Abstract
According to the unreliable Hermann Rauschning, Hitler once proclaimed the following:
Two worlds face one another — the men of God and the men of Satan! The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god. He must have come from another root of the human race. I set the Aryan and the Jew over against each other; and if I call one of them a human being I must call the other something else. The two are as widely separated as man and beast. Not that I would call the Jew a beast. He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans. He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature.1
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Notes
Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), 238.
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).
J.L. Talmon, ‘Mission and Testimony: The Universal Significance of Modern Anti-Semitism’, in J.L. Talmon, The Unique and the Universal: Some Historical Reflections (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965), 163.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 15;
Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice: in Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism’, Political Theory, 20, 2 (1992), 202–46.
Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), 327–56.
See also Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996);
Kenan Malik, ‘Making a Difference: Culture, Race and Social Policy’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39, 4 (2005), 361–78;
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). For a thoughtful discussion of the ‘postessentialist’ problem, that is, ‘how to get away from the negative consequences of identity politics without simply returning to notions of universalism, Reason, and the unified subject’,
see Susan Rubin Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), epilogue (here 237).
Cited in Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide: Crawford House, 2000), 44.
Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (1919), cited in Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (London: John Murray, 2002), 39.
Shiraz Dossa, ‘Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 13, 2 (1980), 309–23. For the term animal laborans, as well as the other human types described by Arendt, Homo faber, and animal rationale,
see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
See also Mary G. Dietz, ‘Arendt and the Holocaust’, in Dana Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86–109 for a convincing discussion of the importance of the terms developed in The Human Condition as a response to the Holocaust;
Richard Shorten, ‘Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism: Moral Equivalence and Degrees of Evil in Modern Political Violence’, in Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds.), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 173–90 for a demonstration of the fact that Arendt’s categories developed with reference to Stalinism and Nazism can be used to think about nineteenth-century imperialism. It is also worth noting, as Ira Katznelson points out, that Arendt’s Eurocentrism was ‘not celebratory’, but was meant to act as an impetus for Europe to set its house in order. See his Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 70.
See also Alfons Söllner, ‘Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in its Original Context’, European Journal of Political Theory, 3, 2 (2004), 219–38,
and Pascal Grosse, ‘From Colonialism to National Socialism to Postcolonialism: Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism’, Postcolonial Studies, 9, 1 (2006), 35–52.
Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 4 March 1951, in Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (eds.), Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969 (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992), 166.
For discussions see Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 88–100;
Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 11–38.
Hannah Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)’, in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Uncollected and Unpublished Works by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 316.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979), 458.
It is important here to note Eric Voegelin’s criticism of Arendt in his important review of Origins: ‘A “nature” cannot be changed or transformed; a “change of nature” is a contradiction of terms; tampering with the “nature” of a thing means destroying the thing.’ For Voegelin this suggested that Arendt had adopted the same ‘immanentist ideology’ as the ‘totalitarians’. See ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, The Review of Politics, 15, 1 (1953), 74–75. However, Arendt’s response seems to me entirely justified, not just when she argued that the ‘problem of the relationship between essence and existence in Occidental thought seems to me to be a bit more complicated and controversial than Voegelin’s statement on “nature” (identifying a “thing as a thing” and therefore incapable of change by definition) implies’, but also in her assertion that she was not advocating such a change but only recognising that the attempt to change human nature (irrespective of whether this is possible) was the aspiration of totalitarian regimes. Arendt’s ‘A Reply to Voegelin’ is in The Review of Politics, 15, 1 (1953), 76–84 and is reprinted in Essays in Understanding, 401–08.
Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen (Frankfurt/M: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998);
Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998);
Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London: Arnold, 1999).
Christian Gerlach, ‘The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s Decision in Principle to Exterminate all European Jews’, Journal of Modern History, 70, 4 (1998), 759–812.
See also Gerlach’s response to critics in Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, 155–66, and, for a different approach, Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26–57.
See also Bogdan Musial, ‘The Origins of “Operation Reinhard”: The Decision-Making Process for the Mass Murder of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement’, Yad Vashem Studies, 28 (2000), 113–53;
Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002).
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (London: Picador, 1999), 17.
Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London: HarperCollins, 1992).
Statement of Kurt Werner in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess (eds.), ‘Those Were the Days’: The Holocaust as Seen by the Perpetrators and Bystanders (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993), 67.
See also Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), for more examples.
Alain Finkielkraut, L’Humanité perdue: essai sur le XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 69.
See also Alon Confino, ‘Fantasies about the Jews: Cultural Reflections on the Holocaust’, History & Memory, 17, 1&2 (2005), 296–322.
Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern’, in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds.), Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106.
Jankiel Wiernik, ‘One Year in Treblinka’, in Lawrence L. Langer (ed.), Art from the Ashes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 30–31.
See my ‘Modernity and Violence: Theoretical Reflections on the Einsatzgruppen’, in History, Memory and Mass Atrocity, 1–14. For useful studies on the social psychology of genocide see Steven K. Baum, ‘A Bell Curve of Hate?’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6, 4 (2004), 567–77;
Herbert C. Kelman, ‘Violence without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers’, Journal of Social Issues, 29, 4 (1973), 25–61;
John M. Darley, ‘Social Organization for the Production of Evil’, Psychological Inquiry, 3, 2 (1992), 199–218;
Albert Bandura, ‘Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 3 (1999), 193–209.
See the drawings in Thomas Geve, Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1987).
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce (London: Abacus, 1987), 48.
Rudolf Reder, ‘Bełz˙ec’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 13 (2000), 282.
Zalman Gradowski, ‘Writings’, in Ber Mark (ed.), The Scrolls of Auschwitz (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1985), 175. On the ‘Scrolls’,
Alan Adelson (ed.), The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 170.
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 174.
Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), 330.
Naomi Samson, Hide: A Child’s View of the Holocaust (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 74–75.
Adina Blady Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 45.
Pelagia Lewinska, Twenty Months at Auschwitz (1968),
cited in Emil Fackenheim, ‘The Spectrum of Resistance during the Holocaust: An Essay in Description and Definition’, Modern Judaism, 2, 2 (1982), 123.
Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 1;
Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. Abraham I. Katsh (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965), 225, entry for 17 November 1940.
Hannah Arendt, ‘Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps’, in Essays in Understanding, 236. See also the discussion in Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 317–38;
and Amos Goldberg, ‘If This Is a Man: The Image of Man in Autobiographical and Historical Writing during and after the Holocaust’, Yad Vashem Studies, 33 (2005), 381–429.
On the Muselmann see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999). Whilst Agamben inappropriately makes the Muselmann the figure for the Holocaust survivor on the basis of far too small a selection of texts, this is nevertheless one of the few works that have attempted a theoretical analysis of the meaning of the Muselmann.
For a critique of Agamben see Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 144–94.
Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente (Munich: Saur, 1987), vol. 3, 628 (entry for 2 November 1940). One should note here the tension that often occurs in Nazi rhetoric between describing Jews as ‘animals’, as Goebbels does here, and describing them, as Hitler does in my epigraph, as ‘counter-humans’, that is, something other than animals. Similarly, Himmler referred to Slavs but not to Jews as ‘human animals’.
See his speech of 4 October 1943, in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1988), vol. 3, 920.
On the Holocaust as ‘salvation’, see Michael Ley, Genozid als Heilserwartung: Zum nationalsozialistischen Mord am europäischen Judentum, 2nd edn (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1995);
Michael Ley, Holokaust als Menschenopfer: Vom Christentum zur politischen Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2002);
Klaus Vondung, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion: Potentials and Limitations of an Analytical Concept’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6, 1 (2005), 87–95.
Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 73 (‘cockroaches’), 258 (‘work’).
Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Coercion and Consent in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (London: John Murray, 2005);
and the controversial Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer, 2005).
See Darryl Li, ‘Echoes of Violence’, in Nicolaus Mills and Kira Brunner (eds.), The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 117–28.
For the numbers involved, see Scott Straus, ‘How Many Perpetrators Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? An Estimate’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6, 1 (2004), 85–98.
John A. Berry and Carol Pott Berry, ‘Introduction: Collecting Memory’, in John A. Berry and Carol Pott Berry (eds.), Genocide in Rwanda: A Collective Memory (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1999), 5.
See Mark Levene, ‘Rwanda: The Aftermath’, Patterns of Prejudice, 35, 2 (2001), 87–94.
Steven E. Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 55.
For further discussion see Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (eds.), Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).
The Cambodian genocide too provides many examples of this attack on ‘the human’, not just on individual human beings. A satisfactory analysis of Cambodian survivor testimonies requires a separate study, but for a starting point see Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘L’amémoire du génocide cambodgien, ou comment s’en débarrasser’, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, 181 (2004), 317–37.
See the discussion in Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 174–75, and Berry and Berry (eds.), Genocide in Rwanda, 113–15.
Ignace Rukiramacumu in Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 47.
Thomas Kamilindi, journalist, ‘Witness Testimony’, in Berry and Berry (eds.), Genocide in Rwanda, 16. On the international community, see Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2000);
Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004).
Robert Antelme, The Human Race (Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro Press, 1992). Antelme writes (219–20): ‘there are not several human races, there is only one human race. It’s because we’re men like them that the SS will finally prove powerless before us. It’s because they shall have sought to call the unity of this human race into question that they’ll finally be crushed. … And we have to say that everything in the world that masks this unity, everything that places beings in situations of exploitation and subjugation and thereby implies the existence of various species of mankind, is false and mad’.
Here the discussion would need to consider the writings of Georges Bataille on the one hand and Emmanuel Levinas on the other hand. There is no space here for such a discussion but, for a start, see Samuel Moyn, ‘Judaism Against Paganism: Emmanuel Levinas’s Response to Heidegger and Nazism in the 1930s’, History & Memory, 10, 1 (1998), 25–58.
For the text of 1950 and 1952 UNESCO statements on race, see Ashley Montagu, Race, Science and Humanity (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1963), 172–83.
Also Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History: The Race Question in Modern Science (Paris: UNESCO, 1958).
I am indebted here to Richard H. King, Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940– 1970 (Washington, DC/Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 313–16. See also Gilroy, Between Camps,
and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), for the idea of evil as one facet of human freedom.
Françoise Dastur, ‘Three Questions to Jacques Derrida’, in Arleen B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott (eds.), Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 34.
Hannah Arendt, ‘Fernsehgespräch mit Thilo Koch’, in Ursula Ludz (ed.), Ich will verstehen: Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk (Munich: Piper, 1996), 40.
Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (London: Elek Books, 1956 [orig. French ed. 1953]), 286.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 25–26.
Agamben, The Open, 27. Cf. 37, where Agamben writes: ‘it is enough to move our field of research ahead a few decades [from Haeckel writing in the 1890s], and instead of this innocuous pale-ontological find [i.e. Homo alalus, the “ape-man”] we will have the Jew, that is, the non-man produced within the man, or the néomort and the overcomatose person, that is, the animal separated within the human body itself’. On the inappropriateness of talking about ‘beasts’ to describe human evil, see Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), 35–42.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 459. Or, as the German émigré scholar Sebastian Haffner wrote about the second generation of Nazis: ‘the question arises in all seriousness as to whether these beings are still to be called men. Physically, to all appearance, they are still men; spiritually, no more.’ Germany Jekyll and Hyde: An Eyewitness Analysis of Nazi Germany (London: Libris, 2005 [orig. 1940]), 63. For examples of Nazi theorising about the exclusion of the Jews from the definition of ‘human’ see Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 2004), 70–71.
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Stone, D. (2013). The Holocaust and ‘The Human’. In: The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029539_5
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