Comprehending the Holocaust

Dmitry Savelau[1] Comprehending the Holocaust

School of Humanities at Charles University in Prague

 

The Holocaust has made generations suffer. They suffered before, they suffer now. Why would someone kill so many people? What have Jews done to German society to be exterminated for that? How real was everything? Why did we allow this to happen? There’re lots of questions popping up once you return to those times and see countless victims of the Holocaust. Among those questions however, you’ll never find an answer if the Holocaust and whole Nazi machine is comprehensible, and mainly if the Holocaust can be rationalized. These questions do not reflect, but react. However what we need when learning about the Holocaust is to think it over again and try to pay attention to as many conditions as possible.

My major interest can be defined as an attempt to understand the Holocaust, specifically, to try to create a basis on which I could assume that what was happening was not irrational, moreover it was fully legitimate right in the time and space it happened.  Therefore, my question would be the following: how can we rationalize the Holocaust? or what makes the Holocaust rational?

First of all I might jump over my head, but I think it is necessary to follow the example of Zygmund Bauman and clarify a question about Nazis’ psychical conditions. Since I personally would not be able to come out with any medical conclusions, I would rather assume them not being crazy, but quite an opposite – well educated and mentally strong people (how else they would be able to overcome the horror they’ve put themselves into). I will be taking it as granted, at least for this research.

If we turn to Hanna Arendt, we’ll see how well she describes the idea that the Holocaust was only possible within a) a totalitarian state and b) only due a well performed and organized bureaucratic system. She calls it “banality of evil” when on Eichmann’s example she discovers not a hero in himself, but an ordinary man, being as loyal as possible to the machine he was a part of and this how caused a great suffering to millions of Jews.

In her detail analysis of totalitarian machinery, Arendt examines very deeply the organizational structure with an absolutely stable central organ and a constant process of offices “duplication” that caused development of various specific institutions and organizations responsible for every particular aspect of socio-economical and political life of society, but at the same time not actually contributing functionally to the common and ideologically well-developed “good” of the state. Moreover, duplication of offices “seemingly the result of the party-state problem in all one-party dictatorships, is only the most conspicuous sign of a more complicated phenomenon that is better defined as multiplication of offices”[2]. Namely this multiplication plays a very significant role in creation of a sphere of permanent competition, in which everyone is not trying to coexist, but rather involved in a life-long-improving-run. It was seen differently than as we would define it today: the run was the form of existence in the totalitarian state. In other words, artificial motion makes the machine work; competition, therefore, gives motivation to make this motion.

 In this competitive moving nothing remains stable and unchangeable; the only element that does not intend to change is the very top of the machinery – the uniting element of all intellectual and material life orientations – the leader. It seems essential and very important to support the leadership by any means (I’m not talking now about the leader him/herself): the leader (not surprisingly often called “the father”) is the only order giving source to the whole system. Without a leader nothing would be possible, no development would happen, no goal would be reached. It is more than just a personal positioning. That’s probably why it is not surprising and as Arendt points out “quite characteristic, that none of the totalitarian dictators ever tried to the old method of establishing a dynasty and appointing their sons”[3] after them.

If to reflect on it logically it is a very well developed model: why would the machine dismiss/change a driver, if without the driver it doesn’t move anywhere. That is why, probably, Arendt says that totalitarian regime does not use propaganda in internal context. Because it is simply not needed: for the people within the state the leader applies “indoctrination”, which is a different approach, according to her: indoctrination is not aimed on convincing anybody, it serves more as a tool to define and promote directions of moving. The fact that the leader is the law itself is supported by the nature of the whole machinery and it is the reality (without any ideological or political background): once the leader vanishes, the only result that is guaranteed would be chaos.

This fact convinces me perfectly. I totally imagine people being scared to loose the leader. This how we get to a probable reason why would millions of people honestly believe in the system that actually, as we would conclude today, created an illusion around them. It would explain why they ran as fast as they could to improve the life they so-called “constructed together”, though functionally they appeared to be totally useless in achieving this illusive goal, and moreover, how ironically it wouldn’t seem, the only good they were actually producing for the system was not a result of any possible action taken, but the contrary, of a total inaction, civic pessimism and inactivity.

However, within the machinery everything becomes extremely understandable and logical. But would it help us to make the Holocaust understandable? Would it be enough to explain the Holocaust with a reason only related to the authority of the leader and mainly the totalitarian regime itself as the major motivating force for killing millions?

I guess it wouldn’t, though it obviously played an important role.

But after all, how can we then use totalitarian regime to explain such a tremendous mass murder, when we can’t even find the meaning of totalitarianism itself?

According to H. Arendt the whole totalitarian system was useless. It was not pursuing any goal; the means it used were absolutely self-destructive. In her formula of totalitarian regime, Arendt defines two important components: terror and propaganda, where propaganda comes first as a need to get control over the external situation (to put into the context external elements, i.e. other societies, countries, groups, etc.) and insure their either cooperation or neutrality (at least for some time); and terror, which is the main controlling force for inside situation. “The extraordinarily bloody terror during the initial stage of totalitarian rule serves indeed the exclusive purpose of defeating the opponent and rendering all further opposition impossible; but total terror is launched only after this initial stage has been overcome and the regime no longer has anything to fear from the opposition”[4]. At the stage of total terror it becomes a projection into nothing: it basically functions as it has been functioning, which means it permanently searches for possible victims. New victims then are found on totalitarian side, among those machinery workers and elements, who before this day had served loyally for the common good. Arendt distinguishes violence from terror; she concludes that violence has precisely an instrumental character, aimed on a particular object. Violence therefore cannot present a permanent system – that’s why totalitarian regime is based on “self-eating” terror.

Was the real goal of the Holocaust to exterminate Jews totally? Here I would agree with Bauman, that to exterminate a nation it would have been a lot more productive to start with children… The outcome picture though is quite different. War in most cases has a goal, however Hitler, according to Levinas, created a permanent Nazi regime and the society itself on the basis of internal and endless war, a war as a lifestyle. This transformation leaves out any possible pragmatic goals, the aim of living becomes identical to the war itself, which means war itself transforms to a primary goal.

Another reason to say that the whole totalitarian machinery essentially does not have any meaning is bureaucracy that becomes the main principle of totalitarian organization. Bureaucracy creates tricky schemes of functioning, based on maximum separation of its individual elements, multiplication of its infrastructural cells (see above), subjectivation of each section with a specific hierarchy and last, but not least – a permanent state of instability, in which powerfulness of a “cell” can be easily changed into powerlessness[5]. It is a very covered system that makes the true principles of totalitarianism invisible, creates illusory space for minimal citizen’s activism (votes, referendums, etc.) and help to maintain and develop fake legislations (typical cross-law systems). Slavoj Žižek very well underlines the essence of bureaucracy: “the structure, the intersubjective machine works as well if the Thing is lacking, if the machine revolves around an emptiness”[6].

Bureaucracy therefore only as a mechanism, but never by its essence might explain why someone would share passion when producing gas B24 or why would someone be a lot more careful when registering every single Jew in his/her region, or informing special structures about a Jewish family hiding in a house in opposite street. We can call it a tendency to fulfill their civic duties (only a tendency though), or a pretty much rational idea about being as loyal as possible to the state (let’s remind ourselves the Eichmann’s example). Would then bureaucracy contain enough of reason to explain rationality of the Holocaust?

I guess it wouldn’t, though it obviously made the whole process of annihilation function perfectly well.

Picking up particular personalities and examining them in order to figure out the principles on the basis of which one acted, won’t help much either. Nazi regime like any totalitarian regime reformed people into masses. It reached homogeneity it needed to status its own absolute power. This homogeneity concern however was primarily aimed on non-Jewish society, because the Jewish population had already been seen as homogeneous par excellence. The phenomenon we uncover here can be called a “total victimization”. After all, we can consider Nazis as the same victims of Nazism, (and the machinery in general) as Jews – victims of the Holocaust (I distinguish here the act of murder from pre-murder activities that made the actual murder possible). So, before appealing to personalities we should consider if there were any, if a notion of a “person”, especially in the Nazi system is applicable to presently so much evident process of total “dehumanization”. I would not be questioning this, because it won’t help much even if I get an answer. In my opinion an important element of rationality lies somewhere in a more fundamental question.

I’ve recently mentioned Žižek’s comment on bureaucracy. It comes from one of his books, in one chapter of which he reflects on Kafka’s The Trial and underlines there its accent “on the inaccessible, absent, transcendent agency (the Castle, The Court), holding the place of the lack, of the absence as such”[7].  He proposes two common readings of that, which though share the same theoretical frame – theological and immanentist: “one reading takes the elusive, inaccessible, transcendent character of the center (…, of the Court) as a mark of an “absent God” (the universe of Kafka as an anguished universe, abandoned by God); the other reading takes the emptiness of this transcendence as an “illusion of perspective”, as a reverse form of the apparition of the immanence of desire (… the central lack .. is then only the negative form of the apparition of the surplus of desire)”[8]. An absence of God together with the illusive perspective are both well applicable to the Nazi’s context. We can easily accuse them in being godless. By the way, “silence in the face of the organized inhumanity was the only item on which the Churches, so often at loggerheads, found themselves in agreement”[9]. And Hitler himself never left the Catholic Church. On the other hand, illusive perspectives Nazi’s were receiving and Hitler’s strong personal intentions, desires in general, and of spreading power in particular, also fit in very well into this model. Moreover, Arendt would call it one of the major characteristics of totalitarianism, when we indicate a permanent concern for spreading power of regime over the borders.  

Žižek then agues, however, that those two readings miss the same point: “the way this absence, this empty place, is always already filled out by an inert, obscene, revolting presence. The Court in The Trial is not simply absent, it is indeed present under the figures of the obscene judges”[10]. Turning absence into presence opens a lot of new doors. The judges seen as living objects of presence can never be accused of being absent. Present emptiness becomes an object for humanity in Kafka’s book. Outside the book it would mean something more fundamental we’ve been missing when reflecting on the emptiness in Nazi’s society or generally in bureaucratically empowered totalitarianism. The trick lies outside the traditional system we mainly recall to when observing the Holocaust. Since when has the emptiness, absence become central? (Can we assume that bureaucracy became extremely relevant with this change?)

The change started to be formulated with the Age of Enlightenment, when the modernity project appeared. It slowly began to claim independence of reason and especially reconsideration of its role within time and space. It took a while then to constitute Modernity as a new revolutionary intellectual platform that fully criticized the old metanarrative, however very evidently transformed into a new one.

Its basic critique concerns several important elements opposed to traditional society: it affirmed the independence of reason, its transcendental position towards theological concepts of the past; its active constructive nature towards social reality (Conte) and far more than only observing character – on one side, on the other – its historical limitedness. Modernity critically opposed to all basic pre-modern traditional concepts – it criticized harmonic principle, on which the whole classical knowledge was grown out: it confirmed that the reason is limited within a concrete context it is in; that if every particular act conducts the progress, then history has to be viewed as un-systemized container of events, people and acts, whose initial motivations were their inner personal concerns very much attached to concrete situation they had been acting from, but never dictated by any external ideology that had been previously used as a measure of rationality. The contextuality of reason and Nietzsche’s “God is dead” from the Mad Man created a strong authority of this underlined anti-traditionalism, a particularly new image of a man opposed to the image of God. It strengthened independent positioning of human reason out moral and ethical structures previously considered “on default”.

Modernity however not only achieved a complete negation, but also clearly formulated a new essentiality: a permanent need to construct new reality basing on an emptiness that was left after all main traditional concepts had been confidently denied. The emptiness that we find in Nazi’s society then is not accidental. It is actually a presence of a new knowledge realized in the machinery itself as an attempt to construct the reality.

 As we can notice now, the difficulty arrives when we attempt to integrate Nazism as a whole to traditional moral and ethical system. I’ve been trying to separate any particular grain of rationality using this approach, but still haven’t found any positive answer. It simply does not work this way anymore – once we accept Nazism as a part of a new Modern metanarrative, we should reform our vision of rationality and moral criteria into a Modernistic, meaning into relative knowledge, essentially unformulated and equally possible either way it is performed.

Here I would totally agree with Bauman, that in a no way we can compare the Holocaust to the manifestation of a primitive civilization. That makes the Holocaust unique – it is precisely a modern genocide – system of mass murders that “not only have been proved fully compatible with modern civilization, but have been conditioned, created and supplied by it. The Holocaust did not just, mysteriously, avoid clash with the social norms and institutions of modernity. It was these norms and institutions that made the Holocaust feasible”[11]. To see why this situation was naturally possible for the modernity, we need to take into account several important aspects of this new project:

as I have already mentioned before, Modernity created conditions when there was an evident need to construct, to react and reorganize reality on a completely new basis, but how did this basis look like? This knowledge had no “positive conceptions” behind, so much needed to people to orient: under “positive” I mean those stable conceptions, which would include basic orientational modes (that is why totalitarian state was so appreciated for offering them this); at the same time, it won’t be true to say that the Modern project didn’t not include any knowledge impact, it had those “negative conceptions” of a total traditionalism denial. It was like the Decalogue for Classics, for example: but those were denying things as something a person should never do; The Decalogue’s “denial” formed basically the rules. Humanity was used to “negative conceptions” as a form, but not to the content: modernity project did not offer new rules, it simply opened a lot more space to billions of potential trajectories to be constructed. This how, it was the first time in history when the humanity had to choose themselves the orientation they’ll follow, the whole building process of up to them. That’s why probably it seems so typical for modern genocide (as Bauman says, I’d add “and for totalitarianism in general”), that “the end itself [of modern genocide] is a grand vision of a better, and radically different, society”[12];

a major change in Modernity was a denial of God’s existence, which therefore meant no more God’s control over human actions. That I guess strengthened incredibly the very potential of Modernity. This might also explain why Churches kept silence (of course we should never forget, that Church as an institution was perfectly enrolled into the bureaucracy as well);

unlike the Classic times, Modernity project does not centralize objectivity of the truth anymore. However it is still far from Postmodernity, which will later deny objectivity completely. Here what we come to (and that makes one of the biggest points of separation of different visions on Modernity) is a still existing tendency apart from formulating “personal” reality, to apply this reality as the only possible objectivity. Objectivity, that means only one possibility of existence of truth, a unique significant position of this truth in time and space. A tendency to return to universalism unconsciously is one of the equal consequences of Modernity in my opinion, and in the same time the very presupposition of every totalitarian regime;

opposed to that is the status of objectivity of morality. It is a lot more vivid in its representation. The Holocaust illustrates it perfectly. Relativity of morality promoted by modernity, however meant another essential need – is a need for coexistence with “the other”. The need that has never been accepted by totalitarianism, and will never be by its very essence of totalitarian regime. But within one particular community (society, machine[13]) a moral definition is a matter of a common constructivist project of Modernity. It falls on a part of a common task to construct reality, that’s why we could expect it to be different; however, in case of the Holocaust, we never expected it to be so inhumane;

and finally, Bauman’s idea of morality is connected primarily with the moral behavior and power being brought by the notion of progress: “Civilization proved incapable of guaranteeing moral use of the awesome powers it brought into being”[14] I haven’t mentioned progress in Modernity project, though it is of a major interest within this metanarrative.

Indeed, progress became a central concern of Modernity. It co-initiated and supported the process of empowering people to act according to their personal intentions. Progress proved possibility to use power in achieving something, that had not been possible before. Bauman turns a lot to progress; as one of the unique features of the Holocaust, progress then is seen by Bauman “like everything else done in the modern – rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, co-ordinated – way”[15]. Progress obviously added a very confident, but extremely dangerous category in spectrum of human actions, namely, the principle we act, “because we can”. It however brought no order as Bauman seems to underline, but on the contrary, it brought chaos (not in the form of the Holocaust, but chaos as an essential part of the progress). It brought chaos on one hand, on the other – a very strong illusion of order and unlimited possibilities. It might be familiar with Žižek’s “illusion of perspective”. When Hanna Arendt was defining a concentration camp as a place, where everything was possible (“the concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified”[16]) she, to my opinion, replaced the meaning of order with the meaning of bureaucracy, which in its very nature (as I have concluded earlier) produces only a fake order, an illusion of well planned and co-ordinated system. Either way, we should never simplify or reduce the role of progress.

Moreover, I would support Bauman’s and Lyotard’s general conclusion that the project of Modernity has failed and because of it as well. Lyotard claims that “victory of capitalist techno-science on other candidates on universal ending of human history – is nothing else than one additional way how to destroy the modern project by acting, as if you were realizing it”[17]. Bauman adds to that, that Modernity allowed to several usual modern factors to come together, when the Holocaust was produced, in an unusual and rare combination (stress on combination), among those are: radical anti-Semitism of the Nazi type, transformation of that anti-Semitism into the practical policy, bureaucratic apparatus, ‘state of emergency’ (wartime condition). Bauman concludes then, the fail of Modernity was basically in allowing these factors to come together. Moreover, according to him, Modernity allowed the Nazis to function as they functioned; it allowed it all by its very essence. If we look to what Bauman specifies further under mainstream of “allowed” things, we’ll see, that he mainly means a total freedom of one to monopolize rational action: “when the modernist dream is embraced by an absolute power able to monopolize modern vehicles of rational action, and when that power attains freedom from effective social control, genocide follows”[18]. Bauman’s idea of monopoly is close to what I would put as a reason of Modernity’s failure, but I would not agree with Bauman’s statement of pre-defined rational action that is actually being monopolized. What I’ve been trying to highlight in this work is mainly this inability to claim any universal rational action, which does not mean it not exists, but which rather means it exists in a wide pluralism of conceptions. I generally do not support Bauman’s approach in searching for a universal rational grain outside the context regardless how irrational the context might seem first to a researcher. Bauman’s tendency to determination of objectively competent platforms on a part of anything else but not Modernity itself (in particular case of the Holocaust) in my opinion only misleads him to other illusory ideologies.  

Therefore, I would not put monopolizing of one’s rationality as a major reason why the Modernity failed. I agree that none of the above mentioned elements Modernity contained cannot be observed only separately. Still though, I would stress the outcome of this project on different evidences. The failure to my mind is particularly in a fact that citizenship model, very well meant to be implemented never basically worked. Bauman also refers to political democracy as the only evident solution in overcoming the Holocaust: “If we ask now what the original sin was which allowed this to happen, the collapse (or non-emergence) of democracy seems to be the most convincing answer. In the absence of traditional authority, the only checks and balances capable of keeping the body politic away from extremities can be supplied by political democracy”[19]. But still Bauman’s gets too far from Modernity. What he claims is that “it would’ve worked if people would have valued it”. But if Bauman could get in the context, he would probably see, that the real issue was not that national citizenship model (definitely only with democratic meaning) never worked out, but that Global Citizenship model was never yet born (or never developed). National citizenship either way (repressed by totalitarian regime or not) was a matter of a nation-state. On default, I would assume that everyone within a nation state agreed with the existing system of citizenship. The tragedy of Modernity is in different problem, namely in inactivity of border/neighbor/co-continent/co-planet states to react and influence the spreading terror and genocide. I would never then assume that the global community shared the visions of the Nazis. Otherwise this organized mass murder mustn’t be tragic for the world and today.

The idea of Global Citizenship hasn’t been carried out yet, the idea of equal responsibility for the lives of those who died in the Holocaust hasn’t been carried out yet. It is merely a project of Postmodernity, which proved that in an open space of communication, everyone is involved in building coexistence, therefore everyone is responsible for what is happening. Lyotard defines the Holocaust precisely as the beginning of Postmodernity, I would especially underline it as the beginning of global civic society construction.

In my research of rationality of the Holocaust, I came to conclusion, that neither totalitarian regime, nor bureaucracy can explain the essence of this modern genocide, though both of them perfectly matched and completed each other in realizing this annihilation project. The authority of the leader and the totalitarian regime itself created a perfect homogeneous society for implementation of homogeneous interests and visions. Taking then totalitarian regime as a united organism, it appears as very good example of an organized and coordinated society, sharing the same principles, values and goals. Sharing them equally – which means fully accepting the outgoing consequences. Bureaucracy only as a mechanism, but never by its essence added very productive functioning models, where everyone would be involved in the machinery and will have a specific function in it. The homogeneity of society allowed us to find no particular personalities to turn to in order to find out their intentions of actions within the Holocaust (let’s remind the Eichmann’s example). All these elements of Holocaust do not make any sense in particular. As we agreed, neither totalitarianism nor bureaucracy had any further coming perspectives, on contrary, they were self-destructive and as Arendt claims it was only a matter of time until the regime eats itself. The emptiness that these elements were focused on though deserved a special interest: I took this emptiness as a presence of a completely new situation and assumed that only getting into the context in which Holocaust and the whole Nazi machine functioned can allow us to find those rational bodies that made it work. This context though appeared a result of a very different fundamental change, a change that assumed emptiness as an essential beginning and which demanded a human reaction in a form of deconstruction of traditional reality and creation of a completely new, independent and self-organized society. The change called the Modernity. Once we take the main principles of this transformation – the need to construct a new reality, overcoming the idea of God’s control over the human’s fate, unconscious tendency to search for objective truth, a need to construct moral norms and conceptions again, activism empowered by the progress – into account, we’ll see that society the Nazis were constructing lived by its own ethical and moral conceptions, which however we cannot deny and disrespect due to being formulated in their own, unique “Nazi” way. Modernity destroyed ethical and moral system, previously used for distinguishing good from bad. It claimed, that none of these categories is universal, but relative (relative knowledge). Modernity therefore brought independence from any common rational definitions, so it might sound disrespectful to the Jewish population, but what I’ve concluded is that Nazis had a right to construct whatever society they wanted, and moreover, they consciously and fully used their right. The tragedy came though, when a total annihilation was put into practice; by tragedy however I less mean the fact that Nazi machine actually started the mass murder – that was pretty much expected from what they had been claiming as their ideology – the real tragedy was in the fact, that none of the co-existing neighboring modern societies reacted anyhow to stop the annihilation. Unlike Bauman, who stresses the impossibility of national citizenship to revolt against the regime, I would claim that the real problem was a totally incomprehensible impossibility of a global community – global citizenship – to revolt against the mass murder and stop it. This, however was used as a unique experience in Postmodernist project, which indicates the Holocaust as a starting point in forming global institutes for global civic society.