis. What about Rumania, he asked, and its tradition of exclusionist antisemitism dating from the nineteenth century? What about Rumanians' enthusiasm for rounding up and killing Jewish men, women, and children? Why didn't Goldhagen deal with any other traditions of antisemitism, including the Polish, the Russian, and the French? In this regard, Bauer made reference to George Mosse's assertion that, if you had told people in 1900 that there would be a Final Solution, their response would have been (paraphrased), "Oh, those bad, very bad French." Bauer then attacked Goldhagen's advisor at Harvard. Goldhagen, he said, should not be held responsible for this shoddy work, in particular for its lack of a comparative focus. Instead, it is his advisor who must be blamed: How was this work awarded a PhD at Harvard when it doesn't cover the most basic issues? Bauer then criticized Goldhagen for ignoring competing strains of German history and, in doing so, for not being able to answer the questions: If eliminationist antisemitism was dominant already in the nineteenth century, why then did the Holocaust not take place until the twentieth? What was the difference? How was it that Hitler came to power? Bauer chided Goldhagen for not dealing adequately with the breakdown of the Weimar Republic. In this regard, he cited the fact that, in the Weimar Republic's last free election, 67% of Germans did not vote for Hitler. Was Hitler voted in, asked Bauer, solely because people supported his antisemitism?
Bauer concluded by saying that, while Goldhagen's answer was "wrong", his question remains important. But, he continued, it's one that needs to be dealt with with "humility", not arrogance. In asserting that, "I'm right and all those who have come before me are wrong," Goldhagen, according to Bauer, displayed an astounding lack of sensitivity vis-a-vis his subject. Goldhagen also ran the risk, Bauer continued, of becoming another Arno Mayer after "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?" Following a big media splash and a great deal of discussion, Bauer says, Mayer's book has completely and justifiably been forgotten. Mayer's work, he said, is gone and rightly so; no one cites or talks about it anymore. You, he said, turning to Goldhagen, do not want to end up like Arno Mayer. You have started your career the wrong way, he concluded; you do not begin with Public Relations, you end with it.