Social Theory After the Holocaust

Introduction
between ‘structuralist’ and ‘intentionalist’ historians. Even there, the emphasis
on both sides is largely on conditions, parameters, on what was already in place
when the event took place. The philosopher Hans Blumenberg expressed this
problem with incomparable force:
The consolation we derive from giving precedence to conditions over events
is based only on the hypothesis that conditions are the result of the actions of
an indeterminate large number of people instead of just a few who we can
name. But it is just as natural to suppose that history then becomes a process
in nature, a sequence of waves, a glacial drift, a tectonic fault movement, a
flood, or an alluvial deposit…The more subtle the theoretical knowledge, the
more it nourishes the suspicion that history does not take place and is not
made in its great moments, and that no causality attaches to those of its scenes
that are ready for engraving, but rather the chains of their motivations have
already run out when the hammer is raised to nail up the theses, when the
breaking of windows takes place or the trumpet is blown for the day of
reckoning. 4
The challenge to all accounts of an event such as the Holocaust, which
consisted of an unfolding sequence of events, has been, Blumenberg suggests,
to include a sense of the manner in which new links were added to the chain of
motivations as the sequence of events unfolded, thereby avoiding the temptation
to reduce the event to its conditions. Curiously enough, this is actually one of
the achievements of a work often thought to have reduced the Holocaust to the
most extreme manifestation of the set of conditions known as modernity.
Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust is innovative precisely in the sections
where it analyses bureaucratic rationality less as mindless rule-following than as
a search by individuals for innovative solutions to problems. In the more direct
mode of address characteristic of the historian, Christopher Browning describes
the progressive demoralisation of the ordinary men of Reserve Police Battalion
101 and the emergence of the characteristic Einsatzgruppe mentality. In neither
of these respected studies has the chain of motivations been exhausted when the
fatal papers are signed or processed, or when the gun barrel is placed against the
victim’s neck. At the same time, both have attracted criticism for their accounts
of the broader social forces which give rise to the extreme situations they address.
Bauman stands accused of implying that enlightenment culminated in the final
solution and that the final solution’s necessary conditions remain in place in
contemporary society. Browning, with his appeals to the social psychology of
Milgram and Zimbardo, implies that the necessary conditions for such
behaviour are already in place in each of us as ‘ordinary men’.
Much of the commentary which followed Bauman’s book concentrated on
2