{"id":1891,"date":"2017-01-20T15:52:37","date_gmt":"2017-01-20T15:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/?p=1891"},"modified":"2017-01-20T15:53:51","modified_gmt":"2017-01-20T15:53:51","slug":"remembering-wannsee-civilization-and-barbarism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/remembering-wannsee-civilization-and-barbarism\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Wannsee: Civilization and Barbarism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI propose to treat the Holocaust as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society.\u201d<\/p>\n

-Zygmunt Bauman<\/p>\n

\u201cPack your swimsuit and head on out to the Wannsee.\u201d These are the opening lyrics to Pack die Badehose ein, a cheery German beach song of the 1950s, referring to the shores of one of the lakes found in the southwestern plains of Berlin.<\/p>\n

But Wannsee, for non-Berliners, evokes other connotations. On January 20th<\/sup>, 1942, a villa on the edge of that lake hosted the infamous Wannsee Conference. Here high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the \u201cFinal Solution of the Jewish Question.\u201d \u2013 the physical annihilation of the European Jews.<\/p>\n

\n

\"wannseevilla\"
Wannsee Villa<\/figcaption><\/figure>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The 75th<\/sup> anniversary of this decisive event in the history of the Holocaust coincides not only with the Donald Trump Inauguration<\/a>, but also with the passing, this month, of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, the author of a seminal book titled Modernity and the Holocaust. <\/em>In its pages, Bauman poses a fundamental admonition: None of the societal conditions that made Auschwitz possible have truly disappeared. His argument can be described as the sociological unpacking of an intriguing aphorism that German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) had written shortly before falling prey to the Nazis: \u201cThere is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.\u201d For Bauman, the Holocaust \u201chas uncovered another face of the same modern society whose other, more familiar face we so admire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"bauman\"
Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017)<\/figcaption><\/figure>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What is \u201cmodern\u201d about killing on an industrial scale? It is methodical planning and implementation, the coordination of science, technology and the bureaucracy of population administration and transport logistics; a \u201cFinal Solution,\u201d undertaken with a problem-solving mentality. Bauman enlists in support of his argument Max Weber, who predicted an ever-increasing process of bureaucratic rationality in modern social life, an \u201ciron cage\u201d from which there would be no escape:<\/p>\n

\u201cbureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations\u2026. According to calculable rules and without regard to persons. (Weber)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Nazis committed bureaucratic mass murder. This was something very different from an outburst of colossal violence such as the many bloodbaths that are found throughout human history.<\/p>\n

In an interview in Claude Lanzmann\u2019s film Shoah<\/em><\/a> (1984),<\/em> the former Treblinka extermination camp commandant Franz Suchomel described, with precision, how the camp\u2019s gas chambers operated. These were capable, he stated, of \u201cfinishing off 3,000 people in two hours.\u201d This illustrates Bauman\u2019s thesis that the extermination facility became an extension of the modern factory system, which instead of producing goods, produces death. \u201cAnd Treblinka?\u201d asks Lanzmann. \u201cTreblinka was a small but good functioning assembly line of death,\u201d Suchomel responds.<\/p>\n

Bauman left us with a disquieting proposition, since he removed the Nazi crimes from the realm of the exceptional. In line with Hannah Arendt\u2019s earlier insights in Eichmann in Jerusalem<\/em><\/a>, the perpetrators of such crimes were not necessarily sadistic monsters nor hate-filled fanatics, but rather law-abiding officers in societies with compliant and indifferent citizens. The Holocaust is considered not the antithesis of modern civilization, a deviation from the path of progress, but rather the Janus face of the same modern society. In that sense, Auschwitz did not vanish from the face of the earth with the destruction of Nazism in 1945. It remains as an ominous possibility, more so in a world in which the means for the kind of bureaucratic domination that the Nazis pioneered has increased exponentially.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Alejandro Baer is the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI propose to treat the Holocaust as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society.\u201d -Zygmunt Bauman \u201cPack your swimsuit and head on out to the Wannsee.\u201d These are the opening lyrics to Pack die Badehose ein, a cheery German beach song of the 1950s, referring to the shores […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2078,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48824],"tags":[2846,92115],"class_list":["post-1891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-director","tag-holocaust","tag-wannsee"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2078"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1891"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1893,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions\/1893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}