"MURDEROUS MODERNITY," HOLOCAUST NOT "METAHISTORICAL MORALITY TALE"

Konrad H. Jarausch, Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015) ("The brutality of the Holocaust, broadly defined, poses a fundamental challenge to the Western master narrative that views modernization as a civilizing process. If since the Middle Ages Europeans had been progressing toward a reduction of violence . . . , the sudden relapse into utter barbarity during the Nazi dictatorship is hard to explain. In order to maintain the optimistic Whig interpretation of ineluctable progress, democratic intellectuals have tended to claim that the Germans deviated form this liberal development, flowing a special path in an anti modern direction. But the Polish Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has challenged this self-exculpatory view, which understates Western imperialist crimes; instead, he claims that 'the historical study of the Holocaust has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Nazi-perpetrated genocide was a legitimate outcome of rational bureaucratic culture.' By producing a sense of 'moral indifference' among the perpetrators and conferring 'moral invisibility' on the victims, modernity itself was to blame. 'Both creation and destruction are inseparable aspects of what we call civilization." "In order to resolve this paradox, it is necessary to strop treating the Holocaust as metahistorical morality tale and to reinsert it into its actual historical setting. Hitler unleashed his wars of aggression primarily as an effort to gain hegemony over the European continent in order to strengthen Germany's base for global competition. The ensuing mass murder of civilians was the result of Nazi dreams of eastern settlement, which required the ethnic cleansing of the existing residents so as to create space for German colonists. The persecution of millions of Jews caught in ghettos and concentration camps stemmed moreover from a post-Jewish-emancipation form of racial anti-Semitism which, by arguing biologically, cut off any escape by religious conversion or sociocultural assimilation. Finally, the ideological war of annihilation against communism and the Soviet Union facilitated mass killing because the savagery of the fighting ruptured all moral restrains. By involving local auxiliaries and extending into the Balkans, the Nazi campaign of mass murder interwove these three separate strands in a more complex fashion than is commonly remembered." Id. at 365-366 (citations omitted). From the bookjacket: "Out of Ashes explores the paradox of the European encounter with modernity in the twentieth century, sheddng light on why it led to cataclysm, inhumanity, and self-destruction, but also social justice, democracy, and peace." Also, see Geoffrey Wheatcraft, "Continental Divides," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/2/2015.).