Heidegger, Arendt, and the Modernity of Mass Death
6.1 Kindertransport from the Anhalter Bahnhof (September 2, 1936). Photograph by Herbert Sonnenfeld. Courtesy of Alfred Gottwaldt
IN THE 1930s, the Anhalter Bahnhof became known as an “Abschiedsbahnhof” (farewell station) with a “platform of tears” because 3,262 Jewish children were sent out of Germany by their parents from this station.1 On the Kindertransport of September 2, 1936, German-Jewish children from Berlin were sent to the French port city of Marseille, before traveling further by ship to Palestine. Norbert Wollheim tells about his work seeing the transports off:
We had approximately twenty transports which left Berlin. It was my duty to see them all off. On the day the transports left, we assembled the people at the railway station. I had to rent a special room where everyone could gather. Then came the parents, and the brothers and sisters, and the kids with their knapsacks. There was laughing, there were tears.… The children went with the hope that the parents will follow, or that one day they could come back and they would see them again. I did not realize, and I could never realize, that only a year-and-a-half later, from the same railway station, trains would go in the other direction to Hitler’s slaughterhouses.2
After 1939, Jews still remaining in Berlin were unable to emigrate. Beginning on October 18, 1941, “special trains” began leaving Berlin, almost all from Anhalter Bahnhof and Grunewald Bahnhof, to gathering points in Germany and concentration camps in the East. More than 110 “elderly transports”—all consisting of Jews over 65 years of age—left Berlin from the Anhalter Bahnhof bound for the concentration camp of Theresienstadt.
In his book, Meine liebste Mathilde: Die beste Freundin der Rosa Luxemburg, Heinz Knobloch gives the names and places of residence of the elderly Jews collected on “transport list no. 30.”3 Many of the 101 people on this transport came from the Hansaviertel, a middle-class neighborhood north of Berlin’s Tiergarten, where Rosa Luxemburg once lived. They were all sent to the town of Terezín, where an unknown number died in the concentration camp. Knobloch writes in disbelief: “In freight cars, a hundred elderly men and women were carried off. The train went to the Anhalter Bahnhof.… They were taken to Theresienstadt. With the German National Railway … The Berlin Jews left from the Anhalter train station on a regular D-train from the Berlin-Dresden line.”4
The Anhalter Bahnhof became part of a journey of terror for Jews leaving Berlin, who earlier left begrudgingly with the rise of fascism, and who later were deported and killed in the name of fascism. In 1943, in the middle of the horror, the Anhalter Bahnhof was used to save more than seven hundred thousand non-Jews who were evacuated from Berlin after an order by Joseph Goebbels, who feared imminent air raid attacks on the city. Even after the intense aerial campaigns of February of 1945 and the collapse of the station’s roof, the German citizens of Berlin were able to continue to flee the city up until April 17, 1945, the day the last such train left the Anhalter Bahnhof.
Unlike the brief encounters between Heidegger and Celan, the relationship between Heidegger and Arendt was marked by an intellectual and romantic intensity that spanned the better part of half a century. Indeed, much has been written about their relationship, ranging from voyeuristic accounts of their trysts and interpretations of Arendt’s unrequited love for Heidegger to intellectual histories documenting the influence of Heidegger’s ideas on the development of Arendt’s thought.5 Their “affair” has also generated much interest because it was between a German, who at one time was a card-carrying Nazi party member, and a Jewish intellectual forced to flee Nazi Germany. I will give only the barest rehearsal of the facts of their relationship here: Arendt was a student at the University of Marburg when she met Heidegger in the fall of 1924. They corresponded up until 1933, when Arendt left Germany, and they did not speak again until Arendt prepared to return to Germany for a visit in 1950. Their renewed, postwar relationship was marked by a kind of Heidegger hagiography in the later years and lasted until Arendt’s death in 1975.
Although I am not interested in probing any part of the personal side of their relationship, I will situate my analysis of Heidegger and Arendt at a particularly significant juncture in their lives: the period of time immediately following World War II in which both thinkers attempted to articulate the significance of the Nazi death camps for philosophy. In 1949, Arendt finished the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, a resolutely ambitious book in which she sought to explain the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism by analyzing the formation of the modern masses and the creation of superfluous human beings.6 In the book’s last sections, she discussed the “mass production of corpses” (OT 441) in the Nazi death camps, referring more than once to what she called the “insane mass manufacture of corpses” (OT 447). The same year, Heidegger gave two lectures in Bremen in which he referred to the “fabrication of corpses in gas chambers and death camps.”7 Although Heidegger never mentioned the specific fate of Jews in Nazi Germany, he wrote in a letter to Arendt in 1950 of the need for “a thinking that reflects on the extent to which history [Geschichte], imagined only historically [historisch], does not necessarily determine the essential being of humankind … that man must learn another memory … that the fate of the Jews and the Germans has its own truth which our historical calculation [historisches Rechnen] does not reach.”8 One of the things that makes this letter so extraordinary is its timing—that it comes just after he and Arendt have struggled to comprehend and explain the modernity of mass death. Moreover, the letter represents the only time Heidegger acknowledges, if only obliquely, the fate of Jews and Germans, namely that it cannot be encapsulated by “historical” approaches to the past or reached by conventional memories and “historical calculation.” Heidegger, however, does not reveal anything more about the “truth” of the “fate of the Jews and the Germans” or the nature of this new “memory.” Given his notorious silence with regard to the Holocaust, this letter might be interpreted as a kind of conclusion to, rather than an opening on, his thoughts on Jews and Germans during the Holocaust. In what follows, I will confine my own discussion of Arendt and Heidegger to this short period between the end of the Second World War and the resumption of their correspondence in 1950 in order to analyze how they each reflected—in both converging and diverging ways—on “the fabrication of corpses” and the modernity of mass death.
On December 1, 1949, Heidegger gave four lectures entitled “Einblick in das was ist” (A Look at that which is). They represent one of the clearest and earliest distillations of his reflections on the alienation of the modern world caused by the dominance of technology. In fact, the concepts that Heidegger introduces in the four lectures—Das Ding (the thing), Das Gestell (the en-framing), Die Gefahr (the danger), and Die Kehre (the turning)—anticipate much of his thinking after World War II with regard to technology destroying the essence of being. Nowadays, however, these Bremen lectures are primarily known because it is in the lectures on “Das Gestell” and “Die Gefahr” that Heidegger mentions, for the first and only time, the existence of “the gas chambers and death camps” (BV 27) and the fact that “hundreds of thousands … are discretely liquidated in death camps” (BV 56). He never mentions or alludes to the Holocaust again.
In these lectures, Heidegger does not name the perpetrators and victims; instead, he speaks of death strictly in the passive tense: “Sie werden umgelegt…. Sie werden … liquidiert [They are done in. They are liquidated]” (BV 56). At no point does he say that German Nazis murdered Jews. Moreover, he does not indicate where these deaths occurred, when they happened, or the kind of ideology that justified them: He simply says that “hundreds of thousands” are killed, as if the Holocaust was somehow out of time, devoid of place, and without ideology. He avoids all facticities that might have endowed the Holocaust with a specific historicity. Indeed, as many commentators have argued, Heidegger’s brief allusions to the Holocaust are scandalously insufficient, particularly for someone who, at least in his early years, openly supported the policies of the Nazi party and, even in his later years, never distanced himself unequivocally from anti-Semitism.9 As Jean-François Lyotard famously put it in his indictment of Heidegger: He “has lent to extermination not his hand and not even his thought but his silence and non-thought. That he ‘forgot’ the extermination.”10
As in my earlier discussion of Heidegger and Celan, I am not interested in trying to convict or exonerate Heidegger on the charge of Nazism by undertaking a deep hermeneutics of his works or his silence vis-à-vis the Holocaust. This was, of course, the intent of Victor Farías’s 1987 exposé, Heidegger and National Socialism, and it has been the subject of many extraordinary defenses and condemnations of the social and political affinities and consequences of Heidegger’s thought.11 Instead, I am much more interested in how his brief remarks on the gas chambers and death camps betray a consistent trajectory of thought concerning the concept of death, a trajectory that goes back to his 1926 magnum opus, Being and Time.12 It is here that Heidegger articulates the importance and centrality of the paradigm of authenticity for conceptualizing the individuality of death, namely the fact that no one can “take away” my death because it is my “ownmost” and “uttermost” possibility (BT 294). Understood in its properly authentic-existential dimension, death is not an event at the end of one’s life, something that will happen one day, but rather my “ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (BT 294), a possibility that is always and only mine. This is also the concept of death that informs the Bremen lectures of 1949. For Heidegger, the mass death in the gas chambers turns out not to be “death” at all because death is predicated on the principle of individuality, lived as a permanent possibility, and evaluated by its authenticity. However, as I will argue here, this fundamental structuring distinction between authentic and inauthentic dying is untenable, even thoughtless and absurd, in a sociality where anonymous mass death is its defining and ultimate purpose.
In what follows, I first explore Heidegger’s early conceptualization of death in order to suggest how his thinking precludes the thought of “mass death.”13 In this regard, I am not simply arguing that Heidegger “forgot” the Holocaust as Lyotard does; rather, I am suggesting, somewhat more boldly, that Heidegger cannot think the Holocaust. With reference to the work of Giorgio Agamben and Edith Wyschogrod,14 I argue that the existential concept of authentic death presupposes a life-world in which death is a singular, individualizing possibility and temporality is organized according to a tripartite schemata of past experiences, present possibilities, and future projects. This life-world is radically incommensurate with the death-world of the concentration camps, and, for this reason, the possibility of authentically “being-towards-death” reaches its limit with the reality of man-made mass death. Heidegger, however, never changed or surrendered the concept of authentic death; instead, he maintained that the victims of the Holocaust did not “die.”15
Using Arendt’s essay, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” (1946), I argue that her genealogy of totalitarianism begins with a critique of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity, a notion that not only informed the individuality of death as Dasein’s own-most possibility in Being and Time (1926), but also informed his characterization of the death-camps as places where “death” did not occur. Heidegger accords a very specific meaning to death as “the shelter of the truth of being,” which differs significantly from Arendt’s account of death in the last chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, even while she embraces his critique of modernity in its dimensions of technologization and atomization. Whereas Arendt attempted to understand the conditions of possibility of mass death and its significance for human nature, Heidegger treated mass death as a kind of negative proof of the paradigm of authenticity and the authority of the self. In her reflections on how totalitarian violence rendered human beings “superfluous,” Arendt writes:
What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shamefulness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run them according to strictly ‘scientific’ standards; it is the concern of all men. Suffering, of which there has always been too much on earth, is not the issue, nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake.
(OT 458-59)
Unlike Heidegger who refused to give up the paradigm of authenticity, Arendt is suggesting that it no longer makes sense to presuppose human nature, individuality, or death. All of these things changed with the advent of anonymous, state-sponsored mass death. Arendt is not interested in trying to reclaim a “lost” way of being or a “lost” conception of dying; rather, she is interested in the genealogy of totalitarian violence, something which she traces back to the rise of the modern masses, the creation of the “mass man” (OT 311), and the atomization of the individual. Although Arendt will adopt much of Heidegger’s critique of modernity into her political theory, the critical phrase betraying the exterminatory possibilities of the dialectic of modernity—“the fabrication of corpses”—ultimately means quite different things to Heidegger and Arendt. As a snapshot of the German/Jewish dialectic, the purpose of this chapter is to probe this difference by considering how Heidegger and Arendt thought about the significance of mass death.
THE LIMITS OF AUTHENTICITY: DEATH IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL ANNIHILATION
The twentieth century can claim that it has mastered the execution of mass death, as both an absolutely efficient and absolutely anonymous event. Human beings are now able to kill each other faster and in greater numbers than ever before possible: Beginning in 1915, the Ottoman government collected, deported by train, and executed some 600,000 to 2,000,000 Armenian people in the span of several years. With World War I, it became possible for tens of thousands of soldiers to be killed and mutilated beyond recognition every month for four years, many only identified negatively as “unknown.” Between 1942 and 1945, the Nazis systematically evacuated the Eastern European ghettos and transported by train millions of Jews as well as thousands upon thousands of Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and so-called social or political ‘misfits’ to forced labor and death camps, where they were gassed or shot and their bodies incinerated or left to rot in mass graves. Between 1975 and 1979, approximately 1.6 million Cambodians were murdered or starved to death by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in his attempt to centralize dictatorial control and eradicate Buddhism and ethnic minorities from Cambodia. In less than ninety days between April 1994 and July 1994, members of the government-sponsored Hutu tribe slaughtered, primarily by machete, over 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, in Rwanda.
The magnitude of the dead and the short span of time required to decimate these populations bespeak a mentality of reproducible annihilation of people deemed to be expendable or less than human. Although such a mentality was certainly realized and streamlined by the accepting employment of new technologies of mass transportation and new weapons (from machine guns to nerve gas agents, to railway transportation and Zyklon B), ultimately all that is needed is the single-minded will to designate people as expendable and reproduce mass death. That hundreds of thousands of Armenians cannot be accounted for in the most reliable statistics—as either killed or as, in fact, never existent—not only testifies to the anonymous nature of mass death but also to the targeted future reality of plausibly consummating nothingness. For the dead, it is possible that nothing but an uncertain number remains.
And within this thanatological litany, perhaps the most extreme manifestation of technological distancing and efficacious mass death occurred on August 6 and 9, 1945, the days a solitary United States B-29 bomber dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 placed the number of deaths in Hiroshima between seventy to eighty thousand and the number of deaths in Nagasaki between thirty-five and forty thousand. Many of the Japanese people were completely annihilated in the searing flash, reduced immediately to the nothingness of dust. Others were detectable only by a severed white shadow scorched on a wall near where they last were. These are the ones whose bodies were radically unidentifiable and utterly dematerialized in the instant of the flash. They remain among the forever more-or-less, the plus-or-minus ten thousand, who can never be finally checked, accounted for, or named. Every possible connecting trace of who they might have been (their bodies, their lives and personal histories, their relatives and friends, their records and private livelihoods) was simultaneously eradicated when they were atomized.
The Armenian genocide, two world wars, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Cambodia, Bosnia, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Sudan, Rwanda, Darfur—and the list goes on and on. In mentioning these man-made disasters, I am not trying to draw equations, nor am I attempting to level distinctions between these histories of mass death. This was, of course, the ostensible subject of the so-called Historikerstreit in 1986, namely whether the Holocaust was a unique genocide. I have no interest in participating in this debate or in using such terms. In speaking about the modernity of mass death, I am not trying to dispense with, minimize, or ignore each of the historically specific and historically unique circumstances, events, and justifications that led to and created these human disasters. My concerns lies elsewhere, with a philosophical question, which could be asked of any or all of these man-made disasters: Does the possibility of mass death—the factorylike production of anonymous death—constitute a new way of being in the world, a new way of living? And what does this mean for the modern subject, for German/Jewish modernity?
It used to be that humans could be conceptualized as finite beings in time, as simultaneously our past (experiences and futures past, how we used to imagine the future), our present (memories, activities, and projects), and our future (expectations and hopes alongside the contingency of the unknown).16 It also used to be that humans died as individuals and were buried or otherwise commemorated as such. With the advent of the age of mass death, these temporal and corporeal facticities of being have been blasted apart: Experience and expectation, past and future no longer applied as a framework for orienting experience in the sociality of the “death-world” where human lives were reduced to the presence of an annihilating now-time and killed anonymously en masse. The production of an event (the disaster) or sociality (the death-world), where death is its defining and ultimate purpose, seems to necessitate a reconsideration of the inherited relationships between a conventional tripartite temporality and a singular death, what I will term an “authentic” and individualized Heideggerian death for short.
In her landmark study of Western philosophy and mass death, Edith Wyschogrod coined the term “death-world” as a counter-concept to Husserl’s “life-world” in order to articulate the necessity of a new philosophical account of death and dying in the twentieth century.17 The critical question that she posed was this: “[Does] the emergence of the death event, including war and related phenomena, as well as the death-world, affect present historical existence? … Is it possible that the existence of the death event constitutes a new historical a priori, a new grid that determines further experience?”18 Her argument, which I will build on here, is that the creation of the death-world is a fundamentally new and unique form of social existence, in which vast populations of people are condemned to a meaningless death. Although I will not be comparing the political, social, or historical “reasons” or “contexts” for the genocides and mass deaths of the twentieth century, I think it can be said that they are all characterized by the attempt to kill, in the most efficient way possible, a targeted group of people, and that anonymous, mass death is thus their defining and ultimate purpose. As Wyschogrod and others have recently argued, the technological achievement of mass death necessitates a reconsideration of the ways in which philosophy describes the temporality of historical experience and conceptualizes the individuality of death: In the death-world, time is no longer experienced as a space of experience coupled to a horizon of possibilities but as an annihilating present; and similarly, death is no longer dying alone but the anonymous production of masses of corpses.19
The seemingly natural and inevitable division of human experiences into a tripartite schematic—in which the past is linked to a fictive point in the present, which, in turn, is linked to the possibility of an always arriving (and ultimately unknowable, although sometimes foreseeable) future—is a persistent topos for organizing and narrating human temporality.20 As Husserl argued, our life-worlds—our experiences and expectations of the everyday—are imaginable and livable because of the existence of pregiven, familiar spatiotemporal structures for organizing our lives. As “the spatiotemporal world of things,” the life-world is the ground of all our activities precisely because expectations can be, more or less, derived from and based upon experiences.21 In Husserl’s words: “The pregiven world is the horizon which includes all our goals, all our ends, whether fleeting or lasting, in a flowing and constant manner, just as an intentional horizon-consciousness ‘encompasses’ [umfaßt] everything in advance.”22 Expectations flow in a regular, world-founding manner, from the stock of experiences. To quote Husserl again: “The life-world … is always already there … the ‘ground’ of all praxis … [it] is always and necessarily pregiven as the universal field of all real [wirklich] and possible [möglich] praxis, as horizon.”23 The possibility and perpetuation of the life-world—the more or less stable, certain, regular, given, intuitable, predictable and translatable spaces of experience and horizons of expectation—comprise the coherent sociality of being. The life-world is not an object of contemplation that persists outside human beings; it is synonymous with the temporality of being human.
In addition to this tripartite conceptualization of time, we also need to think about the traditional concept of death and what used to happened to corporeal remains, specifically how corpses and lives were valued, mourned, and memorialized together. As Philippe Ariès has shown in his historical anthropology, the burial of the dead is connected—across place and time—to the perpetuation of community and the consolidation of a memory of the dead for the sake of generations yet to come.24 Elaborate and precise funeral rites accompany burial: locating the appropriate grave site (inside or outside the city, a particular plot in a cemetery or monastery), marking the tomb by an identificatory epitaph (often the name of the deceased, the years of birth and death, but sometimes also the profession, last words, social or political status), dressing the deceased and preparing the body (variously embalmed, wrapped, covered, exhibited, or cremated), and mourning the passing of the dead (by saying eulogies or prayers, sitting Shivah, lighting yearly remembrance candles, making pilgrimages, and participating in anniversary ceremonies and other rituals of memory). In every case, the singular individuality of the dead is mourned and memorialized.
Often the very hour of death could be anticipated, expected, and prepared for with the gathering of friends and family at the bedside of the dying.25 It is in this respect that deathbed confessions arose to purify sin and settle accounts in this world before passing on. In the last hour, the entire life was said to pass before the eyes of both the living and the dying, able to be surveyed, evaluated, and possibly redeemed with a final urgency. Death was not just the end of life but the substantive moment in understanding and evaluating one’s life. Over time, the hour of death became stretched into longer and longer durations such that the art of living and the art of dying became ever more closely joined to one another: ‘To be blessed in death, one must learn to live / To be blessed in life, one must learn to die.’ In this late-medieval conception of life in death and death in life, we might see a prelude to the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s obsession with “authentic” dying and, later, Heidegger’s “existential” conception of living as always “being-towards-death.” For Heidegger, an authentic relationship to death—“the possibility which ends all other possibilities”—is not to be prepared for merely in the final hour of one’s life but is the “anticipation” or “running-ahead” [vorlaufen] of death one’s entire life long (BT, 306). Death does not simply arrive at a certain hour but is a way of living: Death confers individuality to life, and like life, it is what is truly one’s own. In Heidegger’s words, “Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue” (BT 307).
Although the survivors cannot, Heidegger argues, experience “the dying of others,” the dead are still “an object of ‘concern’ in the ways of funeral rites, interment, and the cult of graves” (BT 282). Rituals of mourning and commemoration are enacted as a kind of “Being-with the dead” (BT 282) for the living, even if the death of the other is ultimately unknowable and incomparable. The reason for this unknowability, Heidegger maintains, is that “death is in every case mine” (BT 284). Not only can the other not take my death away from me, the other cannot experience my death since it is my ownmost possibility. Death cannot, by definition, be shared or transferred and is, therefore, characterized by Heidegger as “nonrelational” [unbezüglich] (BT 294).
Heidegger is adamant that the properly existential understanding of death is not to conceive of it as a singular event, which happens at the end of life. Death is not to be understood as something which has “not yet” arrived or is still outstanding, such as, to use his example, a piece of fruit in the process of ripening (BT 286–88). At the same time, death is not to be interpreted as the ending of something, such as when the rain stops falling (BT 289). Instead, dying stands for a “way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death” (BT 291). It is here that Heidegger distinguishes between an authentic “being towards death” and an inauthentic “tranquillization” with regard to death (BT 298). In terms of the latter, he sees the everyday attitude of “the they”—the generalized public—as “fleeing in the face of death,” something that manifests itself in fear, idle talk, and forms of evasion and concealment (BT 298). Heidegger cites Leo Tolstoy’s short story, The Death of Ivan Illich, as an example of this fleeing from death: Ivan only confronts his death after becoming extremely ill, having always considered it as something which did “not yet” concern him.26 Such an attitude toward death as an event in the future fails “to recognize Dasein’s kind of Being and the Being-toward-death which belongs to Dasein” (BT 301).
By contrast, the authentic, properly existential conception of death conceives of Dasein as “constantly” and “factically” dying because death is Dasein’s uttermost, nonrelational possibility (BT 303): “Authentic existence” is defined as the “anticipation” (literally, the “running ahead”) of death, “the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being” (BT 307). Death cannot be “actualized” because it represents the impossibility of being; instead, it is always a potentiality or possibility, which “individualizes Dasein down to itself” (BT 308). In sum, authentic death is defined as my ownmost, nonrelational possibility, which is constantly anticipated, in anxiety, by being-towards-death. For Heidegger, authenticity is thus the touchstone for evaluating Dasein’s attitude toward death, and being-towards-death is what individualizes Dasein.
Although Heidegger does not cite Rainer Maria Rilke in Being and Time and does not even seriously write about his work until 1946, many of his ideas about authentic death—particularly the understanding of death as something that should be “one’s own”—were clearly articulated in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910).27 In these notebooks, Paris—as the modern metropolis of alienation—represents the site for the loss of individual death: The modern hospital has 559 beds in which people die in a “factorylike” way (fabrikmässig). The result is that “with such an enormous production, each individual death is not very carefully considered, but that doesn’t matter. It is the mass that matters [die Masse macht es]. Who today cares about a well worked-out death? No one…. The wish to have a death of one’s own [ein eigener Tod] is ever more seldom.”28 By contrast to the masses dying anonymously in the city, Chamberlain Brigge, Malte’s grandfather, still “had a death of one’s own” (einen eigenen Tod gehabt), one that conferred and secured the individuality of the self.29 This is an experience of death that should be privileged, perhaps even prized.
According to Blanchot, contempt for “anonymous death” goes back to the end of the nineteenth century and becomes a staple of critiques of modernity from Nietzsche up through Rilke, Heidegger, and, we might add, Arendt.30 Death is to be something that is unique, individually possessed, and properly experienced as meaningful as opposed to something anonymously suffered and devoid of meaning: “He does not want to die like a fly in the hum of mindlessness and nullity; he wants to possess his own death and be named, be hailed by this unique death.”31 Rilke rejected the inauthenticity of anonymous mass death, and he strove, like Heidegger, to make death a part of the self, not something “foreign and incomprehensible.” Rilke sought “to draw it into life, to make of it the other name, the other side of life.”32 The problem, which Rilke recognizes a few years later, is that the prayer of Chamberlain Brigge for his own death or for an individualized death that is drawn into life no longer makes sense after World War I, “in these days of monstrously intensified dying [in diesen Tagen des ins Ungeheuere gesteigerten Sterbens].”33 Anonymous, factorylike death in the modern city had now been radically outstripped by the technical annihilation of the Great War.
Thus, more than a decade before Being and Time was published, the possibility of death—as my ownmost, uttermost, individualizing potentiality—had already begun to fundamentally change in Europe with the experiences of the First World War. Death could no longer be authentically anticipated, let alone planned for in the inauthentic sense of considering it an “event.” Moreover, it could not be made meaningful by burial services, mourning rituals, and traditional commemorative ceremonies that individualized the dead.34 The deceased were often mutilated beyond recognition, their corpses radically unidentifiable, and their bodies swallowed-up anonymously by blood- and rain-soaked trenches.35 Mass graves became the norm with the advent of technologies that facilitated an infinitely reproducible death. Dying was no longer a singular, individualizing possibility able to be anticipated as a way of being; rather, death was now suffered en masse as a nullifying actuality. Death in the age of mechanical annihilation transformed the entire nature of dying and, I would submit, the very concept of being human. This, however, is not something Heidegger seriously explored. Perhaps the mass death of the First World War not only forms the “traumatic unconscious” for Heidegger and Rilke’s reflections on death but also the negative condition of possibility for the philosopher’s insistence on preserving the paradigm of authenticity.36
If the reliability of the relationship between experience and expectation created the modern life-world and the temporal concept of a human being who is not only the sum of his past, present, and future but also an individual who dies, then the death-world is the fundamental unmaking of this world and the destruction of this being. If we cast our gaze on how contemporary witnesses characterized this “unmaking” and destruction, we find that it is quite common, especially for those who experienced disasters first-hand, to use apocalyptic imagery that draws upon the revelation of an end-time to describe the disaster. Expressionist lyrics and landscapes are, of course, suffused with end-of-the-world images from World War I. It is also no coincidence that Thomas Mann decided to have Adrian Leverkühn perform his first work as a last work, “Apocalypsis cum figuris,” in 1919. About it, Leverkühn says: “I felt that an epoch was ending, which had not only included the nineteenth century but gone far back to the end of the Middle Ages … [to] the emancipation of the individual, the birth of freedom … the epoch of bourgeois humanism.”37 Doktor Faustus is, indeed, a tale of the end-time, which finally ends in a lamentation where nothing “remains behind” [übrigbleibt] but “silence and night.”38 The modernity of the disaster, it might be said, severed all relation between experience and expectation, “our thousand-year history”39 and a Germany “tomorrow.”
In this respect, we can also understand Paul Valéry’s own lament of 1919: “No one can say what will be living tomorrow and what will be dead, in literature, in philosophy, in aesthetics.”40 Or even more ominously, Benjamin on Brecht: “Tomorrow may bring disasters of such colossal dimensions that we can imagine ourselves separated from the texts … of yesterday as though by centuries.”41 The fundamental temporal structuring principle of modernity—that experience and expectation are open yet also progressively linked, as von Moltke demanded or as Husserl articulated in the idea of the life-world—is also the condition of possibility for their rupture or disastrous undoing. In other words, armies and trains, bombs and broadcasts, had first to be coordinated in order to successfully destroy that very coordination. The disaster then is a kind of coordinated destruction that has been realized in, by, and through modernity; it could return at any time by radically severing past, present, and future.
Writing immediately after World War I, Paul Valéry in his letters of April and May 1919, “La Crise de l’esprit” (‘the crisis of spirit,’ as in Geist or intellectual spirit), tells us, as he realizes it himself, that human beings and knowledge, languages and histories, critics and critics of critics, civilizations, and even whole worlds are mortal: “Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were vague and splendid names; the total ruin of these worlds, for us, meant as little as did their existence. But France, England, Russia … now we see that the abyss of history is deep enough to bury all the world.”42 After World War I, the “European Hamlet,” as Valéry imagines him, is standing in the marshes of the Somme, the mounds of Alsace, the plateaus of Champagne, “[staring] at millions of ghosts … Hamlet hardly knows what to do with all these skulls,” he writes—they are the remains of broken lineages, ideas, bodies, histories, and civilizations.43 Mass death is an achievement and product of modernity, and Valéry can only plaintively survey the remains of what amounts to its own destruction.
The disaster is thus the fundamental making and unmaking of the modern world, its coordinated possibility and self-destruction. This is chillingly apparent in the death-world of the concentration camps. Here, the spaces of experience (ideas about the past, histories, memories, recollections) and the horizon of expectations (ideas about the future, hopes, dreams, desires) were compressed into the tortuous eternity of a never-passing present. For its victims, the time of the concentration camp took the form of an annihilating now, a Jetztzeit from the other side. Primo Levi indicates the inhumanity of this time: “We had not only forgotten our country and our culture, but also our family, our past, the future we had imagined for ourselves, because, like animals, we were confined to the present moment.”44 According to the astute analysis of sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky in his book The Order of Terror, time in the concentration camp “locked people into an eternal present,” eradicating all beginnings and all prospects of an end, save death.45 Sofsky details what he calls “the destruction of time”46 in the concentration camp by analyzing how first the prisoners’ future (expectation of release, survival) was severed from them and then the past similarly obliterated. The result was the creation of a sociality in which “the future contracted, withered, and closed up, as did the past” leaving only “an eternal present, a constancy of uncertainty and horror.”47 Or, as Koselleck observed in an essay on dreams in the concentration camps: an inversion of temporal experience took place whereby “past, present, and future ceased to be a framework for orienting behavior.”48
The concentration camp’s utter unpredictability, contingency, and incomprehensible terror not only foreclosed a reliable relationship between the past and the future but also grounded the testimonial aporia of bearing witness to the death-world. Those who were vaporized, those who “touched bottom,” as Primo Levi famously wrote of the Nazi genocide, “those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it.”49 The survivors—the people who did not “touch bottom”—Levi says, do not comprise the rule but rather form an “anomalous minority” who by the fate of good fortune, prevarication, or sheer chance managed to survive. As Agamben recently argued in his reflections on Levi, the value of testimony from this anomalous minority “lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority.”50 The survivors “bear witness to a missing testimony,” that of the nameless Muselmänner condemned to a meaningless, anonymous mass death.51 Sofsky describes the Muselmänner as “persons destroyed, devastated, shattered wrecks strung between life and death. They are the victims of a stepwise annihilation of human beings.”52 As Levi wrote of the Muselmänner in the section on “the drowned and the saved” in Survival in Auschwitz:
All the Musselmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run to the sea…. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.53
Their stories are preserved as nonstories in the testimonies of the survivors: Stories that have not and cannot be told. Absolute annihilation—the complete destruction of body, place, and time without a trace, with no remains—would permit no testimony, no stories, and not even “non-stories” because it would evacuate any possible historical relationship to the present. Levi’s testimony that there are countless nonstories indicates how close both his testimony and the nonstories of the Muselmänner are to absolute oblivion.
DEATH WITHOUT DYING
Shortly before The Origins of Totalitarianism was published, Arendt wrote a critical essay in 1946 entitled “What Is Existential Philosophy?” in which she traced the lineage of existential philosophy in the ideas of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers.54 In this essay, she made the most incisive critique of Heidegger that she would ever make in her lifetime and even implies—opaquely, if not somewhat unfairly—that the origins of totalitarianism can be found in Heidegger’s thought. She pinpoints the beginnings of modern existential philosophy with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual.55 The thought of death is what makes a person “subjective and separates himself from the world and everyday life with other men” (WEP 174). It is death that is “the guarantor of the principium individuationis because death, even though it is the most universal of all universals, nonetheless inevitably strikes me alone” (WEP 175). For Heidegger, as we have already seen, death is individualizing because it is my ownmost possibility, one which is radically nonrelational. No one can know, experience, share, or understand my death, and, more significantly, the anticipation of death is the only way in which the self is authentically and individually constituted. Being-towards-death establishes the self, and Arendt adds that it is “the guarantor that all that matters ultimately is myself” (WEP 181).
She considers “this absolute isolation … of the Self as the total opposite of man” (WEP 181), which is for her always a concept of relationality. Not unlike Celan’s condemnation of the “Dulosigkeit” (you-lessness) of the philosopher of memory,56 Arendt is suggesting that Heidegger’s conception of existence leaves the individual “independent of humanity and representative of no one but himself” (WEP 181). Theodor Adorno offers a similar critique of Heidegger: “The loneliness of the individual in death, the fact that his ‘non-relatedness singles out Dasein unto itself,’ becomes the substratum of selfness. This attitude of total self-sufficiency becomes the extreme confirmation of the self; it becomes an Ur-image of defiance in self-abnegation. As a matter of fact, abstract selfness in extremis is that grinding of the teeth which says nothing but I, I, I.”57 She takes this conception of the self to its logical conclusion, namely a world filled with alienated, isolated individuals existing selfishly for their own ends, not unlike the masses of uprooted, superfluous men she traces in The Origins of Totalitarianism. As she scathingly writes of Heidegger’s philosophy:
If it does not belong to the concept of man that he inhabits the earth together with others of his kind, then all that remains for him is a mechanical reconciliation by which the atomized Selves are provided with a common ground that is essentially alien to their nature. All that can result from that is the organization of these Selves intent only on themselves into an Over-self in order somehow to effect a transition from resolutely accepted guilt to action.
(WEP 181–82)
In effect, Arendt sees Heidegger’s concept of man leading to the creation of “atomized Selves,” who eventually organize themselves into an “Over-self,” much like the lonely individuals of the masses who submit to totalitarian domination. Although this essay is unique in its harsh treatment of Heidegger, it gives us some insight into how she formulates her genealogy of totalitarianism. In much the same vein, Arendt argues that “the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society … totalitarian movements depended less on the structurelessness of a mass society than on the specific conditions of the atomized and individualized mass” (OT 317-18). In this analysis, what Nazism and Stalinism have in common historically is that they are both totalitarian movements predicated on the “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals” (OT 323). For Arendt, it is only a small step from mass society and mass leadership to mass liquidation and mass death.
In the penultimate chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt discusses how the concept of death changed in a sociality characterized by “total domination” in which “everything is possible” (OT 437). In the concentration and death camps, the victims are forced into a world where the significance of the very distinction between life and death is eradicated through death factories of anonymous, enforced oblivion. In the camps, people are “cut off from the world of the living” and reduced to nothing but “superfluous human material” (OT 443). The camps not only took away the individual’s life but also their death and the memory of their death: Mourning, rituals of remembrance, and even grief are all forbidden. As Arendt writes with respect to the destruction of the meaning of death: “The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed” (OT 452).
Arendt does not, however, limit her reflections on death to the fate of the victims. She asks whether the actions of the perpetrators of mass death can be understood and judged within conventional grids of intelligibility: “What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses?” (OT 441). That is to say, how can murder be adjudicated in the sociality of the death-world where mass death—the efficacious production of corpses—is its defining objective and ultimate purpose? Murder, after all, is a juridical notion, which, in addition to requiring the structures of a legal system for its adjudication also needs the structures of a life-world for understanding human agency. The life-world renders the concept of murder culturally, socially, and historically intelligible by endowing it with a particular significance within the realm of human experience. The camps, however, exist outside of the operation of all legal systems and life-worlds, and this is why Arendt sees “the killing of the juridical person” in man as the prerequisite of the complete destruction of his rights and his total domination (OT 451). The death-world of totalitarianism is a social order based on complete domination, arbitrary terror, and mass death as a way of life.
Both Arendt and Heidegger recognized the modernity of the factorylike production of mass death in the concentration camps and gas chambers. Heidegger, in fact, used the term Fabrikation von Leichen (fabrication of corpses) twice in his Bremen speeches of 1949 to refer to mass death (BV 27 and 56), while Arendt referred, on more than one occasion in The Origins of Totalitarianism, to “the insane mass manufacture of corpses” (OT 447).58 Even though he will couch his analysis in much the same terms as Arendt, Heidegger is not interested in the juridical problem of murder vis-à-vis mass death. Instead, he will ask: What meaning has the concept of death when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses? In contrast to Arendt, he is not concerned with questions of agency, ethics, legality or the intelligibility of the life-world, all of which are implied by Arendt’s question about the status of the concept of “murder.” Heidegger is concerned about the status of the concept of death because this concept expresses the authenticity of being.
For the sake of clarity, I will quote the entire passage from Heidegger’s Bremen speech so that we can more carefully understand his trajectory of thought and the significance of the phrase, “the fabrication of corpses:”59
Hundreds of thousands die in masses. Do they die? [Sterben sie?] They are killed. They are done in. Do they die? They become pieces of stock in a reserve of the fabrication of corpses. Do they die? They are discretely liquidated in death camps. And also as such—millions now suffer and perish in China due to hunger. However, to die means to bear death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of this bearing. We are capable of it only if our essence wants the essence of death. Indeed in the midst of innumerable deaths, the essence of death remains obstructed. Death is neither empty nothingness nor is it the transition from one kind of being to another. From the essence of being, death belongs to the occurred Dasein of humankind. In this way, it conceals the essence of being. Death is the highest shelter [Gebirg] of the truth of being itself…. Death is the shelter of being in the poetry of the world. To be capable of death in its essence means to be able to die. Those who can die are foremost the mortal ones [die Sterbliche] in the decisive sense of the word. Everywhere there is massive misery of countless, atrocious deaths that have not died [ungestorbene Tode]—and at the same time, the essence of death is obstructed to men. Man is not yet the mortal one [der Sterbliche].
(BV 56)
Unlike Arendt, he is not concerned with the phenomenon of mass death as a challenge to traditional structures of legality or the death-world as the achievement of a radically new kind of terror and domination. Moreover, he is not interested in how the phenomenon of mass death is the culmination of the totalitarian mentality, something which Arendt traced back historically to the pan-movements of imperialism and nationalism as well as discerned in the widespread cultural legitimacy of anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. For Heidegger, the historical fact of “the fabrication of corpses” in the death camps and gas chambers betrays the limits of being because death—understood authentically—is Dasein’s insuperable possibility; it shelters and conceals the truth of being. Thus, to be a mortal one [der Sterbliche] means to be able to die and, hence, able to be in a certain way: that is to say, able to be as “an impassioned freedom towards death,” which “brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself” (BT, 311). This is the essence of authenticity.
As Heidegger indicates by his repetition of the question, “Do they die?” [Sterben sie?] with reference to the mass production of corpses, the verb “sterben” has a very specific meaning for him. It is distinguished strictly from other seemingly synonymous terms such as “umkommen” (to be killed), “werden umgelegt” (to be done in), or “werden liquidiert” (to be liquidated). All of the latter are terms that presuppose the existence of an other, someone who kills me, does me in, or liquidates me. Although Heidegger uses these terms in the passive construction, they each necessitate an agent and an object on whom this agency is enacted. By contrast, “sterben” is a term reserved exclusively for something that is nonrelational: My death is entirely my own and, hence, “to die” is my ownmost, individual possibility. He asks three times whether the victims of mass death actually die in the sense of “sterben,” and the answer he implied is that they do not. Something else happens to the victims of mass death: “They become pieces of stock in a reserve of the fabrication of corpses” (Sie werden Bestandstücke eines Bestandes der Fabrikation von Leichen).
To understand this strange phrase, we need to look back to Heidegger’s second Bremen lecture, “Das Ge-Stell” (the En-framing), where he clarifies the concept of “Bestandstücke.” In this lecture, he is concerned with how technology reduces the essence of being by turning it into something available, able to be used, stored, manipulated, and distributed at will. Modern technology—such as tractors, power plants, motorized vehicles, and, we might add, gas chambers—“en-frames” being by transforming it into an object to be tapped and, as necessary, kept in reserve or stock as a “Bestand.” He explains:
What the machine brings out piece for piece, it puts in the reserve of that which can be ordered. That which is brought out is a piece of stock [Bestand-Stück]. … The pieces of stock are the same piece for piece. Their piecemeal character demands this uniformity. As the same thing, the pieces are cut off from one another in the most extreme sense; in this way, they solidify and secure precisely their piecemeal character. … A piece of stock is replaceable by another. … Ordinarily, we imagine something lifeless when we think of the word “piece,” although one can speak of a piece of cattle. The piece of stock is, however, bound to an order from which it is placed. Man also belongs, certainly in this regard, to this framing, be it that he works on a machine, be it that he constructed and built the machine within the order of the machinery.… Man is in this way a piece of stock [Bestand-Stück], in the strong sense of the words stock and piece.
(BV 36–37)
In other words, technology has a leveling effect, producing objects over and over again that are, in their essential qualities, the same. These objects—as replaceable, uniform pieces—can be called up, used, and consumed.60
In the concentration camps and gas chambers, according to Heidegger, technology was used to turn human beings into “pieces of stock in a reserve of the fabrication of corpses.” Their bodies became “uniform” pieces, “cutoff” from and “replaceable” by one another: The corpses in the death camps are “the same piece for piece.” Human beings have been reduced, in Arendt’s horribly accurate phrase, to “superfluous human material” (OT 443), which is, in its corporeal form, all the same. It is in this regard that Heidegger can argue, “agriculture is now a motorized food-industry, in essence the same thing as the fabrication of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps” (BV 27). Reserves of food, like reserves of corpses, are produced over and over again, in the same fashion, in the same units or pieces, with the same kind of machinery. In every case—whether the motorized food industry, the production of corpses in the gas chambers, or the starvation of millions in China—individuality is replaced by the mechanized, mass production of the same.
A few years later, in 1955, Heidegger will employ a truncated version of the same locution in his “Memorial Address” for the composer Conradin Kreutzer as well as in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” In both, he writes that “agriculture is now the mechanized food industry.”61 But he stops short of mentioning the concentration camps and “the fabrication of corpses.” Instead, he continues by explaining: “Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use.”62 In essence, the earth is turned into a “standing reserve” (Bestand) able to be tapped, exploited, and variously instrumentalized. Significantly, it is not uranium but rather the mass murder of the Jews that functions as one of Heidegger’s first examples of the leveling effect of modern technology; Jews are turned into the “reserve” or “piece of stock” par excellence. By virtue of the absence of any mention of the Holocaust in his later lectures and essays, Jews and the Nazi concentration camps figure even more conspicuously—as an absent presence—in his philosophy than they would have figured had he continued to place the “fabrication of corpses” at the top of his list of the ills of modern technology.
Perhaps it should not be surprising that Arendt’s treatment of technology and its atomizing effect largely follows Heidegger’s critique in the wake of the Origins of Totalitarianism. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in her chapter on “world alienation” in The Human Condition. Here, she argues that three “great events stand at the threshold of the modern age and determine its character”: The discovery of America and exploration of the whole earth, the Reformation, and the invention of the telescope.63 Arendt argues that the mapping of the world—through voyages of discovery and human surveying capacity—contributed to an ever greater “closing-in process” and “shrinkage of the globe,” which, in turn, “[put] a decisive distance between man and earth … alienating man from his immediate earthly surroundings.”64 This process of turning the world into an object to be surveyed and calculated had the effect of alienating human beings from the world. Although she does not mention Heidegger, Arendt’s notion of world alienation accords precisely with Heidegger’s critique of the modern age as that of “the world picture.”65 When “the world is conceived and grasped as a picture,” Heidegger argues, human beings have turned it into an object to be surveyed and known from a distance, as something set up, en-framed, and exploited.66 In essence, modern technology turns man into a subject and the world into an object, one which is able to be called up, tapped, and exploited. And most chillingly, this logic of instrumentalization could be turned against its beholders: Human beings turned Jews into pieces of stock and thereby “fabricated” corpses in the concentration camps.
We can now understand what Heidegger means when he maintains that the victims of the concentration camps and gas chambers did not die, that “everywhere there is massive misery of countless, atrocious deaths that have not died [ungestorbene Tode].” The victims may not be alive anymore, but they did not die either; instead, they were turned into pieces of corpses, reserves of human material. To become a “piece of stock in the reserve of the fabrication of corpses” is completely commensurate with Heidegger’s critique of technology and, at the same time, radically incommensurate with his conception of death as “the shelter of the truth of being.” I would like to dwell on the latter here. Although the inmates in the concentration camps existed every second of every day towards death as a permanent possibility, their death does not count as authentic because it conferred no individuality. Dying is a permanent potentiality for being, my ownmost, insuperable possibility, which individualizes the conduct of my life. In the final analysis, the victims of the Nazi death camps did not die and, hence, they have no “truth of being.” Heidegger will not even name the victims as Jews because masses of corpses who did not die have no individual or group identities.
Unlike Arendt, Heidegger never attempted to understand the specificity or genealogy of the concentration camps; he considered them to be one instance of a long history of the loss of being caused by modern technology. He refused to name, let alone describe, the victims and perpetrators or even speak about their actions in anything but the passive tense. And, at the same time, he never gave up the existential conception of authentic death, despite the fact that the distinction between inauthentic “fleeing” from death and authentic “being-towards-death” no longer made sense in a sociality designed exclusively for anonymous mass death. The very distinction between inauthenticity and authenticity is only tenable in a life-world where the possibility exists to either evade death by covering up the fact that it could come at any moment or live in such a way that death is always considered my ownmost possibility that no one can take away from me. In the death-world, one could neither flee in the face of death, nor could one become individualized by being-towards-death. The possibility of conceiving death authentically and inauthentically is foreclosed because the nature and presuppositions of death itself have changed: Mass death does not individualize but anonymize; death is no longer a possibility and individual potentiality for being but an absolute actuality, taken away from me and enforced by oblivion.
Nevertheless, perhaps it is tempting to be somewhat more charitable to Heidegger by recognizing how his remarks on the death camps betray a certain insight into the Nazi debasement of death and dying, even if he never mentioned the Holocaust or the victims by name. As Agamben wrote in his analysis of Heidegger: “Curiously enough, for Heidegger the ‘fabrication of corpses’ implied, just as it did for Levi, that it is not possible to speak of death in the case of extermination victims, that they did not truly die, but were rather only pieces produced in a process of an assembly line production.”67 After all, it was Levi, who suggested with reference to the anonymous masses of Muselmänner tottering on the edge of living and dying: “One hesitates to call their death death.”68 It would seem that both Heidegger and Levi recognized the way in which the sociality of the death-world and the phenomenon of mass death not only produced masses of “walking corpses” but also degraded dying itself. As Agamben writes, glossing both Heidegger and Arendt: “it is no longer possible truly to speak of death, that what took place in the camps was not death, but rather something infinitely worse, more appalling. In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production.”69
However, I think Heidegger is ultimately saying something else. Although his recognition of the debasement of death may have accorded with Arendt and Levi’s trajectory of thought, Heidegger is also making a distinction between those who are capable of dying in its essence and those who are not. This is a distinction made from a life-world in which deportations, arbitrary imprisonment, starvation, terror, gassing, and mass death are not the structuring features of being in the world. According to Heidegger, those who were killed en masse did not die because dying is reserved for those who are capable of conducting their lives in such a way that they can still bear death in its essence. This distinction, it seems to me, has the effect of tacitly elevating the perpetrators’ mode of being in the world precisely because they can bear death in its essence. Even as a mass murderer, the Nazi officer could still “authentically” be towards his own, individualized death. This fundamental structuring distinction between authentic and inauthentic dying becomes absurd, if not thoughtless, in a sociality where anonymous mass death is its defining and ultimate purpose.
Why should the concentration camps function as nothing more than an example of the leveling power of technology? Why should mass death be evaluated under the limited rubric of authenticity, something that presupposes the singular nonrelationality of dying and the social structures of the life-world? When Arendt speaks about the serial production of corpses, she is referring to the absolute debasement of human life in the concentration camps, the fact that even the dignity of death is taken from the victims; she is not trying to reclaim a selfishly authentic mode of being. At the same time, Arendt is also showing how the perpetrators have changed the concepts of death and dying, and, hence, have altered human nature: Mass death is a possibility of being human, of existing in the modern world—of being subject to mass death and effecting mass death. This is what she traces in The Origins of Totalitarianism: Mass death as an achievement of humanity, the product of “uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses” (OT 475). It is never a question of reclaiming a privileged mode of authentic being, as it is for Heidegger. To put it more boldly, Heidegger did not simply “forget” the Holocaust (à la Lyotard); instead, it seems that Heidegger cannot think the Holocaust, that his thinking—not just about death but also about memory—fundamentally precludes the thought of mass death.
Heidegger’s remark about “the fabrication of corpses” misses something else, too: The perpetrators of mass death desired the consummation of nothingness such that future generations will not even know that there was a Holocaust. Not only are there no Jews, Armenians, Tutsis but there never were any; they did not exist. The most final and absolute annihilation aims to accomplish even more than killing every member of the targeted group; for it ultimately desires to annihilate all memory of that group, the very existence and being, the very traces, histories, and remains of a people. As Arendt characterized the difference between the traditional concept of murder and the Nazi attempt “to treat people as if they had never existed and to make them disappear in the literal sense of the word”:
The murderer who kills a man—a man who has to die anyway—still moves within the realm of life and death familiar to us; both have indeed a necessary connection on which the dialectic is founded, even if it is not always conscious of it. The murderer leaves a corpse behind and does not pretend that his victim never existed; if he wipes out any traces, they are those of his own identity, and not the memory and grief of the persons who loved his victim; he destroys life, but he does not destroy the fact of existence itself.
(OT 442)
In the final act, in the last deed, an absolutely annihilating mass death destroys both life and death by eliminating all remains of existence. Heidegger does not recognize that “the fabrication of corpses” is essentially a trace of the perpetrators’ failure to consummate their crimes. And this is why his decision to speak of the fabrication of corpses in a strictly passive construction that elides the German Nazis as agents and the Jews as victims is problematic: He essentially redeems the Nazi failure to consummate nothingness. This intention to consummate nothingness is nothing other than the intention to destroy the other absolutely. It is to end the German/Jewish dialectic by eradicating the other and stopping its movements forever.
To be sure, Heidegger and Arendt both offered similar critiques of modernity: Heidegger condemned the “rootlessness” caused by modern technology and the retreat into “calculative thought,” while Arendt condemned the “worldlessness” and “uprootedness,” which she saw to be the conditions of possibility of totalitarian terror. Arendt, however, actually thought about the phenomenon of mass death, the origins of the totalitarian mentality and its human consequences. She recognized precisely what Heidegger could never think: the potentiality of absolute annihilation without a trace. Totalitarianism not only exacted the “complete disappearance of its victims” but created the conditions of possibility for their oblivion, the fact that they “ceased ever to have lived” (OT 434). As Arendt chilling writes: “When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony” (OT 451).
This is why, in The Human Condition, she considers “the task and potential greatness of mortals [to be] their ability to produce things—works and deeds and words—which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness.… By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave nonperishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a ‘divine’ nature.”70 To be human is to leave behind traces, to testify, to have a story; it is precisely the opposite of the totalitarian idea, which was first to destroy human beings and then to destroy the very fact of their existence. As Primo Levi testified, there are countless non-stories from the disasters of the twentieth century, but because something remained behind—survivors, bodies, gas chambers, testimonies, diaries, poems, and stories—none of these disasters was absolute. This places most of us—those who, for now, have been fortunate enough to be “untouched” by disasters or the death-world, those of us who are historically “separated,” “uninvolved,” and still “lucky”—into a possible and present relationship with the remains of the disaster. And it is in this respect that the death-world presents a new historical a priori for the concept of being human in modernity: Mass death could return at any time in the form of genocide or nuclear war. To be a human being in modernity means not only to be a temporal being who individually dies but also the lived possibility of a radically atemporal instant of anonymous mass death. The potentiality of anonymous mass death is now a potentiality of being. We might even say that Being-towards-mass-death is Dasein’s uttermost possibility. That is to say, our future, too, could be the disaster—and if it is not absolute, there might be some remains for someone in another life-world, like Arendt or Levi, to bear witness to the disaster. Perhaps this is what Arendt is ultimately doing in The Origins of Totalitarianism: first, bearing witness, in “the world of the living” (OT 444), to the past and future possibility of the death-world and, second, bearing witness, in “the world of the living” (OT 444), to the past and future possibility of a new life-world, of a new beginning.