Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

The Holocaust and PhilosophyAuthor(s): Emil L. FackenheimReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 82, No. 10, Eighty-Second Annual Meeting AmericanPhilosophical Association, Eastern Division (Oct., 1985), pp. 505-514Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2026356 .Accessed: 30/10/2011 04:50

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THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME LXXXII, NO. 10, OCTOBER 1985

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THE HOLOCAUST AND PHILOSOPHY*

HILOSOPHERS have all but ignored the Holocaust. Why? (1) Attuned to universals, they have little use for particu-

lars, and less for the unique. The Holocaust thus becomes at most one case of genocide among others. However, philosophers have attended to the momentously unique. Hegel and Marx have treated the French Revolution, not revolutions-in-general.

(2) Philosophers seldom consider things Jewish. As regards Jud- aism, the term 'Judeo-Christian' rarely signifies more than token recognition. As regards Jews, they are one "ethnic" or "religious group" among others, just as antisemitism is reduced to a "preju- dice." Rare is a work such as Jean Paul Sartre's Antisemite and Jew,' and even this treats 'antisemite' more adequately than 'Jew'. However, the Third Reich, not merely its Holocaust component, was "the only German regime-the only regime ever anywhere- which had no other clear principle than murderous hatred of Jews, for 'Aryan' had no clear meaning other than 'non-Jewish'."2 (The Japanese were honorary "Aryans," and the "Semitic" Mufti of Jeru- salem was a welcome guest in Nazi Berlin.)

(3) The French Revolution, though momentous, is a positive event. The Holocaust is devastatingly negative. Qua humans, philo- sophers are tempted to flee from this into some such platitude as "man's-inhumanity-to-man-especially-in-wartime." (Arnold Toyn-

*To be presented in an APA symposium on the Holocaust, December 30, 1985. Berel Lang will comment; see this JOURNAL, this issue, 514/5.

On the subject of this article, see also my "The Holocaust," in A Handbook of Jewish Theology, forthcoming with Scribners, and, especially and at much greater length, my To Mend the World (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), cited hereafter as MW. In this essay I have borrowed a few sentences from both these works.

I New York: Schocken Books, 1948. 2Leo Strauss, Preface to the English edition of Spinoza's Critique of Religion, re-

printed in Judah Goldin, ed., The Jewish Expression (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 347.

0022-362X/85/8210/0505$01.00 ? 1985 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

505

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bee:3 "What the Nazis did is not peculiar.") Qua philosophers, hav- ing always had problems with evil, they have a new problem now. However, philosophers must confront aporiae, not evade or ignore them.

This paper will treat the Holocaust as unique; as anti-Jewish not accidentally but essentially; and as a novum in the history of evil.

I. THE UNIQUENESS OF THE HOLOCAUST

The World War II Jewish genocide resembles most closely the World War I Armenian genocide. Both were (i) attempts to murder a whole people; (ii) carried out under cover of war; (iii) with maximum se- crecy; (iv) after the deportation of the victims, with deliberate cruelty, to remote places; (v) all this provoking few countermeasures or even verbal protests on the part of the civilized world. Doubtless the Nazis both learned from and were encouraged by the Armenian precedent.

These are striking similarities. As striking, however, are the dif- ferences. The Armenian deportations from Istanbul were stopped after some time, whether because of political problems or the logis- tical difficulties posed by so large a city. "Combed" for Jews were Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Warsaw. In this, greater Teutonic effi- ciency was secondary; primary was a Weltanschauung. Indian res- ervations exist in America. Jewish reservations in a victorious Nazi empire are inconceivable: already planned instead were museums for an "extinct race." For, unlike the Turks, the Nazis sought a "final solution" of a "problem" -final only if, minimally, Europe and, maximally, the world would be judenrein. In German this word has no counterpart such as polenrein, russenrein, slavenrein. In other languages it does not exist at all; for whereas Jordan and Saudi Arabia are in fact without Jews, missing is the Weltanschauung. The Holocaust, then, is but one case of the class "genocide." As a case of the class: "intended, planned, and largely successful exter- mination," it is without precedent and, thus far at least, without sequel. It is unique.

Equally unique are the means necessary to this end. These in- cluded (i) a scholastically precise definition of the victims; (ii) ju- ridical procedures procuring their rightlessness; (iii) a technical apparatus culminating in murder trains and gas chambers; and (iv), most importantly, a veritable army of murderers and also direct and indirect accomplices: clerks, newspapermen, lawyers, bank managers, doctors, soldiers, railwaymen, entrepreneurs, and an endless list of others.

3In a debate with Yaacov Herzog. See Herzog, A People that Dwells Alone (Lon- don: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975), p. 31.

THE HOLOCAUST 507

The relation between direct and indirect accomplices is as impor- tant as the distinction. The German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher4 understands Nazi Germany as a dual system. Its inner part was the "S.S. state"; its outer, the traditional establishment-civil service, army, schools, universities, churches. This latter system was allowed separate existence to the end, but was also increasingly penetrated, manipulated, perverted. And since it resisted the process only spo- radically and never radically, it enabled the S.S. state to do what it could never have done simply on its own. Had the railwaymen en- gaged in strikes or sabotage or simply vanished there would have been no Auschwitz. Had the German army acted likewise there would have been neither Auschwitz nor World War II. U.S. Presi- dent Ronald Reagan should not have gone to Bitburg even if no S.S. men had been buried there.

Such was the army required for the "how" of the Holocaust. Its "why" required an army of historians, philosophers, theologians. The historians rewrote history. The philosophers demonstrated that mankind is "Aryan" or "non-Aryan" before it is human. The theol- ogians were divided into Christians who made Jesus into an "Aryan" and neo-pagans who rejected Christianity itself as "non- Aryan"; their differences were slight compared to their shared commitments.

These were direct accomplices. But here too there was need for indirect accomplices as well. Without the prestige of philosophers like Martin Heidegger and theologians like Emanuel Hirsch, could the National-Sozialistische Weltanschauung have gained its power and respectability? Could it have won out at all? The Scottish- Catholic historian Malcolm Hay asks why what happened in Ger- many did not happen in France forty years earlier, during the Drey- fus affair. He replies that in France there were fifty righteous men.5

What was the "why" of the Holocaust? Astoundingly, signifi- cantly, even the archpractitioners rarely faced it. 'Archpractitioner' indisputably fits Treblinka Kommandant Franz Stangl. (Treblinka had the fewest survivors.) In a postwar interview Stangl was asked: "What did you think at the time was the reason for the extermina- tion of the Jews?" Stangl replied-as if Jews had not long been robbed naked!-"they wanted their money."6 Did Stangl really not know? Yet, though Treblinka itself was secret, its raison d'etre had always been public. In the Nazi Weltanschauung Jews were vermin, and one does not execute vermin, murder it, spare its young or its

4The German Dictatorship (New York: Praeger, 1969), esp. ch. viII. 'The Foot of Pride (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), p. 211. 6Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974); p. 101.

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old: one exterminates vermin coldly, systematically, without feel- ing or a second thought. Is 'vermin' (or 'virus' or 'parasite') a "mere metaphor"? In a 1942 "table-talk," right after the Wannsee conference that finalized the "Final Solution," Hitler said:

The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions ... in the world. The struggle we are waging is of the same kind as that of Pasteur and Koch in the last century. How many diseases can be traced back to the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only when we ex- terminate the Jewws.7

For racism, "inferior races" are still human; even for Nazi racism there are merely too many Slavs. For Nazi antisemitism Jews are not human; they must not exist at all.

Stangl failed with his interviewer's first question. He failed with her second as well. "If they were going to kill them anyway," he was asked, "what was the point of all the humiliation, why all the cruelty?" He replied: "To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did." The interviewer had doubted Stangl's first answer, but ac- cepted his second as both honest and true. Honest it may have been; true it was not. The "cruelty" included horrendous medical nonexperiments on women, children, babies. The "humiliation" included making pious Jews spit on Torah scrolls and, when they ran out of spittle, supplying them with more by spitting into their mouths. Was all this easier on the operators then pulling triggers and pushing buttons? Treblinka-the Holocaust-had two ulti- mate purposes: extermination and also maximum prior humilia- tion and torture. This too-can Stangl have been unaware of it? had been part of the public Weltanschauung all along. In 1936 Julius Streicher declared that "who fights the Jew fights the devil, and that "who masters the devil conquers heaven" (MW 188). And this basest, most pornographic Nazi only echoed what the most au- thoritative (and equally pornographic) Nazi had written many years earlier:

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood ... By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.8

To "punish" the "Jewish devil" through humiliation and torture, then, was part of "Aryan" salvation. Perhaps it was all of it.

7Cited by Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 212. 8 Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ralph Manheim, tr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), pp.

325, 365.

THE HOLOCAUST 509

"Jewish devil" and Jewish "vermin" (or "bacillus," "parasite", "virus") existed side by side in the Nazi theory. For example, this single Hitler-passage of 1923:

The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human. They cannot be human in the sense of being in the image of God, the Eternal. The Jews are the image of the devil. Jewry means the racial tuberculosis of the nations (cited by Fest, op. cit.).

Side by side in the theory, "devil" and "vermin" were synthesized in the Auschwitz praxis, and this was a novum without precedent in the realm of either the real or the possible. Even in the worst state, punishment is meted out for a doing-a fact explaining Heg- el's statement, defensible once but no more, that any state is better than none. And, even in the hell of poetic and theological imagina- tion, the innocent cannot be touched. The Auschwitz praxis was based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence it- self is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of in- habitants, those who were given the "punishment" and those who administered it.

Few have yet grasped the newness of that new world. Survivors have grasped it all along. Hence they refer to all the "punished" victims as k'doshim ("holy ones"); for even criminals among them were innocent of the "crime" for which they were "punished." Hence, too, they refer to the new world created by the victimizers as a "universe" other than ours, or a "planet" other than the one we inhabit. What historians and philosophers must face is that Auschwitz was a kingdom not of this world.

IL. THE HOLOCAUST AND THE HISTORIAN

But the Holocaust took place in our world. The historian must ex- plain it, and the philosopher must reflect on the historian's work.

Raul Hilberg9 has studied closely the "how" of the Holocaust. In answer to the "why" he has said: "They did it because they wanted to do it."10 This stresses admirably the respective roles of Nazi Wel- tanschauung and Nazi decision-making. But how accept such a Weltanschauung? How make decisions such as these? As if in answer to these further questions, Bracher (op. cit.) writes:

The extermination [of the Jews] grew out of the biologistic insanity of Nazi ideology, and for that reason is completely unlike the terrors of revolutions and wars of the past (430).

9See his magisterial The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quad- rangle, 1961).

10In private conversation with this writer.

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Again further questions arise. What or who was insane, the ideology or those creating, believing, implementing it? If the latter, who? Just the one? Or the one and the direct accomplices? Or the indirect accomplices as well? And, climactically, is "insanity" itself an ex- planation, or merely a way of saying that attempts to explain have come to an end?

Historians will resist this conclusion. Has not the "Jewish devil" a long tradition, harking back to the New Testament? (See especially John 8:44.) As for the "Jewish vermin" (or "virus" or "parasite"), Hitler got it from antisemitic trash harking back decades. Doubt- less without these factors the Holocaust would have been impos- sible, a fact in itself sufficient to mark off the event from other geno- cides. But do these (and other) factors suffice to make the Holocaust possible? To explain an event is to show how it was possible; but the mind accepts the possibility of the Holocaust, in the last analy- sis, only because it was actual. Explanation, in short-so it seems- moves in circles.

In his unremitting search for explanations the historian must re- spond to this challenge by focusing ever more sharply on what is unique in the Holocaust. The philosopher must ponder Hans Jo- nas's paradoxical Holocaust-dictum: "Much more is real than is possible" (MW 233). Minimally, what became real at Auschwitz was always possible, but is now known to be so. Maximally, Auschwitz has made possible what previously was impossible; for it is a precedent. In either case, philosophers must face a novum within a question as old as Socrates: what does it mean to be human?

III. THE MUSELMANN

Allan Bullock stresses that Hitler's orginality lay not in ideas but in "the terrifying literal way in which he . . . translate[d] fantasy into reality, and his unequalled grasp of the means by which to do this."" One original product of this "translation" was the so-called Muselmann. If in the Gulag the dissident suffers torture-through- psychiatry, on the theory that in the workers' paradise such as he must be mad, then the Auschwitz praxis reduces the "non-Aryan" to a walking corpse covered with his own filth, on the theory that he must reveal himself as the disgusting creature that he has been, if disguisedly, since birth. To be sure, the Muselmanner included countless "Aryans" also. But, just as "the Nazis were racists because they were antisemites" is truer than the reverse, so it is truer that

" Cited by Herbert Luethy, "Der Fuehrer," N. Podhoretz, ed., in The Commentary Reader (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 64.

THE HOLOCAUST 511

non-Jewish Muselmanner were Jews-by-association than that Jewish Muselmdnner were a sub-species of "enemies of the Reich."

The process was focused on Jews in particular. Its implications, however, concern the whole human condition, and, therefore, phi- losophers. Among these few would deny that to die one's own death is part of one's freedom; in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time this freedom is foundational. Yet, of the Auschwitz Musel- mann, Primo Levi'2 writes:

Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselminner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty really to suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death.

To die one's own death has always been a freedom subject to loss by accident. On Planet Auschwitz, however, the loss of it was made es- sential, and its survival accidental. Hence Theodor Adorno'3 writes:

With the administrative murder of millions death has become some- thing that never before was to be feared in this way. Death no longer enters into the experienced life of the individual, as somehow har- monizing with its course. It was no longer the individual that died in the camps, but the specimen. This must affect also the dying of those who escaped the procedure (355; my translation; italics added).

Philosophers are faced with a new aporia. It arises from the necessity to listen to the silence of the Muselmann.

IV. "BANAL" EVIL AND PLANET AUSCHWITZ

From one new way of being human-that of the victims-we turn to the other, that of the victimizers. Since Socrates, philosophers have known of evil as ignorance; but the Auschwitz operators in- cluded Ph.D.s. Since Kant philosophers have known of evil as weakness, as yielding to inclination; but Eichmann in Jerusalem invoked, not entirely incorrectly, the categorical imperative.'4 From psychiatry philosophy learns of evil as sickness; but the "SD intel- lectuals" who so efficiently engineered the "Final Solution" abom- inated Streicher-type sadists, "wanted to be regarded as decent," and had as "their sole object . .. to solve the so-called Jewish prob-

'2Survival in Auschwitz, S. Woolf, tr. (New York: Orion, 1959), p. 82, italics added.

3Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975). 14 Referred to in Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin,

1977), pp. 135 ff.; analyzed in MW 270 ff.

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lem in a cold, rational manner."'5 Philosophy has even had a glimpse of what the theologians call "radical" or "demonical" evil-the diabolical grandeur that says to evil "be thou my good!" However, just as people the world over experienced human shock when they watched newsreels of the big Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, so Hannah Arendt-a belated owl of Minerva-experienced philosophical shock when, more than a dozen years later, she ob- served Eichmann at his Jerusalem trial. Of grandeur, there was in them all not a trace. The characteristic Nazi criminal was rather a dime-a-dozen individual, who, having once been an ordinary, nay, respected citizen, committed at Auschwitz crimes of a kind and on a scale hitherto unimaginable, only to become, when it was over, an ordinary citizen again, without signs of suffering sleepless nights. Eichmann was only one such person. Others are still being dis- covered in nice suburbs, and their neighbors testify how they took care of their gardens and were kind to their dogs. Himmler himself, had he escaped detection and the need for suicide, might well have returned to his chicken farm. The philosopher in Arendt looked for some depth in such as these, and found none."6 It was "banal" people who committed what may justly be called the greatest crime in history; and it was the system that made them do what they did.

The concept "banal evil," however, is only half a philosophical thought. Who created and maintained the system, if not such as Himmler and Eichmann, Stangl, and the unknown soldier who was an S.S. murderer? In reply, many would doubtless point to one not yet mentioned by us among the banal ones. And, it is true, Adolf Hitler did have an "unequaled grasp of the means" by which to "translate fantasy into reality." To go further, the whole Nazi Reich, and hence Planet Auschwitz, would doubtless have disinte- grated had some saintly hero succeeded in assassinating just this one individual. Even so, it is impossible to trace the monstrous evil perpetrated by all the banal ones to some monstrous greatness in the Fuehrer of them all. For if it is a "superstition . . . that a man who greatly affected the destiny of nations must himself be great," then Hitler is the clearest illustration of this truth. His ideas, though blown up into a pretentious Weltanschauung, are trite; so, for all the posturing intended to disguise the fact, is the man. Other than a low cunning, his one distinguishing mark is a devouring

"5H. Hoehne, The Order of the Death's Head (London: Pan, 1972), pp. 301 ff. Analyzed in To Mend the World, pp. 211 ff. and also in my The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 69 ff.

16 See especially Eichmann in Jerusalem, passim, and R. Feldman, ed., The Jew as Pariah (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 251.

' Luethy, op. cit., p. 65. Luethy's brilliant essay is worth more than many a whole Hitler biography.

THE HOLOCAUST 513

passion, and even that is mostly fed by a need, as petty as it is limit- less, to show them-whom?-that the nobody is somebody. Were even the beliefs of this "true believer" truly held? Did he ever dare to examine them? Certainly-all his biographers are struck by the fact-he never re-examined them. As likely, they too were part of a Wagner-style posturing, right up to his theatrical death.

Such historical considerations aside, we must face a philosophical problem. If we accept and philosophically radicalize Eichmann's plea to have been a mere "cog in the wheel," we end up attributing to the few-even to just one?-a power to mesmerize, manipulate, dominate, terrorize that is beyond all humanity and, to the many, a mesmerizability, manipulability, and craven cowardice that is be- neath all humanity. Yet, whereas Auschwitz was a kingdom not of this world, its creators and operators were neither super- nor sub- human but rather-a terrifying thought!-human like ourselves. Hence, in however varying degrees, the mesmerized and manipu- lated allowed themselves to be so treated, and the dominated and terrorized gave in to craven cowardice. Not only Eichmann but everyone was more than a cog in the wheel. The operators of the Auschwitz system were all its unbanal creators even as they were its banal creatures.

A moment of truth relevant to this occurred during the 1964 Auschwitz trial held in Frankfurt, Germany. A survivor had testified that, thanks to a certain S.S. officer Flacke, one Auschwitz subcamp had been an "island of peace." The judge sat up, electrified: "Do you wish to say that everyone could decide for himself to be either good or evil at Auschwitz?," he asked. "That is exactly what I wish to say," the witness replied (MW 242).

Then why were such as S.S. officer Flacke exceptions so rare as barely to touch and not at all to shake the smooth functioning of the machinery of humiliation, torture, and murder? And how could those who were the rule, banal ones all, place into our world a "kingdom" evil without precedent, far removed from banality and fated to haunt mankind forever? We cannot answer the first question. Gripped by the aporia of the second, the philosopher is unlikely to do better than fall back on a familiar dictum: Ausch- witz-like the Reich as a whole, especially as revealed in the endless, empty Sieg Heils of the Nuremberg Parteitage 8-was a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.

18I have tried to grasp and to capture the idolatrous compact between Volk and Fuehrer, manifested most clearly in the endless yet empty Sieg Heils of the Nurem- berg Parteitage, in "Idolatry as a Modern Possibility," Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), pp. 171-198, esp. pp. 192-195.

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Philosophers have applied this dictum without hesitation to animal organisms. To human realities-a society, a state, a civiliza- tion, a "world"-they have applied it with hesitation, and only if the whole enhanced the humanity of all beyond what would be possible for the parts, separately or jointly, alone. It is in contrast to this that the novum of the Holocaust-whole is revealed in all its stark horror. It did not enhance the humanity of its inhabitants. On the contrary, it was singlemindedly geared to the destruction of the humanity (as well as the lives) of the victims; and in pursuing this goal, the victimizers destroyed their own humanity, even as they yielded to its being destroyed. Pursuing his own age-old goal, the Socratic quest, "What is Man?", the philosopher, now as then, is filled with wonder. But the ancient wonder is now mingled with a new horror.

EMIL L. FACKENHEIM

Hebrew University, Jerusalem

UNIQUENESS AND EXPLANATION*

Professor Fackenheim's opening claim that "philosophers have all but ignored the Holocaust" seems to me accurate; this neglect is especially notable when measured by the recent attentiveness of philosophers to other topics of "applied ethics" (as in the discus- sions of medical ethics or animal rights). The omission also bears, more generally, on certain systematic questions in the historiog- raphy of philosophy and the sociology of knowledge-what rela- tion there is (or should be) between specific historical events and the work of philosophy, and what factors, inside or outside philo- sophy, determine which (and when) philosophical issues gain currency.

In relating the former of these two questions to the events of the Holocaust, Fackenheim stresses the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust as an unavoidable "given" for any understanding of it. This em- phasis, it seems to me, requires qualification-since, for any such claim, it is the nature and importance of the respects in which uniqueness is asserted, not the fact of uniqueness itself, that most concern us. (The significance of the Holocaust would hardly be

* Abstract of a paper to be presented in an APA symposium on the Holocaust, De- cember 30, 1985, commenting on Emil L. Fackenheim, "The Holocaust and Philo- sophy," this JOURNAL, this issue, 505-514.

0022-362X/85/8210/0514$00.50 ?) 1985 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.