EDITH KURZWEIL
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in Graz - their accommodations to Hitler and their collaboration, by
substituting cardboard myths for a shameful past.
Zygmunt Bauman, while surveying some of the literature on the
Holocaust and the surrounding controversies blames modernity, leaning
heavily on Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy. He holds that the "Final
Solution," far from clashing with the rational pursuit of efficient, optimal
goal implementation (to make Germany
judenfrei), "arose out of a
genuinely rational concern, and was generated by bureaucracy true to its form
and purpose.
"
Thus he goes against the thesis that the Holocaust was a
unique event in Jewish history, an exceptional case of social madness.
Instead, he maintains that the Nazi's links between social engineer–
ing and state control, at the expense of a market-led economy and
"pluralism generating mechanisms," allowed violence to turn into a ra–
tional technique, to be separated from emotions; and that such a situa–
tion may recur whenever social forces get divorced from a state bureau–
cracy in control of the military. This is a familiar argument by those who
equate American involvement in Vietnam to Hitler's expansionist and
genocidal intents, Stalinism to McCarthyism, and Mai Lai to Auschwitz.
I do not mean to excuse such excesses either abroad or at home, and am
as disturbed by them as everyone else. But I find that such blanket com–
parisons are counterproductive when taken out of context, when it is
forgotten that citizens in Nazi Germany inevitably had internalized a
heavily authoritarian ethos.
Bauman avoids these simplifications by demonstrating his familiarity
with the many arguments scholars have constructed about the death
camps, and by integrating a number of their theories into a "sociological
theory of morality." Harking back to Hannah Arendt's point that indi–
vidual moral responsibility was necessary in order to resist socialization
into the Nazi ethos, he holds - against legitimation theories - that indi–
vidual conduct may be moral even if condemned by the group; that a
group may no longer be able to tell right from wrong; and that the re–
sponsibility which presupposes moral behavior was eliminated only after
the Nazi's successes in "establishing" that the Jews were sub-human, not
part
of the German
Volk:
"The Final Solution would not have been
possible without the progressive steps to exclude the Jews from German
society which took place in full view of the public, in their legal form
met with widespread approval, and resulted in the depersonalization and
debasement of the figure of the Jew." The "social production of dis–
tance," which Bauman supplements with the analogy to Milgram's ex–
periment in his laboratory ("assistants" administered ever increasing
amounts of electric shocks to "subjects" behind a screen because they
were told to do so), finally proves that the power of expertise triumphs
