Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Scenographies of suicide: Hitler and his victims

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03085140500054651

1469-5766

C. W. Turner,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

Abstract Writings on the most extreme concentration camps offer a number of explanations for low rates of suicide. Drawing on philosophical anthropology, this article argues that the categories of ‘worldlessness’ – deprivation of the means of keeping reality at a distance – and temporal perversion – reduction of the capacity for retention and protention – offer the most general way of formulating the camps’ inhumanity and of bringing these explanations together. Following Blumenberg, it is argued that these categories may also be used to make sense of the world orientation of Adolf Hitler. Keywords: suicideDurkheimtimeBlumenbergHitler Notes Charles Turner is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Warwick. His most recent articles include ‘Jurgen Habermas: European or German?’, European Journal of Political Theory 3(3), 2004, and ‘Mannheim's utopia today’, History of the Human Sciences. He is currently completing a book entitled Sociological Theory and the Art of Living. Robert Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork conclude their magisterial, gradualist account of ‘what we know’ about Auschwitz with the word ‘why?’ See van Pelt and Dwork (Citation1996: 363). A similar question hangs over Bauman's account of the role of instrumental rationality in Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman Citation1988). See, for instance, the absurd passage in which Giorgio Agamben equates modern life in general with that of the concentration camps (Agamben Citation1998: ch. 7). Two examples are Blanchot (Citation1996) and Agamben (Citation2002). There are many others. What makes such an instrumental attitude to the Holocaust intellectually barren is that its best efforts at profundity tend if anything to diminish the enormity of the experiences and events conveyed in the testimonies themselves. The focus here is solely on the harshest concentration camps erected under National Socialism. But in expressing in a general way some of the conditions under which suicide was made less likely, the argument may be taken to have implications for making comparative sense of the phenomenon of suicide in the worst of the Soviet camps. For brief considerations of suicide here, see Merridale (Citation2000) and Applebaum (Citation2003: 312). This does not contradict the claim made earlier about the Nazis producing prisoners in their own image. The quotations earlier concern behaviour in extremis, not belief or personality type. The absence of recognizable forms of social membership makes the title of one of Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories so pitiless. See ‘Auschwitz, our home’ in Borowski (Citation1976). It is beyond the scope of this paper, but there is likely to be some profit in an interpretation of Palestinian suicide bombers which makes use of the categories of altruism and fatalism. A starting point might be the suggestion that a tendency towards fatalistic suicide is transformed into one towards altruistic suicide when a secular account of the despotism under which one lives is supplemented or replaced by a religious account. It is not often enough remarked that the slogan above the camp gate, ‘Arbeit macht frei’, was a piece of National Socialist anti-urbanism, being a variation on the German medieval slogan ‘Stadtluft mach frei’, ‘the air of the city makes you free’. This referred to the practice by which a serf might become liberated from the condition of bondage to a lord as a result of a prolonged period spent within a city's walls. In his study of Ernst Jünger, Die Aesthetik des Schreckens, Karl-Heinz Bohrer (Citation1978) argues that before World War I Jünger was already in possession of the categories and literary devices through which he would later depict the experience of the front. The theme of ‘world constitution’ is a staple of phenomenological philosophy. One hesitates to become involved here in its more abstruse aspects. See, however, Plessner (Citation1981) For this reason Jack Benny's joke in Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, namely that they are called concentration camps because ‘we [the SS] do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping’, seems to be the wrong way about – never was so much concentration required merely to stay alive. Additional informationNotes on contributorsCharles Turner Charles Turner is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Warwick. His most recent articles include ‘Jurgen Habermas: European or German?’, European Journal of Political Theory 3(3), 2004, and ‘Mannheim's utopia today’, History of the Human Sciences. He is currently completing a book entitled Sociological Theory and the Art of Living.