At Home in the World: Historical Theodicies and the Comprehensibility of the Holocaust

HISTORIOGRAPHY: THE SPECTRUM OF COMPREHENSION

SCHOLAR	MONOGRAPH	THEODICY: IS THE HOLOCAUST COMPREHENSIBLE?	NATURE OF EVIL: MONSTROSITY / BANALITY	FUNCTIONALIST / INTENTIONALIST	IS EVIL AHISTORICAL?	AT HOME / HOMELESS
Jean Améry	At the Mind’s Limits	Never — Holocaust experiences are incomparable, indescribable & unintelligible. There can be no defense or justification for a world that includes Auschwitz.	Monstrosity or profundity — torture & concentration camps dehumanized victims beyond any reconciliation.	No possible explanation for the Holocaust.	Suffering of victims & brutality of perpetrators can never be fully grasped. Depth & intensity of experiences places them beyond understanding or atonement.	Homeless
Hannah Arendt	Eichmann in Jerusalem	Yes — through the banality of evil.	Banality — Eichmann committed mass murder out of duty, lawfulness, stupidity & warped morality, not seduction or indoctrination; Criminals do not have to be monstrous to commit monstrous crimes. Great crimes can originate from small causes, but small causes can be overcome.		Eichmann was a new type of criminal, but the Holocaust was not a new type of evil. Nazi evil lost recognizable quality of temptation & developed from modernity. Was Eichmann evil?	At Home
Yehuda Bauer	Rethinking the Holocaust	Yes — through an expanded category of shared humanity & the context of human actions.	Both — Evil is comprehensible in principle but difficult to explain in history. Humans (Nazis) can be evil but not inhuman.		History is explicable & the Holocaust was perpetrated for human, not inhuman reasons.	At Home
Dan Diner	Beyond the Conceivable	Yes — by expanding conceptions of rationality to include counter-rationality.	Both — Nazi totalitarian fog obfuscated individual responsibility, but Nazi worldview led to mass murder.		Nazi actions were counter-rational, not irrational, confronting civilization with radical new evil. Nazis dissolved distinction between perpetrators & victims in ghettos.
Saul Friedländer	Nazi Germany and the Jews	Yes — through the context of violence in Poland & “redemptive anti-Semitism” But comprehension does not provide closure.	Distinguish banal & monstrous but fuse them together — Holocaust perpetrated by ordinary people within an extraordinary regime.	Intentionalist — Jewish policies driven by Hitler & grew from bond between Fuhrer & German society, Nazi institutions, evolving war & Hitler’s “redemptive anti-Semitism.”
Hans Mommsen	From Weimar to Auschwitz	Yes — through the political & psychological structures of the Third Reich.	Both — Holocaust revealed the fragility of civilizational structures and what insignificant mechanisms can destroy it.	Functionalist — technocratic & bureaucratic machinery created environment for persecution & deportation to become genocide. Hitler was a “weak dictator” & the Holocaust had no grand program.
Susan Neiman	Evil in Modern Thought	Traces 2 intellectual genealogies: (1) Jean Jacques Rousseau to Hannah Arendt; (2) Voltaire to Jean Améry	Good or bad intentions were less relevant. “Souls generally go at bargain rates.” Banality does not explain or justify evil but provides a conceptual framework so that evil does not threaten reason itself.	Holocaust did not take place by accident, but evil intentions are insufficient for all the evil actions they caused.	Holocaust should expand (not destroy) our understanding of human nature & our own capacities for evil.
Special Explanations: Teleology	Sonderweg (Special Path)	Yes — through Germany’s special historical path from the 1848 Revolutions or Franco-Prussian War which culminated in Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich & the gas chambers.
Special Explanations: Ideology (i.e., Daniel Jonah Goldhagen)	Hitler’s Willing Executioners	Yes — through Nazi ideology and “eliminationist anti-Semitism” or Adolf Hitler’s personality and leadership.	Monstrosity — evil motivations due to anti-Semitism, propaganda, brainwashing, or ignorance led to extraordinary atrocities.	Intentionalist — Hitler & his lieutenants masterminded the Holocaust by using propaganda to enflame German anti-Semitism.