A Philosophical View of the Holocaust Phenomenon
Tomas Halik
President of the Czech Christian Academy
Organized savagery aimed at obliterating societies of millions of people just because they happened to have been born into a certain racial or social category, the crimes of German Nazism and Russian, Chinese or Cambodian communism - through their absurdity, cruelty and sheer scope, these have come to signify a hitherto unachieved and still unsurpassed moment not only in this century's history, but apparently in the entire history of the evil and iniquity which has played its part in humankind's biography for thousands of years.
We have gathered in a country depicted on the allegorical maps of yesteryear as the heart of Europe. The blood of three cultures, Czech, German and Jewish, flowed through this heart for centuries. In the course of our century this heart has been cruelly broken several times. Rabbi Nachmann used to say that no heart is as whole as a broken one; but he was referring to a heart broken by the healing pain of penitence.
We have gathered in a city of ancient Jewish culture, at whose beginnings there resounded Avigdor Kano's elegy for the victims of the terrible pogrom of 1389. This history continues in the legends about Maharal the Wise (Yehuda ben Betzalel, better known in Prague as Rabbi Low), and culminates in Franz Kafka's anxiety-ridden vision of a court that sits in Prague's attics and delivers up for execution a human being who never learns the substance of the indictment against him. Scarcely one human generation had elapsed after Kafka's death when hundreds of thousands of Prague Jews, unaware of any guilt, were carted off to death.
We have gathered in a country whose first democratically elected president, while still a professor at Charles University's College of Arts, energetically intervened in an Austro-Hungarian analogy of the Dreyfuss affair exactly one hundred years ago, rising up courageously against anti-Semitic ravings and the superstition of ritual murder. We have gathered in a country where, not even one whole generation later, a now communist president staged show trials against his closest collaborators of many years, trials with a strikingly anti-Semitic undertone.
On this occasion we will also speak publicly about the extermination of the Romanies of Bohemia, which the Czechs also took part in, so that this extermination cannot be blamed one hundred percent on the German forces of occupation. Understandably, this is not exactly a popular topic in Bohemia. For hundreds of years, Czech chauvinism and base nationalism have consorted with the three sinister Fates of anti-German, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish prejudice, which some groups would like to resuscitate even today and put to use for political purposes. Today, when anti-Semitism in Bohemia has, after all, faded somewhat (unlike these other two), its place is being taken by aversion to Romanies. To combat bias in Czech society today requires the same sort of courage as Professor Masaryk exhibited in the Hilsner affair or in rejecting the so-called Manuscripts, that is, those alleged literary treasures counterfeited for the sake of promulgating the pan-Slavic ideology.
I am sure that participants in this conference have visited one of Prague's synagogues, whose walls teem with the names of the victims of an occurrence we are still seeking a suitable name for: Genocide? Holocaust? Shoah? Endlosung? All of these terms are encumbered with certain connotations. Whenever my eyes rest on these names, a dialogue from a book by Eli Wiesel comes to mind:
"Who are you?
A Number.
Your name?
Gone. Blown away. Into the sky.
Look up there. The sky is black. Black with names."
These are verses commemorating the people who were reduced to numbers. And subsequently to zeroes. They were stripped of everything which makes up a human being's personality and dignity, the human identity: property and rights, garments and names, and, in the end, even their bodies. People were turned into smoke rising to the sky. The skies seemed to be black, hopelessly void and empty.
Still, in Jewish religious iconography the sky is but the footrest beneath the throne of the One who, although nameless, endows a human being with a name. And the name of each human being, although forgotten even by his own father and mother, has been engraved on His palm.
When preparing for this conference, I read, or brushed up on, dozens of texts by contemporary Jewish thinkers who seek to give an answer to a burning question: Where was God when his chosen people were suffering in Auschwitz and other places? Some of them have arrived at a sentence which is as much a part of this century's history as Auschwitz and the gulag: God is dead. And many have put this sentence in a causal nexus with Auschwitz and the gulag, in the gist of an assertion made by Dostoevsky: If there is no God, then everything is permitted.
The claim that God is dead is by no means the brainchild of this century. Nor did it originate with Nietzsche, Hegel, or the Lutheran Good-Friday hymn quoted by Hegel. Gershom Scholem, a great authority on Jewish cabalistic mysticism, seems to have come across the oldest extant form of this assertion, in connection with the Golem legends. The legends concerned, however, are several centuries older than their Prague counterparts from Rabbi Low's circle. According to this old legend from the Middle Ages, the Golem was created by the prophet Jeremiah using a combination of numbers standing for the letters in the opening text from Genesis, the creation text. He made his Golem to celebrate the divine power of creation. He brought him to life by inscribing these words on the Golem's forehead: JHWH ELOHIM EMETH, God is Truth. It is said that the Golem took a knife, scraped off the initial aleph of the last word, thus obtaining JHWH ELOHIM METH, God is Dead. By way of explanation, the Golem related the following legend to the startled onlookers: Once upon a time, there lived a builder of great ingenuity. His two apprentices discovered the secrets of his craft and proceeded to build houses and cities in their master's fashion, only at cheaper cost. The builder was ruined. The message is this: You people, who now possess such an ability, who now even have power over the origin of life, will you not be considered gods? Will you not make God superfluous? Some commentators see in this story an outstanding metaphor for technology, or even for modern man's desire to run the whole world, to manipulate nature and history through the power of rationality (knowledge is power).
In his later works, especially in an essay entitled "Twentieth Century Wars & The Twentieth Century as War" (Valky dvacateho stoleti a dvacate stoleti jako valka), the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka describes the logic whereby the world of power, unchecked by conscience and transcendental responsibility, flies headlong towards total war. Nonetheless, Patocka also points out that the experience of extreme suffering and distress, seen as "leaning out into the night of non-existence", or a confrontation with nothingness, makes it possible to re-evaluate values in a profound way and bring about understanding - the solidarity of the shattered - among those who have experienced the total breakdown of power's logic.
In many respects Patocka is akin to Hannah Arendt, who analyzed the essence of modern totalitarianism. In her controversial book (controversial mainly from the historical point of view), Eichmann in Jerusalem, she views Eichmann not as a man of hatred but rather as an average official who, just like a multitude of others, had given up responsibility for his own thinking and the obligation to keep asking himself disturbing questions, and preferred to operate obediently within a monstrous bureaucratic machine. According to Arendt, Eichmann was a "criminal without an evil motive", a man whose actions were not rooted in his personal decisions, but rather one who gradually became the puppet of some sort of objective powers-that-be. His actions are only responses to an ever-changing situation. His words do not convey any inner experience, rather they are merely a stream of platitudes and cliches. He is an archetype of the human being lacking all inner identity, all inward substance. According to Arendt, the prerequisite for an open, free society and the rule of law consists, on one hand, of the law's stability (the law stands, and can only be modified through legal processes, as opposed to, for example, accommodation to a ruler's momentary needs) and, on the other, of responsibility and judgment on the part of people acting independently, creatively and of their own volition. The law separates the public sector, where people are equal, from the private sector, where they are different, unique and irreplaceable. In a totalitarian society, law is the necessity which deprives human beings of their freedom: it is not thinking for oneself and responsible decision-making that are asked of people, but rather submission, conformity and uniformity. Though visible during revolutions, terror is "invisible" in a totalitarian society: it has become a component of the functioning bureaucratic machinery, staffed with officials who lack an awareness of their responsibility.
"Responsibility" is a key concept of the philosophical, ethical and religious thought of Hans Jonas, who wrote the famous text "The Concept of God After Auschwitz" (Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz). In his view, it is no longer possible to subscribe to the traditional image of God as being good, comprehensible and almighty. Since, in Jonas' opinion, the God of the Biblical tradition cannot cease to be good or comprehensible, it is necessary to relent somewhat on divine omnipotence. Here Jonas turns to the tradition of cabalistic mysticism and suggests that God himself has waived his omnipotence in favor of making room for human freedom. God, according to Jonas, is not apathetic but, more accurately, sympathetic, i.e. he is compassionate and suffers along with his creation.
The Christian theologian Jurgen Moltmann thinks in a similar vein. He associates the idea of the "suffering God" with the motif of the crucifixion of Jesus, thus radicalizing certain theses propounded by Martin Luther. According to Moltmann, a radically conceived motif of the cross, divine suffering and compassion breaks down the boundary between atheism and theism. Atheism appears more like a brother to theism: faith is not just about adherence to certain truths and firm convictions, but rather a life-long struggle against the temptation of hopelessness. And the struggle, like life itself, has its ups and downs.
Quite another kind of perception of the Holocaust experience is offered by the German Jewish theoretician Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who is also a leading theoretician of the theater of the absurd; as a young man he worked as a translator at the Nuremberg trials. His "Philosophy of the Absurd" (Philosophie des Absurden) extols the theater of the absurd as a great parable of man's alienation in the world. The theater of the absurd confronts the audience with the world's fragmentation and incomprehensibility. Anyone waiting for the elucidation of a meaning must be told without compassion that he will have to wait until the meaning is revealed by a competent authority, which is to say, never. Hildesheimer refuses to discuss God. But here we can discern a point of convergence with Elie Wiesel's work. The key moment for his religious experience in the concentration camp was the moment when he witnessed the horrendous execution of a young boy. When he asked where God was at that instant, the reply he got was: Here he is, swinging on the gallows.
Elie Wiesel concurs with those who, after Auschwitz, consider it impossible to talk about God. It is still, however, possible to talk to God, to send queries, or even reproaches, to the abyss of His reticence.
And so I would like to close this reflection with the words addressed to God by Avigdor ben Yitzhak Karo over six centuries ago, following an appalling pogrom in Prague, and which were subsequently recited in Prague's synagogues on Yom Kippur for centuries to come:
"Now, Father of us all, the time has come to declare that this slaughter must stop! Say it now, so that not a single one shall be added to the horrendous list of victims! The slaughter and strangulation have been going on for long enough for the world to scorn at us, long enough indeed!"