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Morality After Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic
Endorsements: "This book is a study of the Holocaust as problem in ethical theory. How could a whole society participate in an ethic of mass torture and genocide for over a decade without opposition from responsible political, legal, medical, or religious leaders? How does a society create and adopt its ethical norms? This is a study in narrative ethics at its best, yet the author's purpose is to discover how a people redefined evil to the degree that they committed heinous atrocities that were reprehensible under normal circumstances." --Guy Greenfield, Southwestern Journal of Theology "Peter Haas gives us a good overall description of the Holocaust, the way the Nazis and their myriad collaborators treated the Jews. The book . . . is well formulated and well written. It makes a good one-volume introduction to the Holocaust." --Frederick K. Wentz, Lutheran Quarterly "Peter Haas urges us to recognize ourselves in the perpetrators of the Holocaust. . . . In the course of setting forth his position, the author offers a concise and wonderfully accessible account of the formation of German political culture from Bismarck through Hitler. . . . Morality After Auschwitz is a serious book that should provoke long thoughts, and perhaps useful disputes, about the power of ethics to shape political cultures." --First Things
- GenresPhilosophy
268 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
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June 5, 2013
After a slow start this becomes an engrossing book. Haas, a Jewish Studies professor at Case-Western, came up with it in the course of teaching courses on the German persecution of Jews to a predominantly non-Jewish student body unfamiliar with the war and German race policies. Consequently, the historical background and implementation of such policies are covered adequately and clearly for nonspecialists.
The point of the work, however, is to demonstrate how Nazism represented a coherent ethic in keeping with European traditions and norms. This claim is made in opposition of those who would consign Nazi ideology to the realm of psychopathology or to the broad, but fundamentally obscure, rubrics of wickedness. On the contrary, very few Germans--indeed, very few passively complicit Europeans or North Americans--felt they were doing wrong in respecting, if not directly implementing, State policy. By their lights, the elimination of communists, internationalist socialists, gypsies, sexual perverts, mental defectives, Jehovah's Witnesses and, most particularly, Jews was a good thing, compatible with civilized practice and harmonious communal life at home and in the broader society. Even after the war, the victorious allies, all of whom had known fully of the genocide, elements of whom had supported it, lacked a clear sense of how the Germans and their allies may have misbehaved in any legal or universal ethical sense. The war crime trials conducted by the United Nations and the negotiations leading up to them are portrayed as an illustration of this.
The point of Haas' somewhat overstated argument is to bring German behavior from 1933-45 into a context which includes the American reader into the equation. That such cruelty was almost entirely ignored, if not abetted, by virtually all states and organizations during that period represented a recognition of at least some of the principles by which the German Nazi state operated, a recognition based, in part, on the reality that they were and continue to be shared.
The exceptions deserve to be noted. Other than some, but not all, Zionist organizations, the American Friends Service Committee stands out as actively opposed to the genocide as do the states of Sweden (neutral), Denmark (allied with Germany) and Norway (opposed to Germany). There were also, of course, rare individuals and even communities which stood up to the violence, all of whom, the author claims, were already eccentric so far as broad Western cultural norms were concerned.
My major objection to this otherwise excellent book is that Haas underplays the courage of the opponents. They may, for the most part, have been eccentrics to begin with, but all of them had the opportunity not to remain so when eccentricity became mortally dangerous. Some few were truly courageous and their example is worthy of both approbation and study.
The point of the work, however, is to demonstrate how Nazism represented a coherent ethic in keeping with European traditions and norms. This claim is made in opposition of those who would consign Nazi ideology to the realm of psychopathology or to the broad, but fundamentally obscure, rubrics of wickedness. On the contrary, very few Germans--indeed, very few passively complicit Europeans or North Americans--felt they were doing wrong in respecting, if not directly implementing, State policy. By their lights, the elimination of communists, internationalist socialists, gypsies, sexual perverts, mental defectives, Jehovah's Witnesses and, most particularly, Jews was a good thing, compatible with civilized practice and harmonious communal life at home and in the broader society. Even after the war, the victorious allies, all of whom had known fully of the genocide, elements of whom had supported it, lacked a clear sense of how the Germans and their allies may have misbehaved in any legal or universal ethical sense. The war crime trials conducted by the United Nations and the negotiations leading up to them are portrayed as an illustration of this.
The point of Haas' somewhat overstated argument is to bring German behavior from 1933-45 into a context which includes the American reader into the equation. That such cruelty was almost entirely ignored, if not abetted, by virtually all states and organizations during that period represented a recognition of at least some of the principles by which the German Nazi state operated, a recognition based, in part, on the reality that they were and continue to be shared.
The exceptions deserve to be noted. Other than some, but not all, Zionist organizations, the American Friends Service Committee stands out as actively opposed to the genocide as do the states of Sweden (neutral), Denmark (allied with Germany) and Norway (opposed to Germany). There were also, of course, rare individuals and even communities which stood up to the violence, all of whom, the author claims, were already eccentric so far as broad Western cultural norms were concerned.
My major objection to this otherwise excellent book is that Haas underplays the courage of the opponents. They may, for the most part, have been eccentrics to begin with, but all of them had the opportunity not to remain so when eccentricity became mortally dangerous. Some few were truly courageous and their example is worthy of both approbation and study.
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