Language:
English
Year of publication:
2002
Titel der Quelle:
New German Critique
Angaben zur Quelle:
85 (2002) 107-130
Keywords:
National socialism Philosophy
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
Criticizes historians (e.g. George Mosse, Eberhard Jäckel, Michael Burleigh, Wolfgang Wippermann) who describe the idea of the Final Solution as arising from Nazi racial ideology which needed only to be implemented. Proposes another approach, according to which it was the ontological conceptions of life and "Lebensraum" that lay at the core of the Nazi "Weltanschauung" (as opposed to rational ideology). Nazi politics conceived its objects as a priori belonging, or not, to life. Extermination, in the Nazi worldview, was not a punishment, but a way to realize the right to life; the victim of the extermination process never really belonged to the category of life. Thus the victims' existence in the death camps was their experience of death as an ontological category; they themselves perceived camp existence in this way.
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