Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Muller, Tim B.

Titel

Bearing Witness to the Liquidation of Western Dasein: Herbert Marcuse and the Holocaust, 1941-1948

Ist Teil von

• New German critique, 2002, Vol.85 (85), p.133-164

Ort / Verlag

New York: Telos Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2002

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 47. Marcuse, "New German Mentality" 161, 182. "All the acts of utmost endurance and reliability, savage defiance and inhuman cruelty are performed with a likewise inhuman soberness, efficiency and smartness [here the footnote quotes from an article in the New York Times, giving quotations from a German soldier's diary: `I'm surprised it didn't affect me more to see a woman hanged. It even entertained me. Spent birthday digging up bodies and smashing their faces. My sweetheart will say `yes' when she hears how I hanged a Russian today'; the origin of this diary remains unclear - TBM]. [...] This German cause is like that of a giant machine or apparatus which constantly occupies the mind and feelings of its attendants, controls and dictates their actions and leaves them not the slightest refuge. In National Socialist Germany, all men are the mere appendices of the instruments of production, destruction and communication, and although these human appendices would work with a high degree of initiative, spontaneity and even `personality,' their individual performances are entirely adjusted to the operation of the machine." "The German army is in its entire structure and philosophy tied up with the interests and requirements of imperialist expansion. The army and the party are two heads of the same monster. [...] In the occupied territories, the German army has endorsed, instigated and exercised every kind of atrocity, torture, oppression and exploitation." Cf. especially the books by Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (New York: Palgrave, 2001) and Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Aaron Asher/Harper Collins, 1992). The close reading of military letters by Klaus Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten - nationalsozialistischer [Krieg]? Kriegserlebnis - Kriegserfahrung, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1998) gives evidence supporting [Michael Geyer]'s notion ("Vergesellschaftung der Gewalt"), see, e.g., Geyer, "Organisation," and "Das Stigma der Gewalt und das Problem der nationalen Identitat in Deutschland," Von der Aufgabe der Freiheit: Politische Verantwortung und burgerliche Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift fur Hans Mommsen zum 5. November 1995, ed. Christian Jansen et al. (Berlin: Akademie, 1995) 673-98. Geyer emphasizes both the industrialization of warfare and the subjective side of total mobilization as reasons for the rising willingness to engage in violence. In "Stigma der Gewalt," 679-80 he talks about the "heroic death cult of National Socialism," resulting in the "attraction of the strengthening of one's own body as well as of the collective Volkskorper." That is the reason behind the exorbitant degree of self-mobilization and "readiness to war" (689-90); as Geyer states, the irrational will of destruction "was not manipulated `ideology', but a way of military conduct" - war had become a drug, a "Droge zur Selbstbestatigung." This short excursus shows that this position is very close to Marcuse's interpretation - the interplay of rationality and irrationality, of domination and self-mobilization, of myth and belief.