Holocaust: the product of modernity

By Tran Duong

The Holocaust is a tragic, unprecedented and historically unique event. However, the problem with treating the Holocaust as ‘unique’ is that it risks putting it in a realm beyond the possibility of human comprehension, out of reach of customary historical and sociological understandings. The Holocaust was indeed a ‘unique’ and ‘unprecedented’ event but not because of its sociological unapproachability: rather, it was itself a product of our modern civilization, and in particular the emergence of nationalism. Without the necessary conditions generated by modernity, the Holocaust would have been unthinkable.

We tend to equate civilization with the good and beautiful things that are bestowed on the world: the arts, music, literature, philosophy, science and technology, etc. Accordingly, scholarship frequently refers to the Holocaust as a reversion to barbarism - a failure of civilization. However, this narrative is misleading because it diverts our attention away from the parallel existence of potentially destructive features within the civilizing process. Civilization also means slavery, exploitation, advanced-technological warfare, and industrialized extermination camps. Indeed, Bauman (1989) argued that it is wrong to think of civilization and cruelty as antithetical; both creation and destruction are inseparable aspects of this so-called civilization. Hence, the Holocaust was not exceptional or abnormal; it represents the dark side of our modern civilization.

In order to understand how modernity enabled the large-scale genocide of the Holocaust, we need to examine the history of anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular. Discrimination towards the Jews had extended over two millennia, making anti-semitism an indispensable characteristic of Christian Europe. From a religious standpoint, Christianity considered Jews as those who denied the teachings of Christ and subsequently had him executed, generating estrangement towards Jewish people in pre-modern Christian Europe. In fact, to a large extent Christianity’s process of self-identification was interrelated with its rejection of the Jews. From a social and economic standpoint, different social groups often held contrasting views of the Jews. For example, in Poland, the Jews were the brokers between the noble and peasant classes, tasked with collecting the rents and taxes of the lower classes. Whereas nobles viewed them as servants, uncivilized and filthy, to the peasantry and urban folks Jews were seen as a direct exploiter – they were the enemy. Hence, in addition to being despised by both sides, Jews were entangled in a class struggle. Yet although they were hated in many facets of society – from religion and culture to economic and social relations- in the pre-modern era, there was no intense conflict and tension between Jews and other groups of people. Most of the time, Jewish people could accommodate their existence in the prevailing social order of European society thanks to strongly maintained boundaries between groups, which created a segmented structure keeping different parts of society separated. Thus, there was little inter-class communication, as each group lived in its own caste.

However, with the advent of modernity and the introduction of ideas of universalism, boundaries between different segments of the population broke down. Instead of being clearly identified by caste or group, people were increasingly treated as juridically equal individuals. One of the consequences of this was that Jews merged into Christian districts. They were indistinguishable from non-Jewish populations, as they dressed like all others and held similar social stations. Some even assimilated and converted to Christianity. Hence the distinctiveness of ‘self’ and ‘other’ evaporated and Jews dissolved into a now culturally and legally uniform society. In addition, modernity also constructed certain perceptions of the Jews. Many of those averse to capitalism in the 19th century saw capitalism and Judaism as sharing a common fate. Indeed, the rise of capitalism gave the Jews money power and helped them move out of their ghettos and move up the social ladder. Interestingly, this perception of Jews as representative of materialism still exists today.

In Germany, anti-Semitism was not as deep-seated and widespread as in other European countries, such as France. However, the German unification in 1871 and the rise of nationalism altered the fate of the Jewish people living in Germany. The 1871 Constitution adopted by the North German Confederation granted Jews legal equality with other Germans as well as civil and political rights, through the new concept of citizenship. Ostensibly Jewish emancipation should have been a positive development for the Jewish people. Instead, when combined with the more sophisticated techniques of control developed in line with the process of modernization, it set the stage for a new tragedy of mass oppression. Modern anti-Semitism marked a new episode in the history of anti-Jewishness, in which the separation of the Jews now became an issue that needed to be rationalized, administered, technologically designed and managed. The separation between Jews and other groups lost its naturalness as in the pre-modern era. In fact, modern anti-Semitism was no longer about the great difference between the‘self’ and the ‘other’, but its great absence, and the need to reconstruct it through the instruments of modernity. In addition, nationalism enabled the persecution of Jews through one of its key components, the concept of allegiance. The need for loyalty to the nation is a permanent feature of nationalist rhetoric, and can be found in many of Bismarck or Hitler’s speeches. Yet because the Nazis viewed the Jewish people as in a state of ‘ubiquitously homelessness’, their disloyalty and unnationalistic feeling for Germany was assumed, turning them into threat for the nation.

Therefore, the rise of nationalism not only redefined Jewish identity, it also produced a new imperative: the extermination of the enemy within, for the sake of an ideal, perfect and conflict-free society. The process of and the Holocaust itself was like a gardening job for the Nazi regime, with its propaganda replete with images of Jewish uncleanness and filth. The Nazis created an illusionary image of the Jews to support an artificially constructed social hierarchy, and to justify the elimination of Jewish ‘impurity’ for the sake of racial hygiene. Furthermore, the enactment of the Holocaust was distinctively modern. The extermination of the Jewish people was designed and managed discreetly, and argued for rationally by the Nazi modern bureaucratic apparatus. Nazi bureaucracy carefully embedded the task of Entfernung [removal] within a scheme of “means-ends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application”. For instance, the project to remove the Jews to Madagascar was eventually rejected because of concerns over its cost-deficiency and distance-difficulty. Instead, it was decided that it would be more expedient and less costly to execute them all in order to create an ideal and perfect society characterized by ‘purity’ and ‘cleanness’.

The Holocaust is not an aberration in the trajectory of the civilizing process, but rather an outcome generated by the very process of modernization, in concomitance with the rise of nationalism. It is scary to think that the idea of modernity, implemented by the nation-state, in search of a purposefully designed, fully controlled, and conflict-free society – a gardening society – is potentially genocidal, and thus that a large-scale Holocaust-like event could happen again in the future.

By Tran Duong

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