Zygmunt Bauman, lezing op 27-1-2012 Nijmegen

Lezing Zygmunt Bauman

Holocaust Memorial Day Lezing door Zygmunt Bauman
Lessons of the Holocaust
Vrijdag 27 januari 2012, 20.00 - 22.00 uur, Aula Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Soeterbeeck Programma


What was it - and is - about?  
door Zygmunt Bauman, socioloog en filosoof. Hij werkte in zijn geboorteland Polen en in Israël. In 1971 emigreerde hij naar Groot-Brittannië waar hij hoogleraar werd aan de universiteit van Leeds. Hij verwierf wereldfaam met boeken over de postmoderne ‘vloeibare' samenleving. In 1989 publiceerde hij het spraakmakend boek Modernity and the Holocaust.
   The demons haunting and harrowing the 20^th Century were gestated in the course of the resolute efforts to complete the task at which the modern era aimed since its very beginning (indeed, the task whose assumption defined that beginning, having triggered off the mode of life called ‘modern'). The task was to impose a transparent and manageable design over chaos: to bring the world of humans, heretofore vexingly opaque and unruly, bafflingly unpredictable and infuriatingly obstreperous, into order: a complete and unchallenged order. Such order meant absence of everything redundant - whether due to its uselessness or undesirability; of everything causing unhappiness or otherwise confusing and discomforting - that is everything standing in the way to submitting human world to a full and undisturbed control. Ultimately, it meant rendering the permissible obligatory - and eliminating the rest. The conviction that such a feat is plausible, feasible, in sight and within human reach, as well as the irresistible urge to act on that conviction, was and remains the defining attribute of modernity reached its peak with the dawn of the 20^th Century. The modern era was a journey towards perfection - to a state in which the strains of making things better would grind to a halt, as any further interference into the shape of human world could only make it worse. For the same reasons, the modern era was also an era of destruction. The effort to reaching perfection called for eradicating, wiping out and getting rid of innumerable beings unlikely to be accommodated in the perfect scheme of things. Destruction was the very substance of creation: destruction of imperfections was the condition - sufficient as much as necessary condition - of paving the way to perfection. The story of modernity, and particularly of its 20^th Century denouement, was the chronicle of creative destruction. The atrocities marking the course of that ‘short century' (as Eric Hobsbawm dubbed it, having fixed its genuine starting point at 1914 and true ending at 1989) were born of the dream of neatness, purity, clarity and transparency of ultimate perfection.
Attempts to make that dream true were too numerous to be listed here. Two among them stand out however from the rest, due to their unprecedented scale of ambition and uncanny resoluteness. Both deserve to be counted among the ‘ultimate order' dream's fullest and most dazzling renditions; it is against the standards they set that all other attempts, genuine or putative, undertaken, intended or suspected, are measured - and it is their bland and uncompromising thoroughness that hovers in our collective memory as the prototype of all subsequent instances of following the suit - however blunt or disguised and however determined or half-hearted. The two attempts in question are of course the Nazi and the Communist undertakings to eradicate once for all, wholesale and in one felt swoop, every disorderly, opaque, random, control-resisting element or aspect of human condition.
Having thoroughly scrutinized the archives of research outfits and administrative offices of the Nazi establishment, Götz Aly and Susanne Heim insist that in the Nazi policies aimed at redrawing the political, ethnic and social map of Europe the ‘policy of modernization' and the ‘policy of destruction' were intimately connected. The Nazi rulers were determined to enforce on Europe, after its military conquest, ‘new political, economic and social structures, as speedily as possible'[1]. Such intention meant, of course, that reckoning with such historical accidents as the geographic location of ethnic settlements and the resulting distribution of natural resources and labour forces was not on; the essence of power is, after all, the capacity of ignoring such whims of fortune. In a world constructed to order and in a pre-planned and pre-designed, rational fashion, there will be no room for many of the leftovers of haphazard past, unfit or downright damaging for the newly installed order of things. Some populations would need to be deported to other locations, where their capacities could be put to a better use and harnessed to other undertakings. Some other, fit for none of the conceivably profitable purposes, would have to be evicted or exterminated, to clear the ground for the settlement of the worthier.
SS commanders, state servants, scientists, engineers and managers felt all alike dazed and stunned by the grandiosity of the newly conquered and planned to be conquered territories, virtual infinity of their potential prospects and the enormity of tasks which their proper utilization posited. Particularly the East of Europe appeared to them as a vast, indeed boundless fallow yearning for grubbing and stubbing, ploughing and sowing. Just as the anthropologists, medics and biologists preoccupied with ‘healing the national body' applying the scientific criteria of racial purity, of fitness and prowess, as well as of isolation and elimination of defective (unwerte) individuals and categories - economists, agronomists and space planners felt themselves obliged to ‘sanitize social structure' of the conquered lands. The quality of human races, according to the Nazi social engineers, could be improved solely by the annihilation or at least castration of unwertes Leben.[2]
Cynthia Ozick, renown American Jewish novelist, described the Holocaust as a gesture of artist wiping off a smudge that disturbed the harmony of a composition... Such gesture is quite common among artists - and not among the artists alone, given that more or less pronounced artistic predisposition is a human, all too human trait. In the case of the Holocaust, it so happened that the ‘smudge' was composed of men, women and children who did not fit a particular vision of the perfect world - but then every variety of a perfect composition selects and sets aside an assembly of entities or beings unfit to be accommodated (asked how he creates perfect sculptures that were his trademark, Michelangelo replied reputedly that his method is simplicity itself: he takes a block of marble and chops off all unnecessary bits). The mass slaughters of the 20^th Century were exercises in ‘creative destruction', believed to be indispensable for social hygiene; a surgical intervention necessary for enhancement or salvation of life or nations' or churches' survival.
Nazi-inspired exercises were conducted in the very heart of European civilization, science and art - in lands priding themselves of having come closest to fulfilling Francis Bacon's dream of the ‘House of Solomon': a world under undivided and unchallenged rule of reason, itself the most loyal servant of human best interests, comfort and happiness. The idea of tidying up the world through excising and burning out its impurities, as well as the conviction of its feasibility (on the condition of mustering power and will adequate to the task) was hatched in Hitler's mind when strolling along the streets of Vienna, at that time the veritable capital of European science and arts.
At the same time approximately, at the ‘limen' of European modernity, a kindred idea was gestated in the minds of people gazing piously, with a mixture of respect and jealousy, at the other side of the porous border and awestruck by what they saw: the communist idea of chasing, catching up with, and overtaking modern civilization along the racetrack leading towards perfection. The humiliating awareness of having been left behind in that chase encouraged urgency, prompted haste, and suggested a short-cut strategy; it implied the need of condensing into the lifespan of a single generation what on the other side of the limen needed a long string of generations to accomplish. And there was of course a huge price to be paid in pains of the generation chosen to usher into the pain-free world. No sacrifice was deemed excessive when viewed against the charms and nobility of the destination. And no part of extant reality could claim immunity or safe passage on the ground of its past merits, let alone its mere presence-in-the-world. The entry ticket into the world of perfection had to be earned anew. And of course not everybody had the right to line up for tickets: just as any other model of a brave new world, the communist model would not be completed without an inventory of disqualified and refused entry. Unlike the Nazi model, the communist variant insisted on its universalist credentials and declared the world it was bent on constructing to be a home to the whole humanity; all the more important was to make sure that before the construction starts in earnest, humanity has been cleansed of its impurities, that is all those unwelcome, uninvited and disallowed on the building site.
The formula legitimising the communist genocidal acts differed from the justifications of the Nazi-inspired slaughter; but behind the differences in argumentation hid commonality of the premises. The communists and the Nazis agreed that the right to live is not universal, as some humans deserve to live, while some others don't; and that the difference between them is determined by their fitness or unfitness for the new and improved order designed to replace the current, inferior state of affairs. Adoption of those premises would have been however unthinkable, were it not for the modern, all-too modern belief enthusiastically embraced and brought to its logical conclusions by both brands of 20^th Century totalitarianism: belief, as Hannah Arendt put it, in human omnipotence - the firm conviction that everything could be achieved given the right kind of organization. It was that belief which ‘induced them to experiments which human imagination could have perhaps already played with, but human practice has never before undertaken'[3].
Why the self-appointed, self-admitted and self-acclaimed judges self-empowered to pronounce on human un-worthiness to live were not stopped at an early stage, once they made their intentions public, or later, when they climbed, in glaring light, up the ladder of power? One of the paramount reasons was the mainly tacit, yet all too often vociferous admiration of their aims and practices by many of the greatest and most revered minds of time, finding striking resonance between the search for the perfect, total and ultimate order and the ‘progressive thought' of the era. Modern mind in all of its versions called to war against messiness of human condition; it dreamt of the ultimate purity and transparency of social order - indeed, it identified the idea of perfection with the homogeneity of design and elimination of all and any of its pollutants. It would not willingly budge from the ultimate consequence of such an ideal: the need of severely trimming down or better still putting paid once for to human variety which it found unbearably irritating, and earmarking for execution those charged with rendering such variety irreducible. For modern mind, the elimination of inferior/unworthy elements was and act of creation and the principal method of order-building as well as elimination of chaos and randomness, the two devils allied in a war of attrition against the order's divinity. The Nazi and communist visionaries were not primitive savages, whom modern civilization failed or neglected to civilize, but an avant-garde of the modern army, reaching where other units of that army were too shy, too scrupulous, too cowardly, too poorly armed, or just lacking in courage matching their zeal to venture. Fascist movements liked to self-define as ‘ready to act': the idea was available in abundance - it was just the supply of determination to make words flesh that was in deficit.
In years 1960-19792, as Helen Fein pointed out in her vast study of modern crimes of genocide, we can find a quite a few instances of genocide and kindred atrocities. She reminds us of the mass and aimed to be total annihilation of Iraqi Kurds, tribes residing in South Sudan, Tutsi in Rwanda, Hutu in Burundi, Chinese in Indonesia, Hindu and Bengali in Eastern Pakistan, Indians Ache in Peru, and numerous ethnicities of Uganda. Some of us know of some of those incidents, some others never heard of most or all. Only few among us tried to do something to prevent or stop any of them.[4] Those crimes were ‘none of our business' - committed far from our homes and aimed at categories to which none of ‘us' belonged. Though not entirely ‘none of our business', as a matter of fact, they were. Caring for ‘our' comfort and well-being, motivated by noble need to salvage our factories and jobs, our governments kept supplying arms, munitions and poisonous gasses to enable the murderers to proceed.
Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim have shown that destruction of European Jewry could be only fully understood if it is seen as but one, however centrally placed, element of the Nazi comprehensive vision of new Europe differently arranged - geographically, economically and ethnically. In addition to the complete elimination of the Jews, that vision included, as similarly indispensable parts, massive evictions and deportations of populations settled in ‘wrong places' - that is, places nominated for other uses. Established in 1939 and headed by Eichmann infamous Abteilung IVD4was briefed and empowered to set in motion and see through not only the ‘deportation' of Jews, but also resettlements of Poles, Frenchmen, Serbs, Croats, and residents of Luxemburg.
In every genocidal undertaking, as in any categorial discrimination or prosecution, its victims are punished for what they are and for being what they are they are suspected of being capable of doing - not what they do or have done. Once they stay accused, the slightest case of misdemeanour will be avidly recorded and added to the charge, while even most exemplary and praiseworthy acts or flawlessness of their daily conduct won't bring them grace, let alone acquittal. It does not matter whether they meekly submit or rebel, capitulate or fight back: the verdict ‘guilty' won't be affected. It is their executioners and persecutors, and no one else (most certainly not they themselves) who decide who needs to be uprooted and transported, murdered or left to die. Chalk and Jonassohn rightly took that a-symmetry for the defining attribute of genocide; genocide, they opined, is a form of one-sided massacre, through which a state or another authority intends to eliminate a specific category of humans, whereas the category is unilaterally selected, and the criteria of its membership unilaterally decided, by the perpetrators of the genocide'[5]. Before the perpetrators of a genocidal act gain power over life and death of their prospective victims, they must obtain power over their definition. That power consists in denying a priori all significance to what the people classified as a category unworthy-of-life do or desist from doing. Genocide starts from defining a category unworthy of living and proceeds as a ‘categorial murder'. The only guilt of the marked-for-annihilation category is having been accused. And it is their accusers who sit in judgment.
[1] Götz Aly, Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung, Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für die neue europäische Ordnung, Hamburg 1991, s. 14 i s. 482. ‘Initially a small office established on 6th October 1939 with the briefing to coordinate "resettlement of European nations" (Reichskommisariat für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums) turned fast into a powerful institution with numerous branches, employing in addition to its officers thousands of ethnographers, architects, agronomists, accountants and specialists of all imaginable scientific disciplines' (pp. 125-126). See also Götz Aly, reply to Dan Diner, in: Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4/1993.
[2]Comp. Klaus Dörner, Tödliches Mitleid: Zur Frage der Unerträglichkeit des Lebens. Gütersloh 1988, s. 13 i s. 65.
[3] Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
[4] Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective. Sage 1993, s. 6.
[5] Frank Chalk, Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analysis and Case Studies. New Haven 1990, s. 23.