Bauman’s depiction of the Holocaust relies heavily on Max Weber’s ideal type of modern bureaucratic organizations; he recalls in this connection Weber’s emphasis on the “formal and ethically blind […] bureaucratic pursuit of efficiency.” The Holocaust was in Bauman’s view “so crucial to our understanding” of this organizational form. Its “very idea” was “an outcome of the bureaucratic culture” (Bauman 1989b: 14–15). The Holocaust, he argues, embodied to the highest degree the ruthless and impersonal pursuit of efficiency. For it “was not only the technological achievement of an industrial society.” It was also “the organizational achievements of a bureaucratic society” (Bauman 1989b: 14–15; see also p. 17). In order to implement rational gardening, the Nazi embarked on large-scale project of weeding out (as they said), and therefore exterminating, the Jews. They were selected as “the prime target of anti-modernist resistance” (Bauman 1989b: 46); since they were considered as the representatives of the supranational and destructive forces of “enlightenment and individualism” and therefore of modernity itself, which the Nazis abhorred and endeavored to destroy (Bauman 1989b: 51–52).
This negative attitude toward modernity took hold after the transition from the premodern “game-keeper” society to the modern “gardening” society. The “gardeners,” as Bauman argues, were normal people, not psychotic sadists. In order to make them perpetrators of mass crime, the following preconditions were necessary: the violence was legally authorized; the violent actions were routinized; and their victims were “dehumanized (by ideological definitions and indoctrination)” (Bauman 1989b: 21). The victims themselves were “an integral part of the chain of command.” Their cooperation, which was obtained without difficulty, was “a crucial condition” of the successful extermination project. This was made possible by the distance—both physical and psychic—which the long chain of command created between the victims and their murderers (Bauman 1989b: 46), and therefore the detachment from and indifference to the former’s suffering. It also made murder and violence devoid of any moral significance in the eyes not only of their perpetrators, but also of those “administrators of genocide” who were not directly involved (Bauman 1989b: 18–30).
The Jews were their selected target not merely because of widespread anti-Semitism and their caste-like status in the populace, as it had been the case in premodern times, Bauman argues; but rather because they were seen as the very embodiment of modernity. With reference to German-Jewish writer Jacob Wasserman, Bauman maintains that the more the Jews tried to assimilate and to demonstrate that they were German as much as any other German citizen, the more successful they were in this attempt, the greater became the ambivalence toward them. Assimilated Jews had social intercourse with other assimilated Jews, rather than with non-Jewish Germans, as the assimilated German Jews were still considered Jews after all by non-Jewish Germans. The enthusiasm of the many German Jews for German literary and philosophical culture, and their efforts to distantiate themselves—socially and psychologically—from the lower-class and Yiddish-speaking Jews proved to be of no avail (Bauman 1991: 110–17).
This ambivalence, in which they were trapped, was only one step removed from their rejection from society at large, and from downright Anti-Semitism. Their alleged rootlessness (like Simmel’s stranger) and involvement with money and capitalism made them an appropriate target of anti-modernist sentiments. What is more, the Jewish bourgeoisie was looked askance by conservative Polish public opinion as a social danger and a source of unwanted economic innovation (Bauman 1989b: 46–56; 1991: 102–59). The tragic irony was that the destruction of the Jewry, considered as the very symbol of modernity and the “enemy of the nation-based order” (Bauman 1989b: 68), was carried out “through channels and forms only modernity could develop” (Bauman 1989b: 46).Their “total dehumanization” (Bauman 1989b: 27) was instrumental to this effect, but it had to be supplemented by racism. The racist doctrine, and the strategy of estrangement that is germane to it, paved the way to the Jews’ physical extermination, Bauman argues.
The Jews’ extermination was considered effective in making them harmless. It was conducted “as a service rendered to racially organized human kind” (Bauman 1989b: 68), for the sake and in the name of the Nazi “science” of eugenics. The Nazis conducted the mass murder pursuing the ideal of a “well-gardened” society, and relying on the ideology of race purity and its pseudo-scientific tenets. They considered the systematic murder of the Jews and other groups as “an exercise in the rational management of society” (Bauman 1989b: 72). Accordingly, “the business of mass murder” (Bauman 1989b: 20) was “an exercise in social engineering on a grandiose scale” (Bauman 1989b: 66). This exercise in organized mass murder was “a thoroughly modern phenomenon” (Bauman 1989b: 75), and “a typically modern ambition of social design and engineering” (Bauman 1989b: 77). It superseded the premodern repellence of the Jews from society.
Their confinement into ghettos had been justified with anti-Semitic stereotypes, which persisted in the modern era and portrayed the Jews as an “invisible power behind all visible powers” (Bauman 1989b: 79). There was widespread aversion, Bauman remarks, to open violence against the Jews; however, the traditional restrictions imposed on them, concerning their rights and residence, were welcomed on the part of many Germans who believed in those negative stereotypes. The very political and military power of the modern State, and its contribution to freedom, security and civilization in modern times, made the Holocaust possible. For its “awesome power” (Bauman 1989b: 111), which was based on an efficient bureaucratic chain of command, provided no safeguard against barbarism. Also, the “gardening” ideology was conducive to “treating people as plants to be trimmed (if necessary, uprooted” (Bauman 1989b: 113), as Jews were considered bearers of contagious diseases.
The Jews were deprived of their humanity, stripped of all their economic and social resources, and treated as the objects of bureaucratic intervention in the name of this ideology. Paradoxically, however, the collaboration of the Jewish population was pursued and, to some extent, obtained. This became possible—as Bauman argues—because the Nazis made the Jewish elites, such as the rabbis and other ghetto spokesmen, in charge of the other Jews, turning them into involuntary accomplices of the massacre. Also, they separated physically, socially and legally the Jews from the remaining population. Thereby, their loneliness was complete, and their destruction was made easier to accomplish. Only those who were defined as “full Jews” were discriminated.
This