Apocalyptic Religion

from review of "Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia"

German Nazism, which Gray describes as "negative utopianism", combined apocalyptic fantasies and demoization with perverted racial science.

the plasticity of the real

"Art is an instant that endures without a future."

"An artist is one who is fascinated by the plasticity of the real."

We seem to have given much thought to possibility of art after the Holocaust, but is it indeed vulgar to consider art as existing within the camps? The survivors speak of life in the camps as having all memory, all reflection, all hope driven from their consciousness by the incessant terror and brutalization. The minds and spirits held room for only pain thought for survival. So is there an affinity to art in the unending "instants that endure without a future?"

On the other hand, the camps were a place of extreme rigidity, in which the only plasticity allowed was a very explosive and unpredictable plasticity that did not lend itself to fascination. There was no instant or place for art whatsoever.

Modern Organization

The concentration camp is a part of the history of modern society. The destructive power of modern technology was tested on the battlefields of mass war, with the slaughterhouses of the concentration camps serving as a proving ground for the destructive power of modern organization. The modern era liberated humanity from incomprehensible forces, yet at the same time immensely increased the power of human beings to kill. Measured against this hypertrophy, earlier forms of power seem fragmentary, irrational, crude in their means and limited in their scope.
Wolfgang Sofsky, THE ORDER OF TERROR, 1993.

In terms of this project, I have largely neglected this aspect of the camps situation and failed to explore its new and unique aspects. How the slaughterhouses were not just factories for "manufacturing corpses", but were destructive of humanity on many other levels: consciously, methodically developing techniques for ravaging the universal structures within which human beings move — their relations to the world, to others, and to themselves. They used terror to redefine work, time, death.

I must freely admit that I do not comprehend the motivation or intention of the development of this system that seems bent purely on wrecking destruction. That may be my main motivation for setting out on this project.

What lessons of organization, for better or for ill, have we learned from the camps? About the power of terror, about the force of organization, that we presume upon today? Will there ever be a future in which the techniques of the camps will seem to us fragmentary and crude?

...securely lodged within the city's interior...

The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new political norm of life on this planet. Giorgio Agamben, "Homo Sacer".

This statement most immediately brings us imagine vestiges of the Auschwitz camps seeping through and into remote corners of our urban landscape. Like a kind of lurking memory that won't go away. But I think Agamben is suggesting that the camps are more foundational to the 21st century city. So I thought, perhaps it would be more appropriate to imagine elements from today surfacing inside the camps of 1943.

"However this war may end, we have won this war against you..."

The generic speech given by SS militiamen to camp prisoners as recounted in Simon Wiesenthal's The Murderers Are Among Us:

However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspcions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proff should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that there are exaggerations of Allied propoganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Camps.

It is difficult to imagine German troops acknowledging the monstrosity of their own deeds and at the same planning to destroy all evidence out of some sense of shame. What were they thinking they could "get away with"? And why? Was it some kind of drunken sense of power that defied the taboo of murder and brutality? What was the real nature of their "program" that it focussed such effort and resources. It seems the real war was not against the Allies but against the Jews, Gypsies, the disabled — all those who could not contribute to the glorious future of the German race [as the Chosen People?]

The Museum at Auschwitz

From an interview with Jacqueline Lichtenstein:

When I visited the Museum at AUSCHWITZ, I stood in front of the display cases. What I saw there were images from contemporary art and I found that absolutely terrifying. Looking at the exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, children's toys, I didn't feel frightened. I didn't collapse. I wasn't completely overcome the way I had been walking around the camp. No. In the Museum, I suddenly had the impression I was in a museum of contemporary art. I took the train back, telling myself that they had won! They had won since they'd produced forms of perception that are all of a piece with the mode of destruction they made their own.

I guess I would add to this questions about whether we are fully aware of these forms of perception and how we have failed to produce alternatives. The above quote is from Art and Fear by Paul Virilio, who argues that contemporary art is essentially "pitiless".

Personal Actions

According to Wolfgang Sofsky in The Order of Terror, the removal of any possibility of action on the part of the prisoners was one of the major factors in the process of dehumanization. With no possibility of action, one's future, one's sense of identity, one's social interaction -- all disappear. All the strategies of detainment [concentration] have this as a basic principle that is inflicted on all prisoners.

The irony is that in the war crimes trials that followed, the most consistent line of defense presented by the camp guards and officers, the major rationale for such inhumane actions, was -- they too had no choice in terms of personal action. "They had been educated in absolute obedience, hierarchy, nationalism; imbued with slogans, intoxicated with ceremonies and demonstrations. Their decisions were not theirs because the regime in which they grew up did not permit autonomous decisions; their ability to decide had been amputated." [Levi, The Drowned and the Saved]