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The Nazi Worldview exchange, part 2: ‘Murdering people cannot be an emotionless activity’

[additional-authors]
July 8, 2015

Alon Confino is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and at Ben Gurion University, Israel. Professor Confino received his PhD from Berkley University. He has written extensively and influentially on historical memory, historical method and German history. He has received grants from the Fulbright, Humboldt, DAAD, and Lady Davis foundations, the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, the Social Science Research Council, the Israel Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Professor Confino is the author of four books, and this exchange will focus on his latest book, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014), which received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

You can find part one right here.

***

Dear Professor Confino,

At the end of your first answer you wrote that your book traces the story the Nazis told themselves, “a story that commingled not only racial ideas but also, and fundamentally, religious and national sentiments”.

Your narrative, which offers a vivid description of the religious imagery, utopian vision, and outbursts of national id at the heart of the persecution of the Jews, seems to suggest a paradigm shift: from a cold-hearted, top-to-bottom act of dispassionate bureaucracy, the Holocaust becomes an imagination-motivated crime with a much stronger grassroots component.

Why do you think the Nazis’ crimes are usually presented as examples of cold, efficient acts of dispassionate (and even ‘rational’) monstrosity? Are the Eichmann trial and the things written about it partially to blame? Why do you think no one has taken the intense Nazi imagination seriously thus far?

Yours,

Shmuel.

***

Dear Shmuel,

A World Without Jews seeks to explore Nazi imagination. To achieve this, I attempt to capture emotions and sensibilities expressed in public actions. I look at what the Nazis did because beliefs cannot always be artic­ulated, not even in private letters and diaries, while motivations are often hidden, subterranean, or contradictory. We often tell ourselves stories that we would like to believe about ourselves but that in fact obscure more than they reveal. We ought to look across documents and public actions to establish relations of meaning, to reveal what was thought and believed but was at times kept under wraps because of guilt, shame, repression, or a sense of transgression. Germans’ behavior was both explicit and conscious—that is, what Germans said they were doing, the evidence historians can hope to access easily—and at times inexplicit or uncon­scious but perhaps more fundamental.

The history of emotions is significant here. What was communi­cated emotionally in these public acts—such as the burning of the Hebrew Bible in Kristallnacht–was just as important as what was said in words, indeed often much more important. There is a common view of the persecution and extermination of the Jews as a cold, adminis­trative, industrial process epitomized by Auschwitz. This is of course true, but only in part. There is a tradition in Holocaust historiography of leaving the human element out. The approach called functionalism has interpreted the Holocaust as a result of impersonal administrative, structural state processes, as if history is made by structures, not human beings. Hannah Arendt’s depiction of Adolf Eichmann as the banality of evil contributes to this ultimate view of the Holocaust as made by men lacking qualities and emotions. This image is wrong. The persecution of the Jews in the prewar years was characterized by massive, raw, personal violence, and during the extermination, some two and a half million victims were killed in face-to-face shootings. The persecution and exter­mination of the Jews were fueled by emotions, and all interpretations that avoid, deny, or ignore this must end up in a dead end as to a fundamental human element embedded in the event.

For it is not that the essence of the genocide was emotionless anti-Semitism, but instead that some of the perpetrators presented their actions in such a way. The denial of emotion was a mechanism to deal with feelings of moral unease, transgression, guilt, or shame. Murdering people cannot be an emotionless activity, for human beings, for the most part, are moral beings and like to think of themselves as such. Emotions may be hidden, denied, or subterranean, but they lurk somewhere; they were fundamental to Nazi anti-Semitism at all times, levels, and policies. The question for the historian is how to retrieve them. 

It is important to emphasize that the shift a generation ago to stressing racial ideology as a key motivation of the Nazi killers had already questioned substantially the notion of a cold-hearted, top-to-bottom act of dispassionate bureaucracy. The killers, it has been correctly argued, were armed with a racial worldview that penetrated all levels of society, down to ordinary Germans and soldiers. This argument has shown that the bureaucracy itself was governed by true believers in the idea of genocide. I point this out in order to make clear the history of our understating of the Holocaust. The idea of a cold-hearted Nazis and bureaucracy was modified already a generation ago, and my own study built on this important scholarship on racial ideology.

And yet, as I wrote in my first response, this notion of racial ideology has now become a catch-all idea that explains everything. It itself needs to be revised and rethought in order to lead us to new questions and new understanding of the Holocaust.

It is in this spirit that I decided to explore Nazi fantasies. A key to understanding this world of anti-Semitic fantasies is no longer to account for what happened—the administrative process of extermination, the racial ideological indoctrination by the regime, and the brutalizing war—because we now have sufficiently good accounts of these historical realities. Rather, a key is to account for what the Nazis thought was happening, for how they imagined their world. What was this fantasy created by Nazis and other Germans during the Third Reich, and the story that went along with it, that made the persecution and extermination of the Jews justifiable, conceivable, and imaginable?

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