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
- Appadurai, Arjun (1998) ‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era
of Globalization’ in Develop and Change, 29: 905-925.
- 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.
- Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) ‘Social Production of moral indifference’ in
Modernity and the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, New York,
pp18-23.
- Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) ‘The role of Bureaucracy in the Holocaust’
in Modernity and the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, New York,
pp104-106.
- Du Preez, Peter (1994) Genocide: The Psychology of Mass Murder,
Bowerdean Publishing Co. Ltd, London.
- Engel, David (2000) The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews,
Longman Press, Essex, UK.
- Horowitz, Irving (1976) Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder,
Transaction Books, New Jersey
- Kristeva, Julia (1982) ‘Approaching Abjection’ Powers of Horror: An
Essay on Abjection, new York Columbia University Press, pp1-31.
- Nagengast, Carol (1994) ‘Violence, Terror and the Crisis of the
State’. Annual Review of Anthropology 23:109-36.
- 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.
