Social Theory After the Holocaust

zygmunt bauman
what is rather obvious, though, is that in the course of time the ‘guilt’ aspect,
looming prominently in the beginning, has been progressively exorcised from
the model of the ‘survivor complex’, leaving the pure and unalloyed, unambiguous
and no more contested approval of self-preservation for self-preservation’s
sake. It was just the haunting pain left by those sufferings that staying alive
required which has been blamed for the persistence of the ‘syndrome’.
Such a shift brings us dangerously close to the spine-chilling image of the
survivor as painted by Elias Canetti – as the man for whom ‘the most elementary
and obvious form of success is to remain alive’. For Canetti’s survivor, the
survival – unlike mere self-preservation – is targeted on the other, not on the
self: ‘they want to survive their contemporaries. They know that many die early
and they want a different fate for themselves.’ At the far end of the survivalist
obsession, Canetti’s survivor ‘wants to kill so that he can survive others; he wants
to stay alive so as not to have others surviving him’; ‘the survivor’s most fantastic
triumphs have taken place in our own time, among people who set a great store
about the idea of humanity... The survivor is mankind’s worst evil, its curse and
perhaps its doom.’ 4
The wider repercussions of that cult of survival contain dangers of potentially
formidable proportions. Time and again the lessons of the Holocaust are
reduced for popular consumption to a simple formula: ‘who strikes first,
survives’; or to an even simpler one: ‘the stronger lives’. The awesome twopronged
legacy of the Holocaust is, on one hand, the tendency to treat survival
as the sole, or at any rate the primary value and purpose of life, and on the other
the positing of the issue of survival as that of the competition for a scarce
resource, and so of the survival itself as a site of conflict between incompatible
interests in which the success of some depends on the non-survival of others.
Sinister, pernicious and morally destructive as it is in its own right, this is not
the only avatar of the Holocaust’s ghost and not its only misdeed. Another is
the phenomenon dubbed by Alain Finkielkraut le juif imaginaire 5 – a Jew
manifesting his Jewishness, so to speak, in living on the account and at the
expense of a ‘categorical martyrdom’, basking in the fame of his ancestral
martyrs without paying the price for the glory. Such ‘imaginary Jews’, in Finkielkraut’s
caustic description, are the ‘habitués of unreality’, who ‘have taken up
residence in fiction’, ‘live in borrowed identities’, ‘have chosen to pass their time
in a novelistic space full of sound and fury’ – and as a result have become
‘armchair Jews, since, after the Catastrophe, Judaism cannot offer them any
content but suffering, and they themselves do not suffer’. For this generation Finkielkraut,
prolific and refined French writer and one of its most illustrious and
famous members, is full of contempt: they are, he says, ‘cowards in life, martyred
in dream’ – ‘they mask their inborn softness with the outcast’s courage’. 6
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