“Everyone’s a victim”: Relativizing Auschwitz with Adorno

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Aus­chwitz was lib­er­ated 72 years ago today. In hon­or of In­ter­na­tion­al Holo­caust Re­mem­brance Day, I am re­post­ing a re­cent art­icle by Ingo Elbe on a new book by Marc Nich­olas Som­mer. Elbe is au­thor of the ex­traordin­ar­ily thor­ough over­view Marx im West­en: Die neue Marx-Lek­tü­re in der Bun­des­rep­ub­lik seit 1965. The first chapter of this book has been trans­lated and pub­lished over at View­point, which every­one ought to read. He con­tac­ted me about this short re­view, and en­cour­aged me to re­pub­lish it.

Some brief com­ments of my own, be­fore pro­ceed­ing to Elbe’s art­icle. First of all re­gard­ing the act­ors. Read­ers of this blog will doubt­less be fa­mil­i­ar with Theodor Wiesen­grund Ad­orno, a mu­si­co­lo­gist and lead­ing crit­ic­al the­or­ist of the In­sti­tut für So­zi­al­for­schung. Günther An­ders, ali­as Stern, like­wise con­trib­uted to the In­sti­tut’s journ­al from time to time, though he was nev­er a mem­ber. An­ders was also the first hus­band of the fam­ous Ger­man-Amer­ic­an polit­ic­al philo­soph­er Han­nah Aren­dt. Like her (as well as Her­bert Mar­cuse, an­oth­er mem­ber of the Frank­furt School), he was a one­time stu­dent of the in­flu­en­tial Nazi pro­fess­or Mar­tin Heide­g­ger. In 1948, An­ders up­braided his former mas­ter in a scath­ing po­lem­ic “On the Pseudo-Con­crete­ness of Heide­g­ger’s Philo­sophy.”

Jean Améry, pseud­onym of Hanns Chaim May­er, was an Aus­tri­an es­say­ist based in Brus­sels, Bel­gi­um. Un­like either An­ders or Ad­orno, he sur­vived the Aus­chwitz death camp. Between 1962 and 1966, he wrote a series of re­flec­tions on his ex­per­i­ences there, com­piled un­der the title At the Mind’s Lim­its. It is a haunt­ing, angry col­lec­tion, not­able for its ab­so­lute un­will­ing­ness to for­give any­one com­pli­cit in per­pet­rat­ing the Judeo­cide. Philo­soph­ic­ally Améry in­clined to­ward Sartrean ex­ist­en­tial­ism rather than crit­ic­al the­ory. He was gen­er­ally un­im­pressed by Ad­orno, whose 1964 study of The Jar­gon of Au­then­ti­city he lam­pooned in his own 1967 tract, Jar­gon der Dia­lek­tik. Con­tem­por­ary the­or­ists who draw in­spir­a­tion from both Améry and Ad­orno — such as Joachim Bruhn, of the hard anti-Ger­man magazine Ba­hamas — have at­temp­ted to re­con­cile the rift in rather tor­tur­ous fash­ion, seek­ing to es­tab­lish com­mon ground.

Elbe sides, some­what sur­pris­ingly, with Améry in this par­tic­u­lar dis­pute. That is to say, he be­lieves Améry is bet­ter able to grasp the spe­cificity of Aus­chwitz. Ad­orno is con­victed by Elbe of the very “iden­tity-think­ing” [Iden­ti­täts­den­ken] de­cried at length in Neg­at­ive Dia­lectics, set­ting up a false equi­val­ence between the de­lib­er­ate murder of European Je­w­ry by the Nazis at Aus­chwitz and the in­dis­crim­in­ate mas­sacre of Ja­pan­ese ci­vil­ians by the Amer­ic­ans at Hiroshi­ma. One aimed at an­ni­hil­a­tion, the oth­er at ca­pit­u­la­tion. Here I cer­tainly ac­know­ledge the valid­ity of the dis­tinc­tion Elbe is try­ing to make, but am less bothered by Ad­orno’s in­clu­sion of Hiroshi­ma along­side Aus­chwitz (one could men­tion any num­ber of oth­er at­ro­cit­ies) as an ex­ample of the un­par­alleled bar­bar­ism of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, fol­low­ing the fail­ure to tran­scend cap­it­al in its open­ing dec­ades. Stal­in’s GU­Lag ar­chipelago dis­turbs me just as much, if not more, des­pite the fact they were nev­er meant to ex­term­in­ate the in­mates. For they rep­res­en­ted the be­tray­al of com­mun­ism, which was at least sup­posed to prom­ise a bet­ter world, as Primo Levi poin­ted out, where­as with fas­cism the con­cen­tra­tion camps fol­lowed from first prin­ciples.

Per­haps this is in­dic­at­ive of a broad­er dis­agree­ment between Elbe and my­self, and by ex­ten­sion Améry. While I am awake to the dangers of left an­ti­semit­ism, I do not be­lieve that any and all op­pos­i­tion to Is­rael is an­ti­semit­ic. Améry’s charge that anti-Zion­ism had be­come “the re­spect­able an­ti­semit­ism” by the 1970s may ring true in some in­stances, and he provides sev­er­al com­pel­ling ex­amples where this is the case. (Just a couple weeks ago, a Ger­man court ruled that torch­ing a syn­agogue near Düsseldorf is a le­git­im­ate form of anti-Zion­ist protest). Yet I be­lieve that it is pos­sible to op­pose the Zion­ism with­in an anti-na­tion­al­ist frame­work which does not view it as ex­cep­tion­al, the his­tor­ic­al pe­cu­li­ar­it­ies not­with­stand­ing. However, I do share Elbe’s dis­may at the cheer­lead­ing that fre­quently goes on among West­ern left­ists for Is­lam­ist groups that spout some brand of anti-im­per­i­al­ist rhet­or­ic. So there is prob­ably a great deal we’d agree on. En­joy his art­icle.

“The world as a concentration camp”

Ingo Elbe
History-Net
1.27.2017
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…re­du­cing tor­ment­or and tor­men­ted to the com­mon de­nom­in­at­or “vic­tims,” by means of a dia­lect­ic­al pi­rou­ette.

— Jean Améry¹

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In his book The Concept of Neg­at­ive Dia­lectics,² Marc Nich­olas Som­mer claims to re­con­struct Theodor Ad­orno’s neg­at­ive philo­sophy of his­tory as a “philo­sophy of his­tory from the view­point of the vic­tims” (294). Som­mer sug­gests, fol­low­ing Ad­orno,³ that “since World War II every sub­ject” has be­come “a po­ten­tial vic­tim of his­tory” (295). “Every single one” could now “po­ten­tially” ex­per­i­ence him­self as a vic­tim of “the ut­most ex­treme” [„des Äu­ßers­ten“] (295). Con­cur­ring with Ad­orno, Som­mer defines “the ut­most ex­treme” as “‘de­lu­sion­al pre­ju­dice, op­pres­sion, gen­o­cide, and tor­ture.””⁴ Also in ac­cord­ance with Ad­orno, Som­mer some­times uses the phras­ing the “ever-present cata­strophe”⁵ (325) in­stead of the ut­most ex­treme. In­deed, Som­mer read­ily con­cedes “that not every single one ac­tu­ally ex­per­i­ences him­self as a po­ten­tial vic­tim” (325) and in­so­far per­haps people liv­ing in more or less func­tion­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al states have bet­ter pro­tec­tion against “the ut­most ex­treme” than those liv­ing in au­thor­it­ari­an states and un­der dic­tat­or­ships, but — and this is his main ar­gu­ment — “with the nuc­le­ar bomb a new power has ap­peared,” mak­ing the “ut­most ex­treme” pos­sible for every per­son. In agree­ment with Günther An­ders he refers to his dia­gnos­is that “‘the threat of nuc­le­ar war […] trans­forms the world in­to a hope­less con­cen­tra­tion camp‘“⁶(325). Som­mer uses the term “con­cen­tra­tion camps” for be­ing at the mercy of the “ar­bit­rar­i­ness of the guards,” for the ir­rel­ev­ance of one’s own be­ha­vi­or re­gard­ing the ques­tion of wheth­er one be­comes a vic­tim or not, and for a not fur­ther spe­cified ex­term­in­a­tion. Fur­ther de­tails are not giv­en. Else­where, he uses the term “Aus­chwitz” in­stead of “con­cen­tra­tion camp” (or simply “camp”). Som­mer defines the term Aus­chwitz — once again in ref­er­ence to Ad­orno — as “‘ad­min­is­trat­ive murder of mil­lions.””⁷ With the nuc­le­ar bomb the “ex­per­i­ence of camp in­mates” has been gen­er­al­ized, “that the dis­aster of the ar­bit­rar­i­ness of the guards can be­fall them at any giv­en time, re­gard­less of their be­ha­vi­or.” The nuc­le­ar bomb trans­forms the world in­to a con­cen­tra­tion camp be­cause it con­stantly threatens us with the pos­sib­il­ity of total ex­term­in­a­tion — re­gard­less of how we be­have.” (295f.)

In my opin­ion, Som­mer can jus­ti­fi­ably refer to some state­ments with­in the writ­ings of Ad­orno, and in­so­far he should be thanked for put­ting these tend­en­cies in the open which many Ad­orno-dis­ciples like to ig­nore. My fo­cus here is not on Ad­orno him­self — a crit­ic­al ana­lys­is of his work re­gard­ing these tend­en­cies has not yet been achieved. I be­lieve it it is of more im­port­ance that Som­mer‘s (and partly Ad­orno’s too and en­tirely An­ders’) state­ments are down­right text­book ex­amples for “iden­tity think­ing” in the worst pos­sible sense, un­der­stood here as iden­ti­fic­a­tion of ac­tu­ally very dif­fer­ent facts by in­dis­crim­in­ately sub­sum­ing spe­cif­ic phe­nom­ena un­der one gen­er­al term (for ex­ample “the ut­most ex­treme,” “the cata­strophe,” “the neg­at­ive,” “bar­bar­ity,” “ex­term­in­a­tion,” et cet­era). In the fol­low­ing, I will briefly il­lus­trate that Som­mer’s neg­at­ive philo­sophy of his­tory — in a sug­gest­ive and fac­tu­ally un­jus­ti­fi­able man­ner — iden­ti­fies the neg­at­ive con­tinu­ity of the his­tory of dom­in­a­tion for thou­sands of years (suf­fer­ing, op­pres­sion, ali­en­a­tion), mod­ern tech­nic­al overkill po­ten­tials (nuc­le­ar bomb) and the Shoah (“Aus­chwitz”) and thereby brings about a ver­it­able re­la­tiv­iz­a­tion of Aus­chwitz that al­lows a “crit­ic­al” ex­culp­a­tion of the per­pet­rat­ors re­spons­ible for the Shoah (and their rep­res­ent­at­ives today). It is not my in­ten­tion at all to “un­dia­lect­ic­ally” di­vide “his­tory in­to civil­iz­a­tion and bar­bar­ity”⁸, but — with all ex­ist­ing con­tinu­it­ies — to sharpen the per­spect­ive re­gard­ing “the ut­most ex­treme.”

I. It would be help­ful if Som­mer clearly defined the dif­fer­ence between ex­term­in­a­tion camps⁹ and oth­er Na­tion­al So­cial­ist con­cen­tra­tion camps. For the un­der­stand­ing of the spe­cif­ics of the Shoah — that is “Aus­chwitz” (360), which Som­mer also uses — it is ne­ces­sary to re­flect upon this cru­cial dif­fer­ence. In place of this re­flec­tion, Som­mer uses the terms men­tioned be­fore (ar­bit­rar­i­ness, in­no­cence) and a dif­fuse term of ex­term­in­a­tion which re­mains un­told who should be ex­term­in­ated by whom and why. We will see that these un­cer­tain­ties with­in the term ex­term­in­a­tion are con­stitutive for Som­mer’s fur­ther reas­on­ing.

II. Ar­bit­rar­i­ness and tor­ture as well as the de­ten­tion of in­no­cent people in camps are not spe­cif­ics of Na­tion­al So­cial­ism, but to a great ex­tent fea­tures of oth­er “to­tal­it­ari­an” re­gimes. Fur­ther­more, mass murder of in­no­cent people, the an­onym­ous death, cruel tor­ture and ex­e­cu­tion prac­tices were an in­teg­ral part of many his­tor­ic wars and crimes. Why pre­cisely “Aus­chwitz” and not the cru­sades or the so called “Mon­gol in­va­sion of Europe” are con­sidered the “turn­ing point […]” (360) in his­tory, the “break of civil­iz­a­tion,” re­mains in­com­pre­hens­ible. If Som­mer ar­gued that this state­ment that the in­di­vidu­al be­ha­vi­or of people has ab­so­lutely no in­flu­ence in re­gards to the pos­sible vic­tim status, means that they have been des­ig­nated by a to­tal­it­ari­an ideo­logy as en­emies who have to be com­bated and ex­term­in­ated without al­tern­at­ive simply be­cause they ex­ist or cer­tain at­trib­utes are pro­jec­ted onto them, this would be a pos­sible dif­fer­ence from for ex­ample the “Mon­gol in­va­sion of Europe.” Som­mer omits such dif­fer­en­ti­ations as his reas­on­ing is on a totally dif­fer­ent level which ig­nores the ideo­lo­gic­al mo­tiv­a­tion com­pletely. I will come back to this point (see IV).

III. The fact that they were ad­min­is­trat­ively or­gan­ized “may have been the least of their prob­lems for the ghetto-, con­cen­tra­tion camp-, and ex­term­in­a­tion camp-in­mates.”¹⁰ The topos Som­mer quotes, and which Ad­orno as well as Aren­dt and An­ders equally refer to, the “in­dus­tri­al” or “ad­min­is­trat­ive mass murder” or — as Som­mer also la­bels it — “or­gan­ized mass murder […],” is equally use­less for the un­der­stand­ing of the spe­cif­ics of the Shoah. And there­fore for the un­der­stand­ing of the “break of civil­iz­a­tion.” It does not take in­to con­sid­er­a­tion the fact that ap­prox­im­ately 40% of the six mil­lion murdered Jews, not to men­tion the oth­er vic­tims of the Nazis, wer­en’t gassed in “death factor­ies” but rather con­ven­tion­ally shot and slain be­hind the front­lines.¹¹ It also dis­reg­ards the ideo­lo­gic­al mo­tiv­a­tion of many per­pet­rat­ors and their at times vast free­dom of ac­tion.¹² Ul­ti­mately this res­ults in the false be­lief that the al­legedly “in­dus­tri­al” and “ad­min­is­trat­ive” meth­od of murder is spe­cif­ic to the Shoah, in­stead of the unique in­tent to murder and its con­sequent ex­e­cu­tion.

IV. Som­mer could now re­spond that he is not con­cerned with the spe­cif­ics of the Shoah. And he in­deed ul­ti­mately con­siders “Aus­chwitz” and “Hiroshi­ma” equally as his­tor­ic­al “turn­ing points.” Here be­gins an­oth­er prob­lem­at­ic if not to say: a cata­stroph­ic blur­ring of all im­port­ant his­tor­ic­al and polit­ic­al dif­fer­ences. Why does the nuc­le­ar bomb ac­cord­ing to An­ders and Som­mer trans­form the world in­to a “con­cen­tra­tion camp”? This reas­on­ing con­sists of the al­leged sim­il­ar­it­ies of “con­cen­tra­tion camp” and nuc­le­ar threat, where­as “con­cen­tra­tion camp” is now more dis­tinctly con­noted with a not fur­ther spe­cified “ex­term­in­a­tion”: Firstly, the threat of nuc­le­ar death is one that is in “no re­la­tion any­more” (295) to the ac­tions of the threatened. Secondly, the nuc­le­ar bomb threatens hu­man­ity with “total ex­term­in­a­tion” (296). In this case, Som­mer cat­egor­izes his­tor­ic­ally rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent as­pects in­to poor ab­strac­tions: “in­no­cence” of the vic­tims and their “ex­term­in­a­tion.”

The spe­cif­ics of the Nazi ex­term­in­a­tion camps however do not con­sist of the prac­tice or the threat of in­dis­crim­in­ate ex­term­in­a­tion of all people. Primar­ily, the goal was to murder Jews — namely to murder each and every Jew — be­cause they were de­clared by the Na­tion­al So­cial­ist ideo­logy to be the “evil, sub­vers­ive, ab­stract ele­ment” of mod­ern­ity per se, the “en­emy of na­tions.” This de­clar­a­tion of enmity had noth­ing to do with the be­ha­vi­or of real Jews. Som­mer’s reas­on­ing ab­stracts from these spe­cif­ics of the total-gen­o­cid­al antisemit­ic mo­tiv­a­tion,¹³ where­as only their im­ple­ment­a­tion con­sti­tutes the break in civil­iz­a­tion, the rad­ic­al dif­fer­ence to the Mon­gol in­va­sion and to simple “op­pres­sion,” to un­spe­cified “gen­o­cide” and to “tor­ture.” Even though one could (and should) ac­cuse Ad­orno of such poor ab­strac­tions, at least it is also Ad­orno, with his Erich Fromm trained thoughts re­gard­ing the au­thor­it­ari­an char­ac­ter and his, by all means am­bi­val­ent, stud­ies on antisemit­ism, who sig­ni­fic­antly con­trib­uted to the un­der­stand­ing of the spe­cif­ics of the Shoah. Som­mer bur­ies these as­pects of Ad­orno’s think­ing be­neath his own ver­sion of a neg­at­ive philo­sophy of his­tory.

The threat of total ex­term­in­a­tion of all hu­man life, which em­an­ates from the po­ten­tial use of the nuc­le­ar bomb,¹⁴ is to be­gin with an ideo­lo­gic­ally-polit­ic­ally com­pletely un­defined threat. In­deed, it is not a mat­ter of tech­nic­al pos­sib­il­it­ies of ex­term­in­a­tion, but rather a mat­ter of who wants to ex­term­in­ate who and with what in­tent. Even if in the course of the bloc con­front­a­tion hu­man­ity had been elim­in­ated by a nuc­le­ar war we would be deal­ing with something en­tirely dif­fer­ent from Aus­chwitz, be­cause de­claredly neither of the two sides had the in­ten­tion to ex­term­in­ate hu­man­ity per se and neither side had ex­pressed a de­clar­a­tion of enmity ana­logue to the Na­tion­al So­cial­ist one. Neither the USA nor the USSR for ex­ample — even with all the enmity between them — viewed the en­tire pop­u­la­tion of the op­pos­i­tion as “the epi­tome of evil” and “para­sites to be erad­ic­ated.”¹⁵ But if for ex­ample lead­ing rep­res­ent­at­ives of the Is­lam­ist re­gime in Ir­an con­sider erad­ic­at­ing Is­rael with a nuc­le­ar bomb,¹⁶ then there are in fact sim­il­ar­it­ies between the ex­term­in­a­tion com­mit­ted by Na­tion­al So­cial­ism and the ex­term­in­a­tion which the nuc­le­ar bomb is sup­posed to cause. It is es­sen­tial that we have to an­swer this ques­tion on an ideo­lo­gic­al-polit­ic­al level and that it is fu­tile to com­pare tech­nic­al threats to ideo­lo­gic­ally mo­tiv­ated polit­ics of ex­term­in­a­tion. In this case not only are not­ari­al charges be­ing com­pared to red beets, they are be­ing iden­ti­fied.¹⁷ In this re­spect, Ad­orno’s state­ment that “nuc­le­ar bomb and gas cham­ber have fatal struc­tur­al sim­il­ar­it­ies”¹⁸ is also either trivi­al or point­less or wrong. Trivi­al if mean­ing that both tech­nic­al means en­able the murder of many people from a cer­tain dis­tance (whereby this is doubt­ful re­gard­ing the gas cham­ber, as a dir­ect con­tact between vic­tim and per­pet­rat­or had taken place be­fore and after the killing, even if this con­tact could par­tially be del­eg­ated to the Son­der­kom­mandos). Point­less if by tech­nic­al means one tries to make a state­ment about the ideo­lo­gic­al in­tent of mur­der­ing, which is im­possible. Wrong if “Aus­chwitz” and “Hiroshi­ma” are equated — even if only “struc­tur­ally.” To put it bluntly: In this case Aus­chwitz is a mere pre­text and the Shoah turns in­to a mere “ac­cus­at­ori­al-em­blem.”¹⁹

The “Post-Aus­chwitz-Situ­ation” which, ac­cord­ing to Ad­orno, we are liv­ing in is not char­ac­ter­ized by the ex­ist­ence of tech­nic­al means of mass murder but by the fact that the ut­most ex­treme has already happened, un­der Na­tion­al So­cial­ism the threat of murder of mil­lions of (Jew­ish) people without a however me­di­ated eco­nom­ic, geo­pol­it­ic­al or demo­graph­ic pur­pose be­came real­ity.²⁰

V. “When the pos­sib­il­ity of total ex­term­in­a­tion be­comes the scale” (325) for a neg­at­ive ter­min­o­logy of his­tory, then “we all” can fi­nally per­ceive ourselves as in­dis­crim­in­ate vic­tims “of his­tory.” When this “ex­term­in­a­tion” is in such a way ideo­lo­gic­ally-polit­ic­ally un­spe­cified as it is in Som­mer’s case, then the “po­ten­tial” threat of a nuc­le­ar war and the real threat of “erad­ic­a­tion” for Jews be­come one and the same (as well as the killing of thou­sands of ci­vil­ians in Hiroshi­ma and the real killing of mil­lions of Jews would be of one and the same qual­ity). This ex­culp­at­ory tend­ency began dir­ectly after the Shoah and can be found in vari­ous forms with­in the works of Han­nah Aren­dt, Bruno Bettel­heim, Günther An­ders, or Mar­tin Heide­g­ger. In the year 2016, an au­thor who claims his in­ten­tion is a crit­ic­al the­ory which does not sac­ri­fice “the par­tic­u­lar” to “the gen­er­al” — after all one of the ba­sic themes of the Neg­at­ive Dia­lectic, the top­ic of Som­mer’s book — con­tin­ues in this ex­culp­at­ory tra­di­tion.

Not only does Som­mer re­la­tiv­ize the sig­ni­fic­ance of Aus­chwitz by equat­ing totally dif­fer­ent kinds of threats and ex­term­in­a­tions, he also con­founds neg­at­ive con­tinu­it­ies of a his­tory of dom­in­a­tion (tor­ture, suf­fer­ing, op­pres­sion, power­less­ness, ali­en­a­tion et cet­era) with the spe­cif­ics of the “Post-Aus­chwitz”-Situ­ation. He mingles “mod­ern­ity” per se with “to­tal­it­ari­an­ism” but also suf­fer­ing un­der op­press­ive con­di­tions in pre­mod­ern times and the ac­tu­al “om­ni­pres­ence of the cata­strophe” in­to one.²¹ The real and the po­ten­tial per­pet­rat­ors whose in­ten­tions ac­tu­ally are the “ut­most ex­treme” can be pleased. En­nobled by a crit­ic­al the­or­ist they are fi­nally al­lowed to say: “We all are vic­tims.”

To avoid mis­un­der­stand­ings: In the state­ment I have quoted as an in­tro­duct­ory state­ment, Jean Améry crit­ic­ally refers to the ques­tion if, for ex­ample, one might also con­sider the Na­tion­al So­cial­ist per­pet­rat­ors to be vic­tims — “products of men­tal mu­til­a­tion”²² — as they be­came per­pet­rat­ors un­der spe­cif­ic so­cial con­di­tions.²³ However, this ques­tion is not ad­dressed by Som­mer in his iden­ti­fic­a­tion of all people as vic­tims. Here it is much sim­pler: The vic­tim status of every­one, the tor­ment­or as well as the tor­men­ted, is ex­plained by the nuc­le­ar threat. Be­sides, even if one la­bels the Nazi-per­pet­rat­ors as “vic­tims” in the sense that ac­cord­ing to the the­ory of the au­thor­it­ari­an per­son­al­ity their ac­tions emerged as the res­ult of liv­ing un­der ali­en­ated so­cial con­di­tions and there­fore they had no ab­so­lute free choice in their lean­ings (I per­son­ally would not speak of “vic­tims” here), this “vic­tim” status would have to be con­sidered as totally dif­fer­ent, by every per­son who has not lost his sense of judge­ment, from the vic­tim status of those tor­tured and murdered by these per­pet­rat­ors.²⁴ With his con­cen­tra­tion camp = nuc­le­ar threat = the ut­most ex­treme = vic­tims chain of equi­val­ence, Som­mer levels pre­cisely these cru­cial dif­fer­ences.

Trans­la­tion: Paul Mentz²⁵

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Notes

¹ Jean Améry, Jar­gon der Dia­lek­tik, in: Wer­ke, Bd. 6. Auf­sät­ze zur Phi­lo­soph­ie, Stut­tgart 2004, p. 265.
² Marc Nich­olas Som­mer, Das Kon­zept ein­er neg­at­iven Dia­lek­tik. Ad­or­no und He­gel, Tü­bin­gen 2016.
³ Som­mer refers to Theodor W. Ad­orno, His­tory and Free­dom: Lec­tures, 1964-1965, Cam­bridge/Malden, p. 23.
⁴ Som­mer refers to Theodor W. Ad­orno, “Ta­boos on the Teach­ing Vo­ca­tion,” in: Crit­ic­al Mod­els: In­ter­ven­tions and Catch­words, New York/Chichester, West Sus­sex 2005, p. 190.
⁵ Som­mer refers to Theodor W. Ad­orno, “‘Stat­ic’ and ‘Dy­nam­ic’ as So­ci­olo­gic­al Cat­egor­ies” [1956/1961]. Dio­genes, No. 33 (Spring 1961), p. 46.
⁶ Som­mer refers to Günther An­ders, Die ato­ma­re Bed­ro­hung, Mün­chen 1993, p. 94.
⁷ Som­mer refers to Theodor W. Ad­orno, Neg­at­ive Dia­lectics. New York/Lon­don 2007, p. 362.
⁸ Jean Améry, Jar­gon der Dia­lek­tik, in: Wer­ke, Bd. 6. Auf­sät­ze zur Phi­lo­soph­ie, Stut­tgart 2004, p. 266.
⁹ I am aware that the term “ex­term­in­a­tion” it­self is ul­ti­mately Nazi ter­min­o­logy. But firstly Som­mer uses this ter­min­o­logy to prove his main thes­is and secondly it is in any case nearly im­possible to speak about the Shoah in a lan­guage which does not use the lan­guage of the per­pet­rat­ors. If I spoke of murder camps it is pos­sible that the thought of murder as a com­mon crim­in­al of­fence could rise, which would also be in­ad­equate for an un­der­stand­ing of the spe­cif­ics of these ac­tions and in­sti­tu­tions. Nev­er­the­less it is also im­possible to en­tirely rid one­self of the tra­di­tion­al vocab­u­lary of crim­in­al law.
¹⁰ Fa­bi­an Kettner, Ist die Post­mo­d­er­ne ein Re­flex auf den Ho­lo­caust? p. 4.
¹¹ See Ul­rich Her­bert, „Ver­nich­tung­spo­li­tik. Neue An­t­wor­ten und Fra­gen zur Ge­schich­te des ,Ho­lo­caust’.“ In: Ders. (Hg.), Na­ti­on­al­so­zi­al­is­ti­sche Ver­nich­tung­spo­li­tik. Neue For­schun­gen und Kon­tro­ver­sen, Frank­furt/M, p. 57.
¹² The cri­tique of this ad­min­is­tra­tion topos has mean­while been de­veloped in depth by au­thors like Daniel Gold­ha­gen, Alf Lüdtke, Yaa­cov Lo­zowick, Ul­rich Her­bert, Nic­olas Berg, Mi­chael Wildt, Fe­lix Römer and many oth­ers.
¹³ See, re­gard­ing the spe­cif­ic gen­o­cid­al in­ten­tion­al­ity of the Nazis in the Shoah: Steven T. Katz, “The ‘Unique’ In­ten­tion­al­ity of the Holo­caust,” in: Mod­ern Juda­ism, Vol 1/1981 and Ye­huda Bauer, Re­think­ing the Holo­caust, New Haven/Lon­don 2001.
¹⁴ Be­sides, a lim­ited use is also con­ceiv­able. In this case too, not “all people” are al­ways and in prin­ciple vic­tims of a nuc­le­ar at­tack.
¹⁵ When for ex­ample Ron­ald Re­agan called “com­mun­ism” the realm of evil he meant that the Rus­si­ans had to be freed from “evil com­mun­ism” as an ideo­logy and sys­tem of op­pres­sion, not that they as people had to be ex­term­in­ated en­tirely. In this re­spect it is also in­cor­rect when Som­mer claims that the nuc­le­ar threat per se ex­is­ted totally un­re­lated to the be­ha­vi­or of people. To some ex­tent this might ap­ply to the nor­mal cit­izen, but not to the gov­ern­ment. Had the USSR trans­formed it­self in­to a pro-Amer­ic­an cap­it­al­ist state, the threat of a nuc­le­ar con­front­a­tion would have failed to ma­ter­i­al­ize. A sim­il­ar op­tion of “con­ver­sion” was not avail­able to the Jews and also the Ju­den­rä­te un­der Na­tion­al So­cial­ism.
¹⁶ See here.
¹⁷ It is in­dic­at­ive for the hy­po­stas­ized way of speak­ing, in­to which a “neg­at­ive philo­sophy of his­tory” pro­ceed­ing in this man­ner lapses, that tech­nic­al means are sud­denly por­trayed as sub­jects or that polit­ic­al sub­jects are an­onym­ized by a tech­noid­al vocab­u­lary. The mas­ter of such hy­po­stat­iz­a­tion is without a doubt Günther An­ders. For Som­mer too it is “the nuc­le­ar bomb” which “threatens […] us” (p. 295, my em­phas­is).
¹⁸ Theodor W. Ad­orno, His­tory and Free­dom: Lec­tures, 1964-1965, Cam­bridge/Malden, p. 8.
¹⁹ See Alv­in Rosen­feld, The End of the Holo­caust, Bloom­ing­ton 2011.
²⁰ Re­gard­less of the ex­e­cu­tion of this threat in­to mur­der­ous prac­tice, for the rest of the Je­w­ry the threat per­sists and in threat­en­ing the ex­ist­ence of Is­rael a second Holo­caust an­nounces it­self. This is a cru­cial as­pect of the Post-Aus­chwitz-Situ­ation which even crit­ic­al the­or­ists like Moshe Zuck­er­mann and oth­ers sadly ig­nore. For Zuck­er­mann the les­son of Aus­chwitz even res­ults in the vague de­mand “to op­pose the sys­tem­at­ic caus­ing of ever more new vic­tims.” (Moshe Zuck­er­mann, Krit­ische The­or­ie in Is­ra­el, in: Ders. (Hg.), Theodor W. Ad­orno. Phi­lo­soph des be­schä­dig­ten Le­bens, Göt­tin­gen 2004, p. 20.) One might ask why there is even the need for a re­course to Aus­chwitz, and one might ima­gine what this means for a Jew­ish state when its cit­izens de­fend them­selves by mil­it­ary means against their ex­term­in­a­tion.
²¹ “In the face of Aus­chwitz,” the Ad­orno-ex­egete Dirk Braun­stein also lapses in­to such a form of iden­tity-think­ing in the worst pos­sible way: “In the face of ex­term­in­a­tion war and con­cen­tra­tion camps hu­man his­tory presents it­self as a his­tory of hu­man ex­term­in­a­tion.” (Ad­or­nos Kri­tik der po­lit­ischen Öko­no­mie, Bie­le­feld 2011, p. 189) Once again “con­cen­tra­tion camps” be­come a pre­text for a neg­at­ive philo­sophy of his­tory and at the same time the lat­ter be­comes a means to let the spe­cif­ics of the Shoah dis­ap­pear in­to an in­dis­crim­in­ate “hu­man ex­term­in­a­tion.”
²² Theodor W. Ad­orno, Neg­at­ive Dia­lectics. New York/Lon­don 2007, p. 264.
²³ But this would not ab­solve any­one from the in­di­vidu­al re­spons­ib­il­ity for their mur­der­ous ac­tions, as Ad­orno, too, points out. (See Theodor W. Ad­orno, Neg­at­ive Dia­lectics. New York/Lon­don 2007, p. 264).
²⁴ See Jean Améry, Jar­gon der Dia­lek­tik, Stut­tgart 2004, p. 267: “When in ad­di­tion the tor­ment­ors may be called vic­tims too, then one has to pre­cisely spe­cify: whose vic­tims.”
²⁵ Thanks to Sina Men­ke for help­ful com­ments and cor­rec­tions.