RT Review
T1 Nazi "Ethic," Nazi Weltanschauung, and the Holocaust
JF The Jewish quarterly review
VO 83
IS 1/2
SP 167
OP 172
A1 Fackenheim, Emil L.
LA English
PB Penn Press
YR 1992
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1802085416
AB In showing that the Holocaust was perpetrated by ordinary jobholders and, more characteristically still, "idealists," Peter Haas makes his readers (as he did his own students) face up to the fact that the crime cannot be "tamed" as merely a work of sadists or barbarians (or more "philosophically," be flattened out into man's inhumanity to man in general). Shockingly, the Nazis were inspired by an "ethic" of their own, and those tolerating it had, to varying degrees, yielded to it. That ethic's success, he argues, is an unprecedented challenge to morality after Auschwitz. To a degree but unwittingly, the author himself trivializes the Holocaust by viewing the "ethic" which inspired it as a specimen of the species ethic, when in fact it can be understood only as flowing from the Nazi Weltanschauung. Like traditional religion and metaphysics, a Weltanschauung (in its original German meaning) must be coherent and comprehensive, but unlike these it cannot be put forward as being, but can only be made true. Hence if in the Nazi Weltanschauung Jews were vermin to be exterminated, it would only be half true so long as some Jews in the Welt were still permitted to be human and alive, and still were human and alive. Even within the Nazi Weltanschauung the Holocaust--no "mere" genocide but planned extermination--boggles the mind. Divorce the "ethic" from the Weltanschauung and it becomes incomprehensible.
K1 Rezension
DO 10.2307/1455112