Fragmentation & Annihilation During the Holocaust - Third Assignment

Fragmentation & Annihilation During the Holocaust

As Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the horrors of the Holocaust remain in our “close and yet distant past,” in which time obscures the trauma from our immediate consciousness, yet the enduring guilt of inaction allows us to continue questioning the ways in which millions of Jews were executed under Nazi rule (123). According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators”, meaning that Nazi racism merged with the economic and political ideologies of the German people to promote the Jewish genocide and mass killings of millions of Germans. It’s difficult to comprehend how the Nazi regime and sympathizers were capable of murdering millions of people with the compliance of the majority of the population—how were Hitler and his Nazi regime able to execute their horrific plans of destruction? How did the minority group of racist Germans and Hitler supporters spread their ideologies throughout Germany and eventually gain power?

This is where the ideology of totalitarianism comes into play, the centralizing of government power and the spreading of propaganda to inspire fear in all Germans. With the combination of government suppression and fear for their quality of life, Germans became indifferent to the political agenda of the Nazi regime. The move towards centralized, authoritarian leadership promoted a “diminution of the power of opposition” (which would later lead to the erasure and censorship of anti-Nazi activists) claimed to work “beyond the strife of parties and particular interests, and by men who claimed to speak for the nation as a whole” (Arendt, 153). The sinister establishment of the Nazi regime in political and cultural institutions was disguised in “language…bound to attract and delude precisely those persons who still retained a spark of political idealism” (Arendt, p. 153). Thus, a majority of the population bought into the Nazi-propagated rhetoric, believing that Germans would prosper as a result of eliminating fabricated threats (i.e. the Jews, homosexuals, the disabled and other marginalized groups considered outside of German norms).

The influence of imperialist politicians and racial doctrines targeting ‘alien peoples’ who did not fit the Aryan profile “made it appear as though imperialism alone [was] able to settle the grave domestic, social and economic problems of modern times” that left Germany vulnerable to internal decay and the influence of foreign powers (Arendt, 157). The aggressive use of propaganda facilitated nationwide fear of the other, fear of poverty, and fear of death throughout Germany. The total breakdown of truth and the insertion of Nazi-fabricated reality enabled the extermination of both ideas and people considered against the ‘progress’ of Germany.  The multiple layers of diverging and complex versions of the ‘truth’ made Germans rely on the rumors and words of a small few as “they do not believe in anything visible within the reality of their existence…totalitarian propaganda relies on fantasy” (351). It is only through the writings of Jewish people and Holocaust survivors that the true depth of horror and despair of that era are brought to life.

The diary entries of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who lived through the era of the Third Reich, observed firsthand “the sense of justice…lost everywhere in Germany… being systematically destroyed” by the Nazi regime and German indifference towards the disappearances of thousands of Jews (Klemperer, 113). In his entries, Klemperer writes of the growing dangers he faces as a Jewish man, slowly coming to the realization that he has become a target of the government’s aggression. Even as a German-born man, the alienation of Jewish people and the divisions erected through Nazi propaganda impact Klemperer’s daily life. He loses his job, he and his wife fall ill and grow weary with age, and he lives in fear for his life at all times, expressing the hopelessness of his situation by writing “we are prisoners without hope of rescue” (Klemperer, 136). The most disturbing takeaway from Klemperer’s writing is in the details, the small daily interactions that change with time as people ostracize him more and more in his work and personal life. Through the progression of propaganda and the Third Reich taking control of the country, “in every aspect of the destruction of culture, Jew-baiting, internal tyranny, Hitler rules with ever worse creatures” (Klemperer, 116).

The writings of both Arendt and Klemperer allude to Germany philosopher’s Frederic Nietzsche’s theory regarding the herd mentality clearly reflected in the history of the holocaust. He alludes to the power of conformity, the blind acceptance of power and the narrative of what is good and evil (Gay Science, 279). Nazi propaganda coupled with the economic and political concerns of most Germans, created a vulnerable space in German history where the country was susceptible to the tyrannical leadership of a man who disguised his hateful actions as progressive policy for the betterment of Germany. As Klemperer writes in an entry:

“…many otherwise well-meaning people, dulled to injustice inside the country and in particular not properly appreciating the misfortune of the Jews, have begun to halfway acquiesce to Hitler. Their opinion: If at the cost of going backward internally, he restores Germany’s power externally, then this cost is worthwhile. Conditions at home can always be made good later—politics is just not a clean affair” (127).

The promise of a better future for Germany and the erasure of Jewish identities in the public sphere allowed people to become unresponsive to the atrocities being committed near their homes, the millions murdered within sight.

The famous film Night and Fog by French director Alain Resnais aims to portray the horrors of the Holocaust in vivid detail. After the censorship of the Nazi regime, the complicit actions of Nazi sympathizers and the silencing of millions of Jewish voices, Resnais uses a combination of archived footage and on-set concentration camp footage to capture the horrific reality of Nazi Germany. It was important for Resnais to humanize the Jewish internees, so often reduced to numbers and just a few casualties out of the many. The humanization of Jewish people and documentation of their daily lives, reminiscent of the daily life observations of Klemperer, at beginning of film, makes dehumanization and dead bodies at the end more disturbing at the end. The use of torture and violence on the Jewish people required a total negation of the humanity of the abused and the erasure of the humanity of the Nazi abusers. The film desperately asks “who is responsible”, a haunting admission of the apathy of the past and a warning against repeating such actions in the future.

By reviewing the hidden history of apathy and complicity during the Holocaust through the works of Jewish German authors and activists, the veils of the Nazi propaganda disintegrate, revealing only the horrific realities of Nazi Germany. The establishment of a fascist regime in Germany led by Hitler and the Third Reich allowed for Germans to place trust in a central power to remove the issues impacting the quality of life in Germany, however, the blame for Germany’s failings was placed on marginalized, non-Aryan groups. The indifference to the violence inflicted upon the Jewish community for the sake of self-preservation is a warning towards the dangers of trusting in a totalitarian power, promoting xenophobic hate speech and remaining apathetic towards the violence against others.

 Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins Of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World

1968.Print.

Klemperer, Victor. “1935.” I Will Bear Witness: A Diary Of the Nazi Years

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,Kaufmann, Walter,The Gay Science: With A Prelude In Rhymes

And An Appendix Of Songs. New York: Random House [1974]. Print.

Night and Fog. Dir. Alain Resnais, 1956.

Fragmented Identities - A Final Essay

Fragmented Identities:

A Humanist Perspective on Inequality Within the Black American Community

Identity Politics in Neoliberal America

In the song “The Hyphen” famous actor and director, John Wayne, sings of his disapproval of using the term ‘hyphenated American’ as an acceptable identity in a ‘progressive’ America. He claims that the label is divisive, an indicator of boundaries erected between American’s differences rather than the unifying national identity in lyrics such as: “United we stand...divided we fall. We’re Americans...and that says it all.” He goes on to make an impassioned plea for Americans to do away with the fractured label by claiming the hyphen blocks the road to liberty for all Americans—ultimately placing responsibility on those who identify as hyphenated Americans to embrace their national identity with baiting lyrics like “the Hyphen's use is up to you”. Looking back in time to the origins of the hyphenated American label, it is evident, however, that the hyphen was in fact a marker placed upon marginalized groups as a derogatory and alienating device. The origins of the term reach back to mouths of white, American oppressors a century ago, yet it is the leaders in power in the years since who have condemned its use in an effort to promote democratic multiculturalism and American nationalism (Outlaw, 143).

While Wayne’s lyrics may seem progressive, they are dismissive of the the experiences of alienated peoples and disguising nationalistic, homogenizing rhetoric with seemingly optimistic lyrics about a utopian future where all are seen and treated equally in America. Generations of politicians have similarly spoken out against the term, even within different political contexts. President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Hyphenated Americans” speech claimed “there is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American”, an off-base response to the rising tensions and xenophobia between ethnic groups in the United States during the second wave of immigration. Woodrow Wilson later echoed Roosevelts sentiments to an audience fearfully facing war by saying “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready", again victim-blaming oppressed people for an already divisive national culture. These examples are in the past, but presently even Governor Bobby Jindal has attempted to solve the issues of leading a diverse community in racially tense times by spreading the “We’re all Americans” mantra in 2015. According to Lucius T. Outlaw’s On Race and Philosophy, “we are once again in an era in which ‘difference’ has been made a virtue…with an ideal of equality that presumes essential sameness” (140).

Neoliberal rhetoric in present-day America would have one believe that Americans have collectively embraced the values of diversity, encouraging this new age of ‘multiculturalism’. The external framework of equality is slowly progressing in American institutions ever since the abolishment of slavery, the continuous fight for civil rights, laws promoting the mantra of “equal access for all!” and liberal movements embracing minority issues. On the surface, actions toward equality are good indicators of a socially and politically conscious society, yet inequality is as pervasive as ever. This is due to the fact that the main issue of inequality in American institutions and culture is inherent to the very founding of the United States. Simply working upon the problematic framework of American politics and culture without examining and resolving the traumas of slavery, segregation, oppression and racism, enables a continuous pattern of progression and regression. The innate problems with America’s imperialist and racist past cannot be worked on without the acknowledgment and embracing of people’s distinctive histories as oppressors and the oppressed, particularly the histories of black Americans shamefully censored in the modern interpretation of America’s racist past bleeding into its present.

Some Americans prefer reclaiming the hyphenated identity, empowering themselves through the acknowledgment of their immigrant histories and experiences. Others find the term alienating and excluding as the origins of the term were rooted in such sentiments. As a multiracial woman with black ancestry, I personally prefer using black to identify myself rather than African-American, as the latter excludes the experiences of black Americans who might not identify as African including my own family from the Caribbean. However, being critical of the hyphenated American identity, for the purpose of this work, is not to make a decision on whether minority peoples should use the term or not, but serves as an indication that there has always been a long-standing American tradition of fragmenting the identities of marginalized groups. Specifically, the terms African-American, black, colored, negro and all other labels for black Americans have always carried the traumatic history of slavery which has shaped the black American experience today. The term, empowering for some, serves as a reference to the fragmented identity of black Americans. A divided form of consciousness rooted in dehumanization of slavery and through the continued violence against the black community today, as examined in this work.

A Consciousness Broken

In order to address the historical traumas of slavery and racism in America, the veils of multiculturalism, diversity and national hegemony must be lifted in order to view the truth of the black American experience. In The Souls of Black Folk, activist W.E.B Du Bois addresses the segregated black mind and body. He defines the black American experience of having “a second sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world”, of seeing oneself through the hatred and pity of the oppressive surrounding world (10-11). Double-consciousness is the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” as “one ever feels his two-ness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” and continuous conundrum of existence plagued by the histories of both halves of the black American identity (11). Du Bois describes the constant struggle for liberation for black identities and how one can become whole while existing as both American and black. He questions how one stops being a conundrum, a problem, when one’s very existence enables one’s problem-hood—at some point, there’s a significant break in the reality of black experiences and the reality of the intolerant American sociopolitical structures.

State-Promoted Violence

The fragmentation of self—the split between the human consciousness alive in the mind of the individual and the dehumanized, abused, destroyed social self—creates an experience that is neither one of the living nor dead. The external self—the body that lives in a segregated society, the body that is abused by institutionalized racism, the body that is viewed as inhuman—is therefore perceived by the oppressed individual through the eyes of others. There is an internal awareness that the external world does not recognize the human experience of African-Americans. This system stems from a colonial history of slavery and exploitation in American, and follows the process of decolonization today. The documentary film Concerning Violence, based on the essays of Frantz Fanon, describes the colonial world as a world cut in two, with decolonization serving as the means for two forces opposed to each other to meet in a “murderous and decisive struggle” between oppressed and oppressor.

The documentary explores the rise of the police officer as a forerunner of state-promoted violence. The film credits the pseudo-positions of power officers once represented in the colonial world as the influence of relentless police brutality today. Police are described as “spokesman of the settler and ruler of oppression”, the tools through which colonial conditions are propagated today. As a force, they enable the violence against black minds and bodies, serving as “bringer[s] of violence in the mind of the [oppressed]” by perpetuating the traumatic abuse of black Americans. Though the legality of colonization no longer supports the dehumanization of marginalized groups, colonial conditions remain and are inflicted through government enabled violence as reflected in the high rate of police brutality against minority communities. This continued abuse from the time of America’s founding shows black Americans that they are still viewed as easily exterminated by the American government, perpetuating the double consciousness associated with their abusive treatment.

Segregation of the Church

Of the segregated institutions within the United States, religious institutions and practicing Christianity have served as a form of empowerment for black Americans. Black communities reclaim Christianity in churches and community centers that catered to the well-being of their communities, outside the racism of white churches which often appropriated Christian doctrine to promote discrimination. As explored in the documentary The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin often references to his father’s occupation as a priest and the role of the church in his own life. He observes the great liberation expanding Christian doctrine to include black lives, yet the darker insinuations from his father that the “assumed saved were black” in an effort to deal with the evil white oppressors represented and “deal with life” as a black man. The role Christianity played in mobilizing black voices and creating spaces for black intellects and leaders is incredibly important in the consciousness of black America.

In Cornel Wests’s book The Cornell West Reader, he gives several reasons why black people adopted Christianity in the chapter ‘Race and Modernity’. First, “the evangelical outlook…stressed individual experience, equality before God and institutional autonomy”, all deeply personal yet important values for black Americans to access as a community, liberated from the white oppressor’s erasure of black autonomy (62). Second, as Frederich Nietzsche highlights in The Gay Science, Christianity is “a religion especially fitted to the oppressed”, as it highlights “slaves’ search for identity” and exodus out of their homelands, comforting and empowering the abused and neglected (62). Third, the adoption of Christianity allowed for black people to create safe spaces to exercise political and organization leadership “free from hierarchical control, open and easy access to leadership roles and relatively…uncomplicated requirements for membership”, essentially loosening all the barriers and roadblocks preventing black activism and leadership from reaching the larger American institutions (63). to explore black consciousness and create a sense of culture that had previously been denied by white oppressors. Christianity had once been a device for colonizers to use against Africans and natives in order to suppress and control, yet the segregation of black churches evolved into an institution through which black Christians exercised political rights and expressed cultural freedom in safe, black-run spaces.  

Fragmenting the Mind

Through analysis of black experience in psychiatric institutions, there is a clear pattern of mental illnesses manifesting in generations of black Americans. In extreme cases, fragmented minds mutate into illnesses and manifest in later generations of the oppressed as explored by writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon’s book is a psychiatric and humanist perspective on how systemic oppression manifests into mental trauma. While his perspective is that of a black French man working in Algeria, his analysis of black trauma in Africa as a result of colonialism and imperialism are applicable to oppressed people throughout the world. Fanon describes his experiences working in a psychiatric hospital while reflecting on the “many, sometimes ineffaceable, wounds that colonialist onslaught has inflicted”, a form of violence “fighting against a true liberation of mankind” which must be expelled from the national cultural and institutions (249).

By writing his observations of the many psychiatric cases, cases of violence and depression are juxtaposed against one another. These cases convey the line of contradiction between wishing for oblivion, for a swift death that will end the fear and abuse of generations of black Americans, and the desperate attempt to murder all of the black person’s abusers. The ensuing psychiatric disorders are the ways in which abused black men adapt to the traumas of loss and violence inflicted upon black communities. Just as physical wounds and verbal abuse carried on through generations of black Americans, empowering activists and communities to rise up against physical violence, the wounds of a traumatic history are only slowly being healed today through discussion and acknowledgment of the important role mental health plays in inequality.

Traumatic Experience Breaking Consciousness

So what is the breaking point of black consciousness; at what moment does the conscious of the abused individual break into two? The twoness is always present for the American and black souls don’t exist simultaneously, forever contradicting and always present in the minds. James Baldwin refers to this haunting memory of trauma passed from earlier generations echoed throughout much of his work, most notably Notes of a Native Son, in which he writes “we cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key – could we but find it – to all that we later become” (27). For black Americans born into inequality, the realization that people are not treated equally comes at the moment their parents can no longer protect them from the discriminatory eyes of the world, from the injustice promoted by segregated institutions. The veils of equality and nationalism are shattered in the realization of the physical and mental traumas endorsed by state-promoted, spiritual and psychologically perpetuated violence against black lives.

Lessons from the Past for Future Activism

      Looking back at the writings from countless black authors and intellects, the hauntings of a traumatic past and violence inflicted upon black communities for centuries manifests in the fragmented identities and doubled consciousness of black Americans. The recognition of the lasting affects of colonial conditions, which impact institutions and the experiences of black lives today, lead to the conclusion that the issues of divided communities lies most within the cultural approach we take towards race issues. Du Bois refers to the ‘problem’ of race as a delicate topic, difficult to even frame the question of overcoming racial divides (Du Bois, 9). The tensions apparent in society today lead people unable to form the proper language to confront racial inequality, to acknowledge the unequal treatment of black people. To breakdown the problems of maintaining the construct of race, people need civil activism as well as the institutional support to back cultural movements. Americans and the government need to listen to black voices, the most mobile movement currently being the Black Lives Matter movement, in order to acknowledge the gaps in consciousness shared between races. In every person there is the capacity for compassion through empathy, and the works and literature of generations of black Americans ask readers to recognize the search for wholeness in a nation which does not support black lives and continues to enable the traumatic consciousness of black Americans.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Notes Of A Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, c1955. Print. 

Du Bois, W. E. B., Gates, Henry Louis,Oliver, Terri Hume.The Souls Of Black Folk:

Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, ©1999. Print.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched Of The Earth. New York: Grove Press, ©1963. Print.

Olsson, Göran H, Lauryn Hill, and Frantz Fanon. Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the

Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense. United States: Alive Mind, 2014.

Outlaw, Lucius T. On Race And Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Thorsen, Karen., eds. James Baldwin: The Price Of The Ticket. San Francisco, CA : California

Newsreel, 1990. Print.

West, Cornel. The Cornel West Reader. New York, NY : Basic Civitas Books, 1999. Print.