I
Years before the onslaught of a madness that was to incapacitate him, voiding his intellect like the snapping of a high wire of isolation and brilliance, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book by the name of The Gay Science featuring the parable of the madman leaping into the marketplace, bearing a lantern in the morning hours. Its echoes, reverberating through the decades to come, would sound across the wasteland of the twentieth century whose cruelty and slaughter would eclipse all conceptions of the 19th-century imagination: “The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers…God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him…’” This was the madman prophesying what those milling in the marketplace, complacent and myopic, had yet to realize. Nietzsche goes on to write that “deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”
The prophesying of the death of God trumpeted the pretensions of a society—the fin-de-siècle long since industrialized, enraptured by the advance of science and technology giving rise to newfound beliefs and convictions about the world—that could no longer in good conscience believe that it believed in God; cleaving to a religion outmoded by science, it continued to entertain a religious piety, but Nietzsche contended that this belief was hollow and faithless, that it could no longer believe what it had believed. The ethical and world-historical implications for what was to become history as one knows it today, prophesied by a philosopher whose conclusions were brilliant but inconclusive, gave way to the modern ratcheting up of atheism and individualism, nationalism and a technological rationality whose byproduct was an ethos of “instrumental rationality”—the using of any means to achieve an end. Jettisoning former pieties, Western civilization swelled with optimism and scientism, approaching the genocidal disasters culminating in the Holocaust.
An irrepressible historical beeline between the parable of the madman and the twentieth-century cataclysms suggests itself in the writings of the late British-Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who contends in Modernity and the Holocaust that the Holocaust was the outcome of a potentiality intrinsic to modern society itself, rather than the aberration of an otherwise rational and orderly structure for which humankind could tout its civility. “We need to take stock of the evidence,” he writes, “that the civilizing process is, among other things, a process of divesting the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus, and of emancipating the desiderata of rationality from interference of ethical norms or moral inhibitions.” Bauman suggests the threat of instrumental rationality, divorced from the ethical concerns of great swaths of humanity, and subsumed by the bureaucratic structure whose goals and intentions are those of a collective—and of no one in particular.
Increasingly absorbed by bureaucratic structures operating with renewed gusto in the godless, technological efficiency of the twentieth century, ethical interests and constraints had long since given rise to the conditions of which the Holocaust was a natural outcome. The exhilarating, insidious developments of the prior century have urgent implications for our modernity of the twenty-first, as Bauman writes: “The implication that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were a wound or a malady of our civilization—rather than its horrifying, yet legitimate product—results not only in the moral comfort of self-exculpation, but also in the dire threat of moral and political disarmament.”
Suggestive for those affirming that historical problems are more than societal, this mentioning of perpetrators, and of self-exculpation, points to the junction of the historical and the individual, the cataclysmic and the personal, as the potential means of addressing the unsettling lessons of the Holocaust. Bauman writes that “we live in a type of society that made the Holocaust possible, and that contained nothing which could stop the Holocaust from happening,” noting conditions that are as urgent today as they were thirty years ago, when the book was published. The distant alarm of these conditions has remained urgent, with lessons whose conclusions are indefinite but propulsive. Those looking for answers from the horrific atrocities of the twentieth century, from what our most civil impulses would deem a disgusting aberration, have to ask themselves: How does it pertain to us, and what can we do about it?
II
In 1992, the historian Christopher R. Browning published an epochal study of those perpetrators of the Holocaust deployed as members of Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police enlisted by the Third Reich during the Second World War. The height of the Jewish extermination during which this battalion functioned was between mid-March, 1942, when “some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished,” and mid-February 1943, when “the percentages were exactly the reverse.” This grisly onslaught, a “veritable blitzkrieg” as Browning calls it, was most concentrated in Poland, where during the same period the Jewish population of major villages and communities was whittled down to a few survivors, clinging to life in eviscerated ghettos and labor camps. It was in Poland that Police Battalion 101, as subjects of what Browning has called Ordinary Men, patrolled while carrying out massacres and deportations of Jewish communities throughout this period of the war.
The Order Police of the Third Reich “resulted from the third attempt in interwar Germany to create large police formations with military training and equipment,” but as the country geared up for wartime, independent military formations of the Order Police were undercut by the German army, which ordered many units put at its disposal. The depletion of troops led to the expansion of the recruitment age, so that by the 1940s the Third Reich was drawing on middle-aged reservists, whose backgrounds were often petit bourgeois and whose prewar experiences of Germany were different from those of younger recruits nourished by Nazism. Reserve Police Battalion 101 comprised those who had been drafted as reservists, many of them middle-aged and unprepared for the cruelties of war, with mindsets and experiences setting them at odds with the savage caricature of the former Hitler-Jugend; noting the utter ordinariness of these men of Police Battalion 101, Browning himself writes that “by age, geographical origin, and social background, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were least likely to be considered apt material out of which to mold future mass killers.” Their battalion was “the ‘dregs’ of the manpower pool available at that stage of the war. It was employed to kill Jews because it was the only kind of unit available for such behind-the-lines duties.”
This suboptimal accommodation of the Third Reich was sent to the Lublin district of central Poland, where it was to carry out duties intended to make its assigned areas “judenfrei,” or free of Jews. Of the many massacres and deportations that Browning mentions in Ordinary Men, he examines the scale and effects of those that revealed, in court records of the testimonies that he studied, the behavioral differences among the perpetrators exhibiting commonplace phenomena of social psychology as well as diverse reactions to the tasks assigned to them. The most telling of these massacres was that at Józefów, a village housing about 1,800 Jews in the southeast of the Lublin district, assigned to Police Battalion 101.
Having arrived in Józefów before daybreak in the middle of July, 1942, the members of Police Battalion 101 listened to the assignment as delivered by Major Trapp, the superior of the company commanders to whom he would convey the logistics: after rounding up the inhabitants of this Jewish village and summarily shooting those that were too old, sick, or young to be escorted to the marketplace, the policemen were to separate the frail, women, and children from the able-bodied men designated as “work Jews” for the district; these men being removed from the village, the policemen would escort those remaining to a nearby forest, where they were to be shot. Browning notes that after explaining this assignment to his men, Major Trapp offered to exempt from the shooting those to whom the assignment was objectionable; making up a small proportion of those listening to the assignment as the daybreak lightened the sky, a number of men stepped forward. Their accepting the offer of exemption contributed to the behavioral divisions that Browning uses in Ordinary Men to examine the actions of the battalion. The moment was suggestive of the subtle and various impetuses of members of Police Battalion 101, important to historians such as Browning arguing that the phenomenon of the Holocaust perpetrator should be understood as multicausal.
Throughout the day, this suggestiveness continued to unfold: of those listening to the battalion doctor explaining the one-shot methods of efficient murder (using a fixed bayonet as an aiming guide, placed on the backbone above the shoulder blades), more men asked to be exempted from the killing; others idled in the marketplace in lieu of rounding up Jews, deftly evading such battalion imperatives as the shooting of infants; having carried out their one-on-one murders in the forest where the men shot victims on the ground, others asked to be released from what had become unbearable; and of those that continued in shooter rotations, murdering with fixed bayonets, some men began shooting past their victims, unable to withstand what had become grisly slaughter—deficient as aiming guides, fixed bayonets often failed to prevent the mess of murder, which tended to tear off skullcaps, splattering shooters with brains and bone fragments. Browning writes that one sergeant “watched men emerge from the woods covered with blood and brains, morale shaken and nerves finished.” Many men slunk away after shooting, returning to the marketplace. It was only with the arrival of nightfall that the assignment—the destruction of the Józefów Jewry by rotations of grisly, point-blank shootings lasting throughout the day—was at last completed, and the men returned to their barracks in a nearby village.
The conclusion that those committing these atrocities were bloodthirsty psychopaths deserving our condemnation is all-too-tempting; for by summarily designating them as human aberrations, we discard their pertinence to a human nature that has long been with us, petrifying their historical lessons. Condemning without further reflection is also to commit what social psychologists have called the “fundamental attribution error,” whereby someone underestimates the situational determinants of a given person’s behavior. Accompanying this phenomenon are immediate emotional rewards: if you condemn a driver that has cut you off, uttering oaths reflective of his discourtesy, his arrogance, his stature as a terrible-no-good-rotten-bastard, you have just afforded yourself a temporary enemy vindicating your outrage. You are spared not only the examination of your own errors, but the concession that this driver might have had good excuses for discourtesy, such as an emergency, a false movement, a lapse of attention. This is the common and reactive error impeding those who merely condemn perpetrators. Incommensurate with those of the discourteous driver, the actions of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 undoubtedly justify condemnation; but condemnation is not enough, for this case requires a more studied and ambiguous response.
Operating during wartime conditions, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were subject to a number of social-psychological phenomena influencing their milieu and experiences as perpetrators. At Józefów the men were subject to the phenomenon of conformity, even while carrying out this unpalatable task of the shooting of Jews. As Browning writes, the conformity was the pressure of “the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out.” Combining with this phenomenon was the distancing and dehumanization of the enemy—a ubiquitous phenomenon in wartime—as the product of what sociologist Helen Fein has called the “universe of obligation”: the social territory within which all moral questions arise, and beyond which moral questions become inapplicable. “To render the humanity of victims invisible,” writes Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust, “one needs merely to evict them from the universe of obligation.” Distancing and dehumanization, already a product of wartime conditions encouraging the universe of obligation, would be the inevitable correlatives of the shooting at Józefów. This confluence of phenomena Browning acknowledges when he writes that “distancing, not frenzy and brutalization, is one of the keys to the behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101. War and negative racial stereotyping were two mutually reinforcing factors in this distancing.” A multicausal approach to the phenomenon of the Holocaust perpetrator emerges as the vigorous, unsettling central argument of Ordinary Men.
In spite of the influences of these phenomena, the men of Police Battalion 101 nonetheless exhibited demoralization as well as unease with the inhuman shooting to which they were assigned. But their various drop-out rates point to still more phenomena to which they were subject under extreme conditions. One of the policemen, attempting to rationalize his murdering, resorted to killing only children whose mothers had already been shot; for these motherless children, as he mentions in his testimony, were going to die anyway. His grotesque justification points up the psychological contortions of humans lessening the burdens of their actions. The policeman killing children was not a vicious child-killer, but a man rationalizing actions whose consequences he could not confront. And the policeman, by way of alleviating these consequences, exhibited what is a common social-psychological phenomenon: cognitive dissonance, whereby one eliminates the uncomfortable difference between conflicting thoughts or attitudes by adapting some of them, thereby reducing the difference. If I murder a child, I can abate the overwhelming guilt by changing my attitude toward the victim, or toward my motives: perhaps the child was less than human, perhaps I had to do it, perhaps he deserved it. This change of attitude abates my guilt while preserving the soundness of my self-concept, which is not that of a child-killer. Rationalizations such as these seem both absurd and unconscionable, but in conjunction with these many phenomena and the wartime extremities of the policemen, they become all-too-available.
Aggravating this phenomenon of cognitive dissonance is what is called self-perception theory, a social-psychological concept entailing that when we are uncertain of our attitudes, we infer them from our actions. If those shooting a distanced and dehumanized enemy in wartime conditions were uncertain of their attitudes toward that enemy, they would not be for long—their killing the enemy would soon clarify the matter. This phenomenon, cognitive dissonance, and distancing were exhibited by those participating in the obedience experiments that Stanley Milgram conducted in the 1960s. In the common version of the experiment, participants were directed by the experimenter to administer shocks to “learners”—really concealed and responsive tape recorders. Administering incremental shocks to the learners answering incorrectly, the participant would continue to increase the voltage, and various verbal prods were used by the experimenter whenever the participant demurred, enabling the experiment until the participant had overcome all the verbal prods, or administered 450 volts three times in succession. Contrary to the predictions that most participants would refuse to administer the highest voltage, the results of the first experiments revealed that 65 percent of the participants administered the highest voltage, and that all the participants administered at least 300 volts. Featuring conditions radically different from the controlled environment of the Milgram experiments, the Józefów massacre nonetheless bore the hallmarks of the same social-psychological phenomena to which intelligent, civil collegians had succumbed.
A diversity of behaviors in Police Battalion 101 is the crux of the modern pertinence of these social-psychological phenomena. How do these influences apply to what these policemen, these “ordinary men,” experienced as perpetrators of horrific massacres, responding diversely to various conditions? Nearing the conclusion of Ordinary Men, Browning distills this uncertainty: “Why did most men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 become killers, while only a minority of perhaps 10 percent—and certainly no more than 20 percent—did not?” He concludes that to understand these social-psychological phenomena as they pertain to the Holocaust perpetrators is not to exonerate them as such; attempting to understand is not forgiving, much less exculpating. “Those who killed,” Browning writes, “cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing.” Perpetrator responsibility is thus immitgable, even in conjunction with the various social-psychological phenomena that, however prominent, cannot themselves explain the behavioral differences among those participating in the summary slaughter of thousands of Jews.
So Browning arrives at his messy, unsettling conclusion, which is that of individual responsibility, writing that “human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.” Approaching that junction of the historical and the individual, the cataclysmic and the personal, suggested in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman as being the potential means of addressing the unsettling lessons of history, Browning concludes that “if the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?” The lessons of the ordinary men in Ordinary Men, grisly, horrific, indefinite, unsettling, become in the twenty-first century the signposts of what is to come, or the entreaties to a kind of action different from what has been all-too-common in our efficient, postmodern world.
III
Those searching for the urban epitome of a postindustrial, godless society would find it in the microcosm of Gotham City, which in the second film of the modern trilogy, The Dark Knight, bears out many of the ethical implications that Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the nineteenth century. As a psychopathic anarchist, an “agent of chaos,” The Joker sets up moral quandaries for the primary characters—Batman, Harvey Dent, Lieutenant Gordon—designed to upset those facile, comic-book heroics functioning within a dichotomy of good and evil. He captures Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes, lovers entertaining a more committed partnership, attaching them to time bombs in disparate locations and thus compelling Batman, a vigilante whose heroism in Gotham City has become dubious, to influence who is to live, and who to die. This and many other ingenious schemes draw out what the existential philosophers of the twentieth century, inheritors of the worldviews and sentiments of such philosophers as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche of the prior century, would understand as the outcomes of a godless and technological society of modern warfare: the questioning of values, the inadequacy of an a priori ethics, a nonspecific, anxiety-inducing sensation of meaninglessness, the frequency of moral quandaries similar to those of The Dark Knight. They understood that these were different times demanding a more radical, even a more desperate, approach to modern moral decay.
As the most upstanding character in Gotham City, and the one falling furthest from the justice and goodness to which he aspired, Harvey Dent presents an interesting case exemplifying the ethical vacuum in which modernity has found itself. After the death of Rachel Dawes, Harvey Dent becomes the embittered, ignominious Two-Face, avenging his late lover by tracking down those responsible for her death; and upon finding them, he flips a coin determining whether they live or die—an expression of his new amoral ethos, similar to that of Batman. “The world is cruel,” he says, threatening to murder the family of Lieutenant Gordon, “and the only morality in a cruel world is chance.” His admission of morality-as-chance broaches what is the novel conception of morality in a godless era: not that morality itself is chance, but that amorality and moral indifference are the common conditions under which morality takes its stand. Similar to Batman, Harvey Dent remains differentiable: he falls from his former glory not because he begins killing people, but because he begins killing people as the outcome of vengeful, destructive desires from which vigilantes such as Batman have long since distanced themselves.
Maintaining a personal code of ethics as a vigilante, Batman walks the line between good and evil, contributing to his status as an outcast but making him a uniquely modern character, exhibiting the consequences of a world that no longer honors moral guidelines as it used to; even The Joker has a code of ethics—that such codes do not exist—and he lives out its consequences, having chosen, like Batman, to bear whatever those might entail. But Harvey Dent, after exemplifying an honorable code, falls from that code and continues living without one; his operative motives become vengefulness and embitterment, and all his decisions are reactive rather than proactive, destructive rather than creative. He is a tragic character and a failure, so that by comparison even the Joker seems somewhat admirable.
A provocative and substantial counterpart to the moral indifference of Gotham City is that of the film Lacombe, Lucien, directed by Louis Malle and released in 1974. Its story follows the choices of the titular character, a taciturn adolescent who is refused membership in the French Resistance, then falls in with the local French Gestapo, which happily absorbs him after he betrays the man that refused him that membership. Lucien is a provocative character because he is an inscrutable moral cipher; in contrast with Harvey Dent, motivated by a vengefulness stemming from the death of his lover, Lucien has no motives; and unlike The Joker, his being motiveless is not itself a motive, but merely an absence resulting in a curious impotence. This impotence comes to the fore after Lucien attaches himself to an attractive Jewish girl and her father, who soon realizes that Lucien is using his Gestapo membership to leverage a relationship with his daughter. A courtship during which Lucien solidifies his stature as a bully and a parasite leads to his betrayal of both the Gestapo and the Resistance; amoral and careless, sometimes even lethargic, Lucien exhibits a kind of wartime opportunism whose emptiness is emphasized in the last scene, in which the lover for whom Lucien has fled the Gestapo becomes his next source of apathy and boredom. Like his Gestapo membership, its perquisites and power, his lover becomes an amusement that has lost its luster, and the viewer learns from a subtitle that Lucien was executed by a Resistance tribunal shortly after the last scene. One wonders whether death was to him as valueless as life, whether his was the ceremonious snuffing of a candle that had never been lit.
Although Lucien is an extreme of insipid moral indifference, he nonetheless exhibits what is also exhibited by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, as well as Harvey Dent in Gotham City: the ambiguous potentiality of the individual. Lacombe, Lucien demonstrates that Lucien is an extreme of this ambiguous potentiality intrinsic to the human being. Measured by the consequences of his actions, Lucien is no worse than the many members of Police Battalion 101, the difference being that he exhibits a greater indifference and amorality than most of them, a greater willingness to adapt himself to the circumstances of war without hesitation. And he is no worse than Two-Face, without exhibiting any of the vengefulness and embitterment characteristic of the latter. What Lacombe Lucien, Two-Face, and the members of Police Battalion 101 have in common is that they are negative co-actors with circumstances bringing out what is latent in them; the messiness of good and evil, the ambiguous potentiality out of which Batman and The Joker have made themselves, is what they have never acknowledged. Becoming victims of what they failed to acknowledge, what they did not want to acknowledge, they have chosen not to choose.
This ambiguous potentiality of the human being, an immemorial human condition facing the new challenges of the modern era, is the pressing human reality recognized by those existentialists whose mainsprings Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied with his madman in the marketplace. Moving beyond what the madman prophesied in his diverse and insightful oeuvre, Nietzsche tried to draw out the individual prospects of an upheaval of traditional values dissipating in the smoke of future crematoria, and he addresses these new prospects in Beyond Good and Evil, in which he writes that “in man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day.” However indefinite and speculative his prophecies and insights, Nietzsche profoundly explored the implications for the modern individual bereft of traditional values, confronting anew this ambiguous potentiality whose consequences were the Holocaust. If the human being is both creature and creator, a morally ambiguous individual, then Nietzsche was right in designating the individual as being beyond good and evil, and in foreseeing that the consequences of modernity would require an integrated and autonomous human being affirming the messiness of traditional notions of that dichotomy.
Near the conclusion of Ordinary Men, Browning invokes Zygmunt Bauman’s opinion of what has been called the “sleeper,” the individual in wartime realizing his ambiguous potentiality as a perpetrator of atrocity, as a killer: “Bauman argues,” writes Browning, “that most people ‘slip’ into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of any implication that ‘faulty personalities’ are the cause of human cruelty. For him the exception—the real ‘sleeper’—is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.” As conceived by Bauman, this sleeper, this extraordinary moral individual, is the autonomous human being that has retained autonomy in spite of the process of socialization. This is why the strengths of the sleeper are hidden: because in the fundamental communal structures of a society, the individual has the chance to discover these strengths only when the circumstances have become insidious.
If it is correct that individuals have an ambiguous potentiality existing beyond good and evil, that they must exist beyond good and evil if they are to rise to the challenge of a modernity whose traditional values have become inadequate to a new kind of historical atrocity, and that the real “sleeper” is the autonomous moral individual whose hidden strengths surface only during these atrocities—then it is the sleepers that exist beyond good and evil, as the moral agents for whom all these social-psychological phenomena and socialization are not enough. They alone remain autonomous as the world around them disintegrates.
So the urgent task for those living in a postmodern world, wanting to address and to honor the lessons of history, should be to become the autonomous individuals beyond good and evil, the real sleepers withstanding the normalized madness of the madman in the marketplace. Then the vertiginous vistas of human progress rise up as specters and entreaties: if we must become autonomous individuals, then how to become autonomous individuals, how to acquire true moral autonomy, is the modern problem we must set out to solve, paradoxically, together.
