The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments

The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust

Jules Simon

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Jules Simon

The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust Salvaging the Fragments

Edited by

Jennifer L. Geddes, John K. Roth, and Jules Simon

Jules Simon

the double binds of ethics after the holocaust Copyright © Jennifer L. Geddes, John K. Roth, and Jules Simon, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61492-5 ISBN-10: 0-230-61492-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: May 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. Excerpts from Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 256 and 276, quoted in Chapter 5 are reprinted with permission from the publisher. ©1995 by Yale University Press.

Jules Simon

How is it possible to speak, when you feel . . . a strange double bind : an infinite claim to speak, a duty to speak infinitely, imposing itself with irrepressible force, and at the same time, an almost physical impossibility to speak, a choking feeling. —Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

Section One: Engaging the Double Binds

1

Introduction to Section One

3

1. Double Binds: Ethics after Auschwitz John K. Roth

5

2. Morality after Auschwitz? Haas, Nietzsche, and the Possibilities for Revaluation Beth Hawkins Benedix

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3. Cutting the Roots of the Holocaust: Resisting the Enlightenment’s Universalizing Impulse Husain Kassim

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4. The Tikkun of Philosophy and the Idea of Humanity Elizabeth Cameron Galbraith

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Section Two: Surveying the Fragments

67

Introduction to Section Two

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5. Survival of the Closest: Gender and Agency in Holocaust Resistance Tam K. Parker and Myrna Goldenberg 6. The Role of Moral Examples in Teaching Ethics after the Holocaust: Reconsidering the Rescue of the Danish Jews Hanne Trautner-Kromann

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7. Dignity and Despair: The Double Bind of Jean Améry’s Odyssey Mark Stern

101

Section Three: Salvaging the Ethical

115

Introduction to Section Three

117

8. Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust Jennifer L. Geddes 9. Making Ethical Sense of Useless Suffering with Levinas Jules Simon

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10. Reconstituting Political Philosophy after the Holocaust: Toward the Prevention of Genocide Mitchel Gerber

155

Notes on the Contributors

173

Index

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Jules Simon

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due first and foremost to the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for its organization, funding, and support of the summer seminar, “Ethics after the Holocaust,” which brought the contributors to this volume together for the first time in the summer of 2001. Without such a seminar, many of us would not likely have met, much less had the opportunity to work together on a book project, given our different disciplines, institutional affiliations, and research interests. We would like to thank those seminar participants whose thoughts enrich these pages but who did not contribute directly to this book: Donald Felipe, Charles Fishman, Sandra Lubarsky, Rochelle Millen, Michael Popich, and Mary Todd. As well, we would like to thank Yitz Greenberg, who was unable to co-lead the seminar as planned, but whose absent presence was still able to guide the direction of our conversations. Thanks are also due to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia for its organization and funding of a book manuscript workshop in the summer of 2003 and to the University of Virginia’s Office of the Vice President for Research & Graduate Studies, which also provided financial assistance for the workshop. Several people read through all or parts of this book, each making it much better than it would have been otherwise: Emily Gravett, Kristine Harmon, Spalding Lewis, Charles Mathewes, and Peter Ochs. For their wisdom and editorial skills we are grateful.

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Introduction

Sixty years after the Holocaust, humanity is still feeling its aftershocks, not least of which is the double bind that has come to characterize ethical theory and practice. A double bind is a predicament in which one is compelled to do something one cannot do, at least not adequately. The Holocaust calls for a response, but traditional ethical responses are simply inadequate and insufficient after such devastation and horror have been unleashed. What has happened allows for no completely satisfactory response, and yet a failure to respond in the face of such tragic loss and human failure is unacceptable to many of us. The task set for the authors of the chapters that make up this book has been threefold: (1) to engage the double binds of ethics in an effort to find ways of responding ethically to the Holocaust by assessing those double binds themselves; (2) to survey the fragments of lives and communities shattered by the Holocaust by assessing personal testimonies of survivors, historical accounts, and philosophical and theological responses; and (3) to set forth several interrelated but independent proposals for salvaging the ethical. The first double bind concerns the status of ethics itself: the proclamations of ethics are suspect after such an extreme moral failing in the heart of Western civilization. Centuries-old, rich traditions of ethical thinking, both philosophical and religious, failed to stop the brutal extermination of millions of victims. In fact, significant aspects of those venerable ethical traditions—virtue ethics, duty ethics, and utilitarian ethics—were used to propel the Nazi program of murder. Given this undeniable compromising of our ethical traditions, many of our fellow humans have become cynical about the possibility of continuing to address potentially devastating social tragedies, such as subsequent genocides, with the ethical traditions and customs at our

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disposal. And yet, we cannot simply abandon our ways of ethical thinking because that would paralyze us in the face of extreme suffering and genocide, rendering us spectators, who do nothing while slaughter and torture continue. We contend that we can only move forward with responsible ethical thinking by grappling with the implications of the Holocaust for ethical thought, speech, and action, as we seek to respond to injustices occurring in the world today, both those far from us and those in our very own communities. Another double bind of ethics concerns the limitations of language. It is impossible to speak adequately about or to respond sufficiently to the Holocaust because it exceeds the abilities of language to express or represent it. And yet we find ourselves unavoidably challenged to write and speak both in testimony to those who have been murdered and in an effort to prevent other such occurrences. We learn about this double bind first from survivors of the Holocaust who struggled to find the words to communicate their experiences and found that language was inadequate to the task. However, while we know that language will fail us, that we will fall short of our aims because of language’s limitations and our own inadequacies—and that we may even cause harm or betray the past—we also know that to refuse to speak can be a refusal of responsibility. How might one speak without betraying the past or our fellow humans, friends, or family members? The crimes of the Nazis were an assault on the Jews and at the same time crimes against humanity. One response to the Holocaust has been to think in terms of humanity, human rights, crimes against humanity—in ways that draw us toward each other and toward those in need. And yet our very understanding of what it means to be human has been radically altered by the organized, persistent, modern, bureaucratic, and brutal murder of millions of those deemed “unfit for humanity.” That humans did this makes the effort to draw on notions of our common humanity much more messy, painful, and problematic. No cheery optimism can sustain an earnest humanism after the Holocaust, and yet, what resources can we draw on to try to prevent further genocides from occurring? What discourse can we employ, on what logic can we rely, to what ethics can we turn that has not already been used as a means to violate others and to justify genocide? In this three-part volume, we begin by exploring the inadequacies of our language, the failures of our traditions of ethics, and the Jules Simon

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double binds of ethics after the Holocaust. In the second section, we focus on surveying the fragments that have resulted as a consequence of the dehumanization and devastation of the Holocaust. In the third section, we present some options for reconstituting a new “we,” a new kind of humanism, a new ethics that entails responding responsibly to others in need. As the reader will notice, all three efforts are in one way or another included in each of the essays of the volume, but we have separated them into three distinct sections according to the predominant thematic emphasis of each author. All told, this book constitutes our combined effort toward reconstructing ways we might enact the ethical in human community. Moral and religious commitments that have the courage to persist in spite of humankind’s self-inflicted destructiveness are essential, but the question remains how effective those dispositions can be in a world where power, and especially the power of governments, stands at the heart of the matter. To find ways to affect “the powers that be” so that their tendencies to lay waste to human life are checked, ethics after the Holocaust will need to draw on every resource it can find: appeals to human rights, calls for renewed religious sensitivity, respect and honor for people who save lives and resist tyranny, and attention to the Holocaust’s warnings, to name only a few. Those efforts will need to be accompanied by the kinds of “small deeds” of ongoing acts of resisting dehumanization, deeds that build these concerns into our educational, religious, business, and political institutions. This book seeks to be one of those small deeds that bring into discussion both the double binds of ethics after the Holocaust and the fragments from which we might move toward ethical forms that resist genocide, crimes against humanity, and the other forms of violence that are causing so much suffering in our world.

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SECTION ONE

Engaging the Double Binds

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Introduction to Section One

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he essays in this section explore the double binds that ethics faces after the Holocaust, suggesting that ethical efforts must grapple with these double binds before they can proceed. The authors here confront the troubling double binds that have resulted from not only the failure of language in our attempts to adequately come to terms with the events of the Holocaust but also the failures of our traditional normative ethical theories. That the first two essays include profiles of writers who committed suicide, despite their efforts to conceive of and work for a better world, suggests that the double binds are deadly serious. In his chapter, “Double Binds: Ethics after Auschwitz,” John Roth introduces one of the most troubling double binds that ethics after the Holocaust faces. He argues that we need to resist repeating the past mistakes of promoting grand ideals, ideologies, or theodicies and instead seek to change ethical misdirections through “small deeds.” Roth turns to Sarah Kofman in order to draw upon the hints, allusions, and signposts in her work that lead us beyond the old humanisms, with their reliance on a metaphysics of essential nature or universal reason. Roth concludes that the right kind of “small” speech-acts could lead to questioning institutional practices that engender genocide and might also serve to bind us into more ethically sensitive human communities. In “Morality after Auschwitz? Haas, Nietzsche, and the Possibilities for Revaluation,” Beth Benedix extends the problematic of the double bind through her analysis of Peter Haas’s distinction between the “content” and “form” of ethical systems, which he presents in Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic. Using Nietzsche’s genealogical logic, Benedix argues that all of our systems of ethics are constructed and that our task has become that of understanding the governing logic of this or that particular worldview. This task necessitates abandoning any sort of universal ethic, theological Jules Simon

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language, or assumption of a “shared, human community” hoped for by John Roth. Challenging the vestiges of Enlightenment optimism, Benedix enters into the “after” created by reflection on the constructedness of all ethical system-making and turns to the cryptic poetics of Paul Celan to take up a type of discourse that is conducive to humility without subjugation and that is able to render complexity without the easy categorizations of good and evil. In “Cutting the Roots of the Holocaust: Resisting the Enlightenment’s Universalizing Impulse,” Husain Kassim critically assesses Kant’s Enlightenment ethics and, in the process, extends his critique to the causal conditions that engendered the intellectual colonialism “grounding” the Holocaust. Echoing strains of Benedix’s argument, Kassim speculates that linking the intellectual respectability of the Enlightenment ideals with the agenda of the National Socialists enabled proponents of genocide to act with the disarming conviction of ethical certainty that convinced so many millions of others to join in the destructive acts of the Nazis. Kassim extends culpability to those who placed their faith in the universalizing ethics of the Enlightenment doctrines of autonomy and sovereignty. He proposes the necessity of validating the difference and inviolability of the other as other. As in the later essays by Parker, Goldenberg, Geddes, and Simon, Kassim refers to the ethical position of Levinas for initiating the possibility of an ethical relation that moves us beyond the narrow confines of politics as usual or the culture wars that pit ethnic or class groups against each other. In “The Tikkun of Philosophy and the Idea of Humanity,” Elizabeth Galbraith focuses our attention on Emil Fackenheim’s attempt to redeem our secular, theological, and philosophical failures. While Kant’s ethical philosophy, the quintessential Enlightenment source for intellectual responsibility, failed in the hands of its utilitarian users such as Eichmann, paradoxically, it was also able to serve as a critical guide for a transformed ethics for others. Despite such a failure, Fackenheim nonetheless uses Kant’s ethical philosophy to ground his concept of Tikkun, the Jewish philosophical principle that allows for redemption to occur post-Holocaust, albeit a fragmentary and fragile one. According to Fackenheim, this variation of Kantian ethical theory has to be verified by one’s personal sacrifice to preserving the dignity of the other. Only personal acts of courage and self-sacrifice enable traditional modes of human expression and communication, such as philosophy, to be transformed and thus redeemed for the future. Jules Simon

CHAPTER 1

Double Binds: Ethics after Auschwitz John K. Roth

How is it possible to speak, when you feel . . . a strange double bind: an infinite claim to speak, a duty to speak infinitely, imposing itself with irrepressible force, and at the same time, an almost physical impossibility to speak, a choking feeling. Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words

T

he Holocaust signifies an immense human failure. It did enormous harm to ethics by showing how ethical teachings could be overridden or even subverted to serve the interests of genocide. To the extent that philosophers—moral philosophers in particular—have paid close attention to the Holocaust (not many, unfortunately, have done so), a significant version of the double bind that Sarah Kofman (1934–1994) identified in Smothered Words is definitely in effect. One feels a duty to speak, an obligation to make ethics stronger and less subject to overriding or subversion, an insistence not only to drive home the difference between right and wrong but also to influence action accordingly. Yet such work can produce a choking feeling, a sense that too much harm has been done for a good recovery to be made, a suspicion that ethics may be overwhelmed by the challenges it faces. The bind is double, for the sense of ethical responsibility, real though it is, remains hopelessly optimistic and naïve unless it grapples with the despair that encounters with the Holocaust are bound to produce. To be touched by that despair, however, scarcely encourages one to believe that ethical responsibilities will be sufficiently accepted and met. Caught between the post-Holocaust need to

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speak for ethics and above all to speak ethically and boldly, on the one hand, and the feeling that the key elements of ethics—words, arguments, appeals to reason, persuasion through the example of moral action—may be inadequate, on the other, the question persists: What can and should be made of ethics after Auschwitz? It is doubtful that such a question can be answered, at least if one expects answers to bring finality and closure. But there can be responses, and that is what this chapter attempts to provide, albeit only in part and even in fragmented form. The attempt consists of two parts: (1) consideration of some of Sarah Kofman’s contributions to post-Holocaust ethics, and (2) reflections stimulated by her contributions, which point toward what she called “the possibility of a new ethics.”1 The two parts of my attempt contend that postHolocaust ethics must take seriously the fragility of ethics and the awareness that nothing good should be taken for granted. Knotted Words What can words say? What can they do? Words can be put to many uses. They can make statements and ask questions. They can mystify and deconstruct; they can be used against themselves. Speeches, propaganda, orders, laws—these are only a few of the ways in which language can advance mass murder. Testimonies, memoirs, poems, stories—these are only a few of the ways in which language can bear witness to atrocity. Words can kill. They are also memory’s voice. Without words, there could not have been the Holocaust. Words, however, cannot do everything. One reason is that words can be smothered or, as Sarah Kofman sometimes said, words can be knotted. The Holocaust produced knotted words, especially for the survivors, for such words, Kofman suggests, are “demanded and yet forbidden, because for too long they have been internalized and withheld.” Knotted words, she went on to say, “stick in your throat and cause you to suffocate, to lose your breath”; they “asphyxiate you, taking away the possibility of even beginning.”2 Kofman understood all too well what she was saying, for this French philosopher was a Holocaust survivor. Like some other important writers who also endured that catastrophe—Jean Améry (1912–1978), Tadeusz Borowski (1922–1951), Paul Celan (1920– 1970), and perhaps Primo Levi (1919–1987)—she took her own Jules Simon

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life. Kofman left behind a rich collection of philosophical works, among them significant writings on Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially the latter’s outlook affected Kofman’s moral philosophy in varied ways) as well as major contributions to feminist theory. Her voice, which was often heard on French radio and in political debate, earned its prominence in an influential generation of French philosophers that included Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy, who said of Kofman that “fidelity was for her the very course of life. Not ‘truth’ but fidelity, the truth of fidelity, which has no final sense but the sense of its very course. Truth that returns to life and not the converse.”3 Kofman is better known in many philosophical and literary circles than the other survivor-suicides mentioned above, but in the field of Holocaust studies it has thus far been her fate to be overlooked and too little appreciated. True, she wrote less—or at least less directly— about the Holocaust than some survivors, including Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985), arguably the woman who has written the most impressively in French about the Holocaust.4 Kofman’s explicit works about the Holocaust consist primarily of two small books, Paroles suffoquées (1987), a reflection focused on her father, Berek Kofman, a Parisian rabbi who was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994), her memoir about antisemitism, family separation, and hiding during the German occupation of her native France.5 Ann Smock, one of her translators, notes that Kofman began writing Rue Ordener, Rue Labat during the winter of 1992–1993. She was almost sixty at the time. The memoir takes its title from two Parisian streets, which, Kofman observes, were separated by “one Métro stop.”6 The family home had been on the Rue Ordener, but everything changed when Kofman’s father was caught in the roundup of some thirteen thousand Parisian Jews that took place on July 16– 17, 1942.7 Subsequently Sarah’s mother, who survived the Holocaust, had to find hiding places for the children. Kofman’s turned out to be on the Rue Labat with a Christian widow named Mémé.8 Kofman never saw her father again. In Smothered Words, Kofman sums up the bare facts of her father’s fate as follows: My father: Berek Kofman, born on October 10, 1900, in Sobin (Poland), taken to Drancy on July 16, 1942. Was in convoy no. 12, dated July 29, 1942, a convoy comprising 1,000 deportees, 270 men

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and 730 women (aged 36–54); 270 men registered 54,153 to 54,422; 514 women selected for work, registered 13,320 to 13,833; 216 other women gassed immediately.9

The ending of the five-page chapter that contains these words mentions the memorial created by Serge Klarsfeld, a French historian of the Holocaust and a hunter of Nazi war criminals. Kofman reproduces a portion of its double-columned, alphabetized list of the French deportees. There, in the left-hand column between the names of Simone Klempen and Grange Kohn, one finds Berek Kofman. Klarsfeld’s memorial list, with “its endless columns of names . . . takes your breath away,” says Kofman. Its “neutral” voice summons you obliquely; in its extreme restraint, it is the very voice of affliction, of this event in which all possibility vanished, and which inflicted on the whole of humanity “the decisive blow which left nothing intact.” This voice leaves you without a voice, makes you doubt your common sense and all sense, makes you suffocate in silence: “silence like a cry without words; mute, although crying endlessly.”10

Her father’s death suffocated Kofman, stifled her words. It did so, however, not simply because it was her father’s death, grievous enough though a father’s death can be for anyone. “Because he was a Jew,” as her stifled voice expresses it, “my father died in Auschwitz.”11 And then she adds her double binding questions: “How can it not be said? And how can it be said?”12 Not just a father’s death but a particular Jewish father’s death in Auschwitz—the event, which Kofman calls “my absolute”—made the suffocating difference. She elaborates what she means by suggesting that integral to that difference is the awareness that an Auschwitz death “was worse than death.”13 Kofman’s point is not restricted to the brutality of that place or even to the systematic, assembly-line character of the mass murder that took place in Birkenau’s gas chambers and crematoriums. When she says that an Auschwitz death was worse than death, she is not mystifying that death, let alone denying that death is death. She points instead to the smothering, even the death, of words such as human and humanity. After Auschwitz, Kofman claims, people “do not really die” because death itself—in the sense that the death of Jules Simon

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every man, woman, and child is the death of a human being— reached its nadir as it was degraded and mocked by Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution.” Auschwitz meant that people died differently in the sense that the Nazi extermination camps, whose mass killing went on for months and years, was a devastating assault on the very idea of a shared humanity that puts us all on a common ground of rights and responsibilities, of dignity and respect. This tragic insight is not solely a lament about the loss of humanity conceived generically, universally, or in terms of some fixed philosophical essence, for, in the words of the philosopher Richard Rorty, “most people—especially people relatively untouched by the European Enlightenment—simply do not think of themselves as, first and foremost, a human being.”14 The loss of humanity involves a destruction of particularity, difference, and the potential for personal development—ingredients without which humanity is an abstraction. Not simply wanton but calculated and intended again and again by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, the destruction of Berek Kofman—a particular Jewish rabbi with a distinctive social identity, a specific name, and a singular face whose difference was definitive of his humanity—constitutes the assault on humanity that is also the death of human death. There was, and could be, only one Berek Kofman. The Nazi assault on humanity was systematic, extensive, and devastating. It could only be what it was by destruction that murdered particularity and difference—social and personal—as it destroyed children, women, and men en masse but also one by one by one. Post-Holocaust people, Kofman indicates ironically and tragically, have survived death only to discover, if they will, that reviving suffocated humanity is a task that indeed puts us, and perhaps philosophers and ethicists in particular, in “a strange double bind: an infinite claim to speak, a duty to speak infinitely, imposing itself with irrepressible force, and at the same time, an almost physical impossibility to speak, a choking feeling.”15 All she has left of her father, Kofman observes at the beginning of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, is his fountain pen. “Patched up with Scotch tape,” it can produce words no more, but “right in front of me on my desk,” she says, that mute pen “makes me write, write.”16 As she penned those words, Kofman was trying to do what she had not done overtly very much before. “Maybe all my books,” she observed, “have been the detours required to bring me to write about Jules Simon

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‘that.’”17 That included her father’s death, the Holocaust, the loss of humanity, the death of death. Kofman had written about some of these matters already and in ways many and diverse, but a direct encounter with the Holocaust, unavoidably including the particularity of her father’s death and her own identity in relation to that disaster, created in her something akin to Robert Antelme’s predicament when his “liberation” from Dachau left him to see that it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and that experience which, in the case of most of us, was still going forward within our bodies. How were we to resign ourselves to not trying to explain how we had got to the state we were in? For we were yet in that state. And even so, it was impossible. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it.18

Confronting this double bind, but not paralyzed—at least not completely—by it, Antelme told his story, and Kofman examined the message that she took from it. Antelme saw that the more Adolf Hitler and his followers tried to destroy an inclusive sense of humanity through their genocidal antisemitism and racism, the more undeniable the “indestructible unity” of humanity became, or, as Antelme himself put it, “there is only one human race.” The SS, continued Antelme, “can kill a man, but he can’t change him into something else.”19 Kofman seems to share what she calls Antelme’s “pleasure in tearing the Nazis’ power to shreds and overturning their mastery,” but as much as she admires his resistance, his determination not to permit the Nazis or even his own devastating experience to choke his words completely, Kofman appears to find Antelme’s affirmative understanding of the persistence of a single humanity less than sufficient and therefore not entirely convincing.20 It is not that she denies the unity but that Antelme may not have emphasized enough how Nazism wreaked havoc on community. Her father’s death never far from her consciousness, Kofman starts to draw out what remained only implicit in Antelme’s The Human Race. The value of a shared sense of humanity, of our belonging to a human species, depends on whether that belonging binds us together in mutual respect and caring, whether it draws people together in community. As Kofman sizes up the situation, however, the connections between the unity implied by the word humanity Jules Simon

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and the senses of community that may or may not follow are tenuous and even problematic. First, she points out, “no community is possible with the SS.”21 With a vengeance, Nazi ideology rejected the idea of an inclusively shared humanity. Regarding difference—especially alleged racial difference—as profoundly threatening, its genocidal impulses took the world to Treblinka and Auschwitz. Nazi Germany, of course, took pride in its own sense of community, which underscores the fact that community is not necessarily humanity’s ally, especially if humanity is understood to be pluralistic and diverse. So Kofman makes a second point: it is crucial to support “the community (of those) without community.”22 Those without community are outsiders, but Kofman’s thinking does not stop with a call to defend and protect those who are threatened and harmed because they are left out. More radically and fundamentally, she rejects all senses of community that are based on “any specific difference or on a shared essence” such as reason.23 The right forms of community, she seems to be saying, are those that consciously accept a double bind. This bind acknowledges that every community is particular, different, finite, even exclusive in one way or another, but no community should rest on assumptions about immutable superiority or inferiority. On the contrary, the particularity of one community ought to affirm, protect, and encourage the particularity of others. At its best, she contends, community depends on “a shared power to choose, to make incompatible though correlative choices, the power to kill and the power to respect and safeguard the incommensurable distance, the relation without relation.”24 Here Kofman’s words are not smothered or knotted, but they remain less than fully expressed. They remain hints, allusions, signposts pointing to an ethical outlook that would not be the same as old humanisms that appealed to human nature, to the essence of humanity, or to reason as humankind’s most decisive characteristic. Instead, she suggests that everyday realities and actions—things such as choices and keeping or betraying one’s word—reveal our humanity and make all the difference. The Holocaust reaffirmed that all of those caught in it— perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and more—were human. In some sense, humanity survived the Holocaust, if only to testify, as Blanchot put it, how human indestructibility reveals “that there is no limit to the destruction of man.”25 But if humanity is to mean more than Jules Simon

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that, if humanity is to be what Kofman thought it ought to become, then the destruction of old humanisms may make possible the willful reconstitution of a “new kind of ‘we,’” even “a new ‘humanism’ one might say, if it were still acceptable to use this trite and idyllic word.”26 Unknotted Words? What about Kofman’s guarded hope, her hint of “community (of those) without community” that could be based on “a shared power to choose”? Kofman glimpsed the possibility of a new humanism and a new ethics, but the Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg seemed to emphasize a different theme, even one that disagreed with hers, when he spoke at a conference on ethics after the Holocaust at the University of Oregon in 1996.27 Explaining that he did not consider himself a philosopher or theologian, Hilberg asserted that ethics is the same today as it was yesterday and even the day before yesterday; it is the same after Auschwitz as it was before and during the lethal operations at that place. Especially with regard to needless and wanton killing, he emphasized, ethics is the same for everyone, everywhere. Hilberg left no unclarity. Such killing is wrong. We know that “in our bones,” he said, for such knowledge is the heritage of many years. Kofman, I think, would accept Hilberg’s claims, but only up to a point, and she would be right before conceding that Hilberg’s bold pronouncement unknots the words that ethics after Auschwitz needs to express. True, senses of right and wrong are real. The Holocaust helps to focus them. Even the SS leader Heinrich Himmler knew as much. He and the other perpetrators of the Holocaust were aware of the psychological turmoil created by their orders to kill. They did their best to make those tasks easier, more “humane,” by distancing the killers from their victims. Thus, they substituted mass gassings for the shootings of the Einsatzgruppen. But did Himmler and the other perpetrators know “in their bones” that what they were doing was wrong? In some cases, there is evidence that says so. The perpetrators covered their tracks as best they could. Many of the killers numbed themselves with alcohol. Some Germans refused orders to kill Jews, especially when children were the target. On the other hand, such evidence is mostly circumstantial. It was not very often enhanced by admissions of guilt or expressions of Jules Simon

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remorse. Far more common were excuses that referred to orders that had to be obeyed or to fears of punishment if obedience was not forthcoming. For the most part, Nazi leaders and Holocaust perpetrators remained unrepentant. At the end of the day, their behavior does not show that they knew that their killing of the Jews was wanton, needless, and wrong. On the contrary, their behavior suggests that they believed their killing to be right and good, albeit extremely difficult, even loathsome to do. It would be comforting if Hilberg’s convictions were true, but the Holocaust does not inspire confidence that all human beings know—in their bones or in any other way—that mass killing and genocide are wrong. Kofman was right: no community was possible with the SS because it did not know better than it thought it did. That knowing, as Kofman also understood, depended on an entirely different approach to choosing and fidelity than Nazism required. To the extent that knowledge of wrongdoing complicated the killing that the perpetrators carried out month after month, year after year, moral sensitivity did have to be overridden. Himmler and his henchmen could rely on an ally of vast authority: human consciousness itself.28 Humanity’s capacity to think is amazingly pliable, especially so in its ability to justify whatever the powers that be want done. The explanations offered by German industrialists to warrant their use of slave labor—for example, “Germany was fighting for its life, what else could one do?”—were only one strand in a web of rationalization and repression that did much to ensure that dissenting moral scruples would be subordinated to “higher necessities” or even that the dictates of morality and mass murder would coincide.29 The Nazis were not totally successful in this regard. But when one remembers that the persons responsible for the Holocaust were a cross-section from virtually every profession, skill, and social class, the persistence with which the “Final Solution” went forward without effective moral dissent is the more striking. Absent the force of will, what Kofman called the “shared power to choose” that makes “incompatible though correlative choices, the power to kill and the power to respect and safeguard the incommensurable distance, the relation without relation,” nothing guarantees that ethics will not be smothered after the Holocaust as it was with such devastating results during that disaster. “The owl of Minerva,” wrote the philosopher Hegel, “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” He meant that human Jules Simon

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reason and philosophy in particular achieve understanding only in retrospect; they are hard pressed to give “instruction as to what the world ought to be.”30 If Hegel is correct, the tools of moral philosophy and religious ethics are meager. Still, they have a role to play that nothing else can duplicate. Moral reflection, for example, can clarify and intensify feelings of wrong prompted by the Holocaust. Such thinking can show the importance of those feelings by revealing what happens when they fail to work their way into practice. Yet that understanding alone does little to change the world as long as societies concretely reward activities that kill and take punitive action toward those who refuse to cooperate. If one wants to affirm the United Nations’ declaration that “everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person,” one must realize that such claims are as frail as they are abstract. The same is true of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which the UN’s General Assembly approved on December 9, 1948. Forty years later, in November 1988, the United States became a full party to this convention, the ninety-eighth nation to ratify it, but only with significant reservations. Both the long delay and the reservations resulted from fears that if the United States unequivocally agreed to the treaty that makes genocide a crime, Americans and even the state itself might be unjustly indicted by the nation’s adversaries. Meanwhile, history continues to testify that power, not pacts, breaks or makes mass killing. Rights, liberty, and security of person are real only in specific times and places, only in actual political circumstances. Apart from such concrete settings those ideals are only that. Granted, they are ideals that attract. They can bring out the best in people. They can even rally powerful forces behind them. They may even have a transcendent status ordained by God. To assume, however, that they are more than ideals until men and women take responsibility to make them a concrete reality may well be an illusion. Meanwhile, in our pluralistic world, where cultural, religious, and philosophical perspectives vary considerably, a widely held belief is that values are so relative to one’s time and place that the “truth” of moral claims is much more a result of subjective preference and political power than a function of objective reality and universal reason. This relativistic outlook meets resistance in the Holocaust, for a widely shared conviction holds that the Holocaust was wrong. Jules Simon

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It was something that should not have happened, and nothing akin to it should ever happen again. Michael Berenbaum puts the point effectively when he emphasizes that the Holocaust has become a “negative absolute.” Even if people remain skeptical that rational agreement can be obtained about what is right, just, and good, the Holocaust seems to reestablish conviction that what happened at Auschwitz and Treblinka was wrong, unjust, and evil—period. More than that, the scale of the wrongdoing, the magnitude of the injustice, and the devastation of the Holocaust’s evil are so radical that we can ill afford not to have our ethical sensibilities informed by them. As another Holocaust scholar, Franklin Littell, has stressed, “study of the Holocaust is like pathology in medicine.”31 Pathology seeks to understand the origins and characteristics of disease and the conditions in which it thrives. If such understanding can be obtained, the prospects for resistance against disease, and perhaps even a cure, may be increased. Unfortunately, to identify the Holocaust as a “negative absolute” that reinstates confidence in moral absolutes is a step that cannot be taken easily, and no one is advised to rush to the judgment that study of the Holocaust can obtain the hopeful results of medical pathology at its best. To reiterate the point with which this chapter began, the Holocaust signifies an immense human failure. It did harm to ethics by showing how ethical teachings could be overridden and even subverted to serve the interests of genocide.32 When Berenbaum calls the Holocaust a “negative absolute,” the absoluteness involved means that not even ethics itself was immune from failure and, at times, complicity in the pathological conditions and characteristics that nearly destroyed Jewish life and left the world morally scarred forever. The status of ethics after the Holocaust is far from settled. One might argue that Nazi Germany’s defeat shows that right defeated wrong and that goodness subdued evil, thus showing that reality has a fundamentally moral underpinning. The Holocaust, however, is far too awesome for such facile triumphalism. The Nazis did not win, but they came too close for comfort. Even though the Third Reich was destroyed, it is not so easy to say that its defeat was a clear and decisive triumph for goodness, truth, and justice over evil, falsehood, and corruption. Add to those realizations the fact that the Nazis themselves were idealists. They had positive beliefs about right and Jules Simon

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wrong, good and evil, duty and irresponsibility. We can even identify something that can be called “the Nazi ethic” and “the Nazi conscience.” The “Final Solution” was a key part—perhaps the essence— of those outlooks that were put into practice with a zealous, even apocalyptic, vengeance.33 It would be too convenient to assume that the Nazi ethic’s characteristic blending of loyalty, faith, heroism, and even love for country and cause was simply a passive, mindless obedience. True though the judgment would be, it remains too soothing to say only that the Nazi ethic was really no ethic at all but a deadly perversion of what is truly moral. Most people are unlikely to serve a cause unless that cause makes convincing moral appeals about what is good and worthy of loyalty. Those appeals, of course, can be blind, false, even sinful, and the Nazis’ were. Nevertheless, the perceived and persuasive “goodness” of the beliefs that constituted the Nazi ethic—the dedicated SS man embodied them most thoroughly—is crucial to acknowledge if we are to understand why so many Germans willfully followed Hitler into genocidal warfare. Paradoxically, the “Final Solution” threatens the status, practical and theoretical, of moral norms that are contrary to those that characterized the Nazi ethic, whose deadly way failed but still prevailed long enough to call into question many of Western civilization’s moral assumptions and religious hopes.34 Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime intended the annihilation of Jewish life to signify the destruction of the very idea of a common humanity that all people share. Another philosopher-survivor, Jean Améry, was thinking in a vein akin to Kofman’s when he wrote that the Nazis “hated the word ‘humanity.’”35 He amplified his point when he said, “Torture was no invention of National Socialism. But it was its apotheosis.”36 Améry meant that the Third Reich aimed to produce men, women, and children whose hardness would transcend humanity in favor of a so-called racially pure and culturally superior form of life that could still be appropriately called Aryan or German but not merely “human.” Insofar as humanity referred to universal equality, suggested a shared and even divine source of life, or implied any of the other trappings of weakness and sentimentality that Hitler and his most dedicated followers attributed to such concepts, National Socialism intentionally tried to go beyond humanity. Such steps entailed more than killing allegedly inferior forms of life that were thought to threaten German superiority. Moving beyond humanity Jules Simon

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made it essential to inflict torture—not only to show that “humanity” or “subhumanity” deserved no respect in and of itself, but also to ensure that those who had moved beyond humanity, and thus were recognizing the respect deserved only by Germans or Aryans, had really done so. Hitler and his Nazi followers did not succeed completely in implementing their antisemitism, but they went far enough in establishing what Améry aptly called “the rule of the antiman” that none of our fondest hopes about humanity can be taken for granted.37 As Sarah Kofman helped to show, our senses of moral and religious authority have been fragmented and weakened by the accumulated ruins of history and the depersonalized advances of “civilization” that have taken us from a bloody twentieth century into an even more problematic twenty-first. A moral spirit and religious commitment that have the courage to persist in spite of humankind’s selfinflicted destructiveness are essential, but the question remains how effective these dispositions can be in salvaging moral fragments within a world where power, and especially the power of governments, stands at the heart of that destructiveness. To find ways to salvage the fragments, to affect “the powers that be” so that their tendencies to lay waste to human life are checked, ethics after Auschwitz will need to draw on every resource it can find: appeals to human rights, calls for renewed religious sensitivity, respect and honor for people who save lives and resist tyranny, and attention to the Holocaust’s warnings, to name only a few. Those efforts will need to be accompanied by efforts that build these concerns into our educational, religious, business, and political institutions. If one considers human rights after the Holocaust, it is unlikely that humankind will ever reach full agreement on a single worldview that will ground belief in such rights. But it does not follow that appeals to human rights are dashed as well. If people feel the need to ground appeals to human rights, a variety of options—philosophical and religious—may remain credible, even if they will not be universally accepted. More importantly, there may be considerable agreement—especially after the Holocaust—about what the functional interpretation of human rights ought to be. Here, too, there will not be universal agreement, but the Holocaust itself has had an important impact on helping to clarify what ought not to happen to human beings. If we think about what ought not to happen to Jules Simon

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human beings, moreover, we may find considerable agreement about what should happen. Sarah Kofman never forgot what the Nazi assault meant, namely, that after July 16, 1942, she never saw her father Berek again. In the afterword to Nightfather, a remarkable novel about a young daughter’s poignant attempt to understand her father, a Holocaust survivor, the Dutch writer Carl Friedman—whose father was a survivor— quotes the poet Remco Campert, another author from the Netherlands. “Resistance does not start with big words,” Campert says, “it starts with small deeds. Asking yourself a question/that is how resistance starts/then putting that question to somebody else.”38 Nazism and its Holocaust were an assault on the values that we human beings hold most dear when we are at our best. Resistance to protect them came too late then; hence resistance continues to be urgent now, and it begins perpetually with small deeds, the raising of critical questions among them. Sarah Kofman, her Smothered Words, the Holocaust’s double binds—each and all, they show that nothing human, natural, or divine guarantees respect for those values, but nothing is more important than our commitment to defend them, for they remain as fundamental as they are fragile, as precious as they are endangered. These insights are among those made clearer by Sarah Kofman’s Smothered Words, her guarded hope, her hint of “community (of those) without community,” and her glimpses of the possibility of a new humanism and a new ethics that might emerge from the Holocaust’s double binds. Notes 1. Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 73. 2. Ibid., 39. 3. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Foreword: Run, Sarah!” in Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), ix. Deutscher and Oliver provide helpful background—biographical and philosophical—about Kofman in “Sarah Kofman’s Skirts,” their introduction to Enigmas, which also contains a detailed bibliography of Kofman’s publications. See 1–22 and 264–275. 4. See especially Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Delbo was not Jewish, but her activity in the French Resistance led to her arrest and

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deportation to Auschwitz, which took place on January 24, 1943. She survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, a Nazi camp established especially for women. 5. For the English translations of these books, see Kofman, Smothered Words and Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). Kofman’s memory of her father plays an important part in both. Smothered Words is dedicated to him and also to the philosophers Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) and Robert Antelme (1917–1990). Blanchot’s controversial career included the prewar articles that he wrote for right-wing, antisemitic publications, but also assistance to French Jews during the German occupation and postwar reflections on the Holocaust, especially L’Ecriture du désastre (1980), which influenced Kofman considerably. Antelme, a member of the French Resistance, was arrested by the Germans in June 1944, sent to Buchenwald, and eventually liberated at Dachau. “To have to speak without being able to speak or be understood, to have to choke,” wrote Kofman in Smothered Words (39), “such is the ethical exigency that Robert Antelme obeys in The Human Race.” His book L’Espèce humaine (1957) made an especially strong impression on Kofman. Its inspiration is evident particularly in Kofman’s Smothered Words. For the English translations of the books by Blanchot and Antelme, see Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) and Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 1998). All citations from Antelme and Blanchot as well as from Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and Smothered Words are from the English editions I have noted. 6. Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 31. 7. Kofman adds the following information about her father: On 16 July 1942, my father knew he was going to be picked up. It had been rumored that a big roundup was planned for that day. He was rabbi of a small synagogue on the Rue Duc in the 18th arrondissement. He had left home very early that day to warn as many Jews as he could to go into hiding immediately. Then he came home and waited; he was afraid that if he too were to hide his wife and six young children would be taken in his place. He had three girls and three boys between two and twelve years old. He waited and prayed to God that they would come for him, as long as his wife and children could be saved. (Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 5)

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About 80,000 Jews from France were killed in Nazi Germany’s extermination camps, mostly at Auschwitz. Approximately one-third of them were French citizens; the majority were immigrants and refugees. Foreign Jews were first deported from France to Auschwitz on March 27, 1942. Facilitated by French police, the roundups and deportations intensified during the summer of 1942. For more background and detail, see David Weinberg, “France,” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Laqueur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 213–222. 8. Among the multiple double binds that the Holocaust created were the complex dilemmas of identity encountered by hidden children. Kofman illustrates an aspect of that bind when she briefly describes the journey that took her from Rue Ordener, her home street, to a place of hiding and relative safety on Rue Labat. Her reaction seems to run as deep as it was physical. Short in distance and time though it was, that journey “seemed endless to me, and I vomited the whole way” (Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 31). Kofman indicates that Mémé, her rescuer, was “not without anti-Semitic prejudices.” She also detached Kofman from her mother and Judaism. (Mémé, recalls Kofman, “christened me Suzanne because that was the saint’s name closest to hers (Claire) on the calendar.”) Yet, Kofman says that she came to love Mémé “more than my own mother.” Ending Rue Ordener, Rue Labat with Mémé on her mind, Kofman writes, “I was unable to attend her funeral. But I know that at her grave the priest recalled how she had saved a little Jewish girl during the war” (Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 47, 39, 58, 85). 9. Kofman, Smothered Words, 10. 10. Ibid., 10–11. In this passage Kofman includes two quotations from Blanchot, whose words, along with Antelme’s, are frequently quoted in Smothered Words. The first quotation is from “After the Fact,” Blanchot’s afterword to his Vicious Circles, trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1985), 68. The second passage is from The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 61. Elsewhere Blanchot amplifies and complicates the point made in the first passage quoted by Kofman. “The disaster ruins everything,” he writes, “all the while leaving everything intact.” That relationship epitomizes another of the Holocaust’s double binds, which are so vividly illustrated in Kofman’s life and authorship. See Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 1. In “A Note on Translation,” which helps to introduce Smothered Words, Madeleine Dobie observes that Kofman’s frequent use of quotations, a style often found in her later writings, “may be seen to attenuate the mastery of the narrative voice through the interposition of the voices of others, and thereby of the Other, the style that Kofman,

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following Blanchot, calls ‘writing without power.’ . . . Paroles suffoquées,” continues Dobie, “is at once a scholarly piece that develops arguments supported by quotations and footnotes, and a meditation in the style of Blanchot, in which the conventional privileging of the signified—arguments or ideas—over the signifier—form or the very process of writing itself—is called into question” (xxiv). My chapter’s discussion of Kofman—replete with quotation of her words—modestly tries to emulate her style in this regard. 11. Kofman, Smothered Words, 9. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. Kofman cites Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as an influence on her thinking about this point. 14. See Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in The Philosophy of Human Rights, ed. Patrick Hayden (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2001), 251. 15. Kofman, Smothered Words, 39. 16. Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 3. 17. Ibid. 18. Antelme, The Human Spirit, 3. 19. See Kofman, Smothered Words, 58, and Antelme, The Human Race, 220. 20. Kofman, Smothered Words, 66. 21. Ibid., 70. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Kofman ends Smothered Words with this quotation from Blanchot (see 73). The quoted passage comes from Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 135. 26. Kofman, Smothered Words, 73. Kofman adds an intriguing note to her allusion about a new “humanism.” She writes as follows: “In spite of everything that makes this word unacceptable for us today—after ‘the death of God’ and the end of man that is its correlate—I nonetheless want to conserve it, while giving it a completely different meaning, displacing and transforming it. I keep it because what other, new ‘word’ could have as much hold on the old humanism?” (89–90). Here one thinks of the Nietzschean theme of the revaluation of values. 27. The discussion in this part of my chapter is adapted from the epilogue to Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 365–377.

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28. For instructive sociopsychological discussions about rationalizations and interpersonal dynamics that expedited the Holocaust and facilitate the potential for future genocides, see Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 29. For a useful discussion of the various defense mechanisms employed by Nazis to justify their actions in the Holocaust, see Raul Hilberg, “The Nature of the Process,” in Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust, ed. Joel E. Dimsdale (Washington, D.C.: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1980), 5–54. See also Robert Wolfe, “Putative Threat to National Security as Nuremberg Defense for Genocide,” in Reflections on the Holocaust, ed. Irene G. Shur, Franklin H. Littell, and Marvin E. Wolfgang (Philadelphia: The American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1980), 46–67. As he sized up the excuses that German industrialists offered, Benjamin Ferencz, an American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, added that as far as German businessmen were concerned, “it was only those who had nothing to be ashamed of who expressed a sense of guilt and culpability.” See Benjamin B. Ferencz, Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 192. 30. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 12–13. 31. The quotation is from Littell’s concluding plenary speech at “Remembering for the Future 2000,” a major international conference on the Holocaust held in Oxford, England, 16–23 July 2000. See John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, eds., Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, vol. 3 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 8–9. 32. On these points see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 33. For important discussions of these themes, see Peter J. Haas, Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988) and Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Related topics are discussed in John K. Roth, ed., Ethics after the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1999) and John K. Roth, Ethics

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During and After the Holocaust: In the Shadow of Birkenau (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 34. Even with respect to Berenbaum’s appealing idea that the Holocaust is a negative absolute, this judgment remains valid. There is no guarantee that universal moral reason or intuition exists or that, if they do, they will automatically conclude without disagreement that the Holocaust is a negative absolute. In ethics, the human will is decisive in determining how good and evil, right and wrong are understood. Reason and intuition inform our willing and choosing, but without the latter, our senses of good and evil, right and wrong, lack the force that gives them full reality and makes them effective. Willing and choosing alone do not determine what is ethical, but in the fullest sense no determination of right and wrong takes place without them. For a careful and important ethical study that emphasizes rationality in a more universalistic way, see David H. Jones, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). 35. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 31. After Nazi Germany annexed his native Austria in March 1938, Améry fled to western Europe. During the German occupation of Belgium, he joined the resistance movement in that country and was arrested and tortured by the Germans in 1943. He survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated in April 1945. Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Beyond Guilt and Atonement) appeared in 1966. The English translation noted above was first published in 1980. Améry stressed that his experience of torture and the Holocaust caused him to lose what he called “trust in the world” (28). 36. Ibid., 30. 37. Ibid., 31. 38. Carl Friedman, Nightfather, trans. Arnold and Erica Pomerans (New York: Persea Books, 1994), 134.

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CHAPTER 2

Morality after Auschwitz? Haas, Nietzsche, and the Possibilities for Revaluation Beth Hawkins Benedix

I A quick scan of the section of my bookcase devoted to the Holocaust reveals such titles as Auschwitz and After, (God) after Auschwitz, After Auschwitz, Ethics after the Holocaust, and Morality after Auschwitz. Clearly, the symbolic landscape of Holocaust study carves open jagged crags dividing before from after. A rupture, a breaking point, a point of no return, particularly in terms of theological and ethical inquiry, “after” conjures images of a ship ripped away from its moorings, floundering and flailing about, vestiges of safe harbor shrinking and finally disappearing below the horizon. A frail and precarious space, this “after.” Confronted by the fatality of absolutist political systems that ground the most heinous acts in so-called morality, those taking up the challenge of ethical inquiry in this space recognize the danger underlying the will to systematize, but still seek an ethical system that provides some mechanism for determining the heinous as heinous, some yardstick by which to measure the impossible to measure. We have an unwarranted gut feeling that we intuitively, instinctively know the good and that we know, likewise, when human rights, when life is being violated. The vestiges of Enlightenment optimism run deep; ethical inquiry in this space is marked by a cautious hope that the seductive hold the will-to-anethic exercises will be used in such a way that it harnesses this naïve, Jules Simon

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“intuitive” sense of the good and at the same time retains a suspicion of systematicity. Ethical inquiry in this space urgently reminds us that because ethical systems are so seductive, those who aim to form these systems must be extraordinarily careful. It is into this space of “after” that Peter Haas jumps with his book Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic.1 The “radical challenge” he presents to us is to enter into the Nazi worldview, to assume the existence of an internal logic and a governing system of values, that is, an ethic, and to use the logic of this worldview to attempt to understand the action “necessitated” by it. Haas assumes that there is an inextricable connection between metaphysics and ethics—that the way a world looks is a crucial factor in determining the type of behavior such a world expects of its inhabitants. He calls into question any assumptions of a shared “human” community and instead operates on a localized level; he launches us full force into the realm of the particular, shattering any reliance on a “universal” ethic we may want to bring to bear on the matter. Unsettling though it may be to make the kinds of assumptions Haas asks us to make, his challenge is nevertheless a profoundly useful one. In giving us no recourse to transcendent notions of good or evil, which we might then indiscriminately impose, Haas forces us to consider that systems of value are constructed from a space of the deepest interiority. These systems are so tightly woven, so thoroughly binding, that we need to enter into them to crack them open. This “entering into,” as it were, challenges us also to acknowledge the deliberately discursive element of ethics construction. Haas suggests that the project of ethics building is semantically precarious, primarily because any given ethical system is sustained and reinforced through discourse and rhetoric aimed at such reinforcement. He argues: My theory is that the way a culture formally symbolizes and then talks about evil will determine the kinds of phenomena it will view as evil. Thus we move from basic formal patterns of how we think, to the overt symbolization of these in discourse, to the application of this discourse to the evaluation of real-life phenomena. . . . The Holocaust . . . is a case study of the most graphic sort of how one ethical system can be radically remade at the discursive level and yet continue to motivate because it retains its form and so its power. (6–8) Jules Simon

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According to this theory, the eradication of the Jewish people is bolstered by the principle of “just war.” Once the Jews were deemed “the symbol of quintessential evil,” Haas argues, “the exorcism of Jews from Aryan society could be conceived as not only a racial or historical need but an ethical imperative” (30)—an “ethical imperative,” moreover, that takes its cues from the predominant discourse that sustains this ethical framework. Discourse, effectively, becomes action; action, in turn, serves to emulate the so-called ethical paradigm by which it has been “mandated.” The demonization of the Jews by the Nazis is a clear and all-too-real example of the fatality of a discourse that draws boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, and insidiously promotes these divisions by means of untouchable “moral” tags like “good” and “evil.” Language, discourse, and rhetoric occupy the liminal space between concept and practice; in their most effective role, they bolster an ethic, enforcing the actions and behaviors that the ethic implies. In the specific case of the Nazi ethic, Haas argues, language is used alternately to delineate and obscure, to clarify and distort. Haas suggests that the only way to defeat such a system that closes in on itself is to expose the devastating internal “logic” of that system. This is the moment of “after”—the moment when all claims are simultaneously deconstructed and verified, the moment that requires a somewhat paradoxical approach: a clear-sighted, objective plumbing of the depths and a psychological treatment of how philosophical “truths” are made, bought into, and given power. Such an approach itself is not terribly new. Nietzsche, for instance, championed such a two-pronged approach as the cornerstone of his “revaluation of all values,” as did Freud, William James, and Peter Berger (to name just a few) in their explorations of the psychological and sociological motivations of religious expression. But Haas introduces a radical component to these already radical visions and in effect makes a startling claim with regard to human nature, particularly given the historical context he explores. He writes: Europeans committed what we judge to be heinous crimes under Nazi rule not because they were deficient in moral sensibility, and not because they were quintessentially evil and brutal people, but because they were in fact ethically sensitive. They were fully aware of what they were doing and displayed principled acquiescence. The difference is that for them such deeds were simply no longer understood Jules Simon

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to be evil. Under the influence of what I shall be calling the Nazi ethic, vast numbers of people simply came to understand evil in different terms and, in perfectly predictable and comprehensible fashion, acted upon their understanding. (2)

Given the choice to act within or outside of a prevailing “ethic,” Haas argues, we will choose the ethical; specific action, too, cannot be understood apart from that specific realm of the ethical within which we have chosen to operate. A direct assault on Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil,” Haas’s method would have us discard the category of “evil” altogether in the attempt to make sense of the Holocaust. Or, perhaps more precisely, his method would challenge us to consider that “evil” is perpetually recast in the service of promoting an ethical worldview. The compelling set of questions here is this: Why assume “ethical sensitivity” as the basis for Nazi action? Is this assumption, this move to describe as ethical (a discursive move), born out of a wish-fulfillment almost too grotesque to fathom? Is this assumption about the basis of Nazi action connected to a larger set of assumptions regarding human nature, that is, that it is human nature to crave a meaningbestowing ethical system, that it is human nature to seek out and remain subject to an ethic? It is a remarkable, unexpected, and deeply disturbing conclusion, to be sure, that the Nazis have something to teach us about human nature. And yet, perhaps this is precisely the point. To regard Nazism as a mere aberration, or as a monstrous distortion of what it means to be human, is too simple— too complacent, self-righteous, self-serving. Moreover, as Haas argues, such a position provides no ultimate instructive purpose. The case is open and shut, not worth looking into, easily disposed of without any self-reflection. In forcing these questions, Haas challenges us to occupy an increasingly uncomfortable space; he challenges us, that is, to reevaluate all given paradigms of understanding, to find a new vantage point from which to view an all-too-constructed system. This method echoes Nietzsche’s genealogical approach quite closely. And yet, while Haas begins from a common set of assumptions—that “truth” is in fact constructed and works to perpetuate its own constructedness, that it insinuates itself as given, eternal, and necessary, when it is really the product of contingency layered upon contingency—he transforms the basic motivator of truth-construction/meaning-making Jules Simon

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from an individualistic will-to-power to a collectivistic will-to-be-overpowered. Why? What is the instructive value in making the assumption that an ethic was in place in the Nazi regime, rather than come to a more Nietzschean conclusion that the will-to-ethical-ordering simply fell apart and, instead, was replaced by a far more transparent will-to-power? This apparent departure from Nietzsche might in fact align Haas all the more closely with Nietzsche’s revaluative project. The basic assumption of Nietzsche’s “genealogy of morals” is that moralities (necessarily plural) can be deconstructed in such a way as to expose the original agendas behind them. Once we come to understand the psychological, social, economic, and cultural motivators that are in place for any given system, we can more easily sift through what these systems deem expedient and inexpedient, and how these systems enforce a desire in their adherents for the expedient. The move from “expedient” to “good” and from “inexpedient” to “evil” reflects, in Nietzsche’s view, a drastic defense mechanism in which the utilitarian and “natural” are masked as the transcendent and, therefore, indisputable. And this move is, again, a fundamentally discursive maneuver. What was formerly called “bad” (and as such designated something that presented an obstacle to the fluid motion of the system—a value-neutral term, Nietzsche argued) now is called “evil” (designating by its very nature something diametrically opposed, inherently and essentially other, to what is promoted as good in a given system). Similarly, Haas’s definition of “ethic” underscores the initial utilitarian thrust of systems-building. He describes it as a “complete and coherent system of convictions, values, and ideas that provides a grid within which some sorts of actions can be classified as evil, and so to be avoided, while other sorts of actions can be classified as good, and so to be tolerated or even pursued.” He clarifies further that an ethic must provide a standard against which its adherents can declare certain goals to be good or bad and so judge particular types of actions to be right or wrong. . . . [A]ny formal system that enables evaluations of this sort is an ethic, no matter what its particular judgments or content might be. That is why I am able to call the Nazi standard of right and wrong an ethic—without thereby claiming that it was proper or moral. (3–4)

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Central to this definition is a paradox: an ethic is primarily valueneutral at the same time that it promotes from within a mechanism for making value judgments. In addition, value judgments can only be imposed on an ethic from an external point of reference. The “morality” of an ethic can be determined, presumably, but only from outside the system. The separation of the ethical from the moral produces a peculiar result: form, rather than content, becomes the identifying mark of the ethical. If a system looks ethical, if it allows for internal value judgments to be made, it is ipso facto an ethic. Such a move is inclusive and opens up—expands—the category of “ethic.” At the same time, by virtue of its becoming more inclusive, the definition collapses in on itself and is emptied of specific content. Anything now that demonstrates this form can be defined as an “ethic.” For Haas, as for Nietzsche, any fully enclosed, self-referential system—because necessarily incomplete and limited—is suspect. The will to create such a system—necessarily exclusive as it cordons off a space of reality arbitrarily, circumscribing inside and outside—and a will to be subject to such a system derive from the same basic impulse: to operate within a narrowing sphere. To narrow is to control; to move in a narrow space is to be controlled. If we can claim that it is generally true that the unknown or the uncircumscribed produces a level of discomfort because it has yet to be mastered, then it would follow that the narrow provides relatively more comfort than the broad. We choose our prisons, as it were. We choose the condition of being imprisoned over the dizzying unknowability of freedom. For Haas, ethics making as such is implicated in the process of dehumanization that is paradoxically sustained and exacerbated by the all-too-human desire for order. The gravest danger that Haas’s thesis presents is, then, the perceived elimination of choice, the perception of determinism, in the process of ethics building.2 In his discussion, the Holocaust serves an emblematic, but not unique, role with regard to ethical inquiry. His view is that it is an extreme (in degree as opposed to kind) case that supports “the idea that all societies have an ethic that guides people’s lives” (1). The danger of making an ethical system seem inevitable, fixed, and final, he suggests, is a potential danger for any ethical system. The only defense against such overwhelming (apparent) determinism is a self-conscious awareness of this danger and a deliberate Jules Simon

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rejection of a discourse that would promote it. Do we have any recourse to such a defense? In a frightening moment of his study—a moment in which the categories “victim” and “perpetrator” blur indiscriminately to encompass both Nazi and Jew—Haas demonstrates just how precariously intertwined discourse and this perceived determinism are: The fact that [the liquidation of the Hungarian Jews] could be done so thoroughly, openly, and quickly in a country not committed to an alliance with Germany, and to a community that was aware of what was about to happen, and while the world watched in full awareness shows how overpowering and persuasive the ethic had become. The destruction of the Hungarian community tells us how committed to their ethic the Germans were who at the end of their Reich continued to carry out acts of genocide with complete devotion. It tells us about the moral co-optation of Hungarian functionaries who in sight of the German defeat collaborated in this horrible labor in the pursuit of nationalistic goals. It tells us about the Jews who became victims without mounting any effective resistance. And it tells us about the ethical confusion of the world that watched silently as the trains rolled across Europe bringing the Jews of Hungary to the death camp at Auschwitz. The case of Hungary throws into relief the force of the new ethic promulgated by the Nazis. Its power was so overwhelming that it left even its victims immobilized. Collaboration was simply the most rational choice. But even the German perpetrators, I want to argue, were victims of their own system. Eichmann was not a psychotic or a sadist. He was a middle-level bureaucrat doing his duty to serve what he honestly came to believe was a higher good. In this he was no different from any of us. In pursuit of his ideal he organized hundreds of train transports to carry Jews to Auschwitz, trains desperately needed to carry ammunition and supplies to the ravaged German troops trying to halt the Russians’ advance. Eichmann and his superiors were apparently convinced that this was a better use of the train. There could hardly be clearer proof of how fully the Nazi state had become a victim of its own fanatical view of the world. (108)

A disarming statement, to be sure, that we should be called to think of the “German perpetrators as victims of their own system” in the same moment we are called to remember “the Jews who became victims without mounting any effective resistance.” The futility described here is horrifying: involuntary action squandering attempts Jules Simon

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at resistance, a choreographed collision of chaos and paralysis. Autonomy, independent thought, the power to stop the course of events—these are not options in the picture Haas presents. He further describes the way in which the Jewish victim was “scripted” to respond (read: unintentionally participate and collaborate in his own destruction) to this ethic in terms that are once again heavily discursive: [The victims of the Nazi ethic] obviously cannot be swept up into the overall logic of the system, which would be tantamount to accepting their own need to be punished or killed. On the other hand, to try to fight or influence the ethic from outside would amount to only gibberish. The victims must try to exert their influence from within the system, thereby implicitly ratifying its validity. This was precisely the bind in which the Jews of Germany, and then the rest of Europe, found themselves. As the last leader of Berlin’s Jewish community, Rabbi Leo Baeck, said, the leaders found influence easiest when working within the system. This, of course, left them open to the subsequent charge of being accomplices. It was they, after all, who carried out the day-to-day administration of Nazi policy: identifying fellow Jews, distributing ration cards, arresting people for deportation, carrying Jewish corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoriums, and so forth. It is as if Jewish leaders acquiesced in their own community’s death. (156)

Only in a self-enclosed system, a system that constructs and feeds its own truths, would an oppositional language—a physical rebellion— be determined nonsensical, illogical, “gibberish.” When the Nazis and the Jews they murdered can both be described as “victims” subject to a system greater than either of them, when action (or perhaps better, reaction) is deemed a linguistic impossibility, we have clearly reached a point where language has failed to make sense of a reality more palpably rendered outside of language. In describing this formal ethic emptied of so-called moral content, Haas demonstrates the impossibility of the evaluative judgment that must necessarily follow.3 He has presented us with the horrifying possibility that the same language might be used to describe the Nazi experience and the Jewish experience. He has suggested, even more painfully, that complicity extends to the Jewish community. What does it do to suggest that the Nazis and the Jews are equally tied to a system larger Jules Simon

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than themselves? Even Nietzsche’s revaluation implies a hierarchy of values, with what affirms life at the top of this hierarchy. Why, then, describe a method whereby an ethic devoted to negating and destroying life becomes an ethic as viable as any other? Why state the facts so bluntly, in such a way that Haas makes himself vulnerable to the accusation that he is “blaming the victim”? Haas has brought us to an impasse, a point of no return, where language obscures difference, renders value neutral, cloaks in sameness the brute horror of the events it claims to expose. II In his use of the term “victim” to describe two grossly incompatible situations, in easing the slippage between terms such as “perpetrator” and “accomplice,” and in emptying the term “ethic” of specific content, Haas forces us into a space where language demonstrates the terrifying brutality surrounding it; he exposes and continues to make use of a language that fails to capture difference, that enforces sameness. At the same time, however, he unflinchingly demands that we confront the stark reality too often masked by rhetoric. In the same breath that Haas forces us to confront our demons, as it were, to speak a truth that many would prefer remain unspoken, he also reinforces the danger of the Manichean impulse4—the tendency to “other” the subjects of evaluation to the point that they bear no resemblance to ourselves and therefore pose no imminent danger to our own ethical systems—so central to ethical inquiry and the discourse frequently used in such inquiry. He uses the term “victim” in the same moment that he introduces the term “acquiesce.” He muddies the waters, only to retreat back to a clearly delineated world of division, rupture, and separation, a world governed by the logic of mutual exclusion. For “victim” is, after all, a term that is best understood within an oppositional context, within a context where aggression and power lead to the destruction of will and body. This so-called Manichean impulse works on the premise of opposition and bifurcation—that is, us versus them, good versus evil. The assumption is that these poles cannot coexist; one must destroy the other as a matter of selfdefense. This very impulse is often either central to or projected onto the internal logic of the system under evaluation. The effect is that Jules Simon

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of a distorted hall of mirrors, where claims to a higher code of “good and evil” bounce back on themselves and melt together until the evaluative system is eventually subsumed by its own subject. In his use of the term “victim” to designate, almost interchangeably, Nazi and Jew, Haas demonstrates his own adherence to a discourse that creates division and collapses division simultaneously; he is, as it were, a “victim” of the insufficiency of this particular term to capture the complexity of the situation he exposes. Inadvertently, Haas demonstrates how deeply entrenched such oppositional models are in our language, and in his own language, as he sets out to expose the fatal danger of this model. At the same time, it is precisely, and paradoxically, this oppositional model that illuminates the accompanying danger of using a language that fails to capture difference, nuance, and complexity—the flipside of the Manichean impulse, as it were. This language collapses in on itself, rendering all things equal, making value judgments impossible, precisely at the same time that it gestures to categories of difference by which we may judge. To a large extent, this discursive collapse resembles the stage of nihilism that Nietzsche describes as both necessary and necessarily temporary in the process of his revaluation of all values. Nietzsche’s model is dialectical in that it follows a course from understanding value (or morality) as self-imposed deception (which has long been forgotten or repressed, lending the illusion of eternality to the given moral system), through exposing the deceptive basis of such a value, to a reassessment of what still constitutes “value” in light of this exposure. It is a process of paring away, a deliberate housecleaning, as it were, which requires at once a staunch commitment to objectivity and a perceptiveness regarding the all-too-human motivations for self-deception. What remains, after the proverbial dust has settled, is potentially a mechanism for describing value in a self-aware context that regards “value” as primarily mutable, created, and relative to the system enforcing it. But this should not be taken as a radical relativism. Instead, Nietzsche adamantly argues that some self-deceptions are healthier (that is, more life-affirming) than others, and that any such mechanism should lead us toward these while steering us away from deceptions that damage and negate the pulse of life. This is a naturalistic, perhaps mystical, certainly Heraclitean premise that paradoxically Jules Simon

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(given that Nietzsche forcefully rips to pieces virtually every vestige of modern Western culture and expression) relies on a fundamental faith in human nature to know and intuitively chart out these affirmative paths rather than the negative. After providing extensive “evidence” of how Western culture has failed to do just this, Nietzsche still insists that such a revaluation is possible and crucial, in reversing the degenerative process to which modernity has contributed. Nihilism, he suggests, is—if it becomes an end in itself—a recipe for paralysis. It is a necessary stage in bridging the space from unhealthy self-deception to revaluation, but it must be overcome once it has served this purpose. Nietzsche’s full-scale, persistent analysis of Western assumptions of morality and culture (which is in the death-throes of nihilism, in his estimation) suggests that he believes, or perhaps desperately hopes, that such an overcoming is possible, has to be possible. From his post-Holocaust vantage point, Haas shows how fatal the collapse into a rhetoric that alternately obscures and divides can be. One of the most terrifying marks of this collapse, Haas insists, is that it cannot be regarded as nihilism in any traditional sense. There was a value system in place, but a system that performed with the same totalizing destructiveness, that enforced the same paralysis, as nihilism. Haas’s resigned conclusion that the formal mark of an ethical system trumps all content implies that nihilism, given a powerful enough discourse to reinforce it, can be cloaked in the garb of an ethical system. Perhaps this symbolic equating of a formally ethical system with nihilism provides the first and necessary step in a project that ultimately requires a full-scale questioning of the components that came together to form the so-called Nazi ethic? A questioning that begins, but does not end, with an examination of the discursive element of this ethic? That requires us to make messy the simplistic binary opposition that looks so familiar (and therefore, so powerful and seductive) in the Nazi ethic? Still, it remains intriguing that Haas would have gone precisely this route, that, faced with the brute facts, with the horrifying reality of the Holocaust, he would argue for the essentially ethical (and by extension, selfless—as the ethical requires a loss of self in the subjection of self to a greater power) quality of the Nazi regime. The dedication of his book to his parents, Jewish survivors of this regime, cannot be separated, it seems to me, from Haas’s insistence on the Jules Simon

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ethical quality of Nazism. The compelling force of his argument is his almost violent propulsion of his readers out of the realm of the either-or; he forces us headlong into that far more difficult space to navigate—the both-and. The Nazi regime was both ethical and despicable. There is no easy, clear-cut choice to make here. The consequence of such a statement requires a full-scale rethinking of how this can be the case. How can we have entered into a discursive space that allows the indisputably despicable to be called ethical? And, having entered into such a space, what now can be done? Haas’s insistence on the “ethical sensitivity” of the Nazis is marked by the same surprising (but tempered) optimism that propels Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values. Like Nietzsche, Haas hopes against hope that because of the reciprocal and inextricable link between the ethical systems we create and the action that such systems enforce, we can construct a worldview that aligns itself with the affirmative, that we can pull ourselves out of the ethical morass we are in now as we attempt to evaluate a system that would seem to defy evaluation. Even (and perhaps especially) his choice of the term “victim” to describe at once the Nazi and Jewish experience announces this hope. Merriam-Webster’s defines “victim” in this way: 1: a living being sacrificed to a deity or in the performance of a religious rite 2: one that is acted on and usually adversely affected by a force or agent : as a (1): one that is injured, destroyed, or sacrificed under any of various conditions (2): one that is subjected to oppression, hardship, or mistreatment b: one that is tricked or duped .

Tellingly, the primary description for this term involves “sacrifice”; it asserts a realm other and higher, a force that has presumably demanded this sacrifice. Such a description underscores the use of the term “holocaust” (from the Hebrew olah, meaning burnt sacrifice) to designate the extermination of the Jews of Europe. The use of this term marks another point of no return, a sealing-off, an abrupt and graphic announcement of the collision of the all-toohuman with the transcendent. The theological implications of this term are horrifying; the persistent use of this term, indiscriminately, to encompass the whole range of ethical, philosophical, political, Jules Simon

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historical, religious inquiry perpetuates these profoundly horrifying implications, but does nothing to confront and dismantle them. Use of the term Holocaust demands that we view these events as theological in nature; the very suggestion that a divine power has given sanction to extermination prohibits any mode of inquiry that would attempt another vantage point. At the same time, however, the term betrays the hope that we can retrieve meaning out of suffering, the deepest conviction that suffering should not be in vain. This is the merest whisper of hope, a scarred and tattered remnant of the optimism that belies the insistence in our belief systems that we are not alone. Haas’s study represents an attempt to find that mysterious place that will allow for evaluation even after the yardstick for such evaluation is shown to be woefully imprecise, an attempt to retrieve the moral sphere even after it has been so decisively divided from the ethical, to locate something in reserve that resists relativism, some mechanism that will allow us to call the Nazi ethic “evil.” Where is that vantage point from which we might cast value judgments? Haas gestures tentatively toward this place, using Fackenheim as his point of departure: The real point of the Holocaust . . . is that all people act out of mythic constructs of the world. We now have before us two possibilities, that of secularism, culminating in Auschwitz, and that of an existential Judaism, pointing to a faith in God simply for the sake of survival. The mythic construct we choose will determine the future course of events. . . . Individuals do not act as independent moral agents. They make decisions within a given framework or meaning. The failure of the Holocaust rests ultimately not in its individual actors but in the mythic cosmos they inhabited. Our response should take the form not of this or that act but of choosing a countermyth. As long as we frame future discourse in these terms, we can effectively and authentically defeat what Auschwitz represents. (225)

At this late moment of his study, after challenging us to embrace a logic of the “both-and,” Haas presents us with a dire “either-or”: either secularism, which leads inevitably to the destruction of Auschwitz, or “existential Judaism,” which would seem to be roughly equivalent to a resigned belief in the God of the Hebrew Bible for no other reason than that it is better than no belief at all. The silver Jules Simon

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lining in this apparently limited and empty set of choices is that we have been given back the power to choose, if only for that brief moment before the necessary action that this choice dictates takes shape. And the moment of choice, he implores us, is upon us. If the “mythic cosmos” one inhabits determines one’s course of action, one’s orientation in the world, then we need to choose deliberately to inhabit a cosmos that will not permit the sort of devastating violence and brutality of the Nazi ethic—a hypothetical that remains perfectly in line with Haas’s thesis overall. But are these really the only choices we have? Does secularism necessarily lead to devastation? Would a “countermyth”—couched as it is in terms of opposition and antagonism—move us toward revaluation, or does it implicitly promote a reactionary stance? The “countermyth” Haas would have us choose seems to require the acceptance of an expedient illusion, a “necessary lie,” as Nietzsche would describe it. “A faith in God simply for the sake of survival” perhaps might read more broadly: the assumption of a higher power, an “other” at a remove of height and distance from the self (à la Levinas), and, by extension, a collective community.5 Such an assumption is mindful of the “face” of the other as the hindrance to violence; “face-to-face” encounter requires the recognition of the inviolability of the other, the embrace of the other as other, a refusal to reduce self and other to sameness. Promoting a stance of essential humility and deference, such an assumption reflects a wish to resanctify (if, indeed, this space has ever been sanctified) a space that has demonstrated the terrifying course of “secularization.” However hopeful it might be, this gesture toward a higher power is an extremely problematic gesture. If form supersedes content, as Haas argues, what mechanism is then in place to insure that a stance of humility does not slide into a stance of subjugation? Any appeals to human decency should make the distinction between these stances self-evident, and yet, the danger inherent in promoting a stance of deference before an essentially unknowable, higher source (even if implemented only as necessary illusion) resembles, formally, a totalitarian ethic a bit too closely for comfort. Is it possible, reasonable, probable, after World War II, to expect humility to become the governing mechanism in political affairs? Is it enough to plead that a political system be grounded in a de-secularized worldview? That “faith in God simply for the sake of survival” become the yardstick Jules Simon

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by which to measure the ethical viability of a given system? Such a prescription appears, sadly, more empty than directive, more potentially dangerous than ameliorative (not to mention that it glosses over myriad subtleties, the first of which might be: which God?). Any prescription has to be broader than this. The gesture to the other is crucial, but faith in this other cannot be used to justify a giving over of personal responsibility, just as it cannot be used to legitimate the wish (conscious or unconscious) to dominate. The slope between faith in a force outside the self that would encourage other-oriented action and a willful acceptance of demagoguery is far too slippery to navigate without tremendous caution. “Faith in God simply for the sake of survival” is no safeguard against the deliberate manufacturing of discourse to control public opinion. What, then, are we left with? If indeed the ethical is enforced on the discursive level, what type of discourse can be conducive to humility without subjugation, to rendering complexity and resisting easy categorization? The poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan offers a way, albeit a cryptic way, to begin thinking about what this discourse might look like. In his poem, “Speak, you also,” he suggests that to speak truly is to give what you say the meaning of “the shade.” Celan promotes a discourse of the shade, that is, a discourse that resists fixation at all turns. This is a discourse that resists, as well, opposition or division; the imperative to “speak” is accompanied by the prescriptive qualifier, “but keep yes and no unsplit”—speak from within a space that will not allow for clear delineation between categories that are deemed mutually exclusive but in fact partake of one another. This type of discourse is not so much slippery or evasive as it is extraordinarily cautious, deliberate, and mindful of the destructive potential that it persistently guards against. Celan lost both of his parents to the Nazi regime; he himself was a prisoner in a labor camp. This call to a discourse marked by nuance, complexity, and shade heralds his own linguistic revaluation, a process by which he means to transform the at once euphemistic and brutally divisive German of the Nazis into a discourse of healing, a process by which he takes back the very language implemented to deny and destroy the Jews of Europe. Such a process he describes as a hindurchgehen, a “going through”; moving through its own fatal collapse, this discourse becomes something new, though this new discourse retains continuity with the trauma propelling it forward. Jules Simon

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This is a discourse that remembers its own inception, that remains ever aware of the toxic ground it forces itself out of. This is a discourse that allows for movement toward the future, that uses nihilism to its advantage without becoming paralyzed by it, because it remembers the damage of the past. It is a discourse that grows out of death without minimizing, trivializing, or replicating the forces that caused this death—a discourse of stoic responsibility, demonstrating a commitment to rendering complexity, regardless of the difficulty and pain inherent in this task. III We remain, perpetually, in the space of “after,” still cautiously and tentatively fumbling about in a landscape where the familiar presents danger and the unfamiliar is still too murky and uncharted to be inviting. It would seem that the real productive force of Haas’s argument is finally his message of prevention, rather than prescription. At the close of his book, he reiterates the task he has undertaken: The strategy here has been to focus on the frame of thought that made the Holocaust possible, in the process trying to account for the actions not only of the grand designers but also of the tens of thousands of more or less common people who carried out the everyday tasks of modern genocide. The claim has been that if we can understand in detail how the people came in good conscience to espouse a Nazi-like ethic, we will have gained insight into an important and relevant dynamic of human culture in general. (232)

If we can dig deeply enough into this psyche, he suggests, we can begin to understand what went so terribly wrong. If we can understand what went wrong, we can begin to arm ourselves against this psyche. In challenging us to enter into this psyche, Haas calls on us to dismantle it, to recognize the self-consciousness and the deliberateness with which we construct ethical systems to legitimate what we would like to believe. It is too easy, he implores us, to accept categories such as “evil” and “good,” and to cast off these categories as “banal.” Far more difficult is the charge Haas presents us with: to acquire new categories of thought, such that “good” and “evil” no longer apply, to uncover the intricacies and subtleties of a system that might appear, on the surface, utterly foreign and unfamiliar, a system Jules Simon

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that, in fact, owes its persuasive power to a long and cherished history. Any accompanying prescription to this preventive strategy Haas offers, however, might be far bleaker, far more difficult to carry out, than he implies. Though he rightly charges us to deliberately construct a mythos that would bolster an other-oriented ethic, an ethic that should not, theoretically, tolerate violence, we cannot—should not—rely on the assumption of a higher power in the construction of this mythos. The danger that this “higher power” will become the repository for self-serving agendas is simply too great. The alternative, then, is rather stark, but it would seem to more closely capture the reality that the Holocaust made all-too-apparent: any appeals to a higher power, to a deus ex machina that would render individual action negligible, that would provide for grotesque theological justifications of human atrocity, must be replaced by vigilant and persistent commitment to individual action. Notes 1. Peter J. Haas, Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). All references to this work are made parenthetically in the text. 2. See David Patterson’s critique of Haas’s essay “Science and the Determination of the Good,” in Ethics after the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. John K. Roth (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1999), 70–73. 3. Didier Pollefeyt, “The Kafkaesque World of the Holocaust: Paradigmatic Shifts in the Ethical Interpretation of the Nazi Genocide,” Ethics after the Holocaust, 234. 4. Pollefeyt, 239; Haas, 4. 5. See Leonard Grob, “Emmanuel Levinas and the Primacy of Ethics in Post-Holocaust Philosophy,” Ethics after the Holocaust, 1–14, as well as the critiques of Grob’s essay on pages 15–48.

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CHAPTER 3

Cutting the Roots of the Holocaust: Resisting the Enlightenment’s Universalizing Impulse Husain Kassim

D

iscussions of the Holocaust focusing on religion or the immediate philosophical and political backgrounds of Nazi Germany do not provide an adequate explanation of what prompted such a horrendous act unparalleled in history. In response to religious explanations, it must be noted that the Nazis did not want to kill those who believed in a Jewish God, but rather those who were Jews, since their policy was to eliminate the Jewish race, not simply the Jewish religion. Explanations that look to the immediate philosophical and political ideologies of the time do not go deep enough. The Holocaust cannot be explained simply in terms of German nationalism or what took place during and between the two World Wars. Where, then, might we turn for a better explanation of what happened during the Holocaust? In his article “The Spirit of National Socialism and its Destiny,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe tries to explain what lies at the root of National Socialism and the Nazis.1 In this chapter, I present his view, explaining its merits and what is missing in his explanation of the causes of the Holocaust. While Lacoue-Labarthe makes allusions to the Enlightenment, he fails to explain how it contributes to the creation of Nazi Germany, National Socialism, racism, and the Holocaust. In contrast, I argue that the Holocaust emerges out of the German philosophical Enlightenment project of Kant and, thus,

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that any ethical project after the Holocaust must reject this project and proceed along other lines. Heidegger and National Socialism Lacoue-Labarthe’s analysis of the Holocaust begins with Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of National Socialism. Heidegger claimed that National Socialism was the completion of the Western history of techné, or aesthetic knowledge. His notion of techné gave rise to his understanding of National Socialism as “national aestheticism” and of the inner “truth” and “greatness” of the movement. That provided Heidegger, as Lacoue-Labarthe claims, his arch-fascist ontology, which erected not a type of human but a type of humanity itself. The Nazis’ arch-fascist ontology intended to recreate humanity in terms of the pure German race and appealed to the ancient myth of the heroism of the Germanic people. The new version of humanity put forth by National Socialism was that of the Aryan race and the completion of the German destiny. According to LacoueLabarthe, the Germans lacked national identity—they were the confused people of Tacitus’s “Germania.”2 The manifestation of “German distress” due to this lack of identity was the declaration that only Nordic Germany could be the creator of Europe, and this resulted in an “imperial monumentality of totalitarianism.”3 Heidegger explained his two major reasons for joining the Nazi Party as, first, the headlong rush of knowledge toward technicism, and second, the “spiritual destiny” of Germany or of the “Western and historical essence of what is German.”4 Heidegger saw himself as the one who could unlock what had been locked away in the language of the Greeks. It was Heidegger who could say what was unsaid and unthought by conceptualizing it as an art. That art, according to Heidegger, was Dichtung (Poetry), which, in turn, was conceived as Sprache (Language) and as Sage (Myth).5 This Myth, not mythology, functioned as the spiritual force, strength, and vigor of the community and acted to situate the people in history. Thus, as Lacoue-Labarthe maintains, in the vocabulary of Heidegger the political belonged to techné, and the role of its guardian (Hütter) was assigned by the Nazi party to the German people. Thus, the aesthetization of the political became in its essence the program of National Socialism.6 Jules Simon

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Science (das Wissen) in its essence is aesthetic knowledge, techné. While it was initiated in Greece, that was merely the beginning. According to Heidegger, the task remained to unleash all the possibilities that techné could create and energize. These possibilities included the possibility of pure emergence, of pure originality, a model of self-formation of the people according to their capacity of art (techné)7 to mold the phusis (nature) according to their mimesis, creativity, and genius.8 The will at the core of the German people was the will to science as well as the historical mission to be a people that knew itself in the State. The leadership (Führung) in essence was spiritual (geistig) because the destiny of Germany was science.9 In this way Heidegger saw, by identifying politics with aesthetics, Germany’s only chance of finding its identity as resting in its being the community of techné. That was the program of National Socialism. After explaining Heidegger’s philosophical commitment to the political, Lacoue-Labarthe asks the question But why, in spite of everything, should this privilege be accorded to the German people? Why is this mission confided to it, of completing science? Why should this responsibility for the intellect and spiritual power of the entire Western world fall upon it? Or more strictly: why is the access to science, to “power” made to depend on the access of the German people itself to “power,” and inversely?10

Lacoue-Labarthe, limiting his investigation to the immediate political milieu of the time, suggests that Heidegger’s political engagement with National Socialism is nothing but the consequence of his philosophical commitment. But the question demands that we look beyond Heidegger’s own thought to the commitments of the Enlightenment. Lacoue-Labarthe views the causes of the Holocaust and the sufferings of its victims within the narrow framework of the fragmented ideologies of Fascism and Nazism. His analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation is valid, but in this case Heidegger’s own views on it are subject to skeptical speculation and the political motivations behind them. Whatever may be the case, it is Heidegger’s “affair.” The real questions are: Did the Nazi party pay any heed to it? Did Heidegger’s philosophical interpretation of National Socialism have an actual impact on the Nazi movement? Did it help in creating the Nazi movement or in intensifying its activities? Would the National Jules Simon

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Socialist movement have occurred without Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi party and his writings on its ideology? Of course, Heidegger was an influential thinker, but he cannot be seen as the sole or primary cause of the Holocaust. Lacoue-Labarthe’s analysis does not go deep enough. While he makes distant allusions to the Enlightenment in explaining the phenomenon of the Nazi party, Lacoue-Labarthe becomes locked up in analyzing Heidegger’s “affair” and his political involvement with National Socialism. He suggests that it was a philosophical “commitment” on Heidegger’s part, rather than political “engagement” at the time.11 Thereby, Lacoue-Labarthe explains Heidegger’s involvement in terms of the philosophical milieu and the Nietzschean culture of the time, but this does not explain the locus of the Holocaust. I propose that we look for the roots of the Holocaust somewhere in the broader spectrum that can be traced back to the German Enlightenment. What did the Enlightenment project contribute to making possible the Holocaust and the human suffering it caused? Nazi Germany grew up in the context of European thought in which the Enlightenment remained an important focus of intellectual influence and social direction. What role did the Enlightenment play in creating a context conducive to the occurrence of the Holocaust? The German Enlightenment Project The German Enlightenment project began with Kant, who was the first person to use the German word Aufklärung, which means Enlightenment. Kant described it as an autonomous force directing human life and as an attainment of maturity through the use of reason: “It is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of understanding without direction from outside authority.”12 Kant’s idea of Enlightenment involved the recognition of the critical powers of human reasoning and a triumph over custom, tradition, religious dogma, and despotism. Furthermore, to be enlightened one had to be truly autonomous in the exercise of his will. With this, a man of Enlightenment could take charge of his destiny by making choices based on rational decisions without being forced by an outside authority. Reason and freedom were the twin virtues with which an enlightened person was endowed. The Enlightenment project claimed the autonomy of human reason and Jules Simon

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human will. We humans were approaching, Kant assumed, the maturity where, by rational thought, we would be able to guide our own destiny and be able to use our own minds to make rational decisions without any direction from an outside authority. The Enlightenment thus was open to anyone who relied on his reason. It was reason, a natural faculty shared among human beings, that in effect defined human beings. Though the Enlightenment thinkers were diverse in many ways, one thing that stood out prominently among them was their impulse for universalization through the use of human reason and rationality. Moral agents were defined in terms of universal characteristics, and the test for ethical judgment lay in whether it could be universalized or not. The Enlightenment thinkers envisioned a grand scheme for their universal principles and their modes of discourse—one that would be applicable to all human beings regardless of their varied cultural, social, religious, and ethnic differences. This impulse for universalization called for, as Peter Gay states, “a social and political order that would be secular, reasonable, human, pacific, open and free.”13 It is not only ironic but also tragic that even so long after the Enlightenment period, we are no closer to conceiving of such an ideal. Why and where did something go wrong? The ideal of universalization conceives of the individual and the self in terms of a general definition that precludes any historical, cultural, social, political, religious, ethnic, or regional differences among different people and different groups. Kant considered that in “public matters” these differences did not count. Even in “private matters” only matters of taste were allowed so long as they were “accidental” and not “essential” toward their being universalized. It was, indeed, this basic factor that contributed to an “opening for arbitrariness.” As Berel Lang notes, “So long as ‘human’ and ‘rational’ are defined ahistorically and abstractly, it is at its best arbitrary in its applications and at worst, a pretext used to conceal other purposes.”14 This was indeed the case with Nazi policies, legislated at whim by applying a definition of “the human race” that mirrored their notion of the German race. The formal principles of universalism are usually applied by the people or the group that has power. In the case of National Socialism, this resulted, to say the least, in the gruesome tyranny of the Nazis against the Jews. In the hands of those in power, Jules Simon

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the principles of universalization become controls over others’ desires, wishes, and ideals and are used to exclude those not of the same culture, race, nationality, or ethnicity and to exclude the particularities and differences of others.15 Indeed, it is this looseness and laxity in the application of the principles of universalization that allows an arbitrary interpretation of them by a group, community, or people who share the same goal, race, or nation—or by those with political power, money, or intellectual fame, as in the case of Heidegger. The Enlightenment project was conceived in the narrow historical framework of Europe, by individuals wrestling with its particular cultural, political, and social circumstances. Their models were based on European cultures, worldviews, and traditions. And this project bore the fruits of their endeavors in their own cultural environment. But, when they tried to envision this culturally and historically specific project as a universal principle, it could not transcend those limitations with which it was bound and thus its dream of universal principles and a universal mode of discourse remained abstract. This narrowly based European Enlightenment was taken as the norm for all. These individuals did not even think to take into consideration other cultures, societies, and communities. Same and “Other” Michel Foucault came to a similar conclusion in his analysis of the mechanism of order and exclusion that has operated within European society since the sixteenth century. In the conflict between the “same” and the “other,” every “same” needs the “other” against which it can define itself, just as every master needs a slave.16 Heidegger saw the Germans as being metaphysical thinkers par excellence and declared, “the ‘Jew’ in his essence is a caricature; ugliness in itself.”17 Further, he claimed, “The Jews do not belong to the humanities . . . because they have neither dreams nor myths. This rejection of myths is precisely why Jews do not constitute a type. They have no Seelengeist—and therefore no Rassengestalt.”18 Heidegger defined the Jews in opposition to the German people, revealing the ways in which any group, community, people, race, or ethnic group that one does not identify with can be perceived as the “other.” When one looks at the development of German philosophical thought that distinguishes between Being and beings, beginning with Jules Simon

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Kant and culminating in Heideggerian ontology, the alleged priority of the former (Being) to the latter (beings) is a manifestation, as Emmanuel Levinas contends, of the most vicious of all tyrannies of the “same” over the “other.”19 As Levinas notes, “Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relationship with the other to the relation with Being in general, remains under obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny.”20 This is an example of what he calls “ontological imperialism” that reduces the “other” to the “same.”21 Edward Said described this relation of the West to the rest of the world as a “relationship of power, domination, of varying degrees of complex hegemony.”22 This scenario can be perceived even today wherever Western powers enter into any conflict with developing countries, especially countries that the Western powers colonized in the past. As a rule of thumb, these countries are perceived, as J. J. Clark notes, as if they are an “inferior complement to the West, its opposite ‘other’ the bearer of negative qualities whereby the West’s own superiority is by contrast underscored and its rule legitimized.”23 This othering mode of relation has brought into sharp focus serious issues related to multiculturalism, ethnic identity, gender, and the relationship of the West with developing countries, other cultures, and colonized countries in the past.24 As a matter of fact, when one sees the Enlightenment—and what Kant envisioned it becoming, that is, a triumph of the human race and a vindication of its confidence in the rationality of human being—in light of Foucault’s analysis, that is, in Said’s words, as “the relationship between knowledge and power, one finds that it is the ‘master narrative’ of Western imperialism that constructs and controls its subjected other.”25 The Enlightenment was not far-sighted, and it got carried away. It saw the eggs in its own nest and when it could not hatch them all, it started building other nests outside its own flying zones. But, the eggs could not be hatched in those new nests as they were in their native nests. The Enlightenment project envisioned a grand scheme for universal principles and modes of discourse applicable to all humans regardless of their varied cultural, religious, ethnic, and other social differences. However much the quest for the realization of this ideal seemed to be admirable, it failed not only to achieve it but, on the contrary, left behind a violent wake. The Enlightenment project, in Jules Simon

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spite of its great aspirations to rationality and human autonomy of will, has erected the terrible tyrannies of ideologies based on regionalism, territorialism, differences of nationalities, creed, skin color, racism. The Enlightenment was indeed a Western project, and it grew from its scientific and philosophical traditions, from its cultural, social, and religious legacy. The narrow, historical, European worldview was taken by Enlightenment thinkers to be the norm for all. It saw other cultures, peoples, and ethnic and racial groups as the “other” necessarily to be reckoned with in order to realize the goal of the Enlightenment in terms of its universal principle. This led to the elevation of particular ideologies as exhaustive and complete, and created the Eurocentricity and hegemony of Europe. National Socialism in Germany is an example that needs to be examined and analyzed in this context and light, for how it saw other ethnic groups, cultural entities, and races, and especially the Jews at that time, as others to be eradicated. The Enlightenment, under the tutelage of universality, created divisions within social and nationstate units between those who were part of the universal and those who were the problematic “others.” The Nazis did this with the aid of a bureaucratic machinery of death, deeming the Jews as the “others” to be exterminated. Other European nation-states also engaged in the process of othering, deeming people in colonized areas as inferior. As Said mentions, Michel Foucault’s analysis suggests that the relationship between knowledge and power is a “master narrative” of Western imperialism that constructs and controls its subjugated “other.” Instead of constructing and structuring knowledge and power that engaged with “others” and the ideas and knowledge of others, the Enlightenment project created fragmentation, dividing the world into the “we” who was affirmed and the “other” who was to be erased. Nazi Germany saw the Jews as “other” than German, as a race, a group, and a people, in spite of their being German nationals. Jews were deemed different, vermin, and subhuman, and the only solution for a pure German race and a strong German nation was to be rid of Jews. The Holocaust must be viewed in the wider context and the long-range results of the Enlightenment project rather than in the narrower frameworks of ideologies and philosophical and political backgrounds of the time, which in themselves were Jules Simon

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merely the by-products of the Enlightenment project that took place in Germany. Toward a New Ethics If the roots of the Holocaust lie in the Western European Enlightenment project, we need now to find ways to cut those roots by creating an entirely different and new model, by restructuring the relationship of knowledge and power. We need to find a way to engage the “other” in an ethical relation, in which one sees one’s self, to borrow Levinas’s phrase, in “the face of the other.”26 The Enlightenment thinkers got carried away with universalization and ended up dealing with abstract interlocutors. Levinas’s ethical relation brings back the concretization of the individual, where interlocutors do not renounce their unicity in desiring the universal, but in desiring one another.27 The Enlightenment project in its zeal for universal principles and discourse became abstract; multiplicity and particularism were reabsorbed and discourse came to an end for lack of interlocutors. It went on creating a model based upon knowledge, rationality, and science from within its own cultural background, legacy, and traditions, which did not take into account the concreteness of the “other,” his or her culture, traditions, or living environment. The “other” ceased to be an interlocutor. Kant’s true birth of reason is not something that can easily emerge abstractly in the human mind, but rather, and more importantly for Levinas, it emerges when one engages in conversation with the “other,” and the essence of discourse becomes ethical. The “other” stands with me and is not a stranger standing against me: “The ethical presence is both ‘other’ and imposes itself without violence.”28 The “very fact of being in a discourse consists in recognizing in the ‘other’ a right over one’s egoism . . . the ‘other’ as my speech and interlocutor.”29 The conversational relationship is the birth of reason when one considers and acknowledges what the “other,” who is no longer an “other,” says. What the other says does not melt into air and become smoke in the clouds; it has meaning and context. It has a unique sense and tries to give a certain direction and orientation toward its goal. The “other” is acknowledged and what he says is taken seriously. His voice is heard and what he has to say carries significance. We face each other, communicate with each other, and Jules Simon

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take into consideration what is being said in the context in which it concretely conveys what it intends and means. When this takes place, the birth of reason is on its way to finding its home. But there is a long way to travel to get to the point where the saying of the other is accepted when it is being said. Jürgen Habermas suggests a procedure to move us along that path. According to Habermas, we understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable. The language implies a communicative action that leads to mutual understanding and communicative reason. This mutual understanding and communicative reason imply a principle of universalization, which involves the satisfaction of everyone interested, and everyone takes into consideration the concern of the “other.”30 No groups or communities are excluded as “other” from the process of participation in this communicative reason. Habermas’s understanding of communicative action helps us to bring together the polarities of Kant’s abstract principle of universalization and the concretization demanded by Levinas’s birth of reason in discourse. Habermas’s communicative reason is grounded in the principle of universalization and, at the same time, entails structurally a procedure in which everyone takes “care” of the concern of the “other” and accommodates it. While only a fragment of what is needed, this principal and procedural approach may offer a place to start thinking in our efforts to resist the ideas of absolutism and hegemony and to acknowledge pluralism and autonomy, thereby accepting others as they are and not as the excluded “other.” Notes 1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Spirit of National Socialism and its Destiny,” in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 143–150. 2. See “Tacitus’ Description of Germanic Culture,” in Medieval Culture and Society, ed. David Herlihy (Prospects Heights: Waveland Press Inc., 1968), 20–33. 3. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Transcendence Ends in Politics,” in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy and Politics, ed. C. Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 267–300. 4. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “techné,” in Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 54.

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5. Ibid., 55–56. 6. Ibid., 65. 7. Ibid., 80. 8. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Aesthetization of Politics,” in Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 66. 9. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Transcendence Ends in Politics,” 279. 10. Ibid., 285. 11. Ibid., 65. 12. Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in Foundations of Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?, trans. Lewis White Beck (London: McMillan Publishing Co., 1990), 83. 13. Peter Gay, The Age of Enlightenment, vol. I, (New York: Knopf, 1966), 397. 14. Berel Lang, “Genocide and Kant’s Enlightenment,” in Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 189. The phrase “an opening to arbitrariness” is borrowed from Berel Lang. 15. Ibid., 187. 16. Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 192. 17. Lacoue-Labarthe, “techné,” 69. 18. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Fiction as the Political,” in Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. C. Turner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 96. 19. Megill, Prophets of Extremity, 192. 20. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 46–47. 21. Ibid., 43. 22. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 5. 23. J. J. Clark, Oriental Enlightenment (London and New York: Routledge, 1977), 8. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. Ibid., 8. Clark is quoting Edward Said. 26. Ibid., 195. 27. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 33–40. 28. Ibid., 219. 29. Ibid., 40. 30. Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lehnhardt and Sherry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 86–93. See also the excellent Introduction by Thomas McCarthy, viii–ix.

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CHAPTER 4

The Tikkun of Philosophy and the Idea of Humanity Elizabeth Cameron Galbraith

I

n the lead-up to World War II in Germany, Emil Fackenheim took a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Judgment with the philosopher Paul Menzer, who “missed no opportunity to attack the Nazi regime . . . in the name of Goethe, Schiller, and, of course, Kant himself.”1 According to Fackenheim, for his valiant criticism of the Nazi government, Menzer “could have relied on no more suitable text than Kant’s Categorical Imperative” (xxxv), which Fackenheim summarizes according to two main principles set forth in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. First, one ought never to act except in such a way that one might also will that the maxim of one’s action should become a universal law.2 Second, one should act in such a way that one always treats humanity, whether in one’s own person or in that of another, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end (xxxv).3 Fackenheim notes that Kant was quite explicit about what it meant to treat humanity as an end: “the condition, on which alone something can be an end-in-itself, is that it does not have merely a relative value, i.e., a price, but an intrinsic value, i.e., dignity” (xxxv).4 It was precisely human dignity, Fackenheim argues, that was targeted for destruction in the Holocaust, and despite the commendable stance of Menzer prior to the war, Kant’s ethical philosophy became an accessory to that crime through a perversion of the categorical imperative. In the preface of To Mend the World, Fackenheim suggests that “the Holocaust must be viewed as no less than a rupture . . . of all Jules Simon

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things hitherto considered ‘human’” (xxii ). The human dignity of the Jews was not merely forsaken by the Nazis, it was subject to what Fackenheim calls a Nazi logic of destruction: “the ‘dignity’ of humanity; the human being as end-in-itself; the concept ‘humanity’ itself: all this the Nazi rulers wished to destroy” (xxxv). The logic of the death camps entailed the extermination of the Jews, but it also included the annihilation of their human dignity as the precursor to murder. The destruction of the humanity of the Jews was achieved “by working them to death, or, as in the case of the ‘vermin with a human face,’ through the invention and practice of all kinds of humiliation and torture, this in the hope that the ‘vermin’ would eventually not only look like vermin, but also think of themselves as such, that is, be filled with self disgust” (xxxvii–xxxviii). An appalling sense of the degradation to which victims were subjected in an effort to drive them into self-loathing is given by the following survivor’s testimony, quoted by Fackenheim: Imagine what it would be like to be forbidden to go to the toilet; imagine also that you were suffering from an increasingly severe dysentery, caused and aggravated by a diet of cabbage soup as well as by the constant cold. Naturally, you would try to go anyway. Sometimes you might succeed. But your absences would be noticed and you would be beaten, knocked down and trampled on. By now, you would know what the risks were, but urgency would oblige you to repeat the attempt, cost what it may. . . . I soon learned to deal with the dysentery by tying strings around the lower end of my drawers. (209)

This “excremental assault,” to use Terrence Des Pres’s term, aimed at the ultimate destruction of human dignity and reduced some victims to the status of the “Muselmänner.” Fackenheim quotes the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s description of the Muselmänner as “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” (99–100). According to Fackenheim, the Muselmann is “that skin and bones person who can no longer feel or think, but still, if barely, stands and walks until he drops to the ground” (xxxviii), the living dead whose humanity the Nazis had succeeded in annihilating. As for the perpetrators—those “whose job and vocation once were the daily commitment of the most monstrous crimes, Jules Simon

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and who yet became, after all was over, a secretary, a bookkeeper, or some such job holder, without showing the slightest bad conscience or guilt”—Fackenheim observes, “in destroying the humanity of their victims, they also destroyed their own” (xxxviii). Auschwitz, which Fackenheim calls “an anti-world, indeed, the antiworld par excellence, for its like had never existed before” (xxxvii), leaves us with haunting questions: “What must be said of a world . . . in which the most ‘unnatural’ crimes were the norms of daily behavior, and any show of ordinary decency, itself unnatural?” (xxi). And what are the devastating consequences for humanity itself of such a world? These questions, Fackenheim tells us, “concern the whole human condition—and are for philosophers” (xxi). Horrified by the fact that philosophy did not provide an adequate obstacle to the Nazi onslaught against the humanity of the Jews, Fackenheim confronts the study and practice of philosophy, in particular “the part of it in which human nature is involved” (xxi), with a devastating indictment. Not only did the most renowned German philosopher of the time, Martin Heidegger, fail “philosophically to confront the Holocaust” (264), but even the philosophy of Kant, Germany’s greatest moral philosopher according to Fackenheim, became an accessory to the Nazi genocide when notorious Nazi perpetrators such as Adolf Eichmann appealed to the ethical teachings of Kant to rationalize their own behavior during the Holocaust. “How,” Fackenheim questions, “was the Hitlerization of Kant’s Categorical Imperative possible?” (xl). Eichmann, the Categorical Imperative, and Human Dignity Eichmann, who belonged to the highest ranks of the Nazi government, was the person primarily responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jews to their deaths. Though initially escaping prosecution for war crimes, he was captured in Buenos Aires in 1961 and brought to Israel for trial. In her landmark work Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt documents the moment when, during the trial, Eichmann “suddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty.”5 One of the judges, “either out of curiosity or out of indignation at Eichmann’s having dared to invoke Kant’s name in connection with Jules Simon

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his crimes,” decided to question the accused. And, “to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative: ‘I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws.’” Upon further questioning, Eichmann added that he “had read Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.”6 Though Eichmann then proceeded to explain that he had ceased to live by Kantian principles from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution, Arendt suggests that he had instead “distorted” the Kantian formula along the lines of Hans Frank’s formulation of “the categorical imperative in the third Reich” in Die Technik des Staates: “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it.”7 Further, Arendt suggests, “there is not the slightest doubt that in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant’s precepts: a law was a law, there could be no exceptions.”8 Eichmann took his duty of obeying the law of the Führer to such an extreme that when Heinrich Himmler, contrary to the Führer’s command, ordered the dismantling of the extermination facilities in Auschwitz in 1944, Eichmann objected. Commenting on this, Fackenheim laments, “to stop the Final Solution before its completion—wasn’t this against the Law? What Law? For Eichmann ‘Law’ ultimately meant one thing: a clear exceptionless always-to-beobeyed Führerbefehl” (xxxvii). According to Fackenheim, philosophy itself is ruptured by the fact that “the man who probably will go down in history as its greatest organizer of mass murder knew, believed, and occasionally practiced bits of the teaching of Immanuel Kant” (xxxvi) and could manipulate Kant’s categorical imperative to rationalize his own complicity in genocide. Determining how this murderous cocktail of Kantian ethics combined with Nazi genocide became possible is crucial to identifying the essential nature of the rupture wrought by the Holocaust. More than any other philosopher, Kant emphasized the way in which the moral life is centered on duty. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant’s aim was “to seek out and establish the supreme principle of morality,”9 and his starting point was the conception of the “good will”: “it is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.”10 A “good will,” he goes on to Jules Simon

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argue, “is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes . . . it is good through its willing alone.”11 What should guide the will in action is the strictest sense of duty. For Kant, a good will is a will always to do one’s duty regardless of one’s inclinations, or feelings for others. What counts as ethical is our will to do our duty and the disinterested application of our reason in support of that will.12 In other words, as Fackenheim succinctly puts it, “it is morally necessary to do duty for duty’s sake” (270). Furthermore, an action done from duty has its moral worth, according to Kant, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the principle in accordance with which it is decided upon.13 The only appropriate principle is “to act out of reverence for the law,”14 and by “law” Kant means a universal law, valid for all. In other words, people are morally good when they seek to obey a law valid for all persons according to an objective standard not determined by individual desires. This is what is meant by the formulation of the categorical imperative, “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my principle of action should become a universal law.” Unfortunately, there is no doubt, according to Fackenheim, that Eichmann obeyed the Kantian principle of “duty for duty’s sake.” He was, Fackenheim notes, “a dutiful, idealistic mass-murderer, not merely a sadistic or opportunistic one” (270). The horror is increased, Fackenheim suggests, by the fact that Eichmann also sought to fulfill the formulation of the categorical imperative referred to above: “for there is no doubt that the ‘maxim’ of his acting was to make through his own will the Führer’s will into universal law” (270). Eichmann’s universal law, however, departed from the most crucial tenet of Kant’s categorical imperative, namely the principle that the human person is an end in herself or himself and is thus worthy of respect. Kant argues that “man is not a thing—not something to be used merely as a means: he must always in all his actions be regarded as an end in himself. Hence I cannot dispose of man in my person by maiming, spoiling, or killing.”15 Morality is, according to Kant, the only condition under which a rational being can be called an end in himself or herself, and for this reason, “morality, and humanity so far as it is capable of morality, is the only thing which has dignity.”16 And this dignity is above all price; it cannot be brought into reckoning or comparison without this being a “profanation of its sanctity.”17 Kant’s concept of human dignity is brought into clear focus through Jules Simon

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further formulation of the categorical imperative, according to which it is morally necessary to treat humanity, whether in one’s own person or in that of another, “never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end in himself.”18 A Fragmentary Tikkun Without this core principle of the human person as an end in herself or himself, Fackenheim implores, the very “heart and soul of Kant’s categorical imperative” is lost; “as for the Third Reich, its heart and soul was the aim to destroy just this principle” (272). When Kant formulated his categorical imperative, he took it for granted that every human being is entitled to respect. This very idea, which Fackenheim calls “the Idea of Humanity,” (273) not only was not taken for granted, it was negated in the Nazi death camps. As a result, “whereas Kant had formulated his imperative in behalf of human dignity,” the Eichmanns of the Third Reich “invoked it in behalf of a destruction of that dignity so total that, were the dream to come true, no remnant would be left” (273). That Kant’s idea of humanity was not immune to “this unheard of, unprecedented, unique assault” (272) is a travesty for humankind. For, as Elie Wiesel has concluded, “the Holocaust destroyed not only human beings but also the idea of humanity” (xxxix). And yet, the egregious and willful destruction of humanity is not the entire story, as the title of Fackenheim’s text To Mend the World makes clear. In Hebrew tradition the term Tikkun refers to “a mending of what is broken” (252). Fackenheim speaks movingly of the resilient spirit of the Jewish people, able to mend against all odds the historical brokenness of exile, destruction, and human devastation with their dedication to Torah, mitzvot, and survival itself. What remains to be considered is whether it is possible to affirm a “mending” of the humanity ruptured by the Holocaust. According to Fackenheim, “the reader who does not recognize this as the fundamental problem of To Mend the World may understand much in the book but not its central problem” (xxii). With talk of “mending,” however, one enters into precarious territory, liable to be misunderstood as suggesting that the Holocaust can be transcended. Fackenheim resists the abhorrent notion that any mending can atone or make up for the Holocaust, since “the screams of the children and Jules Simon

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the silence of the Muselmänner are in our world. We dare not forget them; we cannot surpass or overcome them: and they are unredeemed” (256). And yet he also acknowledges an unavoidable paradox, a double bind: the impossible Tikkun is also necessary. Thus, “it is true that because a Tikkun of that rupture is impossible we cannot live, after the Holocaust, as men and women have lived before. However, if the impossible Tikkun were not also necessary, and hence possible, we could not live at all” (254). Though at most “only a fragmentary Tikkun is possible” (256), such a Tikkun is required to mend the brokenness left in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The astounding fact—Fackenheim calls it “the crucial fact” (xxiv)—is that in the midst of the very sphere of life in which destruction of the idea of humanity took place is to be found the basis for the impossible but necessary Tikkun: “for if the wonder in which philosophy originates is turned into paralyzing horror by the ‘humanly impossible’ crime of the criminals, its paralysis is mended by the wonder at the victims who resisted a crime to which resistance itself was ‘humanly impossible’” (xxv). It could not be more fitting that Fackenheim finds fragmentary yet meaningful glimpses of Tikkun in the midst of the Holocaust itself, first and foremost through the voices of victims of the Nazi onslaught, such as Pelagia Lewinska, according to whom: At the outset the living places, the ditches, the mud, the piles of excrement behind the blocks, had appalled me with their horrible filth. . . . And then I saw the light! I saw that it was not a question of disorder or lack of organization but that, on the contrary, a very thoroughly considered conscious idea was in the back of the camp’s existence. They had condemned us to die in our own filth, to drown in mud, in our own excrement. They wished to abase us, to destroy our human dignity, to efface every vestige of humanity . . . to fill us with horror and contempt toward ourselves and our fellows. But from the instant that I grasped the motivating principle . . . it was as if I had been awakened from a dream. . . . I felt under orders to live. . . . And if I did die in Auschwitz, it would be as a human being, I would hold on to my dignity. I was not going to become the contemptible, disgusting brute my enemy wished me to be. . . . And a terrible struggle began which went on day and night.19

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“It is symbolic,” Fackenheim tells us, “of the universal significance of this statement that its author is not a Jewess but a Polish noblewoman, and also . . . an honorary Jewess” (26). When Pelagia Lewinska grasped the true meaning of Auschwitz, she “awakened from a dream” and “felt under orders to live.” In this way, recognition of the Nazi logic of destruction helped produce dignified resistance to it. Her testimony speaks to the ordinary men and women, who “confronted and grasped this whole-of-horror even while they were in it and trapped by it.” Without this confronting grasp, Fackenheim suggests, Lewinska and other resisters “could not have done what in fact they did” (218). Though “the destruction of humanity remains possible, for in Auschwitz it was actual” (xxxix), Fackenheim considers the life-and-death, day-and-night struggle of Lewinska and others monumental. For Jews, he suggests, “resistance was a way of being” (224). In confronting and resisting the assaults upon their dignity, such resisters made the Tikkun of the rupture possible, thus salvaging for our post-Holocaust world those fragments that are essential to the mending of broken humanity. Echoes of the Tikkun performed by Lewinska are also to be heard—though, as our world now knows, too excruciatingly few and far between—in the voices of some individuals who with their lives protested against the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Of paramount significance for Fackenheim is the Tikkun that salvaged philosophy, in particular Kant’s philosophy, from the debris of Auschwitz. According to Zachary Braiterman in (God) After Auschwitz, “the philosophy of Kant (with its universal concepts, categories and judgments) was the authoritative bar before which Fackenheim tried to justify Jewish thought.”20 In To Mend the World, Kant’s philosophy becomes the authoritative bar to which Fackenheim returns in his efforts to demonstrate the mending of the idea of humanity that became possible in the midst of its greatest rupture. According to Fackenheim, “a philosophical Tikkun is possible after the Holocaust because a philosophical Tikkun already took place, however fragmentarily, during the Holocaust itself ” (266). What Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of the age, failed to achieve was accomplished “at least in principle, by an obscure German professor of philosophy” (266). The professor to whom Fackenheim refers is Kurt Huber, the mentor of a 1943 student-led resistance movement in Munich named “The White Rose.” Fully aware that their efforts were likely Jules Simon

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to come to naught and that they were almost certain to be caught and put to death, the students of “The White Rose” continued to distribute anti-Nazi pamphlets. “They knew it: yet they did it. And they were caught and brutally, legally, murdered” (267). Kurt Huber’s posthumous papers contain a “Final Statement of the Accused” in which he defends his actions. Summarizing the contents of that statement, Fackenheim notes in particular Huber’s claims that “he had acted out of responsibility for all Germany; that his action was not illegal but rather an attempt to restore legality; that this was so because there were unwritten as well as written laws; and that although he was set by the court at the level of the lowest criminals, he would be vindicated by History.”21 Huber concludes his “Final Statement” with the following words of Johann Gottlieb Fichte: And act thou shalt as though The destiny of all things German Depended on you and your lonely acting And the responsibility were yours.22

Fackenheim suggests that though the words are those of Fichte, the sentiments are unmistakably Kantian (267–268). Further insight into the Kantian sentiment underlying Huber’s concluding words are given by a statement he makes earlier in his testament: “I asked myself, following Kant’s categorical imperative, what would happen if these subjective maxims governing my actions were to become universal law. To this there can be but one answer: public order, security, trust in the government and in our political life would be restored. Every morally responsible person would raise his voice in concert with ours against the threatening rule of raw force over justice, against mere arbitrariness over the will to the moral good.”23 Such words are of more than passing significance to Fackenheim: “As friends of the categorical imperative, we are inspired by what Huber said in 1943 before the Munich Volksgericht, in support of what he had done” (270). The import of Huber, and of other resisters like him, lies in his deed more than in his thought: “his action was itself the required Tikkun” (276) that philosophy, and in particular Kant’s categorical imperative, stood in need of. In obeying the unwritten law he had appealed to in his defense, Huber “restored that law . . . by writing it into his own heart” and most significantly, “in acting in behalf of Jules Simon

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Kant’s Idea of Humanity, he mended that Idea—it was broken—for he recreated the matrix or Boden of it in actual humanity, even if only in his own person” (276). To defend, not only in thought or word, since “resistance-in-thought to the Holocaust would degenerate into academic self-satisfaction unless it climaxed in calling for, praying for, working for, resistance in life” (247), but also in deed philosophy’s “noblest achievement—the Idea of Man, and hence the dignity of actual men—against the most thorough, most dedicated enemies” (277), was to perform a “Tikkun of philosophy, in the age of its most catastrophic rupture” (276). Huber’s actions then “created the possibility and necessity of a post-Holocaust philosophy, here and now” (276), for they carried within them the imperative to “rebuild the destroyed idea of humanity, to rebuild human dignity” (xxxix). “Humanity can be—has been—destroyed” (276). This is the “awful legacy of Auschwitz to all humanity” (273). While calling us to accept this devastating verdict, Fackenheim will not allow such destruction to have the final word. Humanity, though destroyed, can, he implores, be mended, because it has already been so by Pelagia Lewinska, Kurt Huber, and others like them, who through their resistance performed Tikkun Olam, the mending of our world (276). Notes 1. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), xxxiv. Subsequent references to this text are made parenthetically. 2. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 70. 3. Ibid., 96. 4. Ibid., 102. 5. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1963), 120. 6. Ibid, 121. 7. Hans Frank, Die Technik des Staates (Munich, 1942), 15–16. Quoted, with translation, in Arendt, 121. 8. Arendt, 122. 9. Kant, 60. 10. Ibid., 61. 11. Ibid., 62. 12. Ibid., 80. 13. Ibid., 67–68. Jules Simon

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Ibid., 68. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 101. Quoted in Fackenheim, 217. Pelagia Lewinska, Twenty Months at Auschwitz (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1968), 141ff., 150. 20. Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 137. 21. Summarized by Fackenheim, 267. See Inge Scholl, Students against Tyranny (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1970), 63ff for the full draft of Huber’s “Final Statement of the Accused.” 22. Scholl, 65. Quoted, with alternate translation, in Fackenheim, 267. 23. Ibid., 63–64.

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Jules Simon

SECTION TWO

Surveying the Fragments

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Jules Simon

Introduction to Section Two

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he essays in this section provide a glimpse into some of the fragments of human lives and communities that resulted from the Holocaust. These fragments reflect both the evil committed and the suffering endured, as well as the fractured attempts that illuminate acts of human goodness. In Chapter Five “Survival of the Closest: Gender and Agency in Holocaust Resistance,” Tam K. Parker and Myrna Goldenberg explore another double bind of ethics, even as they offer a possible prospect for reclaiming human dignity and human communities from the violence and despair engendered by the mass support for the Nazi ethic. Writing about Charlotte Delbo’s fragments of poetry and reflective prose in her memoir of deportation and suffering in Auschwitz, Goldenberg and Parker argue that Delbo’s work demonstrates core values of feminist theory, such as bonding, caring, and the greater importance of connectedness over autonomy, but that it also shows the double bind of such caring—it increases one’s sufferings and vulnerabilities because of the attachments it involves, that is, attachments to women who are slated for death. Rather than addressing the problems of Enlightenment-inspired individualisms and the ethics of autonomy at work in Roth’s, Benedix’s, and Stern’s essays, they appeal to a more Levinas-inspired communitarian ethics, to an ethics of relationality, informed by the particular gendered experience of mutuality described by Delbo. After exploring the failures of modern religious and secular ethical systems and the limitations of our languages to respond to the Holocaust, Hanne Trautner-Kromann’s narrative of the brute fact of rescue, in “The Role of Moral Examples in Teaching Ethics after the Holocaust: Reconsidering the Rescue of the Danish Jews,” seems like a breath of fresh air. And it is. The fact that the Danes rescued the Jews because they were there and were Danish and needed rescue

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gives us permission to breathe the common air of human dignity, at least as a possibility. Representing the story of an ethically commendable set of events sets up an empirical touchstone to ground the theory-heavy revaluations of ethical theory and political philosophy by Kassim, Simon, and Gerber. In “Dignity and Despair: The Double Bind of Jean Améry’s Odyssey,” Mark Stern explores another double bind of ethics, exemplified in the life of Jean Améry, that the pursuit of dignity often resulted in death or despair for those who suffered the Holocaust. Stern also explores Améry’s struggles with the language and ethics of a modernity inspired by the Enlightenment. Where Benedix turns to Celan’s attempts to reclaim the language lost in the Holocaust, Stern turns to Améry to explore the problems associated with an attempt to win back the Enlightenment’s universal values/ethics. However, the failure of community and institutional support is deepened even further, leading the reader to the realization that reliance on the Enlightenment principles of autonomy and sovereignty and respect for the universality of human rights have been irrevocably and radically called into question by the Holocaust.

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CHAPTER 5

Survival of the Closest: Gender and Agency in Holocaust Resistance Tam K. Parker and Myrna Goldenberg

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harlotte Delbo’s trilogy, Auschwitz and After 1—a memoir of her experience in Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and, after liberation, Paris—not only demonstrates but also exemplifies what has been noted in the interpretation of many published Holocaust memoirs by women: that is, we can discern a feminist ethic of caring, derived from the socialization of women and the cultural norms in the pre-Holocaust era, that women, consciously or otherwise, applied to the extreme conditions the Third Reich imposed on its perceived enemies. The feminist ethic is understood within the context of connectedness, as Carol Gilligan explains: “Women not only define themselves in a context of human relationship but also judge themselves in terms of their ability to care.”2 Indeed, Gilligan, in agreement with Nancy Chodorow, elaborates further: “Intimacy goes along with identity, as the female comes to know herself as she is known, through her relationships with others.”3 Citing Robert May’s work on caring, Gilligan describes women’s relationships as weblike, rooted in human attachment and grounded in the ethic of care.4 Gilligan’s research leads her to conclude that women value both their individual/separate identities as well as their connectedness to others. Inasmuch as women define themselves through relationships, separateness (or separate identity) can and does coexist with connectedness.5 Thus, through understanding the tendency of women to value connectedness and caring, we can illuminate Delbo’s emphasis, in all

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her works, on the creation of caring relationships. For example, Delbo acts to help others because they need her help, thereby demonstrating Gilligan’s assertion that “[r]esponsibility for care . . . includes both self and other, and the injunction not to hurt.”6 Through the contemporary lens of feminist ethical theory, we will examine Delbo’s descriptions of moral agency within surrogate familial clusters of women survivors and nonsurvivors of the Holocaust. However, while her memoir describes women’s bonding with one another through forming and maintaining surrogate families, this narrative of tactile care, physical and emotional bonding, and gendered agency is also filled with expressions of the unrelenting moral shame of powerlessness and the inability to engage in what Tzvetan Todorov calls “ordinary virtues.”7 And although her description of surrogate family morality resonates with the rhetoric of care and mutuality, her testimony also disrupts too easy an identification with a romanticized feminist ethic of caring. As Delbo’s descriptions suggest, the mutual care and allegiance to one another that sustains the surrogate family is simultaneously fraught with moral agency in the face of concentration camp life, torture, and death. Born near Paris, Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985) became interested in theater and had been touring in South America with Louis Jouvet’s theater company when, in autumn 1941, she received news of a friend’s execution at the hand of the Nazis. She returned to Paris and, with her husband, Georges Dudach, joined the Resistance, editing and developing anti-Nazi literature. In March 1942, they were arrested by the French police, who turned them over to the Gestapo. Dudach was executed by firing squad in May, while Delbo remained in prison. In January 1943, Delbo was sent to Auschwitz with 229 other French women, 49 of whom returned after liberation. In January 1944, she was transferred to Ravensbrück. In April 1945, she was sent to Sweden to recuperate, after which she returned to Paris to resume her life. She worked with Jouvet and then joined the United Nations’ National Center for Scientific Research. At the same time, she began a career as an active/activist playwright. Meanwhile, she completed None of Us Will Return and much of Useless Knowledge, both of which she put aside for almost twenty years. Jules Simon

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Her works carry the themes of Holocaust and post-Holocaust victimization and heroism. One play in particular, Who Will Carry the Word? (1974), encapsulates the issues raised in Auschwitz and After. In this short, stark drama, Delbo’s protagonist, Françoise, speaks of both the need to survive and its futility, the absurdity of choices that involve suicide as one of the two choices, the uselessness of the knowledge their suffering brings them because nonsurvivors cannot learn anything from them, and the likelihood of not being able to represent the indescribable experiences of a death camp and therefore evoke either expressions of disbelief of the whole concentration camp system or comments that discredit the survivor: “You survived, so it couldn’t have been so bad.”8 In both prose and poetry, she discloses some of her fears about the “return”: Whether you return from war or from elsewhere when it’s an elsewhere unimaginable to others it is hard to come back Whether you return from war or elsewhere when it’s an elsewhere which is nowhere it is hard to come back for everything in the house has grown foreign while we were in the elsewhere Whether you return from war or from elsewhere when it’s an elsewhere where you conversed with death it is hard to come back and speak again to the living. Whether you return from war or elsewhere when you come back from over there and must relearn it is hard to return having contemplated death with eyes wide open it is hard to relearn looking at the dull eyes of the living. (256)9

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Her despair is even more evident in a passage about her camp sisters who did not return: Everything has been wrenched from me. What’s left? Nothing. Death. When I say that I know the difference between before and after, I mean to say that before I was alive and that I have forgotten everything of that life, the life before. Presently, I am no longer alive. . . . Nothing can fill the abyss between other people and myself. (259)

While we find these concerns echoed in reflective, highly articulated memoirs of both men and women, there is another issue that appears more conspicuously in women’s memoirs than in men’s. That is, Delbo’s 23 women create surrogate families, or small groups based on mutuality. These surrogate families are uniquely feminine and feminist in that the spotlight is on the group rather than the individual. Although we meet each speaking character separately and can anticipate their responses, they are important only within the context of the larger group. Delbo’s characters make their moral decisions in terms of what the good is for one another. For example, Claire pleads with Françoise to suppress her despair: you don’t have the right to take your life. You don’t have the right because you’re not alone. There are the others. And above all, there are the little ones, . . . all the little ones whom you taught to recite poetry, whom you had perform in plays before we left [the prison in Paris] when we invented pastimes while we waited for the departure. They admire you because you were grown up. They listen to you, they follow you. If you commit suicide, they may imitate you. Suppose that among them, there is one who has a chance to come back, just one, and that because of you, she loses that chance. Even if you were to die in fifteen days and become as tortured a cadaver as those, you have to stand it.10

Women’s responses to the Holocaust, within and outside the camps, are often recounted in the language of mutuality even when the recounted event is one of the mutilation or annihilation of mutuality.11 The rhetorical strategies employed, particularly in the case of Delbo, speak to a self-conceptualization of communal rather than individual agency borne and bolstered by the closeness and shared language of companions rather than by religious or political Jules Simon

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principles. While most Holocaust testimonies of men and women, oral and written, address the role played by choice or, more painfully, what Lawrence Langer has called “choiceless choices,”12 the analysis of women’s accounts may indicate a revaluation of volition as the central category of victim morality. In Delbo’s memoir, we hear a recounting of death and survival in which individual willpower, though present, is sometimes displaced as the moral axis of the Lager community by acts of caring and the failure of caring. In Delbo’s phenomenology of camp existence, presented primarily in the present tense, first person plural, the good is defined not so much as the right or the just or the brave or the retention of dignity through the tenacity of will but as the participation in communal or interpersonal relations, even if those relations and acts are entirely symbolic or pragmatically useless. The maintenance and disruption of surrogate camp families suggest an axiological schema in which solidarity and care between prisoners are the foundations, a proximate causal precondition, on which the individual will falters or abides. In other words, the bonding between and among women prisoners reinforced the individual’s will to survive as it also transformed group into community—a caring community, to be precise. Delbo’s testimony also de-emphasizes the capacity of choice or efficacious agency as the determining variable between Muselmann (the living dead) and survivor. However, it must be noted that survival was almost always a matter of luck, depending on when one was deported, the country or region from which one was deported, the season of deportation, the temperament of local Nazi sympathizers and German officials, and certainly the destination of the deportation.13 In Convoy to Auschwitz, Delbo takes caring/community/surrogate family to a new level; she tracked the 229 women who were deported with her and documented the fate of all but one. All but one are thereby memorialized: “Everyone on the transport receives the biographic gift of factuality, exactness, understatement—in effect, a carefulness and caring, des petits soins, as the French would say.” 14 Obviously, Delbo felt the responsibility of the witness activist: she bore witness for the convoy, which was her expanded community. In her introduction to Convoy, Delbo meticulously documents each woman’s life/death from January 24, 1943, to 1965, when the book was published. She explains as much, Jules Simon

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attributing the high rate of survival of the group (“unique in the history of the camp”) to “friendship and mutual aid” resulting from the formation of small, tightly knit units within a large, homogeneous group, helping each other in all sorts of ways, often quite small: holding each other’s arms while walking, rubbing each other’s backs during roll call . . . talk[ing] to each other. Speech was self-defense, comfort, hope. By talking about who we were before, about our lives, we perpetuated the time before, we maintained our reality. Each of the survivors knows that without the others, she would not have returned.15

These are powerful expressions of bonding that women were socialized to create and maintain—as explained by Nancy Chodorow’s theory of the reproduction of mothering: in sum, “women define and experience themselves relationally.”16 Like Primo Levi’s categorization of the drowned and the saved, Delbo’s testimony is filled with the anguish of moral ambiguity that so often and cruelly (perpetrators often seem shockingly devoid of the pangs of conscience) attends survival.17 For Levi, the physical survivors are often crazed, self-concerned, or smiled upon by the blindness of Fate.18 The dead but morally upright are those whose actions and attitudes defy the inexorable logic and habituation of the Lager, such as the politically defiant “last one”19 on the gallows or Lorenzo, whose kindness seems miraculously (to Levi) untainted by the Lager’s law of survival of the fittest.20 We hear in Levi’s testimony an account of moral heroism resulting from the individual will or moral resistance to the logic of destruction. Like Levi, Delbo’s own conscience is haunted by her selfperceived moral “failure” to act in a manner defiant of the Lager’s law. But unlike Levi, Delbo’s account does not configure moral heroism or agency as individual resistance. We even hesitate to use the rhetoric of “heroism” because it is semiotically bound to a conception of subjectivity, the exercise of whose will is free and efficacious, two traits of personhood almost completely absent for the Häftling (the concentration camp prisoner). The “virtue” (perhaps irretrievable as well) described in Delbo’s testimony is always enacted within the social or camp-familial unit, within the context of what Gilligan calls “connectedness.” Levi writes of social cohesion and the mutuality of comrades when discussing the political prisoners and the Jules Simon

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Greek Jews whose group loyalty and organization he admires—but he admires them from a position outside what he perceives to be their expanded circle of self-concern, a Hobbesian society held together by the fraternity born of mutual self-interest. Delbo’s campfamily, like Levi’s Greek Jews, comes together originally through the camaraderie of a shared language and ethnicity. But unlike what Levi tells us of the Greek Jews, Delbo’s account of her “true family” (258) is an insider’s testimony that reveals relationships of reciprocity and visceral love: “My real sister is you. My true family is you, those who were there with me” (258–259). These relations motivate acts of other-regard, selflessness, and tenderness that function as resistance to the Lager’s logic of destruction. These acts are verbalized, but just as often they are gesticular and occur when one of the family group is on the verge of emotional collapse, in immense physical pain, or dying. For example, on several occasions she describes forced marches and runs accompanied by blows from kapos (camp inmates who were given positions of authority over other prisoners) and SS in which the “herd” of women shelter the weakest among them by moving them into the center of the crowd or giving them a lighter load: we don’t want to be separated from each other. We protect one another. Each wishes to remain near a companion, some in front of a weaker one, so as to be hit in her stead, some behind one no longer able to run, so as to hold her up if she begins to fall. (92)

Often these acts are executed at the risk of the one who renders aid to her comrade. Delbo finds herself the recipient of this care when at the end of her psychological rope while ditchdigging on a work detail, she is sheltered from view of the guards by Lulu, so that she can “have a good cry.” Delbo likens the episode to the comfort of having “wept against my mother’s breast” (105). In another episode, Viva slaps her back into bodily awareness and into the “poor communal warmth” of her comrades during interminable winter roll calls when she faints: Viva tells me, “Keep your chin up! On your feet!” I do not argue with this command. Although I long to give in once, once since it will be the only time. It is so easy to die here. All you must do is let go of your heart. (65)

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In the third work of her trilogy, Delbo recounts the death twenty years later of Germaine and being struck at her bedside with a vivid and painful flashback of the death of Sylviane in Block 25 (death by forced slow starvation, corpses carried out every day). Delbo remembers that she, Lulu, and Carmen run the risk of going inside the death barrack (Block 25) in order to see and speak with Sylviane for whom there is no possibility of survival. Delbo recounts the tenderness with which Carmen speaks to, caresses, and kisses the skeletal and fetid body of Sylviane who will be a corpse in a matter of hours. This is a particularly interesting moment in that, in addition to describing the practically useless but infinitely moral act of Carmen, Delbo also gives an account of what she portrays as her own moral weakness and failure. In contradistinction to Carmen’s expressions of love and tenderness, Delbo recalls that she was overcome with physical and psychical disgust in encountering the nearly dead Sylviane. She felt shame in front of Lulu, Carmen, and the countenance of Sylviane whose mouth was “covered in mortal dribble” and whose “burning blue eyes” became “larger and larger” as Delbo leaned over and forced herself to kiss her: I wanted to flee, run far away from this bay of skeletons, these tiers covered by skeletons, far from the stench of death and rot. I leaned over Sylviane’s burning blue stare, wishing I had the nerve to cheat in the presence of Carmen and Lulu. But since I didn’t, I kissed Sylviane with my mouth almost closed, wondering, as I felt my whole being contract with revulsion, if this was satisfactory in my comrades’ eyes. (314)

Upon giving us this memory, Delbo immediately rebukes herself for feeling such shame, saying that such feelings “are useless” (315). Nonetheless, this episode is couched within a segment of text that discusses the bonds of love and the love-driven duty of proximity in a comrade’s time of need. The maintenance of love relations, through shared tactile or emotional bolstering, is the primary act of resistance portrayed in Delbo’s memoir. Over and over again, it is the fear and danger of being separated from one another that threatens the women’s psyches and keeps them from falling into the catastrophic mental and physical collapse of the Muselmänner. For example, during a ditchdigging work detail, Delbo finds herself forcibly separated from other members of her Jules Simon

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camp-family by a kapo who has her working alone. Delbo describes the experience: Left alone at the bottom of the ditch, I am filled with despair. The other’s presence, the things they said, made it possible to believe we might return. Now that they have left I am desperate. I cannot believe I will ever return when I am alone. With them near me, since they seem so certain of it, I believe it could happen. No sooner do they leave me than I am frightened. No one believes she will return when she is alone. (103)

The filial and vital bond occurs not just between biological kin, or between two individuals, as was the case with Levi and Alberto or Elie Wiesel and his father, but among a multitude of women who form a camp-family unit. The social nature of her experience as a prisoner is in part responsible for the dearth of red-in-tooth-and-claw descriptions of inter-Häftling relations by Delbo. Survival is more likely, according to this extended filial logic, not by looking out for oneself but by the development and maintenance of the family group. In Delbo’s account, the Lager does not render “everyone desperately and ferociously alone.”21 Yet even a description of this social formation in terms of survival alone is to overlay a Darwinian analysis upon a phenomenon that defies the evolutionary law of the jungle. Delbo and her comrades do not speak in terms of “survival”; rather, they speak in terms of “return.”22 The surrogate camp-family sustains the hope of a return to life beyond and after the physical act of survival. It functions as surrogate, but it is a bond that surpasses the simple utility of survival. Building surrogate families can be construed as an extension of women’s social role outside the concentration camp. In Dalia Ofer’s study of women in the Warsaw ghetto, she says that women attributed their coping skills to their experience in domestic roles, particularly, in the roles of mother, wife, and other relative.23 According to feminist intellectual theory, women have been relegated to domestic—and therefore familial—roles in nearly every culture and in nearly every era. The experience of the domestic sphere “has led to the formation of a particular consciousness, a particular epistemology, a particular ethic.”24 Gilligan concludes that “morality and the preservation of life are contingent on sustaining connection, seeing the consequences of action by keeping the web of relationships intact.”25 Jules Simon

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Even the language of individual altruism does not give an adequate analysis of what transpires within the surrogate camp-family; there are certainly examples of altruistic behavior, such as the selfendangering and inexplicable generosity of a woman named Esther from the Effekts commando (141), but the paradigm of individual altruism operates on the premises of self-sacrifice of one individual on behalf of the continued survival of the other. The multiperson, social nature of Delbo’s camp-family is a matrix of visceral care and empathy that functions as a single body dedicated not just to the well-being of the individual as a member of that body or family but also to the corporeal whole. Lest this analysis of Delbo’s ethic of resistance through tactile and gesticular love and mutuality lull us into the cozy comfort of an emotionally satisfying moral paradigm, let us examine the flip side of her narrative. The surrogate family relations not only bring support and reciprocal nurturance, they also generate anguish in the social body and individual psyche when a member is separated from the group, temporarily by logistics or permanently by death. This anguish of filial closeness rent asunder does not die with the death of the family member nor with the passage of time, as Delbo’s portrayal of her survivor group twenty years after in The Measure of Our Days indicates. When a member of the social body is missing or separated, she is not lost to the love and memory of her companions. The others experience emotional agony at her disappearance and are tormented by the hideous suffering of her dying process/murder. The memory of the ones lost remains vivid for the survivors, as does the pain of mutual love interrupted by separation or death, such as exhibited in Delbo’s list of her dead and their virtues: You don’t believe what we say because if what we say were true we wouldn’t be here to say it. We’d have to explain the inexplicable explain why Viva who was so strong died and I didn’t why Mounette so passionate and proud Jules Simon

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died and I did not why Yvonne the undaunted and not Lulu who was innocent and had no idea why one lived or died. (276)

It is this harsh accompaniment to the camp-family ethos of reciprocity that makes up the bulk of Delbo’s account. Just as the comrades sustain each other and “heroically” refuse destruction of their relational capacities, they find themselves helpless against the onslaughts of the Lager. Delbo does not shy away from giving us the explicit sensory detail of the limits of mutuality and even of her own failures as the memory of Germaine and Sylviane’s deaths indicates. Cruelly, it is in fact the visceral reality of the sustaining camp-family love and ethos that renders the moments wherein mutuality is mutilated or fails all the more terrifying and painful. Simply put, because these women cling to their devotion to each other and have empathy for the pain and degradation of others they do not know, they experience daily the agonies of compassion, suffering with their surrogate sisters and prisoners and feeling “ashamed” of moments of indifference or “revulsion” for their fellows (314–315). A Levinasian analysis may be helpful in elucidating Delbo’s complex portrait of women’s moral expression and resistance under genocidal duress. Proximity is the word Levinas uses to describe the phenomenon of the ethical relation in which the subject is called upon by the agony of the other to respond. According to Levinas, the other, in her pain, is unbearably close to the subject, commanding her to render assistance. This “closeness” is borne of the inescapability of the subject from the imperative of response. Ethical proximity is the immediacy and materiality of bodily sensibility and requires a “subjectivity of flesh and blood in matter”26 that responds to the coarse corporeality of animal need. The goodness of the responsible subject who answers the call of the other is inextricably bound up with its own and the other’s corporeality. Materiality, the self and the other’s, is the arena wherein the goodness beyond being transpires. It is precisely this exposure, the vulnerability of sensibility, that is the site of ethical responsibility. The urgency of the call speaks Jules Simon

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to the immediacy of material emergency. Useless suffering—the grotesque, gratuitous, and disfiguring pain of the other—is at the center of the ethical relation. Levinas makes the phenomenological observation that useless suffering and need sears itself not only into the psyche/body of the victim but also into the moral sensibilities of the witness. Levinas is suggesting that the call of the other in need, who is alien and perhaps repulsive to us, pulls us out of our egoism with an urgency that impels us to respond with an obsession to heal that is as ferocious as the pain of the other. In the ethical relation we are both convicted with responsibility and consumed with ethical exigency, with the desire to reach across the infinite space of proximity in the gesture of aid. Levinas’s phenomenological claims regarding the suffering of the self and other seem to be reflected in Delbo’s testimony of suffering shared and compassion both provoked and hindered. We hear this moral phenomenology in Delbo’s numerous accounts of the horrors of watching someone else suffer indignities, torture, and death without being able to intervene or even offer a gesture of sympathy. In None of Us Will Return, we hear of a starved and dehydrated Jewish woman who breaks rank during an interminable winter’s roll call and struggles up an embankment to get to clean snow to eat. Although she says nothing, the woman, according to Delbo’s moral memory, calls out to the women in rank, imploring them with bewildered eyes to come and help her in what is a life-and-death struggle with the embankment. “Why don’t you help me, you standing so close? Help me. Pull me up. Lean in my direction. Stretch out your hand” (25). In fear of the SS, no one moves to help her. The exigency of her silent demand collides with the brutal reality of Lager law, and it is Delbo, the Häftling, incapacitated under threat of death, who still feels the inescapable moral sting of the woman’s unanswered call for material aid. “I no longer look at her. I no longer wish to look. . . . What does she want us to do? Reach the electrified barbed wire fence? Why does she stare at us? Isn’t she pointing at me? Imploring me? I turn away and look elsewhere. Elsewhere” (26). Delbo knows the answers to her own questions, given by the omnipresence of SSdealt death, but this cold necessity does not relieve her from a sense of moral obligation in her own eyes. She can only look elsewhere. Exacerbating the pain of this lived social empathy is the awareness of its collapse. Some of Delbo’s most potent prose-poetry is an Jules Simon

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expression of the moral horror of recognizing one’s own loss, not of individual agency but of relational capacity. As in a lucid nightmare, Delbo remains painfully cognizant of the deadening of heart and body to the suffering of the other: “Did you know that you can see your mother dead / and not shed a tear. . . . Did you know that suffering is limitless / that horror cannot be circumscribed / Did you know this / You who know” (11). The consciousness of a hardening heart and of the shutting down of the emotional capacity for grief is a form of living death wherein the sufferer suffers not the peace of indifference but the glaring absence of feeling. This is Delbo’s response to the death of Viva, whose emaciated corpse she witnesses being hauled out of the death barrack: Tomorrow morning, in front of us lined up at attention for roll call, Viva will pass before us on the small stretcher, with her feet sticking out and her hand hanging between the stretcher’s arms. And perhaps one of those standing in the ranks for roll call, and knowing that her turn is coming to be carried on the small stretcher, perhaps one of them will say, looking at Viva’s beautiful black curls, “She lasted a long time, that one.” (154)

This is neither the apathy of the Muselmann who is supposedly “beyond” caring nor the unconcern for the other by one who is consumed with the struggle for her own personal survival, ignoring the consequences for other prisoners. Delbo’s capacity to respond will return to her, and she will be morally plagued by the memory of its incapacitation.27 While care ethics may regard mutuality and other-response as the sine qua non of the moral relation, Delbo’s narrative trains a laserlike focus upon the ethic of care tortured by the impossibility of mutuality and the moral horrors of nonresponse enforced by pain of death and the struggle for individual survival against brutal elements, human and climatalogical: “You cannot get used to the sight of your friends being beaten” (79). Although Delbo suggests an ethic of commonality of shared suffering and pain, her testimony is rife with the terrible fact of alienation and violent severance from others. At many points her compassion and that of her camp-family is aroused precisely by the otherness of the other(s) suffering (see her camp-family’s response to seeing “the men” and “Jewish women”) or by the crushing solitude with which he or she is forced to bear the burden of Jules Simon

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indignity and death (nightmares as individual burdens unshared, hence more dreadful) (57). Delbo’s ethic of compassion issues in mutuality, but it is a mutuality shot through with the agony of distance (akin to Levinas’s notion of ethical proximity). The inability to attain and sustain protective closeness, sometimes physical, sometimes psychical, is the source of shame, fury, and moral agony. The impulse of physical expressions of compassion for the vulnerable suffers the duress of incommunicability. Although her companions in pain may be as close as their thin skins will allow, Delbo insists that we, her readers, witness the misery and horror of witnessing the suffering and death of others across the chasm of separation that ferocious other-love is both impelled to and impeded from bridging. The physical inability to respond when witnessing the degradation of another burns its way through the psyche like acid, incurring the wounds of guilt and the festering anguish of impotence to heal what will not heal (41).28 In one of many descriptions of interminable roll calls that expose the prisoners to the onslaught of weather and enforced immovability and silence, Delbo relates the inability to share a mournful cry with a group of emaciated women in the back of a truck being ferried from the starvation block (25) to the gas chambers. The women in the truck are howling, keening in the knowledge of where they are going. Although Delbo sees them, their cries remains “unheard,” swallowed by the din of wind and impassable cold: “The cries remain inscribed upon the blue of the sky.” One prisoner comments ironically about the cold, “I won’t ever like winter sports again” (33–34). Her group responds with a cry, but that moral act, the saying, the moral howl of compassion (“Here I am, witness to you”) is swallowed by the cold and distance. Delbo suggests that such distance, the abyss of helplessness that both links and separates sufferer and cosuffering witness, is part and parcel of Nazi torture and genocidal acts against the bodies and souls of their victims. In this sense, Delbo’s account resonates with many other camp memoirs, in particular, with Levi’s testimony regarding the “demolition” of personhood. Yet, Delbo also gives us a radically different description of the relational life of the Häftling. Her testimony is filled with attestations of ethical agency borne of a filial love and compassion that run deeper than the bonds of blood. In response to indignities and torture, Delbo and her companions quickly form a Jules Simon

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familial unit that is the primary source of resistance and the wellspring of the capacity to continue living in the face of such suffering and death. “They expect the worst—not the unthinkable,” laments Delbo (4). Indeed, recent research focusing on gender differences and stress shows that under stressful conditions women seek “social support,” a response that one research team labeled “tend-andbefriend.” Women, the researchers argued, “are more heavily engaged in their social networks than men” and turn to other women for support and as resources.29 In Delbo’s Lager world, survival is a form of resistance, but survival is a communal task in which the mutuality of care is the central weapon used in the struggle. And yet—and this is perhaps the Nazis’ greatest cruelty for Delbo—the imperative of, and agency for, compassion and the will to love that spring from the bonds of surrogate camp-family are the sources of the most grievous and perpetual wounding of the survivors. Delbo’s painful testimony shows that the mutuality of care that helps engender resistance and survival is accompanied by the moral agony of incapacitated agency and the self-condemnation that attends surviving as a witness to the suffering and death of the beloveds to which she is bound. Notes 1. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Subsequent references to this text will be made parenthetically. 2. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 17. 3. Ibid., 12. Based on her research on moral development and concepts of justice, Gilligan finds that, while for men, identity precedes intimacy and generativity in the optimal cycle of human separation and attachment, for women these tasks seem instead to be fused. 4. Ibid., 48, 73. 5. We can further trace the evolution of women as subject and feminism and psychology in a concise essay by Mary Roth Walsh, “Psychology and Feminism,” in The Knowledge Explosion: Generations of Feminist Scholarship, ed. Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 291–202, and especially 292–295. 6. Gilligan, 95. 7. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 107.

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8. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57–74. Laub examines the effect of not being heard or believed on the survivor/witness as well as the impact of listening on the listener: “If one talks about the trauma without being truly heard or truly listened to, the telling might itself be lived as a return of the trauma—a re-experiencing of the event itself,” (67); “There are hazards to listening to trauma. Trauma—and its impact on the hearer—leaves, indeed, no hiding place intact. As one comes to know the survivor, one comes to know oneself; and that is not a simple task” (72). 9. This poem is quite representative of Delbo’s poetry and its incremental repetition, direct address, quiet but intense tone, and unanticipated denouement. 10. Charlotte Delbo, “Who Will Carry the Word?,” in Theater of the Holocaust, ed. Robert Skloot (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 277. 11. For a discussion of the dynamics of surrogate families in Auschwitz and other camps, see Myrna Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors: The Burden of Gender,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 327–339; Myrna Goldenberg, “Testimony, Narrative, and Nightmare: The Experiences of Jewish Women in the Holocaust,” in Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture, ed. Maurie Sacks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 94–106; Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors / Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 166; Myrna Goldenberg, “Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps,” and Pascale Bos, “Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Differences,” in Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, eds. Elizabeth Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 161–179, 23–50; Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of the Research,” in Different Voices, ed. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 373–405; Joan Ringelheim, “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust,” in Ofer and Weitzman, 340–350; Marion Kaplan, “Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish Women’s Responsibilities to Daily Life in Nazi Germany,” ibid., 39–54; Lisa Chapnik, “The Grodno Ghetto and Its Underground: A Personal Narrative,” ibid., 109–119; Michal Ungar, “The Status and Plight of Women in the Lodz Ghetto,” ibid., 123–142; Lidia Rosenfeld Vago, “One Year in the Black Hole or Our Planet Earth: A Personal Narrative,” ibid., 273–284; Ruth

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Bondy, “Women in Theresienstadt and the Family Camp in Birkenau,” ibid., 310–326; and Sara R. Horowitz, “Women in Holocaust Literature: Engendering Trauma Memory,” ibid., 364–377. 12. Lawrence L. Langer, “The Dilemma of Choice in the Death Camps,” in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 126. 13. That is, theoretically one had a better chance of survival if one was deported in a mild season and thus had time to learn how to manipulate one’s camp role/status before winter set in. Additionally, coming from a considerable distance, for example, Greece or Rhodes, and its consequent long journey and dramatic change in climate, diminished one’s ability to survive. In the same way, deportation to a death camp rather than to a labor camp obviously influenced chances for survival. And, of course, as a camp prisoner, one was always vulnerable to the temperament of the guards and other persons in the Nazi hierarchy. Indeed, Delbo says, “It depends on the whim of the SS,” (141). 14. John Felstiner, “Foreword,” in Charlotte Delbo, Convoy to Auschwitz: Women of the French Resistance, trans. Carol Cosman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1965; 1997), xiii. 15. Charlotte Delbo, “Departure and Return,” in Convoy, 9. 16. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 207. Chodorow examines the “early experience and preoedipal relationship [that] differs for boys and girls. Girls retain more concern with early childhood issues in relation to their mother and a sense of self involved with these issues. Their attachments therefore retain more preoedipal aspects. The greater length and different nature of their preoedipal experience, and their continuing occupation with the issues of this period, mean that women’s sense of self is continuous with others and that they retain capacities for primary identification, both of which enable them to experience empathy and lack of reality sense needed by a cared-for infant. In men, these qualities have been curtailed, both because they are early treated as an opposite by their mother and because their later attachment to her must be repressed. The relational basis for mothering is thus extended in women, and inhibited in men, who experience themselves as more separate and distinct from others” (207). 17. See Delbo’s account of watching the slow death of a Jewish woman during a winter roll call (25) and her anguish of having to abandon 14 comrades during a forced run back to the camp (37). 18. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Collier Books, 1993). See pages 87–100 for Levi’s descriptions of

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his fellow prisoners whose traits (most not commendable) make them more likely to survive, according to Levi. 19. Ibid., 145–150. 20. Ibid., 119–122. 21. Ibid., 88. 22. Ilona Karmel, Estate of Memory (New York: Feminist Press/CUNY, 1969). 23. Dalia Ofer, “Gender in Ghetto Diaries and Testimonies,” in Women and the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 163. 24. Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1985), 173. 25. Gilligan, 59. 26. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 78. 27. As Delbo says in the voice of Mado, “I died in Auschwitz and no one knows it” (267). 28. See Delbo’s impressions of Alice as “alone” during the dying process in Block 25. 29. Shelley E. Taylor, Laura Cousino Klein, Brian P. Lewis, Tara L. Gruenewald, Regan A. R. Gurung, and John A. Updegaff, “Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-orFlight,” Psychological Review 107:3 (October 2002): 411–429. The authors found a physiological as well as a behavioral response to stress that differs in men and women. This difference was apparent crossculturally: “Women and girls seek more help from others and give more help to others than men and boys do.”

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CHAPTER 6

The Role of Moral Examples in Teaching Ethics after the Holocaust: Reconsidering the Rescue of the Danish Jews Hanne Trautner-Kromann

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he rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943 aroused great interest, admiration, and hope in the Free World both during and after World War II. The transfer of over 7,000 Danish Jews to neighboring Sweden by Danish fishermen and helpers and Sweden’s “open doors” policy were used in the United States as an argument for pressuring the British government to open the gates of Palestine in order to find a refuge for doomed European Jewry. A mass meeting was called at Carnegie Hall on October 31, 1943, in an advertisement in the New York Times with the heading “It Can Be Done! Simply by opening its doors Sweden saved the Jewish population of nearby Denmark. Simply by opening the gates of Palestine thousands of Jews from nearby countries will save themselves.”1 The results of the mass meeting were probably small, if there were any, and in Denmark the struggle for daily life and freedom went on and did not leave any time for reflection. Many years later, however, a growing number of mostly American Jews started asking the Danes about the rescue and the reasons that prompted the helpers to risk their own lives in order to save their fellow compatriots. At first the answers were evasive and few, but the last twenty years have brought much research and several memoirs to public view, and now a more complete picture of the events and the motives is beginning to appear. Jules Simon

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This growing interest in the actions of the Danish people during the Holocaust raises some important questions about the role of moral examples in the study of the Holocaust. In this chapter, I argue that despite the risk of simplifying the complex factors involved in resistance and the risk of glorifying ordinary people as heroes, the stories of those who resisted should play an important role in our teaching about the Holocaust, especially in our teaching of ethics. The Danish Example The German occupation of Denmark on April 9, 1940, was met with protests by the Danish government, but with very little physical resistance due to the overwhelming German force. Although Denmark was occupied, the government, parliament, army, and administration were allowed to function. Anti-Jewish policy was forcefully rejected by the Danish government and administration, which declared that there was no “Jewish question” in Denmark. The Danish Jewish community of about 7,000 people, most of them Danish citizens but also about 600 stateless refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied territories, continued its daily life like the rest of the population. This “peaceful” occupation depended on official Danish economic cooperation—or “collaboration,” as it was seen by a growing number of Danes—and willingness to prevent active resistance and acts of sabotage. The Nazi regime pretended that Denmark was a natural “Aryan” ally and that the occupation was a friendly act. The Danish government and the population reluctantly accepted this state of affairs, trying to avoid massive destruction and repression. When this delicate balance was broken on August 29, 1943—due to the growing resistance, strikes, and sabotage by the population and the subsequent German demand of the Danes to introduce the death penalty for sabotage—the government resigned. The Danish army and navy were disarmed and interned, and a state of military emergency was declared by the Germans, but the Danish police were still allowed to function. Now there was no impediment to Nazi persecution of the Jews, although the still-functioning civil administration tried its best to prevent it right up to the actual roundup of the Jews on October 1, 1943. On Tuesday, September 28, 1943, a German official gave information to a Danish politician about the impending arrest of Danish Jules Simon

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Jews. The warning was spread by word of mouth the same evening and the following days by the Jews themselves and by the underground movement. The Danes’ initial response to news of the roundup was confusion, since both the small underground movement and the Jews themselves were totally unprepared. The Danish officials had repeatedly warned the Jews not to jeopardize the Jewish community by illegal activities or by trying to escape, hoping to be able to protect the Jews, so only 69 had fled to Sweden on their own accord during September, mostly by paying fishermen big amounts of money. It was a risky and unknown affair, and Sweden as a neutral country was not prepared to accept huge numbers of refugees from Denmark, and certainly not Jewish refugees. The first few days after the warning, some wealthy Jewish families organized and paid for their own flight, often with the help of Gentile friends, but most of the Jews did not have the means and connections to do this. Many Danes only started their illegal work due to the imminent threat of roundup, first by hiding the Jews themselves, then by transporting them to the fishermen’s villages along the Orotund coast facing Sweden, finding shelter for them in the small houses of the local population, and then looking for fishermen and boats willing and able to sail them to Sweden. Danish police, on German orders, had much earlier confiscated rowboats and pleasure boats along the coast to prevent underground fighters from escaping to Sweden, and this route had been considered sealed. Since Sweden now had declared its willingness to accept all the Jews from Denmark, the helpers and the fishermen had hopes of ferrying the refugees into Swedish territorial waters without being arrested—at least by the Swedes. At first the fishermen had fears, not only of being caught by the German patrol boats but of their boats—their only means of living—being confiscated by the Swedes, and therefore most of them asked for a high price for each passenger. The wealthy Jews paid for the refugees without money, and some fishermen even refused to be paid. Later on fares were regulated by the individual helpers or groups of helpers, who after a few days had organized their work so that they could set the price and avoid middlemen and profiteers. Some leaders of the rescue work contacted people of means all over the country who donated large sums to cover the expenses of feeding and transporting the Jews, and some helpers even took private loans to finance their work. After a few days the underground movement Jules Simon

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even bought larger boats so that many refugees could be taken in one sweep to Sweden. The Swedish navy also helped by escorting the Danish boats once they were in Swedish territorial waters, and the Danish coast guard often actively helped the refugees or at least turned a blind eye to the activities at the coast and in the harbors. In many cases, even the German navy and soldiers refused to take part in the persecution, wanting to concentrate on their primary tasks. By the evening of Thursday, September 30, the Jewish New Year’s Eve, most Jews had succeeded in finding refuge with other Danes or in going into hiding. Since there was no general awareness of who was Jewish, not all Jews were found and warned, and some even refused to believe they were singled out for persecution, since they were Danish citizens and their ancestors had been citizens for centuries. In the late evening of Friday, October 1, 1943, at least 1,500 German policemen tried to arrest the Jews in Copenhagen by driving from home to home in military vans, according to a list of about 1,700 homes owned by Jews, but found most of them empty. They only succeeded in arresting 198 Jews in Copenhagen and 83 in the provinces that first night, and after a few hours the whole campaign was finished. The Danish police could only look on passively and only afterward try to register the names and addresses of the captured Jews. The German transport ship waiting in the harbor was meant for 5,000 Jews but had to leave for Germany with only 198 persons. The following days and weeks a few hundred more were arrested on their flight to Sweden, and in the end, 470 Jews from Denmark were interned in Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia. By the end of November 1943, most of the Danish Jews had reached Sweden—about 7,200 Jews and so-called half-Jews and 700 Gentile spouses. About forty Jews died on the way to safety, mostly by drowning, and a few committed suicide. The reaction of the non-Jewish Danish population to the Nazis’ efforts to round up the Danish Jews was immediately one of outrage and active help in assisting the Jews to go into hiding and find escape routes to Sweden. The Danish authorities, the King, and broad sectors of the public protested officially and openly against the persecution of the Jews, both before and after the roundup. Universities were closed, the ministers read a protest letter by the bishops from the pulpit in the churches, and the Danish army and navy protested against the Germans’ promise to release Danish soldiers, published Jules Simon

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on October 2, 1943, since this promise was motivated by the Germans’ desire to pacify people concerning the removal of “the disruptive element”—the Jews. We know that thousands of unknown individuals helped the refugees, from the taxi drivers who picked up helpless Jews wandering in the streets of Copenhagen, not knowing where to go, and brought them to the homes of potential helpers or even to their own homes, to the total strangers who gave Jews the keys and addresses to their own homes, to policemen, doctors, hospitals, ministers in the Danish Church, business partners, colleagues, acquaintances, and friends who helped. In addition to these, thousands and thousands of Danes knew and saw what was going on, from neighbors to the staff on trains to the Danish police, and did not tell the Germans. Some helpers and groups of helpers managed to save hundreds and even thousands of Jews, most notably a few hospitals in the middle of Copenhagen. There were, of course, also informers who either for money or for ideological reasons—as Nazis or antisemites—told the Germans about the whereabouts of Jews and their helpers. Several hundred refugees were arrested during their flight and interned, some of them so-called half-Jews or non-Jews married to Jews. They were soon released and “only” “full” Jews were later transported to Theresienstadt. Some of the helpers were arrested by the Germans and often given over to the Danish police, who soon released them, or they were given a sentence of a few weeks in a Danish prison to appease the Germans. A few people were shot dead in the fighting that ensued when German police tried to arrest Jewish refugees, and some were imprisoned and later deported to concentration camps, where a few of them died. The fate of the 470 Danish and stateless Jews who were deported to Theresienstadt was very harsh, but not as bad as the fate of most other Jews during the Holocaust. Unofficial protests and pressure by the civil administration convinced the Germans that to regain order and cooperation, they had to promise that the Danish Jews would not be deported from Theresienstadt to extermination camps. Moreover, the stateless Jews were declared Danish Jews by the Danes, who demanded that they be given the same treatment as the rest of the Danish Jews. Promises were given that the Danish social welfare authorities would be allowed to send clothes and parcels of food and vitamins to the Jews and that these authorities would be given a Jules Simon

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receipt for each parcel so that they would know if the Jews were actually alive. In June 1944, after months of negotiation, a Danish delegation was allowed to inspect Theresienstadt in order to control the conditions of the Danish Jews. Needless to say, the inspection was a mockery and bluff, since the delegation was only shown the best-looking, newly renovated, and painted living quarters and met only the healthiest Jews, who had strict orders not to reveal the truth. Thousands of other Jews had been deported to Auschwitz in the months before to make the camp less crowded. This constant concern from the Danish authorities, however, effected better conditions for the Danish Jews and in the end made it possible for a rescue mission to bring most of the Jews back to Denmark in the last month of World War II. In all, 53 Danish Jews died from starvation and illness in Theresienstadt. The Motives for Moral Choice Given the fact that most Danish Jews were rescued from German persecution with the help of thousands of ordinary Danish citizens, rather than a few outstanding heroes, the question of the motives behind these acts has become more and more intriguing, especially when this situation is compared to the failure of other Nazi-occupied countries to rescue the Jews living there. Historical research from the last decades has brought forth much new information about the highly complex relations of the Danes to the Germans, which explains some of the reasons why this complicated relationship did not end in more death and disaster than it did. But a quite different question concerns the motives of the individual helpers in the rescue of the Danish Jews. By reading the hundreds of books, reports, and stories written by and about the rescued and the rescuers, it is possible to get a picture of the motives for helping.2 The overriding motive for the vast majority of the helpers seems to have been indignation—innocent people, known or unknown, were being persecuted for no reason by a common adversary and enemy, and this obvious need for help evoked the spontaneous reaction of coming to the help of the needy. That being said, there were also other—secondary and later—motives and considerations at play. Generally, the Danish population felt a growing annoyance and resentment at the occupation, and since, by Jules Simon

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this time, the Germans were defeated in many places by the Allied Forces, the end of the war was not only hoped for but also expected in the foreseeable future. For the small but growing Resistance Movement, the secondary motives were both political and practical. In the course of the rescue work, it became apparent that it was possible to gain or intensify popular opposition to the Germans. The brutality of the persecution of the Jews made it clear that an open fight against the enemy was necessary and unavoidable, and this led to a growing acceptance among the population of general resistance in deed. The practical results were that many helpers turned into active resistance fighters after the end of the rescue and that the newly established escape routes were also put to use for resistance fighters, who needed to escape to Sweden to avoid arrest by the Germans. The ordinary helpers were also impressed by the new political facts. With the resignation of the legally elected Danish government, there was no longer a real government, no official Danish cooperation policy with the Germans, and therefore no Danish legal restraints or prohibition against resistance activity. The fact that the Danish police in many instances were also giving assistance to the Jews and their helpers gave the act a kind of “legality,” and it was, therefore, not seen as a serious crime. The clandestine and illegal press published articles condemning the German persecution of the innocent Jews and calling it the vilest crime ever committed in Denmark, thus strengthening even more the morals of the Danish population. Besides, the Germans did not declare any threat of death as a penalty for helping Jews. For some helpers there might also have been an element of adventure-seeking or greed for money. Although thousands were actively helping the Jews, the rescue could not have been possible without the tacit agreement of the majority of the Danes. A large part of the rescue operations was conducted in broad daylight, and most of the helpers had no experience in clandestine work. A “wall of silence” was erected, and only a few informers were at work. Most of the Danish helpers did not want to be thanked, let alone praised, saying that they only did the right thing and that the only possible and natural reaction to the German persecution of fellow Danish citizens was to extend immediate help. The injustice was too blatant, the moral answer obvious. Jules Simon

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Teaching Good and Evil, Help and Harm Why is the story of the rescue of the Danish Jews still attracting so much interest and admiration? Why do we need this story and stories like it? What use are we making of them? Philosopher Philip Hallie gives his answer in Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm.3 While researching a book about cruelty, he read about the torturing and killing of children in certain Nazi concentration camps—examples of the ultimate cruelty and evil. These accounts left him feeling completely depressed and without any hope; life seemed hellish. By chance he opened up a book about the resistance movement in France during World War II and read about the nonviolent resistance of the people of a small French town, and this gave him hope. In this situation, the help came from love, not from force. John J. Compton, in his foreword to Hallie’s posthumous book, comments on Hallie’s writings about the help the people of Le Chambon gave to fleeing Jews: Chambon made hope possible. . . . [T]he very existence of Le Chambon “sets a precedent.” A certain kind of goodness, that of armed resistance to the Nazis’ destructive power—killing to prevent further killing—was, indeed, necessary. . . . [T]here was in Chambon another kind of goodness, a purer kind, the goodness of helping rather than harming, even at great personal risk. . . . Real human beings had brought it about and other real human beings could hope to have the courage to emulate them. (xix)

The story of the rescue of the Danish Jews seen in this perspective is, then, about much more than historical facts. To read about it gives hope that, even in the darkest hours of humankind, goodness is possible; the story can be used as a precedent and as a moral teaching. Hallie himself writes: True narratives of the deeds and passions of particular human beings are especially revealing . . . because they show us something, something particular, and yet something of large significance. . . . In stories, the ethos of a particular human being can seize you. . . . In a true story, a part of history is captivating now and memorable afterwards. (xxi)

To gain moral orientation in our daily lives, we need such true stories, not only to know the historical facts but also to get a feeling, a Jules Simon

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sense of what happened. We need these stories so that we can use them on a personal level; they make us think about what we would have done in similar circumstances, about what the right thing to do would have been, and about what the right thing to do under present circumstances might be. Compton says: Our ethical formation depends on them. . . . Remembering, telling and retelling tales of good and evil, moreover, is what helps to create and sustain an ethical community (xxii). . . . Ethical judgments in specific cases are often terribly complex and require more than exemplary stories to go on. Hallie knew this very well, but he wanted to insist, nonetheless, that there are clear cases, there are some “plain facts” in ethics. . . . That it’s good for a person, any person, to be nurtured and helped when in need and bad to be tortured or starved. (xxiii)

The core of the rescue of the Danish Jews is exactly this simple message: it is good to be helped when in need, whatever the complexities of the motives of the helpers are. That is why the story even today attracts attention, why the rescue is taught and studied in some high schools in Denmark, and why books are still being written about it. The Danish story may be especially useful since it does not tell about heroes and superhuman men and women but about ordinary people acting for minutes, hours, or days in an extraordinary way. The indirect message is that you do not need to be a very special person, courageous and noble and outstanding, in order to be able to extend help, little or much, passively or actively. It tells us that it need not take a hero to show civil disobedience or civil courage, each and any of us can contribute our share in an act of humanity. Compton outlines the uses of such stories: In Hallie’s view, they are not impersonal facts for some kind of pure reason or given in some inherited doctrine, disconnected from the feelings of particular people. Rather, they are personal and communal facts. They are the rock bottom experiences of communities of human beings, felt in their bodies and articulated in their shared stories, in the “imaginative perceptions” they have connecting themselves to others. (xxiii)

One tells these stories, Compton suggests, “in the hope that one’s hearers—even some of those who may have disagreed—will be moved to enlarge their ‘imaginative perceptions’ and come to see the Jules Simon

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evil etched in the faces of those victims and the goodness in the deeds of those rescuers” (xxiii–xxiv). The wish to be heard is exactly what motivates so many of the helpers to write their books. As one of the most prolific Danish resistance fighters and helpers, Jørgen Kieler, states, “[the rescue story] that some might see as self-glorification has been converted to an admonition of the civilized world’s obligations to the persecuted in the future.”4 This is also one of the motives of educators for teaching and discussing this story with their pupils—to make use of these narratives for teaching ethics, to give the young generation a feeling of the shared stories and thereby also a shared ethics. While it is not a simple task to convey ethics by using such stories as examples of ethical behavior, mere theory is also difficult and not always useful. As Hallie explains: Most of the old ethical theories and commandments present ethics as a friend of life and an enemy of death. And so those theories and commandments praise help and condemn harm. They celebrate the spreading of life with two sorts of ethical rules or ideals: negative and positive. . . . These (negative) rules say no to the deliberate extinction of life and joy. . . . These positive rules say yes to the protection and spreading of life. . . . To follow the negative ideals you must have clean hands; but to follow the positive one you can be less hygienic—you can dirty your hands doing something helpful. If you would be your brother’s keeper, you must go out of your way. The negative ethic is the ethic of decency, of restraint. It is terrible to violate it—to be a murderer or a liar—but obey it and you could be a dead person . . . you could obey the no ethic by being silent, and it was the silent majority in Germany and in the world who fed the torturers and the murderers with their silence. . . . On the other hand, the yes ethic demands action. You must be alive if you would meet its demands; sometimes you must even put your life on the line. You must go out of your way, sometimes very far out of your way. In combat I had to become a killer [Hallie was a soldier in the allied armies in World War II] in order to help stop Germany in its tracks. I had to violate the no ethic in order to help stop the many tortures and murders that Nazi Germany was perpetrating in Central Europe. (26–27)

This dilemma between the no ethic and the yes ethic was keenly felt in Denmark during the rescue. How far could the helpers go in actively helping the Jews? Could they use weapons to protect them Jules Simon

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while on their way to the lifesaving boats? Could they even kill aggressors? What about the risk to their own lives, their families, their children? The Danish rescue is so complex that many aspects of moral action are revealed and illuminated through the telling of these stories, making them an important educational tool in the teaching of morals today both on the personal and official level. It is possible to help or rescue fellow beings, and the importance of a moral example should not be underestimated. Of course there is no guarantee moral action will be successful. Political and human priorities can hamper or even prevent moral action in spite of clear moral examples. The Danish refugee policies in the 1930s had been very restrictive. Most German Jews did not get refugee status and were only granted a three-to-six-months residence permit; when it expired they had to leave. Many German Jews were turned down at the border. The policy of collaboration was another stain on Denmark—saving the Danish people from disaster but also helping the Nazis in their war against humanity. Many Jewish families felt that their rescue had only been possible because thousands of persecuted German Jews had been turned away so that only well-integrated Jews—and few in number— lived in Denmark during the occupation, giving no “reason” for antisemitism. So the story of the rescue of the Danish Jews is not one of unmitigated good, but it does show us the possibilities of helping, little or much, even in the most difficult circumstances. The Danish helpers saved the Jewish victims, but in a certain sense they thereby saved themselves. As the Danish Jew Herbert Pundik aptly writes in his personal narrative of his flight to Sweden in 1943: The Danes saved the Jews. And this, in turn, contributed to saving the self-respect of the Danes. After October 1, the resistance grew in scope and activity. The Danes earned the compliments of Winston Churchill, who called the Danish resistance movement “second to none.” Thanks to the underground movement Denmark became recognized as a member of the group of allied nations defeating Nazi Germany.5

There are necessary moral choices. If a person or a group does not decide to stop violence out of fear or indifference or for some other reason, the price can be too high: the loss of self-respect and of respect from others. This underscores the old wisdom in the Jewish Jules Simon

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ethics of Tzedakah (righteous goodness) that to do a mitzvah (good deed) to another person is both an obligation of the giver and a service to the giver by the receiver, because by receiving the giving he makes the giving possible. It is edifying in itself for a human being to behave in an ethical way. Notes 1. The New York Times (October 31, 1943). 2. See, for example, Jørgen H. Barfod, “The Occupation of Denmark,” in Kings and Citizens: The History of the Jews in Denmark, 1622–1983 (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1983), 72–79; and Leo Goldberger, ed., The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage Under Stress (New York: New York University Press, 1987). 3. Philip Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). Subsequent references to this work are made parenthetically in the text. 4. Jørgen Kieler, Why Did You Do It? Personal Memories from the Occupation in the Light of History, vol. 1 (Copenhagen, 2001), 288. In Danish. Title and quote translated by H. Trautner-Kromann. 5. Herbert Pundik, “The Escape,” in Kings and Citizens, 91.

Jules Simon

CHAPTER 7

Dignity and Despair: The Double Bind of Jean Améry’s Odyssey Mark Stern

ean Améry’s life suggests a double bind of ethics: during the Holocaust, the effort to maintain one’s dignity often cost a Jew his or her life, and after the Holocaust, moral protest, involving the affirmation and struggle for those things that are worth living for, resulted for some survivors in despair when their efforts went unheard and unheeded. Améry’s moral protest ended in despair and suicide. Primo Levi once said of Améry that he imposed upon himself a position of such “severity and intransigence [so] as to make him incapable of finding joy in life, indeed of living. Those who ‘trade blows’ with the entire world achieve dignity but pay a very high price for it, because they are sure to be defeated.”1 This chapter outlines the pathway Améry’s life took, including both the admirable stand of moral protest and his subsequent decision to take his own life. Améry left his Austrian homeland, became a member of the Belgian resistance, suffered torture by the Gestapo and the death machine of Auschwitz, and found himself in a world in which he could never feel at home. In At the Mind’s Limits, he writes through the prism of an existentialist giving testimony—testimony infused with the intellectual spirit and philosophic perspective of the Enlightenment, but flowing from a life of pain that ended in suicide. Améry’s writings are “personal,” those of a Jewish victim of Nazism. However, his writings also present a “phenomenological description of the existence of the victim” in a universal sense.2

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Exile and Torture Jean Améry, born Hans Mayer in Austria in 1912, was raised as a Catholic and celebrated major Catholic holidays.3 His mother, a practicing Catholic of Jewish and Catholic heritage, guided him in his religious upbringing. His father’s Jewish family had lived in Austria since the seventeenth century, but his father died fighting as a rifleman for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I. Mayer subsequently moved with his mother to Vienna, where he completed his university studies in literature. He saw himself as an intellectual and a follower of the Enlightenment, a view of himself to which he always remained committed. One day, sitting in a café, drinking coffee, he read the newspaper text of the Nuremberg Laws and understood that these laws “were the expression, concentrated in legal-textual form, of the verdict ‘Death to the Jews’” (89). “Henceforth,” as Améry understood it, “I was a quarry of death” (85). “I was an Austrian who had been raised a Christian, and yet I was not one. Not any longer. The overwhelming majority of not only the German people but also my own Austrian people had excluded me from their community.”4 He had become a Jew. With the advent of the Nuremburg Laws in 1935, and the subsequent amalgamation of Austria into Germany in 1938, Mayer-to-be-Améry understood that his homeland had been withdrawn from him and from all of its Jewish citizens. He and his now fellow Jews had become subjects. Mayer remained in Austria until it became part of the Third Reich. On March 12, 1938, the German army entered Austria, and Hans Mayer “could no longer say ‘we’” when talking or even thinking of his homeland. He felt alienated from all that had culturally defined him. He understood that to stay in the Third Reich was to wait for death, and he fled to Belgium (43). His birth name no longer made any sense to him, and he changed his name to Jean Améry—an anagram of Mayer. He would never again speak the dialect of his youth when he spoke German. After the Nazis moved into Belgium, Améry was deported to southern France in 1940 as an illegal alien, but he escaped from the French internment camp and returned to Belgium in 1941. He began to work with the Belgian underground. While working with a group producing anti-German leaflets, he encountered a German Jules Simon

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soldier who spoke the same dialect as he had spoken in Austria. However, Améry understood that he could not speak with the soldier in his native German, as that would give away his identity. He spoke in a halting French. “At that moment,” Améry writes, “I understood completely and forever that my home was enemy country and that the good comrade was sent here from the hostile homeland to wipe me out” (49–50). Améry remained active in the Belgian resistance until his capture by the Gestapo in 1943. “It was a matter of fliers,” he recounts (24). Silly fliers, Améry came to believe, that would not alter even one German soldier’s beliefs. But the fliers, which carried the text “Death to the SS bandits and the Gestapo hangmen!” demonstrated that resisters were there in Belgium, actively lurking in opposition to the occupiers. Thus, the resisters, no matter how ineffectual their efforts might have been at the time, did present a threat to the Germans. The SS men who arrested Améry had the caricatured leather coats and pistols, but they also had faces: “not ‘Gestapo faces’ . . . but rather faces like anyone else, plain ordinary faces” (25). This was but the first of many times when Améry understood that the terrible cruelties imposed by the Nazi terror machine were not carried out by extraordinarily different men but were in fact perpetrated by ordinary beings, rather average persons. When first arrested, Améry was punched and beaten by the police, but he revealed nothing, as he had nothing to reveal to them. They wanted names, but all he knew were aliases. They wanted places, but all he could remember were dark houses in unknown locations. So they shipped him from the police station to “Reception Camp Breendonk,” the infamous Gestapo center, where torture would be applied by the “experts” (29). His personal torturer was Herr Lieutenant Praust, a small, stocky man who had a face that Mayer saw as “gruffly good-natured” (32). The goodnatured face masked an expert in the art and science of torture. Having heard reports of torture by the Gestapo from members of the resistance, Améry thought he understood what was coming as Lieutenant Praust started to go about his work, hoisting Améry up off the floor by a chain attached from the ceiling to the handcuffs binding his arms behind him, until in midair his shoulders could no longer bear the body’s weight and dislocated. Améry came to know what only those who have been tortured can know in the very core of their being: what happens to the body and the mind of the tortured. Jules Simon

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In a windowless vault from which “no scream penetrated to the outside. . . . I experienced it: torture.” Améry continues, “Twenty-two years after it occurred, on the basis of an experience that in no way probed the entire range of possibilities, I dare to assert that torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself” (22). The tortured individual will always feel the pain, the self-negation, the crying out for relief, and the impossibility of getting to safety beyond the pain. “Whoever was tortured,” Améry concludes, “stays tortured” (33–34). “Twenty-two years later I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms” (36). The aftermath of torture is manifold. The tortured individual loses “trust in the world,” for there is no control over what may happen to him, to his physical being and to his metaphysical being, and loses the expectation of help from others (27). Suffering utter humiliation and dominance, the tortured person finds himself in the hands of someone who controls his pain, spirit, death, and life. The torturer is the absolute master of the tortured, and the tortured person comes to know “the other as absolute sovereign and sovereignty revealed itself as the power to inflict suffering and to destroy” (34–35). Améry was astonished that he survived the torture and that his mind and his body still remained his. Yet, he writes, “whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world . . . will not be regained.” He continues, “It is fear that henceforth reigns over him” (40). The Nazis, Améry argues, tortured because it showed their domination, their greatness over others. He was “convinced . . . that torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence” (24). Torture and destruction of the Jews in particular was the Nazi trademark. The Nazis interpreted Nietzsche to fit their worldview, seeing Germans as Nietzsche’s people (Volk): strong, capable beings, carrying out the will to power, who destroyed the less-than-perfect beings in their way. “To see others suffer does one good,” wrote Nietzsche, “but to make others suffer even more: this is an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle.”5 The Nazis viewed the Jews as a destructive element that had imbued the Christian world with compassionate weakness, which was a poison that flowed through the West. According to Nietzsche, “The source of this poison, the Jew, had to be destroyed lest the poison destroy Western civilization.”6 And the Nazis took this task as one of their central Jules Simon

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aims. Experts at cruelty, the Nazis wrought upon others “deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim eventually trust[ed] neither himself nor anyone else.”7 Améry was sent to Auschwitz after the Gestapo realized that he was not a German deserter and turncoat but just a Jew who had fled from the Reich’s grasp and thus was no longer worth the effort of the special Breendock treatment. “I lost all relevance for them,” writes Améry. “There was no trial. I was subjected to the general death sentence: it was called Auschwitz.”8 Humiliation of the prisoner was constant in Auschwitz, especially that of the Jewish prisoner. Améry wrote of one particular instance when he revolted against this humiliation imposed by the camp: A huge man, a Polish common criminal who was an overseer, struck him in the face. Améry, doing the impermissible, struck back: “My dignity was all in that punch aimed at his jaw. That in the end it was I who, physically much weaker, succumbed to a ruthless beating no longer had any importance whatsoever. Hurting all over from the blows, I was satisfied with myself.” Yet the satisfaction was temporary, and the victory a Pyrrhic one. He writes that he had struck back “in the mistaken belief that in this way I could regain my dignity. Then I recognized that it made no sense. The Jew was the sacrificial animal. He had to drink the cup, down to its bitter end. I drank. And this became my Jewish being.”9 Dignity, it seemed, was only achievable at the cost of death. Death and survival, and the perpetual presence of fear, had placed their mark on the death camp survivor. Twenty years after Auschwitz, he wrote of a remarkable resurgence of Jewish creativity, accomplishment, and acceptance in the Western world: Two Jewish citizens had been chosen presidents of the French Republic; Jews were prominent among Nobel Prize recipients; Jews flourished in the burgeoning postwar American cultural and scientific renaissance. But Améry believed this was but a momentary respite in the perpetual world-at-war against the Jews. “I don’t trust this peace,” he wrote, and “without trust in the world I face my surroundings as a Jew who is alien and alone” (95). Homeless “How much home a person needs cannot be quantified,” wrote Améry. But “he needs much home, more, at any rate, than a world of people with a homeland” (60). Martin Buber wrote, “Good is the Jules Simon

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movement in the direction of home.”10 But where is good when there is no direction home? On April 15, 1945, the British freed Améry from Bergen-Belsen. He returned to Brussels soon after liberation, but he had not returned home. He was in exile. “The-exilein-permanence that I chose was the sole authenticity that I could attain for myself; being Jewish blocked all other outlets for me” (93). Améry, raised as a Christian, became a Jew because others defined who he could be, and he came to the conclusion that “my being Jewish is in the end decisive after all.”11 It was the defining factor of his post-Nuremburg Laws life. Home, in every meaningful sense of the word, as one’s place of respite, security, love, and comfort, or as one’s place of heritage and culture, or where one has ties of deep friendship and kinship, was lost to Améry once he became a Jew. It was never to be recovered. To be without a home is to have nostalgia, as the Greeks termed it, a suffering caused by an unrequited yearning to return. In the Odyssey, Odysseus lays entwined with Calypso, having not seen home for years, but he yearns for home and he tells her of his yearning. Odysseus does go to find his home, and he has his day of return. For Améry that house, that home, that day of return was beyond reach. He had been banished, and remained forever exiled, from his Austrian-German culture, from his moorings of childhood and youth. He ends his essay “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” by quoting from the last line of Nietzsche’s poem, “Alone”: “Woe to him who has no home” (61). In assessing his sense of loss, Améry understood that the Germans and “my own Austrian people had excluded me from their community.”12 Possessions were lost, but more deeply, “we also lost the people: the school-mate from the same bench, the neighbor, the teacher, they had become informers or bullies, at best, embarrassed opportunists. And we lost our language” (42). The memories of his childhood and youth no longer existed in a positive sense. He adopted the culture of the French Enlightenment, but it was a forced adoption. He had adopted a place of residence, Belgium, but this was out of necessity, as he had to have someplace to reside.13 To Améry, “one must have compatriots on the village and city streets if the spiritual ones are to be fully enjoyed” (44). But after his exile such compatriots were never in his circle. Now, “I did suffer from homesickness, and still suffer from homesickness, a nasty, gnawing Jules Simon

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quality. . . . Suddenly, the past was buried and one no longer knew who one was” (42). All of this had been lost the moment he became a Jew. “My identity was bound up with a plain German name and to the dialect of my more immediate origin. But since the day when an official decree forbade me to wear the Volk costume that I had worn almost exclusively from early childhood on, I no longer permitted myself the dialect” (43). He could never again speak the very language of his upbringing in what was for him its natural, regional form. His life and family history had been tied to a permanence of place in Austria where his ancestors had lived for centuries, unlike the Wandering Jew who understood that he had no place of permanence as he wandered. The Wandering Jew knew who he was in his wandering, while Améry had lost all that was his mooring. He had even been given a new middle name, Israel, not by his parents but by Nazi officialdom. “Exactly how to define myself I did not know, since my past and my origin had been confiscated from me” (58). It was in Auschwitz that Améry became a Jew. Originally he had thought of himself as a Nazi victim. Subsequently, through his experience in Auschwitz, he came to understand that he was “the Jewish victim” (xiv). However, he did not see himself as a Jew in terms of its being “part of my person.” He did not understand the lingua franca, Yiddish, of the European Jews, and he knew little of the Jewish culture. He did not believe in the God of Israel. Yet, he had to be a Jew; there was no alternative. He would “claim” this identity as he now understood, “the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew,” but this would henceforth cause him “indistinct pain” (82). His becoming a Jew mirrored more than the Nazi worldview. It was a Western worldview. He recalled a conversation that he overheard in the concentration camp: A Jewish inmate told a French man, “I’m French,” and the French man responded without a hint of hostility, “Français, toi? Mais tu est Juif.” This conversation reinforced in Améry his essential aloneness as an outsider, the essential aloneness that he saw as having befallen the Jew in the Western, Christian world. As World War II came to a close, the concentration camps were opened, and the remaining uprooted Jews of Europe were released either to return to their homelands or be placed in DP (displaced persons) camps. Many of these Jews, especially from Eastern Europe, could never return home, as either new pogroms or threats of pogroms and hostility awaited them. They sought a new homeland Jules Simon

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in Palestine, and for them that was “going home.” From within Palestine the state of Israel was founded and a new community emerged. It was a community whose people were bound around a common sense of persecution and survival, but enlarged by a newly revived and modernized Hebrew language and culture and Jewish state. Any Jew could immigrate to this land and be automatically granted citizenship. Kinship through being a Jew defined the new state and its community. Améry believed that the fate of the Jewish remainder was tied to this new polity, even for those who did not migrate there.14 All Jews were threatened by being permanent outsiders to their Christian neighbors. Améry became committed to the state of Israel, which he saw as “a gathering place of survivors, a political entity in which every single inhabitant, still and for a long time to come, must fear for his physical existence. For me, solidarity with Israel means keeping faith with my dead comrades.”15 Israel is the place where every Jew can find shelter, where Jews define themselves and are not defined by the other. It is the political entity in which every Jew understands that every other citizen is one with them. Its capital is mentioned at the end of the yearly Passover service commemorating freedom from bondage and the freedom to return home: “Next year in Jerusalem.” This, as Améry saw it, is what binds every living Jew to the fate of Israel.16 Améry felt solidarity with the Jewish people, but his Jewish identity was a kind of adoption both thrust on him and subsequently willed. His identity was a double bind. He could be neither the Austrian he was as a child, nor fully the Jew he had become. This latter identity was both impossible and necessary. He noted that “what made it impossible for [him] to invent a new present were the memories of childhood and youth.”17 And his homeland had rejected and ejected him, renaming and reclassifying him as worse than a foreigner. He had no home, no clear identity, and no trust in the world. He had no home to return to and no new home to go to either. Voluntary Death—Freitod It was not until 1964, twenty years after he had been freed from the concentration camp, that Jean Améry publicly discussed his years of exile and torture under the Nazi regime. He broke his silence by Jules Simon

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giving an invited lecture on German radio. This turned into a series of lectures given, as he said, because “the generation of the destroyers— the gas chamber constructers, those ready at any time to sound their name to anything, the generals duty-bound to honor the Führer—is growing old with honor.”18 Out of these lectures he produced At the Mind’s Limits, which reviewed his years under Nazism. At the time of its publication, he noted how a newly resurgent antisemitism accompanying anti-Zionism was again stalking Europe, with the blessing of some intellectuals and the silence of most others (ix). This provoked in him a welling up of anger and despair as he once again saw the possible specter of Jewish corpses being the by-product of a societal dementia. He publicly renewed his commitment to Israel and his Jewish identity and affirmed that for him, “the impossibility of being a Jew becomes the necessity to be one, and that means a vehemently protesting Jew” (xx). His anguish was public and bitter. In his “Preface to the 1977 Edition” of At the Mind’s Limits, Améry noted that thirteen years had passed since he had written this work, and “they were not good years” as “sometimes it seems as though Hitler has gained a posthumous triumph. Invasions, aggressions, torture, destruction of man in his essence” (xvii). He cited the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the evacuation of PhnomPenh, Stalin’s crimes, Chile and Allende’s overthrow, and other massive, bloody occurrences during this period as evidence of his assertion. He concluded that the world had not learned what led to the “eruption of radical Evil in Germany . . . [and] this Evil is singular and irreducible in its total inner logic and its accursed rationality” (xviii). He saw this Evil as present in the resurgence of bloody totalitarianism and the rebirth of widespread antisemitism. He always pledged his “loyalty to the Enlightenment, specifically to the classical Enlightenment . . . I stand up for analytical reasoning . . . knowledge leads to recognition, and recognition to morality. And I maintain that it was not the Enlightenment that failed . . . but those who were appointed its guardians.”19 The rational world, the enlightened world that led to morality, was again disappearing. The leaders of the world, the major thinkers, were not leading the defense of the pursuit of knowledge, rationality, universalism, and human dignity. But Améry could not refuse the fight that the world had imposed on him. They had defined him as a Jew, and he “became Jules Simon

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a person . . . by discovering myself within the given social reality as a rebelling Jew and realizing myself as one” (90). He would not stop protesting when another holocaust was again possible. He could not stop fighting when he saw the values that he cherished, the values of the Enlightenment, again becoming eclipsed. He saw this as a portent of more human tragedy. His unhappiness with where things had gone, and where things were going, culminated in his suicide on October 17, 1978. But suicide, for Améry, was the ultimate “intoxification of freedom,” if rationally chosen.20 Suicide was what he called “Freitod,” voluntary death.21 To commit suicide was a “privilege” of being human, and when successfully completed after conscious, rational choice, it was accomplished by those “who departed from us in freedom.”22 He lived this existentialist philosophy of suicide, which he had started writing about in 1975, with conscious, rational choice serving as the basis for his decisions (xiii). “Voluntary death,” he wrote, “is a breath-giving road to the open.”23 Améry saw his analysis of suicide as a “view of suicide from the interior of those who call themselves suicidal.”24 He had attempted suicide in 1974, and now he discussed Freitod as one who knew it, almost, from the inside. He wrote of suicide as “liberty in the most extreme and final form that we can attain.”25 It is a choice, a road that few take, but that may be taken if needed, with a view toward freedom—freedom from pain in the extreme, or from a burden that can no longer be borne without inducing more agony in the extreme. “One enters upon it in order to end the torment and, in moving forward, sacrifices even the moments of elevation [that may have occurred in life]. Never without the mourning of farewell, always in the feeling of throwing away a burden that became too heavy.”26 Améry’s treatise on suicide is neither sociological theory and analysis nor psychological analysis. It is an argument for individual freedom and choice. Susan Neiman eloquently writes that his text is “a stunning tribute to the ideas of dignity, humanity, and freedom— one that goes so far as to defend the act of suicide as a means that may be chosen to protect them.”27 Suicide, Améry concludes, after discussing the alternatives with empathy and great consideration, may be the most dignified choice available under certain circumstances. The pain of life may become too unbearable either physically or emotionally for an individual to continue carrying the burden Jules Simon

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without a total loss of dignity or sense of self. “The demand to escape a life lacking in dignity, humanity, and freedom” is the path of well-chosen, voluntary death. The last sentence of his treatise on suicide reads, “And so, subdued and in an orderly manner, with lowered heads, we want to offer a lament for those who departed from us in freedom.”28 Suicide as a way out of pain, sickness, old age, or weariness with the world has a long and honorable litany of defenders. The Cynic, Stoic, and Epicurean philosophers argued in defense of the right to suicide. Plato argued that in the case of incurable sickness, or where God had summoned the soul, suicide is acceptable. Montaigne, in his “Apology,” defended Socrates’ choice to commit suicide so that he could keep his integrity. Most modern adherents of the Jewish and Christian traditions frown upon suicide under almost any circumstances. The acceptance or rejection of suicide under given conditions varies widely throughout history and across religions and cultures.29 At the conclusion of his modern classic on suicide, The Savage God, A. Alvarez writes of suicide as “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.”30 To Jean Améry, the “strained, narrow, unnatural” path that his life had taken was made for him by others. He well understood that hardship and danger were part of this path, but he could not leave it. Ultimately, this path became too strained, too much of a burden. The Holocaust and the permanent physical and psychical wounds the Nazis inflicted on him cruelly reconfigured Améry’s courageous moral protest and his maintenance of dignity as a double bind in which these efforts cost him any hope of a home, his sense of trust in the world, and ultimately his own life. In Perspective Jean Améry’s life and words resonate because he speaks as a person banished from his home, and forever remaining banished physically and psychologically, to a world where banishment is an ever-present reality from Rwanda, Serbia, Palestine, and Darfur, as well as an ever-expanding list of other lands. He speaks as a man who suffered the lifelong damage done by torturers to a world where the highest levels of democratic governments discuss how to torture without having it seen as torture. He speaks as a Jew defined by the other, Jules Simon

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who is outraged at the Left’s attacks on Israel and its behavior in dealing with the Palestinian issue, at a time when the intensity of the Left’s attacks on Israeli actions is again intensifying. He speaks of voluntary death and suicide as the final, rational, and autonomous decision of an individual, having taken that road for himself, in a world where rational, individual autonomy is increasingly seen as an affront to a God-based religious approach that denies the legitimacy of such behavior. Améry speaks as an existentialist whose choices were bound by his view of human dignity as being tied to the absolute need for human autonomy. Yet, his life, aside from his choosing his own time and manner of death, was not seen by him as being of his own choice; it was a life determined by others who forced him into perpetual exile, tortured him, and made him live as a Jew. He was indelibly defined by the other. He never could undo this self-knowledge and bore it openly in the pessimistic and angry reflections that marked his writings. Hans Mayer, renamed Hans Israel Mayer by Nazi officialdom, chose to be known as Jean Améry once he had been abandoned by his homeland. His pain from the time of his rejection and flight from Austria was palpable, and it never abated. His deepest wound, being denied a home in every sense of the word that he could imagine, could never be assuaged in his memory. The other wounds he received along the way, those from the Nazi tortures in Breendonk and Auschwitz, were also absorbed, catalogued, and remembered. Renewed antisemitism, renewed totalitarian violence, and renewed rejection of his beloved Enlightenment values—all added to his deepening sense of loss and rejection. In the end he took the “road to the open,” as he defined it in the context of the double bind that the Holocaust had put him in: suicide was the only way he saw to peace and his road home. Notes 1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1988), 136. 2. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), xxiii–xxiv. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text.

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3. Jean Améry, Radical Humanism: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 13, 40. 4. Ibid., 13. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1989), sec. 6. 6. Ibid., sec. 9. 7. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1984), 37. 8. Améry, Radical Humanism, 17. 9. Ibid., 18. 10. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: MacMillan, 1965), 78. 11. Améry, Radical Humanism, 19. 12. Ibid., 13. 13. Ibid., 40. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 19. 16. Ibid., 40–41. 17. Ibid., 18–19. 18. Alexander Stille, “What the Holocaust Meant in the Thinking of Primo Levi and Jean Améry,” Dissent 37 (1990): 362. 19. Améry, Radical Humanism, 136. 20. Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death, trans. John D. Barlow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 152. 21. Ibid., xviii. 22. Ibid., 152–153. 23. Ibid., 141. 24. Ibid., xxiii. 25. Ibid., 128. 26. Ibid., 9, 146. 27. Susan Neiman, “Jean Améry Takes His Own Life,” in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1966, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 782. 28. Améry, On Suicide, 153. 29. Norman L. Farberow, “Cultural History of Suicide,” in Suicide in Different Cultures, ed. Norman L. Farberow (Baltimore: University Park Publishers, 1975), 1–15. 30. A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: Random House, 1970), 283.

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Jules Simon

SECTION THREE

Salvaging the Ethical

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Jules Simon

Introduction to Section Three

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he double binds of ethics continue to challenge us today, particularly in how we define our commitments to human rights, much less defend them. These difficulties extend to our efforts to develop communities that not only tolerate but actually support others who are different, marginal, or outcast. As the foregoing authors have suggested, an imperative ethical challenge of our time is the nearly impossible one of diagnosing what has gone wrong with the worthy sorts of projects associated with modern social contract theories and the Enlightenment ideals of universal rationality and the harmonious communis sensus. The fact that our previously trusted ways of ethically ordering our lives and communities have so often and so tragically failed challenges and calls into question our common, human ethical heritage. This last set of essays, “Salvaging the Ethical,” presents three perspectives on taking up these challenges in an effort to confront our failures through acts of retrieval and reconstruction. We hope that readers of this book will be better able to understand how the double binds that continue to constrict us post-Holocaust also impel us to engage in intentional sorts of speech-acts that are meant to prepare us to respond better to the ethical challenges that continually emerge in our evolving human communities. In “Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil and Suffering,” Jennifer Geddes argues that ethical responses to the Holocaust face two temptations, that is, the temptation to mythologize evil, on the one hand, and the temptation to domesticate suffering, on the other. In other words, Geddes deals with how we want to put as much distance as possible between us and the horrors of the Holocaust while simultaneously wanting to draw nearer to those who suffer and seek to do so by reducing the alterity of their suffering. In order to elaborate more closely the lineaments of this problem for the sake of recognizing them as temptations—and thus enabling us better to resist them—Geddes Jules Simon

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draws on Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Delbo’s Auschwitz and After (1995) for her reflections. In his chapter, “Making Ethical Sense of Useless Suffering with Levinas,” Jules Simon works out a practical application of Levinas’s complex and demanding ethical theory. For Levinas, we can never justify the suffering of an innocent one for this or that utilitarian or pragmatic calculus. Levinas is adamant and unrelenting in his ethical demands and the responsibility that the proximity of the face of the other initiates, regardless of how the formula of the greatest good for the greatest number is twisted and turned. Simon traces the demand to respond with words and gestures to the suffering of the other to the extent of even taking up the other’s own responsibility to be responsible—or his or her lack of responsibility. This self-limiting and self-critical posture, as a “non” natural law and “non” social contractarian ethics, suggests a way to respond to the double bind presented by Roth and Benedix in the first two chapters. It is also an important and effective alternative to Gerber’s attempt at salvaging social contract ethics and politics in the last chapter of this volume. As the final chapter of the text, it is appropriate that “Reconstituting Political Philosophy after the Holocaust: Toward the Prevention of Genocide” makes a concerted effort to reconstitute the ethical and political frameworks that have been under critique by several of the other authors in this volume. While aspects of these frameworks contributed significantly to the systematic slaughter accomplished during the Holocaust, Gerber reminds us of the important fact that political systems also had a hand in counteracting the Holocaust. This is difficult work, and Gerber effectively demonstrates that there is still much work that can be and needs to be done in order for our political systems to move beyond empty social contracts. Indeed, Gerber demonstrates that working within systems of ethics from the perspective of the social contractarian traditions of our human societies is possible, but that those systems need to be more rigorously and searchingly criticized to reveal the built-in conditions that allow for their abuse, particularly when they are used to philosophically justify and politically legislate atrocity. Besides calling for ongoing vigilance of our political systems, Gerber implies by the end that we need to find better ways to cultivate the kinds of simple but deeply ingrained small acts of human heartedness and communal support that so rarely but so truly make the difference between death and life. Jules Simon

CHAPTER 8

Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust Jennifer L. Geddes

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hree related divisions currently mark scholarship on evil.1 The first is the divide between studies of perpetrators and studies of victims. In the field of Holocaust studies, this division is a matter of principle for some scholars, who focus solely on the testimonies and histories of the victims. One rationale behind refusing to study the perpetrators of the Nazi horrors is the belief that they do not even deserve the dignity of being made objects of study. Behind the work of those who study the perpetrators is the idea that unless we understand how humans came to do such evil, we will not be in a position to prevent it from happening again. The second division—one that is closely associated with the first—is the split between viewing evil either in terms of intention or in terms of effects. Behind this division is a debate about what constitutes evil: is an event evil because of the intention of the actor to inflict harm or because the event results in great suffering? A third division is the divorce between theoretical and empirical studies of evil. Theoretical studies take up the problem of evil in general. Empirical studies focus on particular, historical events. This is often a disciplinary divide, with philosophers and theologians debating the problem of evil (for example, in terms of theodicy or Kant’s understanding of radical evil), while historians, sociologists, and psychologists focus on empirical cases, either institutional or individual.

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This chapter argues that these divisions in the study of evil are artificial and can be pernicious. First, perpetrators commit acts that make people victims; we should not ignore the relational aspect of evil. Second, intentions and effects must be looked at together, both because intentions when enacted produce effects, and because, as Hannah Arendt shows us, the absence of evil intentions does not necessarily imply that a person is not responsible for evil. If we look merely at intentions, we might miss numerous instances of evil. In addition, the absence of effects does not necessarily mean that evil was not intended. Finally, the abstract concept of evil is worthy of our attention precisely because of the empirical realities to which it refers. This chapter attempts to bridge the gaps between these scholarly foci, divided discourses, and methodologies in the context of thinking about the Holocaust by bringing together the writings of Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo. One reason why a study of evil that focuses only on the perpetrators of evil or their intentions is problematic is that evil is relational and does not merely exist in the minds of “evildoers.” For evil occurs between people: one or more persons do evil (and are thereby understood to be evil or responsible for evil) and someone else, or some other group, suffers evil. As Paul Ricoeur notes, “to do evil is always, either directly or indirectly, to make someone else suffer. In its dialogic structure evil committed by someone finds its other half in the evil suffered by someone else.”2 In an attempt to understand the horror of the Holocaust, we need to look at the perpetrators’ intentions and actions and the victims’ experiences, as well as theoretical discussions of evil and analyses of empirical events deemed evil. If we fail to study the perpetrators, and look only to the victims, we run the risk of forgetting the agents who caused their suffering, those who are morally responsible for the suffering inflicted by evil. We run the risk of forgetting the task of justice. However, if our understanding of evil is limited to a study of the perpetrators, we can lose sight of the main reason evil is such a persistent concern—the extreme suffering inflicted on the victims of evil.3 Another danger of failing to attend to the experiences of the victims of evil is that we run the risk of seeing evil through the distorted eyes of the perpetrators. Separately, Arendt and Delbo each bridge the gap between the theoretical and empirical (or particular) approaches to evil. Brought Jules Simon

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together, they move us to a better understanding of evil—one that resists both the temptation to mythologize evil, or the person who does evil, and the temptation to find something redeeming in the suffering that results from evil. Let me explain. People speak of evil geniuses or demonic monsters as if there is an extraordinary quality in those who do evil.4 Evil takes on a mythical quality in these ways of speaking, making it less a problem for humanity than an aberration. The evildoer, who is a monster, is removed from us, placed in a category outside of the human. For if evildoers are demonic monsters, they can be accounted for by jettisoning them from the category of “human beings,” from the “we.” Thinking of those who do evil as monsters renders them as dissimilar from us as possible. But as Hannah Arendt shows us, and as much research on the perpetrators of the Holocaust has revealed, thoughtless bureaucrats and “ordinary people” were responsible for extreme cruelty and inflicted evil of the sort that is hard even to imagine.5 The other temptation we face is the impulse to “redeem” suffering, to find something useful or good that came out of it. This is a more subtle process and may seem, at first glance, not a temptation but a constructive response to suffering. But, as Delbo shows us, there are subtle ways in which we fail to listen to the stories of those who have suffered evil, fail to face suffering as suffering, fail to acknowledge the extremity of suffering undergone as a result of evil actions. Sometimes we sentimentalize extreme suffering, glossing over the sheer destructiveness of it. Sometimes we sanitize extreme suffering, ignoring the unpleasant, harsh, or even disgusting elements associated with it. We want to think of the experience of extreme suffering as at least being useful, in other words, as not being completely suffering, but as somehow leaving the victim with something that can be of use. This is an understandable response to the horror of the stories that many survivors of evil have to tell, but it is one that we need to learn to move beyond. Sometimes suffering is “for nothing.” Sometimes suffering is useless. Sometimes nothing good comes from evil. It is important to listen to the stories of those who have suffered evil and to recognize those points at which we bring erroneous presuppositions or imaginings of the suffering of evil to the table, to recognize those points at which we may be trying to impose our “version” of suffering onto their experiences. Jules Simon

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These two temptations—to mythologize evil and to “clean up” suffering—arise out of the understandable desire to avoid the outrage of evil and the suffering it inflicts, but as scholars of evil, we need to recognize these temptations and resist them. Arendt and Delbo help us to do just this. Brought together, their texts—particularly Eichmann in Jerusalem and Auschwitz and After—trouble our preconceptions about those who do evil and those who suffer it. Each writer does so, in part, by presenting us with a counterintuitive and jarring term: Arendt’s “banal evil” and Delbo’s “useless knowledge.” Immediately we might ask: How can evil be banal? What does it mean to call knowledge useless? In seeking to understand these terms, we both “unlearn” hindering preconceptions and open up space to learn about evil from those who have a different knowledge of it than we, as scholars, can have. While Arendt and Delbo had very different connections with the events of the Holocaust, each was profoundly affected by it. A young German Jewish woman during the rise of the National Socialist Party, Arendt left Germany in 1933 and subsequently immigrated to the United States, where she spent the remainder of her life as a leading intellectual and scholar. Charlotte Delbo, a non-Jewish woman who was part of the French resistance movement, was captured in 1942 with her husband (who was executed shortly thereafter) and sent with 229 other women to Auschwitz, which she barely survived. Both women’s interest in, approach to, and understanding of evil were shaped by their experiences during the Holocaust. Arendt and Delbo, I argue, move us toward new ways of thinking and speaking about evil that do not shy away from the challenges that concrete evil presents to thought and language. Arendt shows us that evil can be banal. Delbo shows us that the knowledge gained from extreme suffering can be useless. Arendt shows us that evil can be much more ordinary than we imagine—and this fact makes evil more horrifying, not less so. Delbo reveals that the suffering of evil is much more unfamiliar than we imagine—and this makes it even more disturbing. In other words, Arendt helps us to resist mythologizing evil, and Delbo helps us to resist domesticating suffering. By thinking about evil with the help of both Arendt and Delbo, we are also able to steer away from dangers implicit in the demythologization of evil and the defamiliarizing of suffering. The danger of demythologizing evil, as Arendt does for us, is that we then domesticate it; Jules Simon

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we become too familiar, perhaps even complacent in the face of it. Reading the accounts of those who have suffered extreme evil serves as an antidote to our complacency. The danger of revealing the unfamiliarity of extreme suffering is that we thereby distance ourselves from it, lose our connection to the sufferers, and begin to isolate them. Reading about the perpetrators reminds us of the extreme dangers in allowing that distance to remain and underscores the necessity of seeking ways to respond to those who have suffered evil. The “Banality of Evil”: A New Kind of Evil, A New Kind of Perpetrator Ever since Hannah Arendt connected the words “evil” and “banal,” any work on the nature of evil has had to grapple with this counterintuitive understanding of evil. Arendt was criticized for essentializing evil as banal and disregarding the experience of the victims of evil. For what could be less banal than the experience of physical injury, pain, and violation at the hands of the torturer, rapist, or death camp guard? What could Arendt possibly mean by calling evil “banal,” particularly in the context of reporting on the trial of a Nazi official responsible for the implementation of the “Final Solution,” a person responsible for the deaths of millions of Jewish women, men, and children? After the book came out, some critics suggested that evil may be “banal” when it is sitting behind glass (as Eichmann was throughout the trial), but quite another thing when felt on one’s flesh. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis is a direct result of the puzzle Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann presented to her thinking about evil. She went to Eichmann’s Jerusalem trial expecting to meet a monster. How else would one imagine a person responsible for the deaths of millions of people, including over a million Jewish children? And yet, Arendt’s expectations were far from met. The sort of person that Eichmann appeared to be did not square either with the deeds for which he was being tried or with the traditional preconceptions about the kind of person who does evil. Instead of a monster intent on inflicting harm, she found an efficient bureaucrat who routinely sent thousands to their deaths and considered it a day’s work. Eichmann displayed so little of the demonic intelligence associated with “moral monsters” or “evil geniuses.” What Arendt faced Jules Simon

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was the “dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them . . . everyone could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”6 In fact, the intention to do evil was replaced with a thoughtlessness that enabled him to do evil in the guise of doing his job. Arendt writes: Eichmann was not Iago. . . . Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. . . . He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. . . . He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness . . . that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. . . . That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together, which, perhaps, are inherent in [humans]—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem . . . the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil.7

It is important to recognize that in noting Eichmann’s thoughtlessness Arendt is in no way suggesting that he is not responsible for the deeds he committed, nor is she suggesting that our moral judgment of him be lessened in any way. His thoughtlessness is in no way a mitigating factor. While Larry May rightly sees in Arendt a focus on “the institutional factors that socialized Eichmann, as well as so many other petty bureaucrats, into believing that their highest moral duty was to follow their superiors’ orders,”8 it is important to note that Arendt’s account of evil is not deterministic. She places a strong emphasis on moral responsibility and agency throughout Eichmann in Jerusalem. While this new form of evil was made possible by the emergence of the modern, bureaucratic state, individual actors were responsible for the acts they committed. Many readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem misinterpret its subtitle, A Report on the Banality of Evil, assuming that it suggests that banality is the essence of evil. However, the evil that Arendt writes about in this book is of a particular kind. It is specifically connected to a particular kind of perpetrator; it is also connected to a particular time period. Banal evil is a new form of evil in the modern world. Arendt’s subtitle should not, then, be read as A Report on Banality as the Essence of Evil, but rather as A Report on the Banality of the Evil of which Eichmann is an Example. Implicit in this idea is the suggestion Jules Simon

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that evil has many forms, that these forms may change over time, and that historical/sociological contexts may produce new forms of evil and evildoers. In other words, Arendt’s thesis points to an understanding of evil as particular, evolving, and nonessentialist. In fact, that she arrived at her thesis about evil by attending a historical event and focusing on a particular perpetrator suggests that Arendt herself resisted essentialist understandings of evil. Her method reveals the importance of attending to the particular and of continually attending to the possibility of new forms of evil. Arendt’s focus on one new form evil has taken in the modern world implicitly suggests both that there are multiple forms of evil and that these forms are not a static set of unchanging elements. Evil occurs in different ways at different times. Because of this, we need to be wary of failing to recognize evil. As Arendt notes, “evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.”9 By thinking that evil has an unchanging, abstract essence, we may fail to recognize the particular, unfamiliar form that evil has taken right in front of us. In other words, Eichmann in Jerusalem, rightly understood, moves us in the direction not of essentializing evil or of reducing all of evil (including the suffering of evil) to banality but rather of specifying what we are talking about each time we use the multivalent term “evil.” Jean Améry, who was tortured at the hands of SS officers, argues that the very use of the term “banality” in the context of evil betrays an insensitivity to the realities of suffering that the person who does evil inflicts. He suggests that only someone who has not suffered at the hands of evil could make such a connection. He writes: “There is no ‘banality of evil,’ and Hannah Arendt, who wrote about it in her Eichmann book, knew the enemy of mankind only from hearsay, saw him only through the glass cage. When an event places the most extreme demands on us, one ought not to speak of banality.”10 Améry’s point is a strong one—that evil may appear to be very different from the perspective of the sufferer than from that of a scholar looking at it after the event is something we should keep in mind as scholars of evil. However, while Améry is right in saying that the victim’s experience of evil is certainly not banal, Arendt’s banality of evil thesis is not thereby wrong, if it is rightly understood, that is, if it is understood in context. She does not argue that banality is the essence of evil nor does she suggest that the experience of evil is banal. Arendt’s writing Jules Simon

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was occasioned by a particular, concrete event—Eichmann’s trial; she did not set out to write a treatise on the nature of evil and conclude that its nature was banal. Arendt’s book is a report on a trial that challenged her understanding of evil, that suggested a new and shocking form that evil had taken in the modern world. However, Arendt’s report needs to be supplemented by the reports of those who, like Améry and Delbo, saw evil up close, who experienced in their bodies the results of the decisions people like Eichmann made. In the years since the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, scholars have begun to see the need to include the study of suffering in the study of evil. Twenty-five years after the publication of The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur confessed: “The problem which haunts me more and more—and which is taking the place of the problem of evil or of guilt: [is] the evil of suffering. . . . There is a language to be found. It is the problem of Auschwitz.”11 One place this language can be found is in the testimonies of survivors who have undergone that evil. What emerges from the perspective of the survivor is a recognition of our outsider position as scholars of evil—a recognition that cautions us against presumptuous knowledge when it comes to thinking and speaking about evil. As Ricoeur notes, “the problem of evil offers at the same time the most considerable challenge to think and the most deceptive invitation to speak nonsense, as if evil were always a premature problem where the ends of reason always exceed its means.”12 Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, a testimony of her experiences in and after the camps, offers a phenomenology of suffering that questions the outsider’s ability to know or comprehend that suffering. Her phenomenology of the evil of suffering disrupts our understanding of how evil is suffered and shows us the limits of our knowledge of evil. “Useless Knowledge” and the Phenomenology of Suffering Whereas Arendt moves us to think about the varied, changing, and historically specific forms that evil can take—and specifically one form it took in Nazi Germany—and challenges us to resist the temptation of essentializing or mythologizing evil, Delbo’s work challenges us to consider the limitations in our ability to understand evil, to acknowledge the gap between the knowledge we as scholars have of evil and the knowledge one has of evil when one has suffered Jules Simon

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because of it. Her work also reveals our temptation to find something redeeming about the suffering inflicted by those who do evil. Delbo’s account of the suffering she and her “comrades” experienced at the hands of the Nazis and of its long-term aftereffects provides a stark yet thick description of the experiences of nonJewish women prisoners in Auschwitz. By showing us the ways in which these women suffered, formed bonds with each other, and, in a few cases, survived, Delbo’s testimony offers an important portrait of the particularity of women’s suffering during the Holocaust. In doing so, Delbo also interrogates the shape and extent of our knowledge of suffering. She asks her reader: “O you who know / did you know that you can see your mother dead / and not shed a tear . . . / Did you know that suffering is limitless / that horror cannot be circumscribed / Did you know this / You who know.”13 We philosophers and scholars of evil, did we know this? Did we know that “suffering is limitless, that horror cannot be circumscribed” before we read the testimonies of those who have suffered evil? The suffering of evil is not circumscribed by the facts of the events of harm. To know that someone was stripped, shaved of all her body hair, and beaten is one kind of knowledge. To know that you have seen your mother dead and not shed a tear is quite another. The latter is “useless knowledge.” By this Delbo means that the knowledge one acquires from extreme suffering is not useful for life. It does not teach the sufferer anything that will be of help after the suffering is over. The sufferer has not gained anything through suffering. In fact, the knowledge itself is a liability: “a knowledge / born from the depths of despair / You find out soon enough / you should not speak with death / for it is useless knowledge. / In a world / where those who believe they are alive / are not / all knowledge becomes useless / for the one possessed of that other knowledge / it is far better to know nothing.”14 For Delbo, the knowledge acquired through suffering is costly but not useful, a liability not an asset, and it is “far better to know nothing” of this kind of knowledge. “Useless knowledge” is a difficult concept to grasp. To say that the knowledge acquired through extreme suffering is useless seems to condemn the sufferer to having gone through a meaningless experience, to having suffered “for nothing.” Is this not adding to their suffering by denying that their suffering might have meaning, that the knowledge gained through their suffering might be useful? It is Jules Simon

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important to note, however, that the term “useless knowledge” is not one to be used by an outsider looking at someone else’s suffering, but rather by the sufferer herself. Only the sufferer herself can make use of her own suffering or can deem the knowledge gained from suffering useful; an outsider doing so imposes meaning onto the suffering of another. As Emmanuel Levinas notes, the only suffering we can make use of is our own suffering; to make use of someone else’s suffering is to co-opt that suffering for one’s own purposes and to fail to respond to the sufferer.15 By highlighting the uselessness of the knowledge acquired in extreme suffering, Delbo is resisting efforts by outsiders to redeem suffering (“well, at least, you learned something out of the experience”), to make it “good” for something (“something good must have come out of it”). These are efforts to make the extremity of suffering less extreme, to grasp ahold of the knowledge gained as a reason for hope; they are also efforts to shut our ears and eyes to the extreme nature of suffering that results from evil. If there is anything “useful” to come out of Delbo’s experience in Auschwitz, it is not from the knowledge acquired through suffering. For that knowledge is part of the infliction and ongoing effects of suffering. The knowledge, like the memories, is part of the haunting past that the survivor lives with in the present. The knowledge gained from suffering is part of the suffering itself, not a good that can be extracted from it. To know one has seen one’s mother dead and not shed a tear is to know the extent of one’s own degradation, to know how unlike one’s self one can be made to become, and that knowledge is part of the devastating destructiveness of evil. This is not to say that Delbo writes out of despair or a nihilistic sense that all of life is “for nothing.” Her many accounts of the ways that the women around her formed a community of support that enabled her to survive point to the possibility of hope, to the possibility that helping and healing connections can be made between women, between sufferers, and even between those who have suffered and those who have not. But these connections will not be based on the redemption of extreme suffering as something that gives us useful knowledge. For the possibility of connections between outsiders and sufferers to happen, it is important that we outsiders begin to “unlearn” some of our presumed knowledge of evil. Delbo tries to bring about this Jules Simon

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process of unlearning in her writing. In particular, Delbo challenges our sentimentalized and sanitized representations and imaginings of suffering, and she does so with the starkest of language. Again and again in Auschwitz and After, Delbo shows us the limits of our knowledge of evil: You may say that one can take away everything from a human being except the faculty of thinking and imagining. You have no idea. One can turn a human being into a skeleton gurgling with diarrhea, without time or energy to think. Imagination is the first luxury of a body receiving sufficient nourishment, enjoying a margin of free time, possessing the rudiments from which dreams are fashioned. People did not dream in Auschwitz, they were in a state of delirium.16

Clichés about it not being possible to destroy the human spirit fail to recognize the facts of extreme suffering that results from evil and the degradation it can inflict. Rosette C. Lamont, the translator of Delbo’s writings, tells us: “As I was working I recalled her impassioned tone as she explained that she had to transmit the knowledge she acquired in l’univers concentrationnaire. ‘Je veux donner à voir!’17 she kept on repeating. She was referring to the moral obligation she felt to raise the past from its ashes, to carry the word (the title of one of her plays).”18 This transmission of “knowledge” is not one of passing on information but of helping us to see what extreme suffering is really like, as opposed to how we might imagine it to be. Delbo wants us to “see.” She presents us with bodily images and pungent details that call to our senses to see, feel, and hear the physicality of her suffering and that of the other women with her in Auschwitz. She uses all the power she has as a writer of spare and painful prose, and yet there is a gap between her experience of extreme suffering and our ability to understand that experience. For example, Delbo describes her inability to speak due to extreme thirst: I’d been thirsty for days and days, thirsty to the point of losing my mind, to the point of being unable to eat since there was no saliva in my mouth, so thirsty I couldn’t speak, because you’re unable to speak when there’s no saliva in your mouth. My parched lips were splitting, my gums swollen, my tongue a piece of wood.19

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Notice the interweaving repetitions that carry the prose along in a delirious rush: “thirsty . . . thirsty . . . so thirsty,” “days and days,” “to the point of . . . to the point of,” “no saliva . . . no saliva.” Notice the brilliant clarity of her last image: “my tongue a piece of wood.” The reader can feel it in her mouth. Or, can she? Delbo continues: “There are people who say, ‘I’m thirsty.’ They step into a café and order a beer.”20 What does it mean to know a thirst that turns your tongue into a piece of wood? Delbo shows us what and how much we do not know and in so doing helps us unlearn what we have presumed to know or to be able to imagine. And yet, in doing so, Delbo gives us a glimpse (a taste almost) of what we cannot really know and brings us closer to “seeing” her suffering and those of the women with her, even though our seeing is merely a glimpse. Knowing that our abilities are limited, Delbo struggles to make us see by pointing out the ways in which our preconceptions blind us to the realities of extreme suffering. She reveals our temptation to sentimentalize suffering: “So you believed that only solemn words rise to the lips of the dying. . . . Naked on the charnel house’s pallets, almost all our comrades said, ‘I’m going to kick the bucket.’ They were naked on a naked board. They were dirty and the boards were soiled with pus and diarrhea.”21 Like Terrence Des Pres in his essay on “excremental assault,”22 Delbo does not retreat from the physical details of suffering that may arouse our disgust—there is no sterilization of suffering, no glorification of what it means to be a victim. Our knowledge will always be partial and inadequate, and we should allow our “knowledge” of suffering to be thoroughly interrogated by those who have another kind of knowledge of suffering, a “useless knowledge” that haunts them. By acknowledging the limitations to our knowledge of suffering because we are outsiders, by recognizing our temptations to “redeem” suffering—to find something good that can come out of it—and by listening to those who have suffered evil in a way that reshapes our preconceptions, we begin to “see” in the way that Delbo strove to make us see. Conclusion Calling into question our preconceptions about what kind of person a perpetrator of evil can be, what the suffering of evil is really like, what kind of knowledge of evil is available to us who are outsiders, Jules Simon

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Arendt and Delbo lead us away from discourses of mastery, that is, ways of speaking about evil that suggest a knowledge of evil from on high. Our knowledge is always from a distance, but not from on high, and we need to listen to survivors’ testimonies, to those who have had a view from up close. Because evil can take on new forms with the emergence of new historical and social contexts, we will never solve the problem of evil once and for all. Our knowledge of evil is always partial, always in process, always in need of interrogation. We need to pay ongoing attention to the particular forms evil takes and to move away from the thoughtlessness that is sometimes linked to the infliction of harm. That evil can be banal, that knowledge can be useless, should give us pause, pause enough to look around to see what unfamiliar shapes evil might be taking in our present world, and pause enough to listen to the testimonies of those who have suffered evil. Notes 1. This essay was originally published in Hypatia 18.1 (Winter 2003):104– 115, and reprinted in Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, ed. Robin May Schott (Indiana University Press, 2007). 2. Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pallauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 250. 3. Primo Levi goes so far as to propose that if it were possible to contain evil in one image, it would be the image of the victim of the Nazi concentration camps: “If I could enclose the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen” (Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf [New York: Collier Books/Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993], 90). 4. See Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996). 5. See Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993); and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996). 6. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1964), 54. 7. Ibid., 287–288.

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8. Larry May, “Socialization and Institutional Evil,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996), 84. 9. Arendt, 150. 10. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 25. 11. Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 135. 12. Ricoeur, 165. 13. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 11. 14. Ibid., 225. 15. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous: On Thinkingof-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 91–102. 16. Delbo, 168. 17. This phrase can be translated as “I want to make it seen” or “I want to make them see.” 18. Delbo, vii. 19. Ibid., 142. 20. Ibid., 145. 21. Ibid., 108. 22. See Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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CHAPTER 9

Making Ethical Sense of Useless Suffering with Levinas Jules Simon

I. A Phenomenology of Suffering Throughout the body of his work, Levinas contests the dominant modern Western paradigm. He counters the view in which peace is only achievable as a dialectical resolution of the competing assertions of self-satisfying egoist superiorities. In contrast to privileging relationships of domination, he offers a phenomenology of the unrelenting obsession with responsibility for the other, in works such as Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence.1 As a philosopher, he raises questions about the philosophical foundations of knowledge that subtend the three major Western ethical traditions: virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and utilitarian ethics. Especially in the modern period, utilitarian, instrumentalist ethics have come to dominate our decision making. It could even be said that a form of this sort of ethics was used to justify committing the genocidal murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis during World War II. The greatest good for the greatest number can be interpreted in many different, even obscene, ways. The German people were taught to accept this utilitarian tradition as a limit to their horizons, even though the principal intent of utilitarian ethics is to preserve the general good. But a “double bind” emerges when the general good is so defined as to entail either victimizing the excluded few within a bounded nationstate or, what was just as deleterious in the case of the Holocaust, justifying the suffering of the few for the sake of the general good.

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Levinas does not claim to have a direct answer for this problem because of the inherent difficulty in identifying what precisely constitutes suffering. Instead, he merely asserts that “the least one can say about suffering is that, in its own phenomenality, intrinsically, it is useless: ‘for nothing.’”2 The phenomenon of the suffering of an other cannot be systematically justified, teleologically rationalized, or categorically classified. In fact, playing on the double sense of the French word mal, which means either “pain” or “evil,” Levinas claims that suffering is not merely a restriction of one’s freedom, constricting possible spontaneous movements, but an overwhelming of one’s humanity so concretely violent and cruel that we can only describe such pain as “evil” or “absurd.” These words simply say that suffering is intrinsically “useless,” in the sense that it serves no purpose and is “for nothing.” Suffering, and by this Levinas means “innocent suffering,” is meaningless. But does that mean that we are left with nothing to say? Are we left with no accounting for suffering, with no accountings to give to each other? At just this border of determining meaningless and meaningful statements, Levinas’s ethically informed phenomenology provides us with a resource for a restrained but expressive way of accounting for the empirical fact that an other suffers and that in our communications we can perceive traces of the palpability of that suffering. Accustoming ourselves to detecting these traces is not an easy or formulaic process, however, and is counter to the learned responses normally associated with our most familiar ethical orientations. Learning to become sensitive to the vulnerability expressed by another in his or her gestures or in the verbal inflections of his or her utterances is another way of expressing the Levinasian notion that traces of the saying of a voice that would be forgotten or ignored trouble the said. The Levinasian demand is a demand for personal, intimate, and responsible involvement in the life of another. If I merely indicate or point out as an impartial, third-person observer “that one suffering over there,” I succumb to the temptation to replicate the indifferent impersonality of traditionally reified forms of language, relying on the familiar patterns of stereotyping, objectifying, and thus being tempted to utilize the suffering one for my own personal agenda. Rather, what counts in the nonfreedom of suffering is the concreteness of the not, looming as an evil more negative than any Jules Simon

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apophatic not. As Levinas notes, this negativity of evil is probably the source or kernel of all apophatic negation, of not being able to show or indicate, of not even being able to be able.3 Hence, in that all evil relates back to suffering, this not of evil is a negativity that extends as far as the realm of unmeaning. It is the impasse of life and of being—the limit beyond which is absurdity—in which pain does not just somehow innocently happen to “color” consciousness with affectivity. Rather, the evil of pain is the outburst and deepest expression, so to speak, of absurdity.4 Levinas insists that the only time that I can say that suffering is meaningful is when I personally take on the responsibility of suffering for the suffering of an other. With this judgment, Levinas opens a breach in the usual approach to dealing with the failure of traditional normative ethics. The breach becomes abysmal when those normative systems are relied upon in the face of the overwhelming intentional infliction of and casual indifference to the countless sufferings that occurred in such an event as the Shoah. But is Levinas’s philosophy for orienting our teaching in the area of ethical inquiry fraught with fragility, despair, and uncertainty? Evidently, Levinas’s words do not provide us with clear prescriptions for the “new ethics” called for by John Roth in his reflections on “double binds” and in his guarded hope for a new community. In fact, Levinas seems intent on showing just how violent our own attempts at forming sovereign or autonomous political communities have been. The plausibility of appeals to individual and sovereign autonomy are thrown into radical question. Indeed, Levinas’s claim that “ethics is first philosophy” seems to originate from his radical skepticism about any and every attempt at rationalizing the prioritizing of any individual’s rights at the expense of the weaker one, the sufferer.5 The biblical trope that Levinas relies upon—“the widow, the orphan, the stranger”—to refer to destitute and suffering others echoes Western monotheistic traditions, but his reference to the ethical monotheism of the Jewish and Christian traditions is misleading.6 Levinas was convinced that the possibility of enacting an ethical response—one other than the anesthesizing and desensitivizing of traditional ethics based on this or that theodicy—could only emerge from a darkened and radically uncertain horizon. In fact, in the presence of innocent suffering, the ethical response should invoke absence and the very loss of possibility. Such an Jules Simon

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invoking of absence and an uncertain horizon attends to an irrecoverable past inflected with the voices of those who should have been heard but whose voices have been either violently silenced or indifferently ignored. But even such simple testimony to lost and absent others is insufficient because such testimony is just a preliminary response in the presence of the suffering of innocent ones. What this means is that it is not enough to point toward those who have suffered, toward the loss of new beginnings and children. Those very children are victims of institutional structures that support the actions of those members of our society who have lost their sense of responsibility. Thus, the creation of an environment where the voice of the victim can be raised as narrative testimony needs to be accompanied by an ethical critique. Such a critique assesses the logical principles, presuppositions, and intentions of the policy makers and educators who instruct, influence, direct, and lead the many among us who cause suffering through direct intentions, complicit toleration, or indifferent complacency. After assessment comes judgment and then coordinated action. Levinas’s use of the term “ethics” as interruptive, as ethical critique, helps us to better confront those very traditions of philosophy that have produced the systematic and normative ethics that have been used by successive political regimes to enforce totalitarian and genocidal policies. In confronting those traditions with Levinas’s writing, we become more sensitive to the suffering and pain of others on the practical and interpersonal levels of our day-to-day lives. In fact, accompanying those very others who are disruptions heightens my sensitivity to them and thus leads to a questioning of my own reified principles. This is a process whereby I become more vulnerable and open to the disruption of the routinely pragmatic orderliness with which I integrate or justify the pain and suffering of those others into my “business-as-usual” life of acquisition and possession. Through their disruptions I am uniquely called to respond without the voluntary possibility of declining such a call. I am called in such absolute and extreme passivity that I would substitute myself for the suffering other, even for the persecuting other. Unfortunately, the burgeoning records chronicling the Shoah and other atrocities continue to provide overwhelming evidence of how so many colluded with those who intended to cause pain, and add to the unavoidable conclusion that so many failed to respond to those in need, failed to Jules Simon

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resist the policies of concentration and extermination that took so many helping hands to accomplish. Fortunately, and paradoxically, we have also been provided with the evidence of exceptional humans who helped others in community efforts, often risking their own individual lives, such as the Danish people who united to rescue their fellow Danish Jews or the Protestant Christians in Le Chambon, France, who united to hide the Jews in that region. As Hanne Trautner-Kromann points out, what seems to be a common denominator in these unrelated instances of “collective” response to the suffering of others is that the response was not motivated by obedience to any law or normative ethics, but rather by a face-to-face confrontation with the suffering of others. Levinas claims that “life is a fine risk to be run” and that those who do not risk the uncertainties, ambiguities, and openness of face-to-face encounters with the ultimately unknown and unknowable other are simply not living the adventure of life, that is, not living the adventure of enjoying and suffering the “good” life.7 Confounding the problem of how to address the immediate suffering of the particular one facing us and how to de-anesthetize ourselves to the prevalence of politically and socially engendered causes of suffering is the urgency and the ambiguity of the issue. Despite the unconscionable recurrence of social and political atrocities, the very means by which we have attempted to respond to suffering and to address the causes of suffering have, as Roth insistently points out, failed us and continue to fail us. Established ethical traditions ultimately failed to provide a means to avoid the massive and tragic loss of lives in the Shoah. What should continue to trouble us is that genocides have continued on a massive scale throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries—in the killing fields of Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, the tribal revanchism of Rwanda, and the destruction in Darfur. And while the slaughter of many thousands of innocents defies comprehension, what of the neglect or the intentional avoidance that has resulted in the continued murders and loss of lives on a daily basis in our own neighborhoods? By any reasonable or quantifiable standards of measurement, we are failing in compassion, generosity, and kindness for each other. But it could very well be the case that relying on “reasonable or quantifiable standards of criteria” is precisely the root of the Jules Simon

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problem. It has become readily apparent that at least in the United States, the standard forms of jurisprudence, legislation, and education are failing, given that as of December 2007, one in every 32 Americans was either in prison or on probation.8 Perhaps our traditional response patterns are no longer adequate, and we need to expose ourselves to other kinds of nonquantifiable cultural events. Perhaps, despite Levinas’s aversion to the arts, we need to read more poetry and literature and to become accustomed to hearing the voices of others in ways that are not formal and mechanistic or prepackaged for consumption, instant gratification, or populist demagoguery. Perhaps we need to learn to distrust the empty promises of every kind of system based merely on logical notation and learn to question the currently fashionable formalisms of global economies of scale, patriotic nationalisms, the indifferent technological projects of positivist science, and the agenda of rugged, selfgratifying individualism.9 These contemporary forms of totalizing vehicles, each in their own way, not only contribute to a process of dehumanization that allows for maintaining and even expanding a class of expendable humans but also contribute to establishing a discourse, and the material and mechanical means, for creating an environment where violence and murder are essential elements of an inverted system of justice. If, as Jean-François Lyotard has claimed, the narratives of such a conservatively “progressive” modernity can no longer be trusted— namely, the modern project of reconstructing metanarratives that continue to create, maintain, and expand hierarchical group structures of political and social domination and exploitation—then perhaps, as Husain Kassim suggests, we need to examine ways to deal with the fragmentation of our social and political relations in more cooperative ways. Perhaps what is now needed post-Holocaust is that sort of ethics that encourages us to become better able, better trained, and better disciplined to respond to “innocent suffering.” In other words, we need to be better able to initiate ethical critique. This returns us to the double bind that is the theme of this book. On the one hand, we have the problem of the need to communicate, to listen to each other, to speak, and to understand. On the other hand, we have the problem that what needs to be communicated is, in essence, incommunicable. What is incommunicable is, precisely, an insightful reference to the tortured one, to the one in pain and Jules Simon

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suffering. The pain of the other is ontologically always beyond me and beyond what I am ever able to know. II. Beyond Murder, Mere Survival, and Indifference The double bind of attempting to communicate that which is incommunicable is taken up by Levinas when he claims that using language itself is an experience of exile. On the one hand, I use language to express my rootedness in a necessary affirmation of autonomous subjectivity, of dwelling and developing the sovereign freedom of myself as “I.” On the other hand, language reveals to me the face of the vulnerable and sensible destitution of the other who appeals to me not to commit murder. This is another way to consider the double bind of language. For Levinas, “the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised” as joy or knowledge, introducing to me my very “ability for power” (mon pouvoir de pouvoir).10 And the exercise of that power is “measured” in terms of domination or annihilation, since murder is accomplished over what escapes power, what is incomprehensible and beyond grasp and domination. I murder simply because I am able to murder, in the sense of annihilation of that which is beyond my control. When I am presented with the absolute alterity or otherness of the other I encounter, whose very otherness I am not able to master or dominate, I am presented with material possibility. The “face” of the other is that which expresses the very material sensibility that rends my own sensibility, expressing thereby its absolutely independent existence and, thus, its resistance to murder. But the other can be murdered by the very force I possess in spite of the resistant force with which she may oppose me. She resists as absolutely other and can oppose the force that strikes her, not with a force of resistance but with the very unforseeableness of her reaction. She opposes me not with a greater force, an energy assessable and consequently presenting itself as though it were part of a whole, but with the very transcendence of her being by relation to that whole. She resists not with some superlative of power, but precisely with the infinity of her transcendence. This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists me in her face, is her face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: “you shall not commit murder.”11 The appeal of the other as infinitely transcendent and beyond my comprehension Jules Simon

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and mastery is revealed in her defenseless eyes, in the vulnerable nudity and absolute openness of her face. The absolutely other does not resist me by a greater force, but resists me as absolutely other, as ethical resistance. In discontinuity with me, the other calls into question my agenda, my quest for self-certainty and security, and spurs into restlessness my complacent comfort of being uncritically at home with myself. But the approach and appeal of the other should call into question the very narrative that I weave to consolidate my possessions and my ever-encroaching domination of the world. Unfortunately, such selfcritical accusation only occurs unnaturally—metaphysically—since what is at stake is not the repetition of a mere asceticism, of voluntarily denying myself for an altruistic gesture of benevolence toward the other. Rather, what is most important is that I come to terms with the priorities in my life, namely, coming to terms with the appeal of the other to not commit murder is to determine what comes first or second, or who comes first or second. In this way, Levinas leads us to better understand the development of our subjectivity as including enjoyment that is both necessary and yet the source of our persecution of the other and thus is an occasion for self-accusation. I struggle with and yet enjoy the process of laboring to establish myself on the land, a process in which what I need for gathering and building up a store of possessions comes from the very land from which I exploit irreplaceable resources in my accumulating and possessing activities. Historians make their living by recounting the wars and conflicts that constitute the narratives of such commerce. For example, how much airtime is given to the history of warfare and conquest on the History Channel? How many standard textbooks chronicle the “progress” of civilization as moving from one battlefield to the next? What is not self-evident is the extent to which we are insensitive to the aching hunger or pain of the other, caught up in the inertia of securing our own relative level of security and enjoyment, in an ongoing quest for security that inevitably causes the suffering of those with whom we share this world. But for Levinas, even the “sins” of environmental injustice are, at their very core, a consequence of not coming to terms with the issue of “useless suffering” and the ways in which we calculate or give accounts for the suffering of others. By reckoning their quotient of Jules Simon

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suffering in our accounting as justified for a range of instrumental or utilitarian reasons, we can and have justified the genocides that have occurred over the course of the twentieth century. But if suffering is ultimately absurd, what is the point of even trying to “make sense” of suffering? Levinas’s contention that I can only murder the other because I am commanded by the presentation of her face, as my neighbor, precisely, not to kill her, still leaves us with the nagging issue of a “so what” response to such proximity. Who is to say that this command by the face of the other to not murder, to not violate what should be inviolable, to not act with indifference to what should claim my respect, has any compelling claim on either my attention or my desire to act otherwise than in the traditional self-serving ethics of utilitarianism and instrumentalism? Who is to say that I should act otherwise than according to the rational calculations of the various social contract theories that have founded our modern democracies and that explicitly affirm my right to murder that other if she merely trespasses on my property?12 Who questions the way that I justify the daily sufferings of others to sleep well at night? Levinas contends that suffering is both a brute datum and a passivity and that “justification of the neighbor’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality.”13 The most insidious sort of justification is the choice to act with indifference to the suffering of the other, because such indifference denies the vulnerability of the suffering one, a denial that Levinas calls evil precisely because suffering, as such a radical undergoing that overwhelms, is unbearable but also unassumable. To be indifferent to the unassumable unbearability of the other’s suffering thus compounds the pain of the one who suffers. It is unassumable in the sense that as unbearable, suffering is untransferrable—one is caught in a phenomenon that is beyond the formal structures of consciousness and is revolted by a Kantian assemblage of data into order and meaning that constitutes a state of consciousness or unity of apperception. Because suffering happens as a physiognomic revulsion, it is the denial of all meaning, since in suffering the sufferer undergoes a passivity that is so beyond simple sensory receptivity that it is untranslatable into a formal, communicative schema. It is the bearing of the unbearable whose only possible expression is the moan of woe, the groan of submitting and not grasping or conceiving. What the suffering moan of “extreme passivity, helplessness, abandonment and solitude” also indicates, however, Jules Simon

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is the “possibility of a half opening” that the moan, or groan, or cry slips through as a cry for help.14 It is this expression of vulnerability and cry for help from another that is primordial, irreducible, and ethical—and, Levinas claims, undeclinable. According to Levinas, such a cry provides the promise for a kind of “salvation” in that it opens up, out of the self-enclosed purity of an unbearable and unassumble suffering, a path to the interhuman. And it is the realm of the interhuman that seems most promising in Levinas’s ethical response to the phenomena of suffering, since it is in that domain that suffering arises. What Levinas means by “promising,” however, is not readily apparent. Rather than offering narrative descriptions of suffering, accounts that would edify or instruct us with fixed examples based on universal rules for addressing any possible empirical event in the future, Levinas attempts a phenomenological analysis of suffering. He does so because of his contention that providing this or that account of suffering obviates the possibility for the discreet intimacy with the other that is necessary for self-accusation. The narrative account distances me from encountering the unpredictable and unforeseeable immediate exteriority of the other and from hearing the “half-opening” moan of pain that escapes from her interiority. And without the possibility of the intimacy that could develop from one interiority to another, through the sensible exteriority with which a trace of the inviolable vulnerability of the other is expressed, I make no “progress” toward alleviating the pain of the other because I am not even able to sense her pain. Normally I am so caught up in my own projects, with executing my own “narrative,” that I am oblivious to even the approach of the other; consequently I am incapable of any response whatsoever. In fact, it could be that I deny the suffering of the other because not to do so would be to have to undergo my own undeclinable call, the source of my uniqueness. That is, when I decline to undergo suffering for the other with a responsibility to the point of substitution, I deny my own subjectivity and become a cipher, a manipulable number, and contribute to the erosion of the possibilities of distributive justice that would result in more “enjoyments” for those others suffering in plain sight or in relative silence. Beyond utilitarian consequences, the problem, however, is that suffering reveals to us the phenomenon of meaninglessness, since the Jules Simon

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suffering surpasses our intellectual means of grasping and holding. The suffering of the other, enveloped in his or her pain, is beyond every attempt at schematization and resists every effort to harmonize his or her essentially absurd passion in any kind of theodicy of ends justifying the means or of any and every political teleology or sacred history. Suffering is, as it should be, beyond all social, political, or religious institutional uses and, especially, should be beyond all rational administration of pain based on oppression of the weak. Of course, the specter of the work camps, concentration camps, and extermination camps—as exemplary institutions for penal reform— should serve as historical markers of the possible horrors of allowing administratively ordered pain to be enacted on members of our social body in the name of social justice.15 Levinas rejects justifying suffering for the sake of a “kingdom of transcendent ends” that would guide one by a benevolent wisdom, rejecting all grand designs and any suprasensible project, including those involving an arbitrary god, belief in progress, a metaphysics of original sin, or a congenital failure. Instead, Levinas tells us that suffering is a denial of meaning: it is the way of not bearing (a breakdown of my being able to bear) and takes place as the sensation of passivity. It is important to note, however, that such passivity is precisely a sensibility that is conditioned by direct and sensual engagement in the face of the other. By not forcing the other into the preconceived categories of my own project, I enable the possible working out of the desires and needs of that other. For Levinas, my desire is for the other insofar as I become responsible for the suffering of that other in the passivity of his or her undergoing an unbearable pain. But how is such a responsibility enacted? As passivity, suffering is “useless” and is heard as the moan, ache, or woe of pain that escapes from the person who is enclosed and enveloped in his or her pain—a moan, ache, or woe that, for example, projects and exposes me to a medical, undeclinable ethical duty that is “my unique duty.” That unique, undeclinable duty is a duty to respond to the sufferer’s original call for aid via a merciful responding that imposes itself as the most basic and primordial task. In fact, this task defines the uniqueness of my very subjectivity, a task that takes form as an imperative to not act in indifference or rationalization or abandonment, but to act beyond my given categories in providing an interhuman response to alleviate in any Jules Simon

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way the suffering of the immediate other. This includes making use of technological and medicinal means to alleviate the pain of the other.16 More importantly, for Levinas, the useless suffering of the other imposes itself on me a just suffering, namely, my suffering for the suffering of the other. In other words, such a just suffering, as opposed to the useless suffering that I encounter in the face of the other, points out the radical difference between the suffering of the other and the suffering in me—and is the only way that suffering can be meaningful. Suffering or enduring pain for the other is then raised to a compelling ethical principle that takes the form of shaping hopes and commanding the discipline of peoples, such as sharing wealth and coming to aid. Indeed, such suffering for the other is an inescapable obligation and is so inescapable that waiting for divine action in order that I might then imitate it is degrading. I lower and degrade myself with waiting for a redeemer or any other to take over the responsibility that can only ever be mine, a responsibility of which I become aware in the face of the immediate suffering of the other with whom I am sensually and directly engaged. And with whom do I engage? How do I become aware of the face of the other for whom I am responsible? Levinas contends that I engage with the stranger and the sojourner, the one forced into flight for political, religious, economic, or other socially oppressive reasons, the exilic one who stands in difference to all that is usual and ordinary.17 I engage with the one who calls to me out of the unbearability of his or her suffering. To concretize the ethicality of his position even further, Levinas uses gendered language, such as feminine and masculine for, respectively, the word of passive welcome and the word of active command. The word of passive welcome is uttered from the interior of the home, symbolized by the feminine, the corresponding word and work of sharing—of giving the bread from one’s lips to the other; while the word of active command is uttered from the height of the exterior, the corresponding word and work of teaching and mastery, symbolized by the masculine. Levinas has been highly criticized for his use of gendered terms, but such gendered language is unavoidably relevant in connecting what enjoyment and the home have to do with “useless suffering.”18 The use of gendered terms by Levinas to refer to actual, historical conditions of stereotypical gender Jules Simon

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relations is his way to lead his readers to consider the gender roles that we play in our own lives. However, what disrupts settling into accepting the stereotypes of these roles is what Levinas says about the face. The face is not simply our biological face with eyes, ears, nose, and wrinkles, but rather the place of the history of smiles, groans, glances, weathering, wounding—but especially of the vulnerability that leads to wounding. Since the face is not merely biological, it transcends gendered terms as well—the welcome of generosity can be offered to the feminine or masculine stranger, sojourner, or sufferer by a masculine or feminine being and the work of teaching and mastery can be accomplished by a masculine or feminine being of either gender. Levinas’s ethical point is that without being grounded in the concrete empirical order of gendered relations, regardless of the particular specificity of the functions associated with this or that gender, any ethical injunction would wither in mere abstract conceptuality. For my reflections in this chapter on the double bind of ethics post-Shoah, the use of gender terms has the following consequences: their use is necessary for the sake of empirical accountability—we are men and women who live in socially determined gender roles— and those definitive roles were ignored by the Nazis. In fact, since those roles are grounded in how we bring baby girls and boys into the world and raise them into young men and women, without taking into my account gendered identities, I would lose contact with actual suffering ones, such as the “more than one million Jewish children murdered in the Nazi Shoah [who] died neither because of their faith, nor despite their faith, nor for reasons unrelated to the Jewish faith [but] because of the Jewish faith of their great-grandparents [who brought] up Jewish children.”19 Significantly, they also did not die because they were born as girls or boys, but simply because they were born of Jewish parents. Perhaps a better question to ask would be: what place or space did these innocent boys and girls enjoy and from which their presence and possibilities were removed?20 Levinas was fond of quoting the philosopher-mathematician Pascal who once wrote that the phrase “this is my place in the sun” constitutes “the beginning of the usurpation of the whole earth.”21 For Levinas, every appropriation of bread for my own mouth, every Jules Simon

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tree that I cut down to build my own house, and any possession that I consume to nurture my own existence is in tension with the needs and desires of every other being. Whereas a Heideggarian would say that I have been “thrown” into the place in which I find myself living and must therefore work out my own destiny as it originates in the destiny of “my” people, a Levinasian would say that “my” destiny only takes shape in relation to the ongoing issue of justifying my place as more important and needful than my neighbors or, and especially, more important than the stranger, orphan, or widow who stands outside the comfort of my home signifying and assigning me to attend to his or her call.22 For Levinas, such justification comes in many forms: enlightened self-interest, the bargaining of the marketplace, pluralized greed, and any other form of rationalization of relative debts, that is, out of those forms of mutual reciprocity that constitute the daily manipulations of our marketplaces. But in Levinas’s sense of the ethical, the other calls to me in need, but does so asymmetrically. The other commands my attention to give without any thought of return, without any calculus of cause and effect, without putting my act of generosity into some kind of balance of exchange based on calculating a bottom line of return reducible to the terms of “what’s in it for me?” There is no “reserve.” Rather, the call of the other expresses his or her face lined in the event or history of suffering, most poignantly, the suffering of innocence—an expression of useless suffering that is beyond any scheme or framework of understanding and rationalization, or any holding back in expectation that I will be rewarded in my turn. The other calls for the bread from my own mouth. III. Enacting the Ethical But is that enough? Is such a dictum in response to the unutterable tragedy of the loss of so many precious and irreplaceable lives even enough? Is it enough to recount the despair that drove Améry or Celan or Kofman to suicide? Is it enough to recall in my writing the tragic death of more than a million innocent children, or their parents, and the absurdity of their “useless suffering”? I would contend that in order to enact the ethical, such recalling, such remembering is necessary but insufficient. Recalling and remembering deepen and Jules Simon

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impel the imperative of response, but do not bridge the gap from me to the other whose pain calls to me for response, now, not in the future, not as part of a project or an altruistic agenda or a social contract, but immediately. The call of the other is the call of my neighbor and for me, for the very bread and breath from my mouth, here and now. For me—here and now—is a call that takes form as the call of the hundreds of women who have been murdered within the last several years in Juárez, just across the river from my office at the University of Texas at El Paso. The deaths of the women in Juárez have gone on with alarming impunity, with barely a trace of official concern or institutional regard—political, educational, or religious. The overwhelming majority of these young women were exploited workers in the Maquiladora industry complex in Juárez, whose economic vulnerabilities were preyed upon by American and other foreign multinationals, only to have then been unaccountably abducted, sexually molested, and murdered by men who are still enjoying the spontaneous freedoms they so violently destroyed in their victims. Only recently has attention been brought more insistently to the loss of these women who suffered unutterable violence, the ongoing suffering of their families, and the malaise and complacency of those of us who constitute the systems of justice and education that should respond and judge the persecutors.23 The suffering that these young women endured makes no sense, but the extent of the issue, and the threat to other young women, is compounded by the systematic economic injustice of the Maquiladora industry24 that exploits them and puts them at the mercy of those Mexican men who have been acculturated to abuse their women and treat them as objects to conquer and penetrate, as faceless objects, por chingar, in the most violent and profane sense.25 For the sake of other women who continue to be threatened and to be treated as disposable objects, specifically women who are subject to the historically dominant and politically tolerated paradigm of male sovereignty over women, a Levinasian phenomenology of the ethical would consider that the phenomenon of desire is, unlike need, never satisfied and never satisfiable. Could it be that what has happened and is happening in Juárez is the horrific inverse of the phenomenal movement of desire that is at the core of Levinas’s ethics, a desire that should occur in the context of enjoyment? Jules Simon

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Desire can never be satisfied and thus is the movement by which the other in his or her infinite alterity remains simply other— ungraspable and absolutely beyond mastery and domination. As Levinas puts it, desire deepens desire for the desired one. But the sensible rending of the face also introduces the temptation to profane and destroy, to annihilate that which cannot be mastered, consumed, absorbed, and which is absolutely beyond fulfilling a need. The sexual realm is the realm of the serious play of vulnerability and domination, of violability and violation, the abuse of the naked exposure of the other, in this case young, poor women from Juárez—Lila Garcia, Paloma Ledesma, Silvia Arce, Griselda Mares—resulting in torture and murder, perhaps because of the extremity of their innocent vulnerability, seized upon in a grasp meant to uncover the uncoverable, to violate and annihilate the very defenseless face that would appeal for patience and tenderness. Nonetheless, the murders have continued in the violent inverse of unsatisfied desire, but so have “exceptional” voices continued to be called to take a stand for the defense of the defenseless, even to the point of suffering for the suffering of these violated and now-silent others.26 Responding to the suffering of my neighbors, the women from Juárez, is what I am called to do “here and now,” since the violent and oppressive domination of the male-majority culture of which I am a complicit member is, for me, my undeclinable responsibility. But what am I to do and upon what resources do I draw? Does Levinas’s phenomenology of the ethical provide me with the wherewithal to respond to their unanswered calls? To the grief of their families and friends? To redress the wrongs of the economic and cultural system that provides the context for their loss? At the first draft of this chapter, my office window faced the Rio Grande, the border beyond which murders are occurring with impunity. I could draw the curtains of my window to keep out the blazing light and heat of the sun, but no act of self-occlusion is able to shield me from the horizon that takes shape in the ongoing presence of unknown persecutors, bereaving families and friends, and the absence of the young women who have lost their freedom to make a difference in the world. In effect, I have become evermore uncomfortable in my skin. But again, it is not my skin that is being torn, raped, and murdered. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas contends that our reasoned discussions are based on the vulnerable nudity of the face of the other who Jules Simon

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has priority in my relating to her. In a face-to-face relation, then, in such a discourse, I am forever dependent on the other for my own significance. The transcendence of the other’s face does not initiate a reciprocal balancing of obligations (an instrumental calculation), because that would justify the continuation of war and violence, and, as it did, the abyss of the annihilation of the Shoah—the abyss of meaninglessness and evil. Rather, the transcendence of the other’s face, as absolute priority, initiates shame—not a letting-be, but an irritation and restless sensibility for an unfulfilled responsibility. That means, to justify my neighbor’s pain is to justify his or her suffering in a reasonable scheme of morality, or a justified scheme of reciprocal violence. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas further maintains that in elevating the other as a priority over my self-seeking, I become, in effect, a hostage to respond to his or her needs and desires: “To be oneself, the state of being hostage, is always to have one degree of responsibility more, the responsibility for the responsibility of the other.”27 This means that I am responsible not only for the other, for his or her suffering as a victim, but for the other’s responsibility, for his or her causing others to become victims. Auschwitz commands me in a double bind of responsibility: the many lost faces of those with whom we could have shared unknown pleasures—a glass of wine, a loaf of bread—is what commands me. These lost ones command me to act ethically here and now, despite the overwhelming of human responsibility that occurred there and then. The asymmetrical command originating in the vulnerable face of the other reveals an anarchical responsibility that is without precedence; it is nonreciprocal and without a founding principle. But such a command calls me not only to prioritize my responsibility for the suffering other, but it also calls me—and this is the double bind—to a wakefulness that challenges reason at every turn and resists any argument or morality that leads to or from the lost faces of Auschwitz, to or from the lost faces of Juárez. But with the failure of justifying theodicies and ideologies, in what should I place my faith? Rather, to rephrase the question, after reflecting with Levinas, in whom should I place my faith? The answer to this question depends on how I define what Levinas calls the “interhuman order.” As Levinas points out, “The interhuman, properly speaking, lies in a non-indifference of one to another.”28 Jules Simon

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But he also notes that interhuman responsibility is such that it demands that the ethical relationship of an I to an other I stands before any impersonal law or social contract, before reciprocity. This relationship is an asymmetry that does not preclude altruism and disinterestedness as conditions for the order of politics and the city, but does provide us with the dynamic condition whereby we can turn to help the other even prior to the simple exchanges of courtesies and the impersonal commerce of customs. For Levinas, the asymmetry of the relation of the one to the other, of my nonreciprocal response to the one who suffers, is the only responsible recourse to useless suffering. The deaths of millions of innocent ones during the Shoah, the suffering of just one touched by the genocidal abyss, is the dark horizon from which I am sensibly reminded that the death of one more young woman in Juárez should never happen. Is such an immediate response to my neighbors even enough? Not if I take seriously the infinitely compelling demands of responsibility. “Enacting the ethical” means that I must also take up the work of justice, that is, I must engage in the difficult transformation of the material conditions of our institutional structures. In the penultimate section of Difficult Freedom, “Hic et Nunc,” which is concerned with education in Judaism in particular, but also education in general, Levinas focuses on issues of education, humanism, and political critique as those tasks that must be taken up “here and now” to advance the work of educating young ones to become historically informed, culturally conversant, politically aware and active, and most importantly, ethically sensitive and awake to each other. As I read Levinas, to act here and now also means to act in the face of the material conditions of the human-created institutions that provide for the very possibilities of eliciting enjoyment and understanding other humans who suffer. This means engaging in the established structures of educational praxes and developing teaching relationships in that strange and uncertain social flux of private and public interfaces that constitute our sociality. That interpersonal commerce of our very sociality—our histories, politics, cultural exchanges, and language practices—is the source and object of our learning and where both suffering and joy happen. Ultimately, though, those phenomenal occurrences are the systematic expressions (however material or formal) of an ethical relation that is interhuman, Jules Simon

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namely, the interrelationship of one to the other that occurs as my responsibility for her. Notes 1. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981). 2. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering” (1982), in Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 93. 3. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), 198. These remarks occur in the context of Levinas’s discussion of the phenomenology of murder and his argument about the disproportional relationship between the infinity of the Other as an absolutely independent being who is not in my power and thus confronts me with the possibility of my power to annihilate rather than, merely, conceptually dominate that other. He goes on in that same passage to note that the suspension of my ability to exercise power acutely occurs in the instance of murder, which “is still a power, for the face expresses itself in the sensible, but already impotency, because the face rends the sensible.” 4. Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 92. 5. Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy” (1984), in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 75–87. 6. See Totality and Infinity, 215: “The Other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obligated.” 7. Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997). 8. See About.com at : “While 1 out of every 142 Americans is now actually in prison, 1 out of every 32 of us is either in prison or on parole from prison, according to yet another report on Americans behaving badly from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This means that 6.7 million adult men and women—about 3.1 percent of the total U.S. adult population—are now very non-voluntary members of America’s ‘correctional community.’” 9. For a feminist critique of the abuse of logical notation, see Andrea Nye, Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (New York: Routledge, 1990), and an online critique of that reading by Noretta Koertge, “The Feminist Critique [Repudiation] of Logic” at . The classic critique of global economies of scale is by Lenin. See V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest

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Stage of Capitalism (1916; London: Pluto Press, 1996). A recent critique of the dehumanization and environmental degradation of global economies of scale is Justice in a Global Economy: Strategies for Home, Community, and World, ed. Pamela K. Brubaker, Rebecca Todd Peters, and Laura A. Stivers (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). On the dangers of patriotic indoctrination, see George Kateb, Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 10. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 198. 11. Ibid., 199. 12. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980), 15. Locke states: “This makes it lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life.” The point is that in not knowing the intention of the other, Locke prioritizes the survival of myself (himself ) over the other even, and especially, in situations where private property is at issue. 13. Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 99. 14. Ibid., 93. 15. This “theme” is also one of the motivating forces for Michel Foucault’s social ethics, namely, that beneath the reasonable forms espoused by the social “uses” of suffering is the “outrage of torture” of the physically handicapped isolated in their pain and the rational administration of pain meted out as punishments by human courts that, especially because they happen during times of war, look like arbitrariness and failures of justice, but are simply crimes against and the oppression of the weak by the strong. See, for example, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977). 16. Note how “Doctors Without Borders” exemplifies a contemporary instance of a Levinasian enactment, that is, they respond immediately to the suffering of victims regardless of the ideological parameters of the conflict that causes suffering to occur, and they make use of whatever technological means are at their disposal. According to their website: Médecins Sans Frontières (also known as Doctors Without Borders or MSF) their members, “deliver emergency aid to victims of armed conflict, epidemics, and natural and man-made disasters.” See . 17. In fact, Levinas contends that useless and mass genocidal suffering signifies the end of theodicy, maintaining that the variety of sufferings of the twentieth century have destroyed the purported balance of harmonies promised by any and every theodicy because of how reason has become political and thus detached from all ethics, that is, ethics based on a face-to-face encounter with the other in need.

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18. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xxii, n. 3, where Beauvoir criticizes Levinas for maintaining a traditional objectivization of woman: “I suppose that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her own consciousness or ego. But it is striking that he deliberately takes a man’s point of view, disregarding the reciprocity of subject and object. When he writes that woman is mystery, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of male privilege.” For Levinas’s response to such a criticism, see “Love and Filiation” in Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 65–72. For more sympathetic treatments, see Catherine Chalier, Figures du feminine (Paris: La nuit surveillée, 1982), and a remarkable treatment of the phenomenology of eros in Luce Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 231–256. Both women take into account Levinas’s unambiguous prioritizing of the other over the subject. 19. Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 98. Levinas quotes Emil Fackenheim who argues for the end of all theodicies in his text God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections after Auschwitz (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 69–70. 20. See Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust, ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1977), 27, for his claim that all ethical decision making should only occur, post-Shoah, in the face of the image of those tortured and murdered Jewish children. 21. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 295 and 456. 22. In keeping with the ethical questioning of “my” place in the sun of the New Mexico desert, I take seriously the call of the others whose spaces I have inherited as colonized or as suburbanized. In my case, that applies to Mexicans who once lived here, but more significantly to the Native Americans and wildlife who once roamed here, displaced from their migratory home. 23. See “Juárez Killings: New Report Emphasizes Obvious,” in the El Paso Times (December 1, 2003). The editorial cites an Associated Press article to the effect that a 1,600-page report by the Mexican National Human Rights Commission was delivered to the Mexican Senate and was being delivered to the President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, detailing that, besides the at least 263 documented murders of women in Juárez, 4,500 have been reported missing. See also Monica Ortiz, “Who is

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Killing the Women of Juárez?” in The Prospector, vol. 90, no. 12 (November 12, 2003) (a student-run newspaper for the University of Texas at El Paso) for her response to the “brutalization and murder of more than 370 women in Ciudad Juárez” and a report on the first international conference directing attention to this injustice, which took place from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2, 2003, at UCLA: “The Maquiladora Murders—or Who is Killing the Women of Juárez.” 24. On the socioeconomic conditions underlying the exploitative dimensions of women and girls involved in the Maquiladora industry, see “Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juárez: 1993–2001” by Julia Monárrez Fragoso at , esp. 4–5. 25. See Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude (1950; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985), chapter 4, for his discussion of the stereotypical cultural and historical traditions of how Mexican men and women relate, perpetuating patterns of self- and other-destruction, and how the violent violation of women by men is at the heart of Mexican social history and gendered relations. 26. International attention was drawn to the events surrounding these murders by Eve Ensler and others on February 14, 2004, with the organization of thousands who marched in protest in Juárez and the presentation of Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues, in Juárez, El Paso, and Las Cruces. 27. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 117. 28. Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 100.

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CHAPTER 10

Reconstituting Political Philosophy after the Holocaust: Toward the Prevention of Genocide Mitchel Gerber

And then I explain to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment— become the center of the universe. Elie Wiesel1

W

hen one surveys the literature of contemporary political philosophy, one is struck by the fact that the discipline has failed to use the Holocaust as a touchstone for evaluating normative political-philosophical claims and for the enterprise of prescriptive ethics in politics. In The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust, political philosopher Norman Geras expresses his puzzlement and chagrin regarding political philosophy’s lack of sustained scholarly analysis of the Shoah, particularly in comparison to the sophisticated critical studies offered by other academic disciplines and perspectives.2

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In this chapter I will argue that the discipline of political philosophy needs to scrupulously rethink the utility of its perennial core ethical concepts (for example, rights, justice, duties) as they have been articulated in the “classic” texts of Western political thought. A careful inquiry into contemporary political philosophy reveals its benign neglect or failure to rigorously examine its own untested abstract normative principles, particularly in terms of their applicability to genocides, such as the Holocaust. This, of course, raises the question of the utility or pertinence of the current discussions, methodological insights, and techniques of political philosophy: Are they adequate for a critical analysis of contemporary normative global issues? Contemporary normative political theory, I will argue, needs to design conceptual frameworks, criteria, or paradigms that will be useful for identifying and evaluating contemporary episodes of genocide and for prescribing ways to eradicate genocide or prevent it in the future. For this task, normative political theory must struggle with three problematic “givens” in conjunction with the historical and contemporary realities of human rights violations and crimes against humanity. First, there exists the moral indifference of humans to assisting others who are being victimized. The bystander phenomenon has been a recurring focus of interest for Holocaust scholars.3 Second, there is the phenomenon of the methodical and efficiently bureaucratic, but not intensely ideological, Nazi perpetrator, most notably described by Hannah Arendt in her classic study Eichmann in Jerusalem, from the genocide planners of the Wannsee meeting to the commandants of the extermination camps to the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads or action units of the SS).4 Third, and perhaps most challenging and morally problematic for normative political theory, there are the stressful psychological and sociological situations of cognitive dissonance, countervailing forces, and crosscutting memberships, loyalties, and affiliations that potentially impede an individual from acting as an independent moral agent intervening in cases of genocide.5 In attempting such a task, Norman Geras argues for a contract that can be characterized as one of mutual reciprocity or one that can be deduced from what he refers to as “the contract of mutual indifference”: Here is the core idea. If you do not come to the aid of others who are under grave assault, in acute danger or crying need, you cannot

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reasonably expect others to come to your aid in similar emergency; you cannot consider them so obligated to you. Other people, equally, unmoved by the emergencies of others, cannot reasonably expect to be helped in deep trouble themselves, or consider others obligated to help them. I call this the contract of mutual indifference. I propose it reluctantly, go into it hoping to be able to come out of it on the other side. (28)

Initially Geras does not explicitly explain whether this prescription resembles Kant’s “kingdom of ends,” Rousseau’s concept of “empathy,” or Adam Smith’s concept of “sympathy,” or whether it is simply a recasting of the classical liberal social contract based merely on mutual egoism or self-interest, as in the case of John Locke. The raison d’être of this proposed contract is to articulate a compelling argument exhorting individuals to make the critical transition from ethically indifferent and passive bystanders to active moral agents and rescuers in disparate contexts of genocide. It challenges the presumed moral disposition of altruism as a character trait universally shared by rescuers and fundamentally lacking in bystanders. Geras’s criterion for moral action and intervention falsely presumes a certain degree of human rationality beyond more natural human propensities (that is, emotional, particularistic, and prejudicial predispositions). This is suggested by Geras in his emphasis on “reasonableness.” Unlike Kant’s “categorical imperative,” in which the motivation is positive (that is, do unto others as you expect them to do unto you), Geras suggests you cannot expect the treatment you receive from others to be any better than your treatment of them, thus articulating the motivation in negative terms. Yet Geras intends to deduce a positive formula or social contract of moral responsibility, which consists in the following: If I as an autonomous moral agent intuitively or even deliberately, via a rational calculation of self-interest, provide assistance to others in serious need, then such other agents are morally obligated to assist me in my time of analogous serious personal danger. There are several fundamental empirical questions pertaining to human nature, the human condition, and societal factors that Geras does not fully or systematically address, exposing potential flaws in his proposed moral formula for ethical intervention. These include: (1) When precisely should one be morally engaged for the prevention

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of genocide? When it is simply rumored or when one observes corpses? (2) What degree of observable genocide or collective harm and suffering must be reached before justifiable or obligatory moral intervention takes place? The empirical issue inferred here is potentially very daunting: multiple opportunities exist for the involved parties to present distorted, inaccurate, and biased information, which undercuts the possibility of acquiring any objective and precise documentation of gross human rights abuses or genocide, and subsequently corrupts any normative decision for humanitarian intervention. (3) What is the specific degree of personal or collective risk that should deter such moral responsibility and intervention? (4) What is the specific ceiling or limitation of personal resources one is morally obligated to commit to the prevention of genocide without diminishing one’s autonomy and survival? (5) Specifically when does one’s moral obligation to other societal members (for example, family members) deserve a higher priority of commitment and fulfillment than one’s ethical duty to end genocide or prevent severe harm to others? Geras himself notes that he fails to address these questions: Thus, first, what is the extent of misfortune or trouble creating a presumption of the need for aid, and short of (less than) which we would be able to feel satisfied that the world under consideration was not marked by undue indifference even though everyone simply went their own carefree way? And, assuming some answer to this question, what is the extent of the helping response from any individual that would represent a sufficiency, morally speaking, and what the social spread of sufficient responses that would enable us to feel, once again, satisfied that a general unconcern over the plight of others did not prevail? I offer no answers to these two questions. (29–30)

Furthermore, Geras has not clarified the debate over the moral decision making that is obligatory in such moments of serious societal or global harm and genocide—particularly if such moments are rife with conflicting priorities, values, and ambiguity or complexity as they often are. Most fundamentally, Geras does not resolve the critical ethical problems of identifying the specific threshold point for moral activism or intervention—the particular moment, or context, when the ordinary citizen should no longer remain indifferent or morally complacent and specifically how citizens should prioritize or Jules Simon

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balance their self-oriented worlds of private affairs and their social obligations, civic responsibilities, and public duties. What is the legitimate balance between the arguments proposing protection of global human rights and the prevention of human rights abuses and genocidal atrocities, on the one hand, and the criticisms against nation-state building, imperialism, unwarranted and naïvely idealistic intervention, and “hyperpower” overextended meddling, on the other hand? Whether one has an absolute moral obligation to preempt imminent or even potential genocide or serious harm to others is a significant question that Geras does not seriously tackle. Geras assigns a great degree of flexibility to his prescribed contract, as he anchors it to moral pragmatism, instrumentalism, and situational ethics. The core underlying utilitarian premise to Geras’s moral equation is suggested when he asks, “How could you reasonably expect the help of others if anything similar, or even much less severe but bad enough, were to befall you?” (33). The motivation of your acts to assist others in cases of genocide or serious harm and to promote certain results (that is, the elimination of such genocide or harm) becomes dependent upon your personal assessment of particular future consequences of your behavior (that is, that others will act to assist you in similar circumstances). Citizens often attempt to delegate or transfer (and thereby dissolve) their individual public moral responsibilities and civic duties of intervention to other sources of authority, particularly to social and governmental institutions. Political philosophers and public policy analysts often allude to this widespread situation as the “freerider problem,” in which citizens greatly minimize their efforts or contributions to the support of collective goods according to a selfish cost-benefit, although they remain beneficiaries of such public or collective goods provided by the government. The burden of moral responsibility, however, should not be casually or unreflectively delegated or transferred from individuals to their governmental institutions, since historical documentation, most notably confirmed by David S. Wyman in his work The Abandonment of the Jews, reveals the tendency of nation-states to be morally complacent and indifferent, acting as bystanders during moments of unprecedented global evil (for example, the Evian conference). Individual moral responsibility too easily shifts to personal moral apathy to national indifference and finally to collective ethical guilt. Jules Simon

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Responding to potential criticisms of his prescribed model as being too reductionistic, simplistic, and psychologically naïve and by implication empirically or historically unrealistic, Geras argues that it is based upon self-validating ethical claims beyond reproach—an inalienable natural right to such aid in times of serious critical need that is inextricably linked to the moral obligations of others to provide such aid. However, suppose that, whatever people may feel able to expect, whatever they have agreed to or are taken on account of their conduct to have agreed to, they do have precisely a right in this matter, a right to aid in dire emergency, and others a corresponding obligation to come to their aid; and suppose that there is no contract which can loosen this bond, the right to help in such circumstances being inalienable. (37)

Geras’s description of the inherent logic of his prescribed contract is articulated in the context of a hostile social environment of anomie, political and social instability, potential anarchy, and, most fundamentally, universal human vulnerability—the equality of human fragility and the potential to be harmed and violated by other persons. All of these conditions are reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature expressed in his classic Leviathan in which the “life of man is nasty, solitary, poor, brutish and short.”6 Geras argues: If, at any rate, our shared humanity as moral agents, or our shared vulnerability or common capacity to suffer, is sufficient to establish between us bonds of mutual obligation, it is not clear why, other than by reasons of practicality, those bonds should stop at some regional or national boundary. (63)

Due to the natural context of mutual egoism, unless individuals understand that it is morally obligatory for them to aid and protect those under situations of serious harm, the rights of these same individuals who now become indifferent and complacent bystanders are meaningless. One’s obligations are reciprocally interconnected to one’s rights. This can be effectively summed up as: If I don’t exercise my moral duties or obligations to protect your basic negative or positive rights to remain free from serious harm, then I in turn have insecure rights, or essentially no rights to be free of such potential harm myself. But this formula or contract of obligatory intervention and rescue is always one step away from collapsing or falling apart, Jules Simon

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as depicted in Hobbes’s Leviathan, since it lacks a cohesive cement of communitarian, organic bonds. Geras is attempting to deduce a positive “ought” from a negative “is.” He is confronting a given human condition of psychological egoism (Hobbes) and rational calculation of self-interest (John Locke, Adam Smith) and, in a leap of faith, hoping to establish a public moral philosophy of civic duties, social obligations, and a communitarian altruistic ethic to help those in serious harm. He is magically attempting to pull a Rousseauian or Kantian bunny out of Adam Smith’s hat. The Task Ahead for Political Philosophy The essential role of political philosophy is to articulate perennial concepts, arguments, themes, or moral principles that have universal and objective normative status beyond a given intellectual-historical context or original point of genesis and that have the prescriptive capacity to generate meaningful social or political change in a variety of historical contexts. The value and primary utility of political philosophy lies in its critical, analytical, normative assessments of the morally conventional, although the specialized perspectives and subfields of political philosophy do not presently focus on this task. There are fruitful moral enterprises of political thought; the discipline can seriously engage theories of comparative genocide and global theories of human justice, human rights, and international law. Furthermore, contemporary political philosophy needs to design some moral formula that includes the basic ethical premise that it is intrinsically morally wrong not to assist others in circumstances such as genocide, regardless of the potential benefits to the agent assisting others. Any utilitarian calculus to prevent or intervene against genocide is insufficient, as it doesn’t clearly propose a transcendent moral principle, an overarching normative ideal, or a theoretical ethical framework that can specifically guide human behavior to counter such cases as genocide. An argument needs to be proposed that offers justification for moral responsibility and intervention against such serious harm and genocide and that clearly states that it is intrinsically wrong to be indifferent, that one is morally obligated to be actively involved in preventing harm or genocide independent of the projected results or benefits of one’s actions. Whatever moral contract is designed for rescue, it must be linked to some cornerstone Jules Simon

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ethical principle of intervention in cases of severe human harm and collective evil and to some general moral theory. What often obfuscates the search for ethical clarity, meaning, and justification for such moral intervention is the prima facie inextricable linkage between social and psychological motivational factors propelling such actions and the moral arguments and philosophical principles justifying and prescribing such behavior. Altruism, compassion, religious principles, calculating egoism, and utilitarian gain have been motivators of intervention, but these are not intrinsically moral arguments for such “good” or legitimate behavior. Social and psychological factors explaining rescue and intervention are legitimate topics of critical inquiry, but can be studied distinctly from the normative analysis requisite for the construction of moral arguments justifying such intervention. Nechama Tec claims that: For other reasons as well, the literature on altruism must be employed carefully, for there are important distinctions between the data on which this field relies and the rescuing of Jews during the Holocaust. As a rule, most altruism studies focus on single acts of help. Probably the largest part of this kind of research deals with bystander intervention. Many of these bystander studies explore the conditions under which people will or will not plunge into a dangerous situation to protect others.7

It is precisely in this context that the altruism of rescuers—the natural moral compulsion to aid others in serious need without any introspective scrutiny of the basis of their intervention—often blurs or obfuscates the ethicist’s search for normative principles centered on why one should act in such a way to provide assistance. Tec claims that: Without exception and regardless of the country they came from, helpers insisted that for them saving Jews was a natural duty. In the overwhelming majority of cases, their protection of Jews fit into an already established pattern of helping the needy. These righteous took their obligation to provide help for granted, finding it hard to explain. One of their typical answers was: Of course I helped them, but I cannot tell you why.8

The canon of Western political philosophy has articulated a profound intellectual and moral commitment toward particular normative concepts. Both classical liberalism (for example, John Locke, Jules Simon

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John Stuart Mill) and social reform liberalism or idealism (for example, T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley) evoke several cornerstone ethical political principles that are prescriptive concerning the nature of social relations and civil society. These principles are requisite norms for the systemic sustenance, survivability, and ethical strength of a liberal civil society and include individual moral autonomy, individual inviolability, and personhood; inalienable human rights; privacy; social contractual consent (recognizing a natural degree of egoism); universal respect or toleration for pluralistic claims; the rule of law; and limited government. The liberal, egalitarian justification of universal respect for human rights, personhood, and individual autonomy is couched in arguments of moral absolutism, as it is obligatory for all individuals and states—independent of historical, social, or cultural context—to esteem and not to interfere with these foundational norms. The political authority of the liberal state, grounded as it often is on some contractual basis, is very much rooted in its protection of human rights and individuals as autonomous moral agents. This principle of moral autonomy is the basis of an alternative to Geras’s contractual solution proposed by David H. Jones in Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character. Jones identifies one critical element of good moral character, which is also considered a standard of its recognition: the virtue of autonomy. Jones contends that: Autonomy is the trait of being self-directed and intellectually independent in moral matters, with a strong sense of responsibility for making up one’s own mind in particular situations and for leading one’s own life as a whole. . . . One especially pertinent example of the importance of autonomy is the fact that thousands of Jews were actually saved by relatively few individual rescuers. . . . There is some evidence that most rescuers were not only courageous (as one would naturally expect) but were also autonomous individuals, being very little influenced by social pressure or conventional moral attitudes.9

Numerous empirical studies of the motivations of rescuers reveal that, regardless of the particularities of their disparate backgrounds, they had a high degree of moral autonomy and independence toward conventional social norms and codes of ethics. This is evident, for example, in Tec’s systematic study When Light Pierced the Jules Simon

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Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. She found that rescuers shared the characteristic of “individuality” or “separateness” as well as a “high level of independence and self-reliance that causes these individuals to pursue personal goals regardless of how these goals are viewed by others.”10 This characteristic of rescuers corresponds with the moral code proposed by the political philosophy of the liberal tradition. Salvaging the Fragments and Recovering a Role for Political Philosophy According to Elie Wiesel: The Holocaust demands interrogation and calls everything into question. Traditional ideas and acquired values, philosophical systems and social theories—all must be revised in the shadow of Birkenau.11

And yet the critical normative principles of modernity, the Enlightenment, and liberal thought failed us miserably during the Holocaust. Western political philosophical normative concepts no longer have privileged status. The Holocaust has demonstrated the fragility of core beliefs, which have been contradicted, inconsistently implemented, ignored, or—perhaps the most frightening thought of all—implemented during the Holocaust. Some scholars argue that this genocide was the logical outcome and derivative of the Enlightenment, industrialization, modern science and reason, or modernity itself. The Holocaust appears to have diminished the moral and epistemological validity of such central norms as individualism, individual autonomy, rights, consent, privacy, human progress, secularism, science, and rationalism. To abandon these philosophical normative concepts would leave us in an ethical void; these normative principles need to be salvaged. But where are the signposts to assist us in this transition? How might political philosophy be reconstituted after the Holocaust? We are locked in a double bind: the political philosophical words and values of modernity, the Enlightenment, and liberalism have failed us—they did not shield us from unimaginable genocidal death—but we have only this language to represent and grapple with the failure and the horrors of Auschwitz. If we admit the failings of Jules Simon

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Western political thought (including liberalism) but subsequently don’t act, this potentially leads to further genocide. And yet we can’t ignore the failings of Western modernity in its path to Auschwitz and complacently continue to use a broken discourse. Helpfully, Geras highlights the normative and methodological problems of contemporary political philosophy and attempts to place it back on its intellectual track. But more work needs to be done, and the limitations of Geras’s proposal need to be addressed. What is required is that we salvage core normative principles, such as individual autonomy, human rights and consent, from the shattered Western tradition of political thought. We need a salvaged political ethics consisting of political philosophical principles and prescriptive guidelines for the prevention of or intervention against genocide and gross human rights violations. In the contemporary global context, these much-maligned ethical political norms and concepts cannot and should not be ignored with impunity. The paradox remains: post-Holocaust they have been denied their privileged status, and yet they seep into the current theoretical dialogue and policy implementation models utilized against genocide. Although the enterprise of normative political philosophy is damaged, we cannot lose sight of its core ethical principles; we lose such sight at our peril. Salvaging a pluralistic universe—acknowledging the value of a diversity of epistemic claims and moral truths derived from disparate cases—enables us to reconstruct a political philosophy capable of prescriptive remedies for the problem of genocide. Several normative conceptual fragments of liberalism might be salvaged for such a task. Geras suggests that the morally neutral liberal state in the context of its legal and ethical culture is based upon negative duties (that is, duties of noninterference) and tends by nature to be inadequate in nurturing positive duties of active moral intervention. Geras claims: “A liberal culture underwrites moral indifference. It makes much room for the bystander to suffering” (59). The concept of “noninterference” and the implied related normative principle of privacy are linked to the classical liberal political theories of John Stuart Mill. In the context of salvaging liberalism, there is the false presumption that a liberal moral culture breeds ethical indifference and complacency, as the role of the bystander is encouraged even when members of such a community are informed of genocide. Jules Simon

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This evaluation of liberalism is problematic for several reasons. First, even if we accept by definition that a liberal state is more naturally prone to producing bystanders than a nonliberal political community, we don’t have to accept the moral equivalency that is suggested here between the roles performed by the bystanders and the roles performed by the perpetrators. The inference is that those who were passive and did not intervene to protect those in harm’s way are just as responsible or morally culpable as the actual perpetrators committing the evil deeds. There are often complex intervening counterforces (for example, the safety of one’s own family or a lack of resources) that mitigate one’s positive moral intervention and place one in the role of being a bystander. Second, detailed comparative empirical political evidence that liberal states are more disposed to act as bystanders than nonliberal states in periods of genocide has not been revealed. Third, and most fundamentally, just humanitarian intervention is a logical corollary of the modern liberal state, since the core values of liberal political thought are respect for individual autonomy and universal human rights in conjunction with the ethical claim that governmental legitimacy is solely justified upon its protection of such rights. It is obligatory for all citizens in a liberal state to recognize and respect the universal status and applicability of such rights, to inculcate or proactively nurture recognition of the virtue of human rights, to not interfere or intrude on the rights of others, and to intervene in particular cases to prevent the gross human rights violations of others. In the discourse of traditional liberal thought, human rights are identified as universal normative constructs that transcend spatial or temporal contexts. Particular states that have violated such rights have forfeited their sovereignty (which they are not automatically entitled to) and any moral claims of legitimacy, while the victims of such political communities that have suffered gross human rights abuses are entitled to rescue. Since human rights are abstract, theoretical attributes inherent in each individual and by definition not created or legislated by governments, they transcend the principle of state sovereignty, and consequently, just humanitarian intervention intruding on state borders is not only justifiable in particular cases of genocide and gross human rights abuses but morally obligatory. What frames my discussion here is the claim that it is fundamentally and intrinsically morally wrong to harm others, destroy their fundamental human rights, autonomy, Jules Simon

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personhood, and dignity. The critical political-philosophical concepts of liberalism inexorably compel us to hold the core assumption that the Holocaust was objectively a moral evil, or as Michael Berenbaum states it, “a negative absolute.” As John K. Roth notes, “Even if people remain skeptical that rational agreement can be obtained about what is right, just, and good, the Holocaust seems to reestablish conviction that what happened at Auschwitz and Treblinka was wrong, unjust, and evil—period.”12 Furthermore, liberal political communities are able, if not even naturally predisposed, to foster the development of a civic culture nurturing those specific civic virtues and moral character traits hostile to the development of genocide or useful in its prevention. The modern liberal state is capable of developing a deeply ingrained moral culture and civic religion, which through disparate processes of political socialization would inculcate such ethical sentiments as civic virtue and the suggested moral imperative of responsibility for the safety of others, particularly in times of danger. In such a proposed community, the moral imperative to assist others in serious danger is not necessarily an intuitive response of the individual, but instead is a learned civic response. The alleged morally neutral or night watchman state is now reconstituted so as to reduce the naturally human, selfinterested predisposition toward complacency and moral indifference (that is, the “bystander” phenomenon) and instead to foster a set of dispositions or moral character traits toward humanitarian interventionism in cases of genocide. Jones identifies and scrutinizes core liberal moral principles and political cultural characteristics: (1) citizens have respect for the rule of law, including a strong disposition to refrain from using violence, (2) citizens strongly value and support the institutions of constitutional democracy, (3) citizens have mutual respect and tolerance toward each other. . . . Characteristics 1, 2, and 3 are the ones most directly relevant for enabling liberal institutions to work well in the prevention of genocide. Notice that each of them identifies a civic virtue, that is, an individual trait of character that it is good for citizens to have, all things considered.13

The second exemplary expression of a salvaged normative concept entails the restoration of the modern Kantian normative principle of free moral will, human moral agency, moral activism, or autonomy. “Moral activism” is a necessary factor and criterion for genocide Jules Simon

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prevention, intervention, and rescue, just as critical as, if not more than, other necessary factors including sufficient resources, opportunity, skills, and energy. By moral activism, I am specifically referring to a normative concept of human moral character and individual will disciplined by a coherent set of ethical beliefs and values that commit one by conscience and moral duty to intervene in situations of genocide or to rescue those who are experiencing severe harm. And conversely if one’s will and moral autonomy as an independent ethical agent are abridged by arbitrary, abusive state power promoting genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, then obligatory intervention is necessary to restore the human identity and potentiality of such victims as autonomous moral agents. In this context, one is reminded of Kant’s ethical theory, particularly when he claims that “Nothing in the world—indeed nothing even beyond the world— can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will.”14 In their classic study The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe, Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner articulate the critical role of moral activism for preventing genocide and claim that potential rescuers are not passive individuals who find themselves in situations of genocide but are active moral agents predisposed to make such ethical choices because of ingrained values: Rescuers did not simply happen on opportunities for rescue; they actively created, sought, or recognized them where others did not. Their participation was not determined by circumstances but their own personal qualities. Chance sometimes provided rescuers . . . with an opportunity to help, but it was the values learned from their parents which prompted and sustained their involvement.15

The emphasis on individual worth, moral autonomy, and human moral character does not presume equal moral status for each individual’s claim but rather a commitment to the absolute integrity of individual autonomy. In certain historical contexts, perhaps, particular values, moral belief systems, and civic virtues inculcated over generations and centuries were the necessary and sufficient conditions of nurture that prompted an intuitive recognition of injustice and crimes against humanity. Such was perhaps the case with Le Chambon. The perceived obligatory ethical response to intervene and resist acts of genocide or prevent severe harm to others was exhibited in Jules Simon

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the classic case of the small Huguenot village Le Chambon in Vichy, France, particularly under the leadership of the Protestant pastor André Trocmé and his wife, Magda Trocmé. But “moral activism” as manifested in this particular case does not necessarily mean a sustained process of analytical reflection, critical moral reasoning, assessment, or thoughtful calculation. A deep intuitive moral impulse engraved in the ethical character and personality of the Protestant villagers of Le Chambon was sufficient to motivate them to act to rescue Jews in an almost matter-of-fact, unreflective way, despite very high risks to personal, family, and community safety. The ingrained, Christian motivating factors of care and compassion fused with the collective memory of centuries of suffering by the Huguenots were sufficient to guide the rescue efforts of the villagers of Le Chambon without any scrupulous scrutiny of such ethical situations or formulaic calculations. In cases such as Le Chambon, motivation to intervene or rescue was independent of any particular utilitarian calculus, just as inaction and indifference were perceived to be morally equivalent to complicity with the perpetration of evil. The ethical intervention of the villagers of Le Chambon, who acted with great modesty and without ethical introspection, is analogous to that of female members of the French Resistance, who often spoke of the need to demythologize their courageous and risky roles. John Roth eloquently and concisely reflects on the ethical motivation and moral spirit of the Chambonnais to prevent genocide: Le Chambon’s resistance to the Holocaust started with small gestures—with Magda Trocmé, for example, opening her door and welcoming a German Jewish woman into her home. She and everyone else were aware of the danger, but that did not deter them. They regarded their acts of rescue as natural, as just the right thing to do. As Magda Trocmé said, “None of us thought that we were heroes. We were just trying to do our best.”16

Similarly, Philip Hallie writes in his classic work on Le Chambon, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: We fail to understand what happened in Le Chambon if we think that for them their actions were complex and difficult. John Stuart Mill in his essay “Utilitarianism” wrote that a benevolent person is Jules Simon

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someone who “comes, as though instinctively, to be conscious of himself as a being who of course pays regard to others. The good of others becomes to him a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended to, like any of the physical conditions of our existence.” For certain people, helping the distressed is as natural and necessary as feeding themselves. The Trocmés, the Theises, and others in Le Chambon were such people.17

Any scrupulous revisiting of the proper reconstituted role of political philosophy in the context of the prevention of genocide, particularly in formulating a political theory of just humanitarian intervention, requires a serious attempt by the discipline to recognize the linked dimensions of theory (that is, abstract moral philosophical justifications of genocide prevention and intervention) and praxis (that is, the institutionalization of practical political channels of genocide resolution and concrete policy options of preempting and eradicating genocide). This task becomes even more challenging when one considers the subsequent normative pledge to avoid genocide after the Holocaust, numerous contemporary examples of genocide after Auschwitz, and the incapacity of the global community despite its institutional and conventional attempts (for example, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to effectively deal with this horror. The international community’s failure of will in implementing these moral conventions derived from a global consensus focused on the prevention of gross human rights abuses and humanitarian intervention against genocide has been critical in the failure to resurrect a political philosophy germane to the contemporary context. Notes 1. Elie Wiesel, The Nobel Acceptance Speech, delivered in Oslo (December 10, 1986), available at . 2. Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (London: Verso, 1999), 25. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. 3. See, for example, David S. Wyman’s study of the decision by the United States not to intervene directly against the genocide of the Holocaust in The Abandonment of the Jews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). Jules Simon

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4. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994). 5. For example, members of the Judenräte were confronted with several conflicting options and priorities: promoting the public welfare of the majority of ghetto Jews, protecting their own family members, complying with Nazi commands and offering no resistance, and complying with the Jewish code of spiritual and social ethics to take care of the poor, sick, and needy, although they were instructed to round up these individuals first for relocation to the camps. Another group that experienced this ethical tension was the Resistants Français Juifs (French Jewish Resistants), particularly females, especially if they were from assimilated Jewish families that had lived in France for generations and had been socialized to conform to traditional, conservative, hierarchical authority. 6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 7. Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 151. 8. Ibid., 153. 9. David H. Jones, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 55. 10. Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness, 154. 11. Quoted in John K. Roth, ed. Ethics after the Holocaust (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1999), viii. 12. John K. Roth, Holocaust Politics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 221–222. 13. Jones, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust, 239. 14. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press, 1959), 9. 15. Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 142. 16. Roth, Ethics after the Holocaust, 293. 17. Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1979), 284.

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Notes on the Contributors

Beth Hawkins Benedix is associate professor of religious studies and literature at DePauw University. She is the author of Reluctant Theologians: Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès (Fordham University Press, 2003) and editor of and contributor to Subverting Scriptures (forthcoming by Palgrave Macmillan), and has contributed chapters to collections such as Chasing Esther: Jewish Expressions of Cultural Difference and Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun: Teaching the Holocaust in Colleges and Universities. Her articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as Shofar, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Jewish Quarterly Review, and Journal of the Kafka Society of America. Elizabeth Cameron Galbraith received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1992. She is the author of Kant and Theology: Was Kant a Closet Theologian?, published by International Scholars Publications in 1996. In addition to continuing research in Kant studies, preoccupation with the problem of innocent suffering led Galbraith to research and teaching interests in Holocaust studies. The most recent paper to result from the combination of Kantian and Holocaust studies, titled “Kant and ‘A Theodicy of Protest,’” was included in Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, Indiana University Press, 2006. She is currently a member of the religion department at St. Olaf College, where she is associate professor of religion and teaches Christian theology, as well as Holocaust seminars for undergraduates in religion. Jennifer L. Geddes is research associate professor of religious studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. She is also editor of the award-winning academic journal The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture.

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In 2006, she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Emilia Galla Struppa fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She is the editor of Evil after Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics (Routledge, 2001). Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Literature and Theology, The Hedgehog Review, and Martyrdom and Resistance, and edited volumes, including Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil (Indiana, 2007), The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism (Rodopi, 2007), and The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Mitchel Gerber is professor of political science at Southeast Missouri State University. He is the editor of Classic Edition Sources: American Government, third edition (McGraw-Hill Contemporary Learning Series, 2009), and has published numerous scholarly articles for Salem Press. He was awarded the Starkoff Fellowship of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. He has been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships to participate in various seminars and institutes, and an American Political Science Association small research grant. In recognition of his exemplary scholarly performance, Gerber received the Outstanding Scholarship Honors Award of the College of Liberal Arts, Southeast Missouri State University. In recognition of his exemplary teaching performance, Gerber received the 2008 University Educator of the Year Award of the Cape Girardeau Area Chamber of Commerce, twice received the Exempli Gratia, the Most Exemplary Honors Faculty, and received the Outstanding Teaching Honors Award of the College of Liberal Arts, Southeast Missouri State University. Myrna Goldenberg, professor emerita, has published seminal articles on women and the Holocaust and coedited, with Elizabeth Baer, Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, and with Rochelle L. Millen, Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun: Teaching the Holocaust in Colleges and Universities. Author of numerous articles on curriculum transformation, American Jewish women’s literature and history, and college and university teaching, she has been an editor of and frequent contributor to Potomac Review: A Journal of Jules Simon

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Arts and Humanities, Women Today, Belles Lettres, and the Community College Humanities Review, and the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Holocaust Studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, 2005–2006. Goldenberg has been recognized by the Association of Community College Trustees and the Community College Humanities Association for outstanding teaching and by various groups for her work on human rights and community activism. Husain Kassim is associate professor and director of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Central Florida. He has published several articles in the areas of Islamic studies and philosophy. To his credit are three books: Legitimizing Modernity in Islam: Muslim Modus Vivendi and Western Modernity; Aristotle and Aristotelianism in Medieval Muslim, Jewish and Christian Philosophy; and Sarakhsi: The Doctrine of Juristic Preference in Islamic Jurisprudence and Concepts of Treaties and Mutual Relations. He has been a Fulbright Exchange scholar at the University of Bremen and the Fulbright-University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and Religion. Tam K. Parker is associate professor and chair of the Department of Religion at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her research and teaching are in the fields of social ethics, modern Jewish thought, and comparative genocide studies. Her current writing project is on the use of moral and religious rhetoric in the perpetration of genocidal violence and resistance to it. John K. Roth served as the 2007–2008 Robert and Carolyn Frederick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Ethics at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. He is also the Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, where he taught from 1966 through 2006. In addition to service on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and on the editorial board for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, he has authored, coauthored, or edited more than forty books, including, Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide and Ethics during and after the Holocaust: In the Shadow of Birkenau, both published by Palgrave Macmillan. Roth has been visiting professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Haifa, Israel, and his Holocaust-related research appointments have included a 2001 Koerner Visiting Fellowship Jules Simon

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at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in England, as well as a 2004–2005 appointment as the Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. In 1988, Roth was named U.S. National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Jules Simon is a philosopher who works in the areas of ethical theory, phenomenology, and critical social theory. He has edited three other books: History, Religion, and Meaning: American Reflections on the Holocaust and Israel (2000); The Philosophy of John Haddox: 50 Years Journeying with Mexicans and Americans (with Carlos Sanchez, forthcoming); and Philosophy from La Frontera: A Multicultural and Interdisciplinary Reader (forthcoming). Mark Stern currently serves as the vice president for academic affairs at Shepherd University, where he holds an appointment as professor of political science. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y. Stern has published extensively on civil rights and the United States’ presidency. He has participated in several postgraduate seminars at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and teaches a course on: “Moral Choice: The Holocaust.” Hanne Trautner-Kromann has been professor of Jewish studies at Lund University, Sweden, since 1990. She studied at the Copenhagen University, Denmark, where she earned her two doctorates in 1981 and 1990. She has authored books and articles about the history, religion, and culture of the Jewish people, especially about Jewish polemics and Jewish-Christian relations, Bible exegesis, and the history of the Jewish communities in Scandinavia. She is president of the Scandinavian Association for Jewish Studies, editor of Nordisk Judaistik: Scandinavian Jewish Studies, and a member of the board of the Danish Jewish Museum.

Jules Simon

Index

The Abandonment of the Jews, 159 active command, 144 aesthetic knowledge. See techné Allied Forces, 95, 99 altruism, 162, 168 The Altruistic Personality, 168 Alvarez, A., 111 Améry, Jean, 6, 16–17, 23, 70, 101–12, 125–26, 146; biography, 102; homesickness, 105–8, 111–12; and Jewish identity, 107–10; suicide, 108–12; torture, 103–5, 105 Antelme, Robert, 10, 19, 20 antisemitism, 109, 112 anti-Zionism, 109 Arendt, Hannah, 28, 57–58, 117–18, 120–26, 131, 156. See also “banality of evil” At the Mind’s Limits, 101, 109 Auschwitz, 6–9, 11, 12, 15, 18–20, 23, 31, 37, 57–58, 61–62, 64, 69, 71–72, 94, 101, 107, 122, 126–29, 149, 164–65, 167, 170 Auschwitz and After, 71–80, 118, 122, 126, 129 Austria, 23, 101–3, 106, 108, 112 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 102 autonomy, 4, 32, 52, 69–70, 112, 135, 139, 157–58, 163–68

Baeck, Leo, 32 “banality of evil,” 28, 40, 121–22, 131 banishment, 105–8, 111–12, 139 de Beauvoir, Simone, 153 Belgian resistance, 101–3 Belgium, 23, 102, 106 Benedix, Beth, 3–4, 69–70, 118 Berenbaum, Michael, 15, 23, 167 Bergen-Belsen, 23, 106 Berger, Peter, 27 Blanchot, Maurice, 11, 19, 20–21 bonding, 72, 75–76 Borowski, Tadeusz, 6 Bradley, F. H., 163 Braiterman, Zachary, 62 Buber, Martin, 105 bystander phenomenon, 156–62, 165–67 Campert, Remco, 18 caring, 69, 71–72, 75, 83 categorical imperative, 55, 57–60, 63, 157 Catholicism, 102 Celan, Paul, 4, 6, 39, 70, 146 children, 12, 20, 60–61, 74, 87, 96, 99, 123, 136, 145–46, 153 Chodorow, Nancy, 71, 76 Christians, 104, 106–8, 111, 135, 137, 163–64, 169. See Protestant Christians

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Index

Churchill, Winston, 99 civic culture, 167–68 Clark, J. J., 49 classical liberalism, 162–63 “collaboration,” 90 communication, 138–39 community, 10–12, 18, 26, 38, 74–75 Compton, John J., 96–97 concentration camps, 56, 61, 72–81, 93, 96, 107, 143 connectedness, 69, 71, 76, 79 The Contract of Mutual Indifference, 155 Convoy to Auschwitz, 75 Critique of Judgment, 55 Critique of Practical Reason, 58 Czechoslovakia, 92, 109

Dobie, Madeleine, 20–21 Doctors Without Borders, 152 domination, 104, 139–40, 148, 151 double binds, xi–xiii, 3, 5, 8–11, 18, 20, 61, 69–70, 101, 111, 117–18, 133, 136, 138–39, 145, 149, 164; definition of, xi–xii Dudach, Georges, 72 duty, xi, 58–59, 156, 165

Danish Jews, rescue of, 89, 90–99, 137 Danish rescuers, 90–95, 97–99, 137 Danish resistance, 95, 98–99 Darwin, Charles, 79 death, 8–10, 50, 56, 72, 75, 80, 105 dehumanization, xiii, 10, 17, 30, 55–57, 138, 152 Delbo, Charlotte, 7, 18–19, 69, 71–75, 77, 87, 117–18, 120–22, 126–31 Denmark, 69–70, 89–99 deontological ethics, 133 Derrida, Jacques, 7 Des Pres, Terrence, 56, 130 desire, 148–49 despair, 74, 101, 127–28, 146 determinism, 30–31 Difficult Freedom, 150 dignity, 4, 9, 55–56, 59–61, 64, 69–70, 75, 101, 105, 109–12, 119, 155, 166–67 discourse, 39, 138

Eichmann, Adolf, 4, 31, 57–60, 123–26 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 57–58, 118, 122–26, 156; subtitle of, 124 Einsatzgruppen, 12, 156 empathy, 81–83, 87, 110, 157 Enlightenment, 4, 9, 25, 43–51, 70, 101–2, 106, 109–10, 112, 117, 164; French, 106; German, 43–51; optimism, 4, 25 Ensler, Eve, 154 ethical, enacting the, 146–51 ethical community, 97 ethical critique, 136, 138 ethical imperative, 27 ethical inquiry, 25–26, 30 ethical proximity, 81–84 ethical sensitivity, 27–28, 36 ethical system, 25–40 ethics, v, 135–38, 152; building, 25–26, 30; definition of, 29–30, 33; failure of, xi–xii, 3, 5–6, 15, 137; normative, 135–37; status of, xi–xiii, 12, 15. See also deontological ethics; double bind; feminist ethic; Nazi ethic; “new ethics”; utilitarian ethics; virtue ethics Europe, 31, 36, 39, 44, 48, 50–51, 98, 109

Jules Simon

Index

European Jews, 89, 107 evil, 26–29, 37, 40, 96–98, 109, 119–31, 134–35, 141, 149, 167, 169; empirical studies, 119–21; mythologizing, 117, 121–23; and the “not,” 134–35, 143; as relational, 120; scholarship on, 119–21; theoretical studies, 119–21. See also “banality of evil”; evil genius evil genius, 121, 123–24 “excremental assault,” 56, 61, 130 exile. See banishment extermination camps, 56, 73, 93, 143 the face, 103, 121, 145–46, 148–49, 151–53 Fackenheim, Emil, 4, 37, 55–64 fascism, 44–45 feminist ethic, 69, 71–72, 74–81 feminist theory, 7, 79, 85 Ferencz, Benjamin, 22 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 63 Final Solution, 13, 16, 58, 123 Foucault, Michel, 48–50, 152 Fox, Vicente, 153–54 fragmentation, 69, 138 France, 7, 18–20, 71–72, 105, 107, 137, 170. See also Le Chambon Frank, Hans, 58 freedom, 110–11, 134, 148 “free-rider problem,” 159 Freitod (voluntary death), 108–12 French Resistance, 18–19, 72, 96, 122, 169 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 27 Friedman, Carl, 18 Galbraith, Elizabeth, 4 Gay, Peter, 47 Geddes, Jennifer, 4, 117–18

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gendered language, 144–45 genocide, xi–xiii, 3, 4, 12–16, 22, 31, 40–41, 57–58, 81, 84, 109, 111, 118, 133, 136–37, 141, 152, 156–61, 164–71; prevention, 40–41, 109, 118, 137, 156–61, 168–71; and the U.N., 14 Geras, Norman, 155–61, 163, 165 Gerber, Mitchel, 70, 118 German Jews, 99, 122, 169 German language, 102–3, 106–7 Germany, 44–51, 63, 90–95, 98, 104, 106–7, 109, 122. See also Nazi regime Gestapo, 101, 103, 105 Gilligan, Carol, 71–72, 85 Goldenberg, Myrna, 4, 69 good will, 58–59, 168 goodness, 96–100 Great Britain, 89, 106 Greece, 44–45, 106 Greek Jews, 76–77 Green, T. H., 163 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 55, 58 Haas, Peter, 3, 26–41 Habermas, Jürgen, 52 Häftling, 76, 84 Hallie, Philip, 96–98, 169 Hebrew language, 108 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13–14 Heidegger, Martin, 44–46, 48–49, 57, 62, 146 heroism, 73, 76, 81, 89, 94, 97 higher power, 38–39, 41 Hilberg, Raul, 12–13 Himmler, Heinrich, 12–13, 58 history, 140 Hitler, Adolf, 10, 16–17, 57, 109

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Index

Hobbes, Thomas, 160–61 Holocaust and pathology, 15; the term, 36–37. See also ethics, failure of; “negative absolute” Huber, Kurt, 62–64 Huguenots, 169 human race, 47, 49 The Human Race, 10, 19 human rights, xii, xiii, 17–18, 25, 70, 117, 156, 158–63, 165–66, 170 humanism, “new,” 18, 21 humanity, xii, xiii, 8–13, 16–18, 26, 44, 55–57, 59–62, 64, 110–11, 160 humiliation, 56, 104–5, 155 Hungarian Jews, 31 idealism, 15–16, 163 identity, 20, 71, 85, 107, 109 indifference, 141, 143, 149, 156–61, 165, 167, 169. See also bystander phenomenon individuality, 74, 77–79, 83–84, 138, 163–64 informers, 93, 95, 106 interhuman order, 149–50 intervention, 161–62, 165–69 Israel, 57, 107, 108, 112 James, William, 27 Jerusalem, Israel, 108, 123 Jewish identity, 107–10 Jews, xii, 8, 9, 12–13, 16, 19–20, 27, 31–36, 39, 47, 50, 55–57, 60–62, 69–70, 76–77, 82, 87, 101–2, 104–12, 123, 133, 135, 162–64; destruction of, 104; and dignity, 55–56; as victims, 32–34, 107. See also Danish Jews; German Jews; Greek Jews; Hungarian Jews; Wandering Jew

Jones, David H., 163, 167 Jouvet, Louis, 72 Juárez murders, 147–50, 153–54 Judaism, 37, 150 “just war,” 27 justice, 156 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 43–44, 46–49, 51–52, 55, 57–60, 62–64, 119, 141, 157, 161, 167–68. See also categorical imperative kapos, 77–79 Kassim, Husain, 4, 70, 138 Kieler, Jørgen, 98 Klarsfeld, Serge, 8 knotted words, 6–12 Kofman, Berek, 7–10, 18–19 Kofman, Sarah, v, 3, 5–13, 16–21, 146 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 43–46 Lamont, Rosette C., 129 Lang, Berel, 47 Langer, Lawrence, 75 language, xii, 3, 6–18, 32–34, 39, 44, 52, 69, 139, 144. See also gendered language Le Chambon, France, 137, 168–70 Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, 169 Levi, Primo, 6, 56, 76–77, 79, 84, 87–88, 101, 131 Leviathan, 160 Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 7, 38, 49, 51–52, 69, 82–84, 118, 128, 133–53 Lewinska, Pelagia, 61–62, 64 liberalism, 162–67 Littell, Franklin, 15 Locke, John, 152, 157, 161, 162–63 Lyotard, Jean-François, 138

Jules Simon

Index

Manichean impulse, 33–34 mass killings, 8–9, 12–14 May, Larry, 124 May, Robert, 71 Mayer, Hans, 102, 112 meaninglessness, 142–43 The Measure of Our Days, 80 memory, 6, 40, 83, 128, 146–47, 169 To Mend the World, 55–56, 60 Menzer, Paul, 55 Mexico, 147–48, 153–54 Mill, John Stuart, 162–63, 165, 169–70 mitzvah, 100 modernity, 164–65 moral absolutism, 163 moral activism, 167–69 moral philosophy, 5, 7, 13–14 moral protest, 101 Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust, 163 moral teaching, 96–100 morality, 25, 30, 32, 37, 58–59, 63, 72, 78–79 motives for helping, 94–95 multiculturalism, 49 murder, 139–41, 147–52 Muselmänner, 56, 60–61, 75, 78, 83 mutual reciprocity, 156–57 mutuality, 69, 72, 74, 81, 83, 85 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 7 National Socialism, 4, 16–17, 43–47, 50, 122 Nazi ethic, 16, 26–29, 31–38, 40, 69 Nazi regime: and gender, 145; and idealism, 15–16; and names, 107, 112; and torture, 104; and victims, 32–34; war criminals, 8. See also Adolf Eichmann; Adolf Hitler; Nazi ethic “negative absolute,” 15, 23, 167

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Neiman, Susan, 110 “new ethics,” 6, 12, 51, 135 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 7, 21, 27–30, 34–35, 38, 46, 104, 106 Nightfather, 18 nihilism, 34–35, 40, 128 None of Us Will Return, 72, 82 “noninterference,” 165 nostalgia, 106–8 Nuremberg Laws, 102, 106 Nuremberg trials, 22 obedience, 12–13, 16 Odyssey, 106 Ofer, Dalia, 79 Oliner, Pearl M., 168 Oliner, Samuel P., 168 optimism, xii, 5, 25, 36 “ordinary virtues,” 72 the “other,” 39–40, 48–52, 118, 133–34, 136–44, 146–51 Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, 133, 149 Palestine, 89, 108, 112 Parker, Tam K., 4, 69 Paroles suffoquées, 7, 21 Pascal, Blaise, 145 passive welcome, 143–44 penal reform, 143 perpetrators, 119–20, 124–25, 130–31, 155, 166 pluralism, 14, 52, 165 pogroms, 107 Poland, 61–62, 163–64 political philosophy, 118, 155–70; role for, 164–70; task for, 161–64 power, xiii, 12, 14, 17, 45, 47, 49–51, 139, 151 Protestant Christians, 137, 169 Pundik, Herbert, 99

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Index

rationalizations, 12–13, 22 Ravensbrück, 71–72 reason, 11, 13–15, 23, 46–47, 51–52, 59, 109, 157, 164 “Reception Camp Breendonk,” 103–5, 112 relativism, 14, 34, 37 religion, xiii, 17, 27, 43 rescuers, 168–69. See also Danish rescuers; Le Chambon, France; motives for helping resistance, 18, 31–32, 62, 64, 76–78, 81, 85, 89–96, 99, 101–3, 139–40, 169. See also Belgian resistance; Danish resistance; French Resistance resistance movements, 18–19, 23, 62–64 responsibility, 118, 133, 135–36, 142–44, 148–51, 158–59, 161, 163 revaluation of values, 27–29, 33–36, 38 Ricoeur, Paul, 120, 126 Rorty, Richard, 9 Roth, John, 3–4, 69, 118, 135, 137, 167, 169 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 157, 161 Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 7, 9, 20 Said, Edward, 49–50 The Savage God, 111 science, 45, 51, 164 secularism, 37–38, 47 shame, 78, 149 Simon, Jules, 4, 70, 118 “small deeds,” xiii, 3, 18 Smith, Adam, 157, 161 Smock, Anne, 7 Smothered Words, v, 5, 7, 18–20 social contract, 117, 141, 147, 150 social reform liberalism, 163

SS (Schutzstaffel), 10–13, 16, 77, 82, 87, 103, 125, 156 Stern, Mark, 69 stories, 96–99 subjectivity, 139–44, 150 suffering, xii, 117, 119–23, 125–31, 133–48, 152, 155; domesticating, 117, 122–23; and face-to-face confrontation, 137; just, 144; phenomenology of, 126–30, 133–39; “redeeming,” 121–22, 127–30; as useless, 121, 140–41, 144, 146 suicide, 3, 6–7, 73–74, 92, 101, 108–112, 146; philosophers on, 111 surrogate camp families, 72, 74–85, 128 survivors, xii, 6–7, 9, 18, 72–73, 75–76, 79–80, 86–87, 101, 105, 108, 126, 128, 131. See also suicide Sweden, 72, 89, 91–92, 95, 99 The Symbolism of Evil, 126 Tacitus, 44 Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm, 96 teaching good and evil, 96–100 Tec, Nechama, 162–64 techné, 44–45 testimony, 101, 136 theodicy, 135, 152 Theresienstadt, 92–94 thirst, 129–30 Tikkun, 4, 60–64 Todorov, Tzvetan, 72 torture, 16–17, 23, 56, 72, 96, 98, 101, 103–4, 108–9, 112, 152–53 totalitarianism, 109, 112, 136

Jules Simon

Index

Totality and Infinity, 148–49 trauma, 86 Trautner-Kromann, Hanne, 69, 137 Treblinka, 11, 15, 167 Trocmé, André, 169–70 Trocmé, Magda, 169–70 trust, 23, 104–5, 108, 111 Tzedakah, 99–100 United Nations, 14, 72, 170 United States, 14, 89, 122, 138, 147, 151, 170 universal law, 55, 59, 63 universalism, 47–52, 109 unknotted words, 12–18 useless knowledge, 122, 126–31 Useless Knowledge, 72 utilitarian ethics, xi, 133 utilitarianism, 141–42, 169–70 values, 14, 18, 21, 26–27, 29–30, 33–35, 37. See also revaluation of values victims, 31–34, 36, 61, 73, 75, 99, 101, 105, 107, 119–21, 125–26, 130–31, 136, 155–56, 166; image of, 131

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183

Vienna, Austria, 102 virtue ethics, xi, 133 voluntary death. See Freitod vulnerability, 142, 145, 148, 160 Wandering Jew, 107 Warsaw ghetto, 79 Western civilization, xi, 16, 35, 45, 49–51, 104, 105, 107, 133, 135, 156, 162, 164–65 When Light Pierced the Darkness, 163–64 “The White Rose,” 62–63 Who Will Carry the Word, 73 Wiesel, Elie, 60, 79, 155, 164 will to power, 29–30, 104 witness, 6, 75, 82–86 women, 71–85, 87–88, 127–28, 147–48, 153, 170 words, 6–18 World War I, 102 World War II, 38, 55, 89, 94, 96, 98, 107, 133 Wyman, David S., 159, 170 Yiddish, 107

Jules Simon