1. For example, the volumes of conference papers edited by Hayes, Peter entitled Lessons and Legacies: the Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, 1991);Google ScholarFriedländer, Saul, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, (Cambridge, Mass, 1992)Google Scholar; also LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, 1994).Google Scholar

2. Bauer, Thus Yehuda: “How then do we avoid mystification without destroying the mysterious quality that every historical event, and most certainly this one, possesses?,” in “Against Mystification: The Holocaust as a Historical Phenomenon”, in Perspectives on the Holocaust, vol. 1 of The Nazi Holocaust, ed. Marrus, Michael R.. (Westport, 1989), 115;Google ScholarDiner, Dan, “Historical Understanding and Counterrationality: The Judenrat as Epistemological Vantage,” in Friedländer, Probing the Limits, 128–29.Google Scholar

3. ThusFriedländer in the introduction to his volume: “it will be evident … that none of the contributors has forgotten the horror behind the words” (p. 1). See also Kershaw, Ian, “‘Normality’ and Genocide: The Problem of ‘Historicization,’” in Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed. Childers, Thomas and Caplan, Jane (New York, 1993), 28–29.Google Scholar Hereafter abbreviated RTR.

4. Wiesel, Elie, Night/Dawn/Day (New York, 1985), 74;Google ScholarRubenstein, Richard J. and Roth, John K., Approaches to Auschwitz (Atlanta, 1987).Google Scholar

5. E.g., Santner, Eric L., Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, 1990), chs. 1–2;Google Scholar LaCapra, Representing the Holocausi, 188–93, and his conclusion, subtitled “Acting-Out and Working-Through,” 205–23. LaCapra admittedly views these unconscious mechanisms as relevant to more than just the German case.

6. Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1989), 8.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., 12, 82, 114.

8. Ibid., 70. Bauman elaborates this notion in his Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, 1991), 1, where he links this act of setting aside with the enterprise of classification and structuration which language performs, and which he sees as at the core of the project of modernity (p. 4).Google Scholar

9. Bauman, Holocaust, 65; he distinguishes it from “heterophobia,” the unease and prejudice that people exhibit when confronted with others who are unfamiliar to them.

10. Ibid., xiii, 15, 28, 103.

11. Bauman, Zygmunt, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford, 1993), 10–11; chaps. 4–5.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., 112.

13. See Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Explained (Minneapolis, 1993), 18, 29.Google Scholar

14. Santner, Stranded Objects, 9.See also LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 221–22.

15. Seidman, Steven, “Introduction” to The Postmodern Turn (Cambridge, 1994), 1, 4, 10, 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See Bauman's piece in that volume, “Is There a Postmodern Sociology?”, and Postmodern Ethics. This critique of the Enlightenment is not new, but goes back to the Frankfurt School. See Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Cumming, John (New York, 1972), 6, 9.Google Scholar

16. See Fritzsche, Peter, “Nazi Modern,” Modernism/modernity, 3 (1996): 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Fritzsche suggests that aesthetic modernism might be the key to illuminating the relationship, in that the Nazis, like the modernist artists and painters, recognized the contingency and impermanence of the twentieth-century world and boldly experimented with new ways of mastering it.

17. See for example, Bartov, Omer, Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York, 1996).Google Scholar Bartov views physicians and lawyers as indispensable interpreters in modern society of the natural and social orders respectively; hence their indispensability to the Holocaust (pp. 67–69). Bartov's notes give a survey of this literature (pp. 208–9). See also Peukert, Detlev, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. Deveson, Richard (New Haven, 1987), 16;Google ScholarKatz, Steven T., The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1 (New York, 1994), 49–40.Google Scholar An exception to this trend is Burleigh, Michael and Wipperman, Wolfgang, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge, 1991), 2.Google Scholar

18. Weber, Max, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Winckelmann, Johannes (Cologne, 1964), 1:5, 17, 60, 159–66.Google Scholar

19. Kershaw, Ian, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987);Google ScholarHayes, Peter, “Polycracy and policy in the Third Reich: the Case of the Economy,” in RTR, 191;Google ScholarBrowning, Christopher, “Beyond ‘Intentionalism’ and ‘Functionalism’: A Reassessment of Nazi Jewish Policy from 1939 to 1941,” RTR, 221–22;Google ScholarGeyer, Michael, “The State in National Socialist Germany,” in Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, ed. Bright, Charles and Harding, Susan (Ann Arbor, 1984), 209–10.Google Scholar

20. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth”; Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, chap. 4.

21. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 58–60.

22. Cf. Schweitzer, Arthur, The Age of Charisma (Chicago, 1984), 93, who claims that the Holocaust was carried out in the name of Nazi ideology rather than based directly on Hitler's charismatic authority;Google Scholar Kershaw, by contrast, sees this hold on the elites as part of that authority (“Hitler Myth,” 251).

23. E.g., Waite, Robert J. L., The Psychopathic God (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

24. Katz, The Holocaust, 1:46–50.

25. E.g., LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, (see n. 1).

26. Browning, Christopher, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992; reprint New York, 1993), 74, 76–77;Google ScholarGoldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler's Willing Executioners (New York, 1996), 221–22.Google Scholar

27. Robert Jay Lifton has suggested a “doubling” of personality on the part of Nazi doctors who participated in the genocide while continuing to lead emotionally integrated lives as husbands and parents. See his The Nazi Doctors (New York, 1986), chap. 19.Google Scholar Hans Dieter Schäfer has postulated a “split consciousness” that was widespread among the German people. See his Das gespaltene Bewusstsein (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 201–6.Google Scholar

28. Reprinted in Remak, Joachim, ed. The Nazi Years: A Documentary History (Englewood Cliffs, 1969), 159.Google Scholar

29. Reprinted in Noakes, Jeremy and Pridham, Geoffrey, eds., Documents on Nazism, 1919–1945 (London, 1974), 37.Google Scholar Lifton, in The Nazi Doctors, 439–41, points out the similarity of such logic to that of paranoiacs, while insisting that such a model is less helpful in explaining the mentality of the Auschwitz physicians than an ideological one based on “sacred biology… [which] drew upon that science, however, in an apocalyptic, wildly romantic fashion.” Lifton also comments on the emotional numbing that accompanied the killing (p. 442).

30. See, for example, Katz, The Holocaust, 1:3–11; Geyer, The State, 210–19.

31. Systematic treatments include Jaeckel, Eberhard, Hitler's World View: A Blueprint for Power, trans. Arnold, Herbert (1972; reprint Cambridge, Mass, 1981);Google ScholarZitelmann, RainerHitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs (Stuttgart, 1990).Google Scholar The limitations of such axiomatization are especially evident in Zitelmann's book: the author stresses Hitler's “rationality,” e.g., his rejection of Himmler's and Rosenberg's racial mysticism. He claims that Hitler believed in a meritocracy, and that talent and ability were the indications of racial superiority rather than vice versa—except, of course, for Jews, Gypsies, and other “enemies” (pp. 422–23).

32. Foucault, Michel, “What is Critique?,” in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. Schmidt, James (Berkeley, 1996), 394–95.Google Scholar Michael Geyer also pursues this approach (Geyer, The State, 214–15).

33. Klemperer, Viktor, Die unbewältigte Sprache (Darmstadt, 1966), 105–8.Google Scholar Cf. Geyer, The State, 214–15.

34. Gellately, Robert, The Gestapo and German Society (Oxford, 1990), esp. 135–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Lindenfeld, David, “On Systems and Embodiments as Categories for Intellectual History,” History and Theory 27 (1988): 39, 46–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer, in his observations of Nazi language, noted first and foremost its impoverishment. (Klemperer, Die unbewältigte Sprache. chap. 3). He also noted the Nazis' dislike of the word “system,” which they associated with Weimar; they preferred “organization” insteed. Ibid., 109–11.

36. Thus this definition avoids making pronouncements on the relationship between rationality and truth, but rather seeks to define reason and unreason in terms of a given historical discourse.

37. In fairness to Bauman, one should note that he recognizes this ideational process. He refers to the “conceptual Jew” as “a semantically overloaded entity, comprising and blending meanings which ought to be kept apart, and for this reason a natural adversary of any force concerned with drawing borderlines and keeping them apart.” Holocaust, 39. Hence the association of the Jew with “viscosity” or “slime.” Bauman introduces this notion, however, in the context of Christian and medieval anti-Semitism. Although it carried over into the modern period, it was not distinctive to it. This tends to undermine his distinction between “heterophobia,” i.e., the instinctive dislike of outsiders, and modern recism, which he views as the basis for the Holocaust (pp. 64–65).

38. Flex, Jane, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley, 1990), 148.Google Scholar

39. Adelson, Leslie, Making Bodies, Making History (Lincoln, 1993), 22–23.Google Scholar

40. As Robin May Schott has observed in her study Cognition and Eros (Boston, 1988), chap. 2, esp. p. 37Google Scholar, the suppression of body respondes has also had a long tradition in Western philosophy in the form of asceticism.

41. See Kelman, Herbert C., “Violence without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers,” Journal of Social Issues 29 (1973): 49–50;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 46–47.

42. Klemperer, in Die unbewältigte Sprache, reports that the Nazis took away the pets of the German Jews and killed them, “not in individual cases or out of sporadic meanness, but officially and systematically.” Pets that were so polluted could not be given to the humane society for protection (p. 113).

43. Weindling, Paul, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870–1945 (Cambridge, 1989), 511–13.Google Scholar

44. Kater, Michael, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill, 1989), 112. Kater gives numerous case studies of how science degenerated into pseudo-science as a result.Google Scholar

45. See Koonz, Claudia, “Genocide and Eugenics: The Language of Power,” in Lessons and Legacies, ed. Hayes, , 164–65;Google Scholar one could as easily have quoted Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, 94, or Friedlander, Henry, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: from Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, 1995), 1–2;Google Scholar cf. also LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 104.

46. See Mason, Tim, “Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism”, in Der “Führerstaal”: Mythos und Realität, ed. Hirschfeld, Gerhard and Kettenacker, Lothar (Stuttgart, 1981), 23–42;Google Scholar Browning, “Beyond ‘Intentionalism’ and ‘Functionalism,’ RTR, 212–13.

47. Hayes, “Polycracy and Policy,” RTR, 191; for similar statements, see Jane Caplan, “National Socialism and the Theory of the State,” RTR, 103; Tim Mason, “The Domestic Dynamics of Nazi Conquests: A Response to Critics,” RTR, 181; Geyer, The State, 197.

48. Hayes, “Polyocracy and Policy,” 219.

49. On the following, see Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, 118–27; Henry Friedlander, Origins, 249–62; 292–94.

50. Henry Friedlander, Origins, 294.

51. This was Freud's use of the term; he postulated it as characteristic of childhood behavior in the wake of the Oedipus complex: if the child cannot literally have the parent, the next-best thing is to be like him. Freud related this to the origin of the superego. See Freud, Sigmund, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Strachey, James (New York, 1965), 63–64.Google Scholar

52. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 106–9.

53. Klemperer, Die unbewältigte Sprache, chs. 9, 18; p. 168.

54. Erik Wolf, for example, claimed that a judge should “not be constricted by arbitrary decisions or by a formalistic and abstract principle of stability of the law; rather find clear lines and,… wherever necessary, their limits through the legal views of the people that have found expression in the law and that are embodied by the Führer.” Quoted in Müller, Ingo, Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, trans. Schneider, Deborah Lucas (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 72.Google Scholar Cf. Ernst Rudolf Huber, quoted in Caplan, Jane, Government Without Administration: State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1988), 202.Google Scholar

55. Henry Friedlander, Origins, 101–6, 120–122. Hitler refused to issue a written law ordering euthanasia or the killing of Gypsies (p. 154, 257).

56. Browning, Ordinary Men, 55, 79, 113, 137.

57. Unlike Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, chap. 16, esp. 416.

58. Browning, Ordinary Men, chap. 18. For a broadly based survey, see Hilberg, Raul, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders (New York, 1992), 39ff.Google Scholar

59. Bartov, Omer, Hitler's Army (New York, 1992), ch. 4.Google Scholar

60. Kelman, “Violence without Moral Restraint,” 29–61.

61. Schmidt, What is Enlightenment?, 1.

62. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiii, xv.

63. Seidman, “Introduction,” in Postmodern Turn 21, 4.

64. Bauman is aware of the provocative role of his critique. He admits that “there is little point in asking whether it [the concept of modernity] is true or distorted,” but makes sense only within the postmodern debate. See “Is There a Postmodern Sociology?,” in Postmodern Turn, 188–89; Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 3–4.

65. Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2 (New York, 1969), 12–23.Google Scholar

66. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 1.

67. Carl von Linné, Cui Bono, quoted in Larson, James L., Reason and Experience: The Representation of the Natural Order in the Work of Carl von Linné (Berkeley, 1971), 143.Google ScholarLovejoy's, Arthurclassic The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass, 1961), elaborates this idea.Google Scholar

68. Poliakov, Léon, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (New York, 1971), 160–61.Google Scholar

69. Hunt, Lynn, ed. The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston, 1996), 4–12;Google Scholar Gay, The Enlightenment, 33–35.

70. Bauman cannot ignore these trends entirely, but deals with them in a way which leads to distortion. He appears to view assimilation as the paradigmatic pattern of inclusion, i.e., adoption by a minority of the culture of the majority. In Modernity and Ambivalence, chaps. 4–5, he devotes much space to Jewish assimilation in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring all the difficulties, compromises, and disappointments which accompanied it. But is assimilation the only means for enacting human rights?

71. Gay, The Enlightenment, 108–25, esp 124. See also Rudolf Vierhaus, “Progress: Ideas, Skepticism, and Critique—The Heritage of the Enlightenment,” in Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?, 330–41.

72. Jürgen Habermas, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” in Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?, 419.

73. Thanks to Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York, 1979), 200–9.Google Scholar

74. Quoted in Huant, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights, 3.

75. See Schmidt's treatment of this connection, in his introduction to What Is Enlightenment?, 20–25.

76. Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Leipzig, 1983), 55.Google Scholar

77. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1:5, 17, 60–61.

78. Kant, , Kritik der Urteilskraft, (Stuttgart, 1963), 40–41.Google Scholar

79. See his discussion in Habermas, “The Unity of Reason,” in Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?, 412–17.

80. For a contemporary philosophical interpretation of the importance and limits of general principles as an earmark of rationality which also brings out pluralistic meanings of the term, see Nozick, Robert, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, 1993), esp. 39–40, 138–39.Google Scholar

81. Berlin, Isaiah, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (London, 1969), 146–54. For the original date, see p. 118.Google Scholar

82. Berlin, “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” in Four Essays, 201.

83. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 171.

84. E.g., Descartes, René, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Haldane, Elizabeth (Cambridge, 1968), 14, 19.Google Scholar Cf. 31, where Descartes compares the rational thinkers with weavers of tapestry. Cf. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 4, chap. 17.