Was the Holocaust Modern?

When discussing the Holocaust, the terms “factories of death,” “white-collar murderer,” and “bureaucratic efficiency” are frequently used, leading to a distorted idea of what really happened. This work contends that far from being an impersonal and purely systematic process the Holocaust was often a...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Hayes, Peter
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:México
Institución:UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO
Repositorio:Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales
Idioma:español
OAI Identifier:oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/56976
Acceso en línea:https://www.revistas.unam.mx/index.php/rmcpys/article/view/56976
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Holocaust
modernity
Third Reich
antisemitism
Holocausto
modernidad
Tercer Reich
antisemitismo
Descripción
Sumario:When discussing the Holocaust, the terms “factories of death,” “white-collar murderer,” and “bureaucratic efficiency” are frequently used, leading to a distorted idea of what really happened. This work contends that far from being an impersonal and purely systematic process the Holocaust was often a rather chaotic labor. Where the horrors it perpetrated in some sense “modern”? Was the Holocaust an expression or outgrowth of the terrible powers implicit in modernity? New empirical findings are shifting our attention away from what made the Third Reich emblematic of general patterns of modern society and remind us of the ways in which that regime was profoundly aberrant and atavistic. Although this swing of the interpretive pendulum hardly represents the last word, it deserves a careful consideration that shows how the primitivism of the Nazi project exceeds by far its modern attributes.