Auschwitz: a negative catastrophe.
Auschwitz is not just a historical problem, it is a philosophical one and a theological problem.
We have been here before under the theme of 'Auschwitz in Australia' in July of this year. But that thread petered out around my claim of the ecological blindness of negative dialectics and I would add, of European philosophy (apart from Heidegger) in general. So let us put the ecology Adorno and Heidegger relationship to one side.
I'm going to pick the thread up again from a different perspective: in terms of the remembrance of the suffering caused by historical catastrophe. How do we do this? How do we begin to remember what has been forgotten and normalizised?
For the Europeans Auschwitz is not only unique in the framework of Jewish existence. It is also unique in European history. Never before did a national state decide on, and carry out, the murder of an entire group of people, including women, the old, children, and babies using every way possible. They killed the people in an industrial way – Auschwitz was a factory.
The dead of Auschwitz should have brought upon the Europeans, and the Germans in particular, a total transformation Nothing should have been allowed to remain as it was. Yet what happened in Germany was that Auschwitz was not a turning point at all. After 1945 there was little sorrow for the victims, only sorrow for Germany's loss of national identity. The restoration of German society and the survival of the church as an institution were celebrated as heroic acts. After 1989, the year of the unification of Germany, Auschwitz is threatening to become only a fact of history.
Adorno forsaw this evolution of normalisation. He wrote in Minima Moralia in 1944:
"The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' – as if the rebuilding of culture was not really its negation – is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for?"
The fine old colonial buildings that we now celebrate as cultural heritage and our pastoral/settler histories are based on aboriginal dispossession and murder. The latter is forgotten. History starts from building white society in the wilderness.
To resist these developments we need to develop an anamnestic culture which keeps track of, and remembers, the forgotten victims. As Adorno says the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition to all truth.
A question: Does the French turn to surrealism, the unconscious and becoming help us develop an anamnestic culture that reconnects us with an ethical life?