Making Sense of Hell: Three Meditations on the Holocaust
| Author | Stephen Eric Bronner |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00202 |
| Date | 01 June 1999 |
| Published date | 01 June 1999 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Making Sense of Hell: Three Meditations
on the Holocaust
STEPHEN ERIC BRONNER
Rutgers University
This essay is an inquiry into the epistemology of the holocaust. It contests organic
explanations of the event in favour of an interpretative pluralism. Dierent questions
are seen as demanding dierent forms of inquiry: what made the holocaust possible
requires a political analysis, the issue of its uniqueness calls for a sociological
perspective, while an anthropological approach is necessary in order to illuminate its
enduring symbolic signi®cance. The essay will deal with these matters in an
innovative manner. Thus, in concert with one another these three meditations will
provide a new constellation for viewing the holocaust even as they confront certain
prevailing prejudices and assumptions.
Hell casts a long shadow. But its form changes over time. Hell was originally a
place for punishing the wicked: its divine creator, as Dante suggested, always
made the punishment ®t the crime. Hell oered lost souls an exemplary
warning. But things were dierent in its modern incarnation: the holocaust. The
moral justi®cation for suering vanished in the world of Auschwitz and
Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen and Dachau and the rest. There was nothing
exemplary about the camps. Damnation lost is connection with sin: hell became
purposeless.
The Jewish religion has no notion of hell. It was invented by Christianity. The
irony is therefore unmistakable. The Jews suered what was, for them,
unimaginable while the heirs of Christian civilization brought about precisely
what they most feared. The incomprehensibility of the holocaust subsequently
takes on its own logic. Unfortunately, however, a growing obsession with new
empirical facts and a refusal to deal with still unresolved normative questions is
undermining the ability to counter that logic. The devil perhaps lies in the
details. Nevertheless, the avalanche of raw information oered by professional
historians has only made blanket claims more appealing among the general
public.
Organic explanations of the holocaust must make way for a new interpretative
pluralism. Con¯ating political with sociological, and sociological with anthro-
pological, concerns has fostered much confusion. Disentangling them is subse-
quently a matter of some importance. Even if disciplinary boundaries are ¯uid,
rather than rigorously de®ned, qualitatively dierent questions will require
qualitatively dierent modes of inquiry: political history is most suited for
explaining what made the holocaust possible; a sociological approach is most
appropriate for determining its uniqueness; while an anthropological under-
taking is most useful for analysing its symbolic signi®cance. Employing these
# Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
STEPHEN ERIC BRONNER
315
three methodological perspectives, in the following pages, three interconnected
meditations will attempt to challenge certain prevailing beliefs and also oer a
new constellation of insights.
What made the Holocaust Possible?
Ideological concerns dominate the current discussion without reference to
political movements or the institutional context in which Nazi ideas became
eective. Various religious and existential thinkers condemn secularism for its
hubris, its assault on all `limits', and its expulsion of morality from politics.
Others consider the Enlightenment as the crucible in which fascism and the
holocaust were forged. Modernity, in short, becomes the source of the holo-
caust:1 technology, bureaucracy, and the modern state are brought into play,
but their character is seen as deriving from a certain instrumental or `totalizing'
form of thinking. The catastrophe increasingly appears preordained. There is
indeed something unfashionable about highlighting the contingent character of
the holocaust.
Teleology maintains its grip on the historical imagination: the end is still, too
often, seen as lying in the beginning. Secularism, the Enlightenment, and
Modernity are all seen by major ®gures of critical theory as tainted with a form
of original sin: `Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from
that over which they exercise their power'.2 Scienti®c or instrumental rationality
is viewed as having initially undermined religious myths and prejudices thereby
fostering a new preoccupation with liberal notions of experimentation and
tolerance.3 Such rationality was believed to have retained its own dynamic,
however, and gradually its power turned against all non-scienti®c precepts
including those emancipatory values which inspired the enlightenment project
in the ®rst place.
`Enlightenment' became equated with modernization. Its ability to contest
repression diminished. Instrumental reason ultimately weaved all realms of
social life into a seamless web of bureaucratic dimension. Conscience degener-
ated: conformity increased. Reason lost the capacity to resist the most loath-
some desires of the unconscious. Instrumental reason found itself serving the
purposes of prejudice and sadism: it became, using the famous phrase of David
Hume, `a slave of the passions'. The irrational, which the enlightenment sought
to subordinate, would subsequently reappear as its own product. The enlight-
enment would engender precisely what it sought to abolish: its idea of progress
would result in barbarism and its vision of `civilization' would culminate in
fascism. Resistance remained necessary if only as a matter of dignity and an
armation of hope. But it was hopeless from the start. Attempts to nullify the
most vicious instincts only strengthens them for `in the innermost recesses of
humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns
the world into a prison'.4
1 Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991).
2 M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno (J. Cumming, transl.), Dialectic of Enlightenment (New
York, Continuum, 1972), p. 9.
3 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 6.
4 T. W. Adorno (E. F. N. Jephcott, transl.), Minima Moralia: Re¯ections from Damaged Life
(London, New Left Books, 1951), p. 89.
# Political Studies Association, 1999
316
Making Sense of Hell
The argument is elegant, but hopelessly abstract. Fascism never portrayed
itself as a continuation of classical humanism or the Enlightenment. Neither its
supporters nor its opponents viewed it in that way. Those inspired by the
Enlightenment tended to identify themselves with liberal and socialist move-
ments. Their opponents generally clustered around movements inspired by
antisemitism, neoromanticism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. Attempts to
unify qualitatively dierent phenomena under a single rubric can only produce
pseudo-dialectical sophistry and political confusion. They inhabit Hegel's `night
in which all cows are black'. Indeed, unable to dierentiate meaningfully
between ideologies and movements, `everyone' becomes responsible for the
crimes of the Nazis other than, of course, those bohemian intellectuals content
to cast a plague on all houses.5
Dealing concretely with what made the holocaust possible, and assigning
responsibility, initially involves a judgment on the politics of the Weimar
Republic and those most responsible for bringing it down. Or, putting it
another way, explaining the construction of a concentration camp universe in
Germany ®rst calls for understanding the triumph of Nazism. A political
perspective is necessary in order to evaluate the institutional weaknesses of the
Weimar Republic and the material interests of its organizational actors. Social
structure and national cultural traditions cannot explain the cunning of the
Nazis, the authoritarian and chauvinist prejudices of the conservatives, the
timidity of the socialists, the self-defeating sectarianism of the communists, and
the inability to form a popular front capable of halting the Nazi seizure of
power. Some groups were less culpable than others and judging the role played
by the dierent actors in the drama calls for a political judgment. Under-
standing what made the holocaust possible primarily depends not upon what
happened after the Nazi seizure of power, given the ability of other totalitarian
regimes to turn masses of citizens into murderers, but before. The simple
historical truth is unyielding despite the ethical problems it generates: had the
Nazis been politically defeated in 1932 any discussion of the holocaust would
now prove moot.
Could it have been dierent? Professional historians hate such questions. But
they persist, and for good reason. The way history happened should not turn
into the only way it realistically could have happened. A battle over the soul of
Germany took place between fascist and antifascist forces during the 1920s.
Ignoring it cannot be justi®ed by merely pointing to the genocidal policies
undertaken later by the Nazi state. The historian thereby makes it far too easy
for himself or herself. It becomes possible to highlight the mass base supporting
the Nazis and simply discount the even stronger electoral base once enjoyed by
their opposition. It becomes possible to dismiss the strenuous eorts to create
conformity undertaken by the new totalitarian regime along with, what is more
important, the millions of political opponents who were its victims....
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