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PDF FormatHilberg’s work also influenced Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust. Contrary to the cautious historian who prefers to discuss the “hows” instead of the “whys,” Bauman does not shy away from far-reaching statements. His work is a long and eloquent indictment of modernity, which he sees as the birth-mother of Nazism. The Holocaust, Bauman writes, “did not just, mysteriously, avoid clash with the social norms and institutions of modernity. It was these norms and institutions that made the Holocaust feasible.”33 Only an industrialized society, governed by instrumental rationality, could have executed such a diabolical plan in so methodical a manner: “Modern civilization was not the Holocaust’s sufficient condition; it was, however, most certainly its necessary condition. Without it, the Holocaust would be unthinkable. It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust thinkable.”34
The Nazis, maintains Bauman, may not have invented genocide—history has witnessed quite a few exterminations of entire peoples—but they did give it a distinctly modern character. What separates modern genocide from previous forms of mass murder is the fact that it has a specific objective, namely, serving “a grand vision of a better, and radically different, society.”35 The racist social engineering that the Nazis took up so zealously is also an innovation of the modern age: It reflects the desire, nurtured by Western culture since the days of the Enlightenment, to “remake the society, force it to conform to an overall, scientifically conceived plan.”36
To translate this megalomaniacal ambition into practical terms, the Nazis required another modern invention: bureaucracy. Racism, emphasizes Bauman, is “a policy first, ideology second. Like all politics, it needs organization, managers and experts.”37 Like Hilberg and other functionalists, Bauman believes that the extermination was not deliberately planned by Nazi leadership, but “cooked up” by administrators, after all the other ways of expelling the Jews from the Third Reich either were exhausted or had reached a dead end:
The most shattering of lessons deriving from the analysis of the “twisted road to Auschwitz” is that—in the last resort—the choice of physical extermination as the right means to the task of Entfernung was a product of routine bureaucratic procedures: means-end calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application. To make the point sharper still the choice was an effect of the earnest effort to find rational solutions to successive “problems,” as they arose in the changing circumstances…. The “Final Solution” did not clash at any stage with the rational pursuit of efficient, optimal goal-implementation. On the contrary, it arose out of a genuinely rational concern, and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose.38
It is to the typical workings of the bureaucratic apparatus that Bauman points in response to the question of how so many people—for the most part normative individuals—could have been willing accomplices in mass murder. The answer, he argues, lies in the distribution of administrative work. By distancing the perpetrators of destruction from its results, the criminals from the victims, the hierarchical structure of the managerial system served as a moral desensitizer: “What such practical and mental distance from the final product means is that most functionaries of the bureaucratic hierarchy may give commands without full knowledge of their effects. In many cases they would find it difficult to visualize those effects.”39 Moreover, bureaucracy’s tendency to address its subjects in abstract terms—as numbers on a page, a graph curve, or sections of a pie chart—denied the victims their humanity, thereby facilitating their extermination.40 “The overall conclusion,” writes Bauman,
is that the bureaucratic mode of action, as it has been developed in the course of the modernizing process, contains all the technical elements which proved necessary in the execution of genocidal tasks. This mode can be put to the service of a genocidal objective without major revision of its structure, mechanisms and behavioral norms.41
Bauman’s diagnosis leaves no room for doubt: The origin of the Final Solution lies not in the hatred of Jews or any other aspect of Nazi ideology, but in the very essence of modern society. And, since the rational bureaucratic model responsible for the Holocaust has only grown stronger and more established since World War II, one cannot discount the possibility of the atrocities’ recurrence. As Bauman admonishes, “none of the societal conditions that made Auschwitz possible truly disappeared, and no effective measures have been undertaken to prevent such possibilities and principles from generating Auschwitz-like catastrophes.”42
Bauman’s choice of presenting instrumental rationality as the main, if not only, driving force behind the German murder industry lends his work a sensationalist appeal, but it is also its great weakness. The most significant flaw in Bauman’s analysis is his underestimation of the central role of the Nazi worldview in the Final Solution. After all, as Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer argues, this ideology not only gave rise to the extermination process, but constantly drove it toward completion—in spite, and not because, of the involvement of an instrumentally governed administrative system:
From Bauman’s description one would assume that the German bureaucratic machinery was efficient and “modern.” It wasn’t. It often was a fumbling, ineffective, contradiction-ridden machine, where each fiefdom in the Nazi state had its own interests and fought against everyone else to preserve them… the unique efficiency they showed in destroying the Jews, often for pseudo-pragmatic reasons, really showed the remarkable impact of ideology on them.43
Thus, contrary to Bauman’s conclusion that Nazi racism was “policy first, ideology second,” the leaders of the Third Reich made it clear to their subordinates that their commitment to the regime’s antisemitic vision must override any rational consideration, including even the preservation of the German state.44 In 1941, when the Reichskommissar Heinrich Lohse asked Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazi party, if it was necessary to exterminate all the Jews in the East “without taking economic interests into consideration, Wehrmacht needs for skilled workers in the arms industry, for example,” Rosenberg replied that “In principle, no economic consideration whatever will be taken into account in the solution of this problem.”45 Israeli historian Saul Friedlהnder, who recounts this anecdote, notes that “the persecution and massacre of Europe’s Jews did away with a sizeable work force at a times when the Nazi Reich was engaged in the most desperate phases of total war…. According to the statistics, the Final Solution was a loss to the German war economy for which the wealth taken from the victims was no compensation.”46
It is impossible to understand so destructive a policy without recognizing that Nazi ideology was, for the most part, not only irrational—but anti-rational. It cherished the pagan, pre-Christian past of the German nation, adopted romantic ideas of a return to nature and a more “organic” existence, and nurtured an apocalyptic expectation of an end of days, whence the eternal struggle between the races would be resolved. “Nazism is anchored to a relentless quasi-scientific, impersonal determinism and is at the same time shrouded in Teuton-Wagnerian vapors of myth and legend, and haunted by an all-damning fatalism,” wrote eminent Israeli scholar Jacob Talmon.47 The contempt for rationalism and its association with the despised Enlightenment stood at the core of Nazi thought; the movement’s ideologues emphasized the contradiction between weltanschauung (“worldview”), the natural and direct experience of the world, and welt-an-denken (“thinking about the world”), the “destructive” intellectual activity that breaks reality down through conceptualization, calculation, and theorization.48 Against the “degenerate” liberal bourgeois’ worship of reason, the Nazis championed the idea of a vital, spontaneous life, unhindered and undimmed by compromises or dilemmas.
The brave new world the Nazis envisaged could not have tolerated the presence of the Jew, a parasitic and infectious life form. Antisemitism was not just another aspect of Hitler’s vision, but a founding dogma, an obsession that poisoned an entire nation and drove its leader obsessively until his very last moments. True, the racism and passionate hatred of Jews did in fact enlist the services of administrators and technicians—in many ways “normal” people—yet they were never lost in the maze of bureaucratic procedures and cost-effective calculations. They were a permanent factor, an uncompromising motivation, a Dionysian power behind an Apollonian apparatus.49
Bauman and other critics of modernity attach only marginal importance to the irrationality of Nazi antisemitism, eager as they are to broaden the target of their postmodern arrows. However, in their haste to cast the blame for the crimes of the Third Reich on Western civilization at large, they create a biased, erroneous historiography. Such a narrative denies the possibility of understanding the Holocaust and gleaning from it actual lessons for the future. It is not only an intellectual insult; it is also an affront to morality.
