Journey · 10 stops
Thinking after Auschwitz
How philosophers after 1945 asked what the murder of the European Jews means for guilt, culture, ethics, the concept of God, testimony and the understanding of modernity – from Jaspers’s lectures on guilt to Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz.
Stops
Stop 1 of 10: Karl Jaspers
What can philosophy say after the murder of the European Jews – and who has to answer for it? In the winter semester of 1945–46, while the Nuremberg trial was under way, Karl Jaspers lectured in Heidelberg on what became The Question of German Guilt (Die Schuldfrage, 1946). He distinguished four kinds of guilt: criminal guilt, which courts judge; political liability, which every citizen bears for the state that acted in their name; moral guilt, judged by one’s own conscience; and metaphysical guilt, the failure of solidarity of those who survived while others were murdered. A collective guilt of a whole people in the criminal or moral sense he rejected – not the political liability of every citizen.
Stop 2 of 10: Theodor W. Adorno
Jaspers addressed his fellow Germans; Theodor W. Adorno, who returned to Frankfurt from American exile in 1949, asked what had become of culture. In “Cultural Criticism and Society”, written that year and printed in 1951, he wrote: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” The sentence belongs to an argument about cultural criticism, which, Adorno held, now faced the last stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism – a state that corrodes even the insight into why poems have become impossible. Shortened to a ban on poetry, it was quoted and contested for decades. In 1962 Adorno declined to soften it; in 1966 he wrote that it “may have been wrong”.
Stop 3 of 10: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Adorno asked about culture; Hannah Arendt asked how a new form of rule had become possible. As early as 1946 she had objected to Jaspers that the Nazi crimes exploded the limits of law. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traces antisemitism and imperialism into a kind of regime that rules through ideology and terror. Its concentration and extermination camps, Arendt argued, were the “laboratories” in which the totalitarian belief that “everything is possible” was tested – by making human beings superfluous. What was done there she called “radical evil”.
Stop 4 of 10: Eichmann in Jerusalem
In 1961 Arendt followed the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for The New Yorker – and revised that word. Her book (1963) is subtitled “A Report on the Banality of Evil”: in the organiser of the deportations she saw not a demon but a functionary whose most striking trait was thoughtlessness. Replying to Gershom Scholem in 1963, she wrote that evil is “never ‘radical’”, only extreme. Jaspers had urged something similar on her in 1946: to see the crimes in their banality instead of lending them a satanic greatness. The book, including her judgement of the Jewish councils, has remained controversial ever since.
Stop 5 of 10: Negative Dialectics
Arendt had reported on one trial; in Frankfurt former members of the Auschwitz camp staff stood trial from 1963 to 1965. In the “Meditations on Metaphysics” that close Negative Dialectics (1966) Adorno wrote: “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” Not wrong, he added, is the question whether one who escaped by chance may go on living. In the same year Jean Améry, who had been tortured by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz, published Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (in English At the Mind’s Limits).
Stop 6 of 10: Emmanuel Levinas
Adorno drew the consequences for metaphysics; Emmanuel Levinas drew them for ethics. Totality and Infinity (1961) begins with the permanent possibility of war and sets against every system the face of the other person, whose claim on me comes before any theory. Levinas dedicated Otherwise than Being (1974) “to the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism.” In the essay “Useless Suffering” he wrote that the disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz with striking, unmistakable clarity.
Stop 7 of 10: Hans Jonas
Levinas saw the end of theodicy; Hans Jonas tried to rethink the concept of God itself. In 1984, receiving the Leopold Lucas Prize of the Protestant theology faculty in Tübingen, he spoke on “The Concept of God after Auschwitz” (book edition 1987). He chose the theme, he said, in memory of his mother, whom he believed to have been murdered in Auschwitz; according to the German Federal Archives’ memorial book, the Nazi regime deported her from Düsseldorf to the Łódź ghetto in October 1941, and she died there in May 1942. He owed the dead, he said, an answer to their long-faded cry to a silent God. His speculative answer: goodness, omnipotence and comprehensibility cannot all be ascribed to God at once – if God is good and at least in part comprehensible, God is not omnipotent. Emil Fackenheim had answered differently in 1967 with a “614th commandment”: not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory.
Stop 8 of 10: The Differend
Jonas wanted to answer the cry of the murdered; a year earlier Jean-François Lyotard had asked what follows when their silence is used against them. The Differend (1983) starts from the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who would accept as proof of the gas chambers only an eyewitness who had been killed in one. For Lyotard this is the model of a differend: a wrong that cannot be stated in the idiom of the tribunal, because the means of proof were destroyed together with the victims. He compares Auschwitz to an earthquake that also destroys the instruments for measuring it: what remains is the feeling of an immense force and that something still has to be put into words.
Stop 9 of 10: Modernity and the Holocaust
Lyotard asked how the wrong can be put into words; the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman asked why his own discipline had treated the Holocaust either as an episode of Jewish history or as a relapse into barbarism. Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) argues against both: modern civilization was not by itself enough to produce the Holocaust, but it was without doubt an indispensable condition of it. Bureaucracy and the division of labour put distance between acts and their consequences, and the ambition to design a perfect social order made the murder thinkable. Drawing on Arendt, on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments and on Levinas’s ethics of proximity, Bauman asked how moral responsibility is socially silenced.
Stop 10 of 10: Giorgio Agamben
Bauman placed the Holocaust inside modernity; Giorgio Agamben, who in Homo Sacer (1995) had called the camp a paradigm of modern politics, turned in Remnants of Auschwitz (1998) to testimony. He starts from Primo Levi’s remark in The Drowned and the Saved (1986) that “we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses”. Every testimony, Agamben argues, bears witness to a gap; almost all the doctrines advanced in the name of ethics since Auschwitz, guilt and responsibility among them, must be cleared away. Dominick LaCapra (2004) and other critics object that this turns Auschwitz into a figure for everything and its victims into a concept. Whether the camp can serve as a paradigm without losing sight of the historical event remains disputed.
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