An Examination of the Violence of Abjection and Suffering During the Holocaust

Society is underpinned by standards and expectations as to what social worlds should resemble and operate. But when the very foundations of that world are rocky and open to misuse and abuse, the society is left in a destabilized position. What remains is the question of how these worlds are tolerated in this destabilized form? Can they continue indefinitely in such a way? This place of discomfort is the abject, that which is contrary to everyday harmony. Often the locus of the abject can be expressed in violence. In the case of the Holocaust the abject impacted the individual Jewish people and the wider community of Germany and the world. The meaning that was derived to spark the violence and the meaning that remains are in stark contrast.

Prior to the Holocaust the Jewish people were not abject to their community, but with a little guidance and propaganda they were led to a mass hysteria that the world hopes to never witness again. During Europe’s enlightened period the annihilation of over 5 million Jews and Gypsies occurred in Europe without a blink of an eye. It was tolerated, accepted and some leaders such as the Vichy government of France contributed to the Nazi effort by gathering their Jews and handing them over to the German’s to protect themselves as best they could from the German occupational army. The fear that gripped Europe and strangled the very humanity out of those in power validated and added meaning to the Nazi ideology. As their power increased through the pain and suffering of individuals within those social worlds their domination over the region continued to surge. If violence is triadic in generating meaning it requires a victim, perpetrator and witness, thus in having the people of Europe witness the demise of the vile cancerous Jew they saw the power of the Nazi’s in ability to control and strip the rights of its own population and later other parts of Europe. As Foucault states “...public execution did not re- establish justice; it reactivated power” (1977: 49).

The purpose behind the Nazi violence was the establishment of control over its people with a goal of world domination. Violence as abjection is something contrary to the human condition, it impacts individuals and the community in the sense that it cannot be tolerated, but what happens when it is tolerated as in Nazi Germany. How does a community bear witness to suffering and pain of the Jewish people and accept it as normal? How does meaning produced by violence make it acceptable on any terms? The use of abjection by Hitler to create distinctions and validate the actions taken against the European Jews, through propaganda and unsubstantiated claims marked the period. Violence that creates meaning rarely does so for those that it violates, typically the impetus is to incite fear and terror. In the case of the holocaust, the violence served as a means of creating fear in the hearts of the Jews throughout Europe and their sympathizers, so that no one would stand in the way of what Hitler viewed as a necessary task to remove the impurities from his nation. The violence impacted both the Jews and Gypsies and the worlds in which they both belong and are outcast.

Hitler’s use of “transcendental genocide...is based on theories of the absolute need to eliminate all members of a category, because of their intractable vileness, wickedness, dangerousness or opposition” (Preez 1994: 11). Hitler portrayed the Jews as the root cause of all that was wrong with Germany and the only means of recreating all that was once great in their national identity and nation through the elimination of that which contaminated the German State and world alike. Jews were described to be “a cancer within the German social body” (Appagurai 1998: 913) this statement highlights this use of the abject to discredit the Jew’s as people with rights that belong within society. Here they are likened to disease which is always to be eradicated. They are the parasites taking jobs and the livelihood for the German people; hence the governments created this state of emergency whereby the suspension of rational though and disgust at the policies that strip people of their dignity and identity. This served as a further means of creating the Jew as the ‘other’, so that good German folk did not have a problem bearing witness to their mass annihilation. As Kristeva (1982: 31) states “the abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things.”. This is what makes the Holocaust so difficult a pill to swallow.

During this period perhaps for the German people and especially those in powerful positions perhaps the fact that they did not view Jews in the same vein as themselves, it was easier to carry out the task. As Bauman (1989: 21) asserts “...moral inhibitions against violent atrocities tend to be eroded once three conditions are met...violence is authorized, actions are reutilized, and the victims are dehumanized”. In creating images of the Jews as subhuman, cancerous and abject to the German people it became “...the arbitrary termination of life against the will of the individual and on behalf of the collective will of the state” (Horowitz 1976: 33), for its own protection. As in all types of ethnic cleansing the imagery of the stain or blemish on society that needs to be efficiently removed so as not to impact on the national identity, so too did “...the Nazi theory demanded the elimination of all Jews and many other ‘impurities’ from the nation” (Preez 1994: 11).

If the mass annihilation of the Jew “is unimaginable...its representation must be fit into existing, acceptable discourses: patriotism, retaliation for real and imagined past injustices, separatism, terrorism, communism, subversion, anarchy, the need to preserve the states and territorial integrity, the need to protect the nation from subversion through ethnic cleansing...” (Nagengast: 120; citing Lyotard: 172). This is what the Nazi party did by making the Jew a distinguishable difference to the German national identity by forcing them to wear the Star of David, by tattooing prisoners of concentration camps with numbers. It created a lasting difference that would forever be recognized a Jewish within that culture. The very fact that each Jew in the concentration camp was numbered dehumanized and removed them as a valuable commodity within that society. They no longer had an identity other than the fact that they were Jewish, similar to that of branding cattle. In this same way “what kept the murdering machine going then was solely its own routine and impetus. The skills of mass murder had to be used simply because they were there” (Bauman 1989: 106) and they were a part of the bureaucracy that failed to see the collective pain of the individuals it destroyed.

The Jewish people were “...shot, hung, electrocuted, gassed to death by [the state]...for political misdeeds: criticism of the state, membership banned political parties or groups, or for adherence to the “wrong” religion; for moral deeds...homosexuality” (Nagengast, 1994: 120). They were no longer accepted as part of the German state hence they were not protected by it. As is typically utilized by certain powers wanting to grasp control of populations, part of that control can involve forcibly removing groups from that national identity that they view as not cohesive. This violence can take the form of genocide against a race or peoples, as they may be classed as outsiders to that nation’s identity. Alternatively, as in the case of Germany, the Jews were seen to be a threat or stain to the national identity. For example, the state of emergency that was created by the Nazi government is highlighted in Article 48 of the Weimar constitution which states:

The president of the Reich may, in the case of a grave disturbance or threat to public security and order, make decisions necessary to re-establish public security, if necessary with the aid of armed forces. To this end he may provisionally suspend the fundamental rights...(Cited by Agamben 1998: 167).

This section of the constitution created a legal loophole for the Reich to decide that those deemed to be ‘threats to public security to have all fundamental rights revoked and “taken into custody”, i.e. concentration camps without question. It is not hard to envisage how easy it was to take advantage of this power within the German constitution. It allowed for rights to be stripped with the wave of a pen.

Through the use of abjection, it became simple to turn the pain of the Jewish people into a silent cry that the German people could not here, it was the ‘other’. As Scarry (1985: 29) affirms “for the torturers, the sheer and simple fact of human agony is made invisible, and the moral fact of inflicting that agony is made neutral by the feigned urgency and significance of the question. For the prisoner, the sheer, simple, overwhelming fact of the world to which the question refers. Intense pain is world destroying”. In the Jewish context it is clear that the Jews had found themselves in an intolerable state in which they were not welcome and were stripped of their very identity for the purpose of mass extermination. Their worlds were forcibly destroyed before their eyes as step by step their identity and rights were forcibly removed, until they had no control or power and were bound off together to be slaughtered and removed from the life and world that they had once known. Their friends and neighbour became enemies, the fear of the unknown and who was a spy for the government, this fear and paranoia is another essence of abjection. The fear that paralyses you to the point where you don’t run you can’t.

The use of abjection to produce meaning in violence that is committed against the ‘other’ can be different from the various viewpoints that people hold. Hitler’s use of the abject and their being likened to a cancerous disease allowed them to be separated and created a collective meaning within the German identity. It reactivated the power of the German government. It reduced the pain and suffering of Europe’s Jews and Gypsies to a silent voice of the powerless. For those that bore witness to the atrocity and found it abject it holds different meaning. The Holocaust is an event in history that will forever plague the world; it was mass murder on a scale never envisioned previously. The meaning derived from this mass atrocity today is very different to its purpose.

It is abject to the very human soul that a society could allow men, women and children to be dehumanized and murdered through a bureaucratic process that belied their human value. As Kristeva states “the abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death which, in any case kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things” (1982: 31). This is what made the Holocaust so difficult a pill to swallow. These people were held in various work camps, concentration camps and marked for death, for no crime other than having the wrong identity. For the Jewish people that have been impacted personally or by a family member, their response is to commemorate it so that the world never forgets what it did. Various films have depicted the abject nature of this atrocity, perhaps to create a new meaning, ‘absolute power absolutely corrupts’ and we should not stand by and allow mass atrocities to occur as we are as guilty as the perpetrators. The one message that should be taken from their harrowing experiences is that no human should ever go through that and that there is now meaning in the world that can excuse it.

by Natalia Maystorovich Chulio, written 2009. 

Bibliography

1. Appadurai, Arjun (1998) ‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization’ in Develop and Change, 29: 905-925.
2. Agamben, Giorgio (1995) The Camp as the ‘Nomos’ of the Modern in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power & Bare Life, Stanford University Press (Chapter 7) pp166-180.
3. Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) ‘Social Production of moral indifference’ in Modernity and the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, New York, pp18-23.
4. Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) ‘The role of Bureaucracy in the Holocaust’ in Modernity and the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, New York, pp104-106.
5. Du Preez, Peter (1994) Genocide: The Psychology of Mass Murder, Bowerdean Publishing Co. Ltd, London.
6. Engel, David (2000) The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews, Longman Press, Essex, UK.
7. Horowitz, Irving (1976) Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder, Transaction Books, New Jersey
8. Kristeva, Julia (1982) ‘Approaching Abjection’ Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, new York Columbia University Press, pp1-31.
9. Nagengast, Carol (1994) ‘Violence, Terror and the Crisis of the State’. Annual Review of Anthropology 23:109-36.
10. Scarry, Elaine (1985) ‘The Structure of Torture’, in The Body in Pain, pp27-59. 

Author biography:  Natalia Maystorovich Chulio recently was awarded her PhD and works in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include humanitarian and human rights law; transitional justice; the archaeological recovery of mass graves; and the capacity of social movements to elicit social, political and legal change as they seek justice for victims.  Her focus is on socio-legal research and qualitative methods in an attempt to merge her political and social interests with a scholarship which may enact social change. Since 2012 she has worked with the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH – Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory) in an attempt to draw attention to the difficulties experienced by victims and their relatives in the recuperation of their missing.