On the Meaning of Life in the age of the Most Meaningless Death

Abstract

Using the cases of Pavel Florensky and Edith Stein (who were killed in a Soviet and a Nazi camp, respectively) as a jumping board, the author proposes a phenomenological reconstruction of the process of “demolition of man” (Primo Levi), to which prisoners were subjected both in Hitler's and in Stalin's camps. This essay, relying systematically on first-hand accounts from camp survivors, dwells on several stages of this process, which were strikingly similar in the two types of camp: “becoming an enemy,” “becoming a number,” “becoming a thing,” “becoming nothing.” One of the conclusions of the article is that, despite the numerous differences between the Nazi and the Soviet regimes, there was a sense in which their approach to what they considered “enemies” was fundamentally similar.

Notes

I wrote this article while I was a Solmsen Fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research in the Humanities. I am grateful to the Institute's Director, Professor Susan Stanford Friedman, for her support. I also owe special thanks to Clemena Antonova, Cristina Bradatan, Aurelian Craiutu, Zachary Hughes and Magdalena Zolkos for their precious feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

1 For an excellent introduction to Florensky's intellectual background, see Antonova's essay “Changing Perceptions of Pavel Florensky in Russian and Soviet Scholarship.”

2 Ibid.

3 In his Introduction to the English version of Iconostasis Sheeman discusses the details behind Florensky's death sentence.

4 A good introduction to Edith Stein's philosophy is MacIntyre's Edith Stein. A Philosophical Prologue. For Stein's life, see first of all her (unfinished) autobiography: Life in a Jewish Family, which covers the period 1891–1916 only but also contains a helpful chronology of her life up to 1942. Among the rich literature on Stein and the Catholic world, see Herbstrith. For Edith Stein and the Holocaust see Brenner.

5 For a discussion of the use of this language in the 1930s in Soviet Russia, see, for example, Applebaum. It was Stalin himself who set the tone: “From the late 1930s, Stalin also began publicly to refer to ‘enemies of the people’ as ‘vermin,’ ‘pollution,’ and ‘filth,’ or sometimes simply as ‘weeds’ which needed to be uprooted” (Applebaum 102).

6 The literature dedicated to a meaningful parallel between the two totalitarian systems (and, in particular, between their most characteristic epiphenomena: the camps) is already voluminous and still growing. In what follows I will limit myself to occasional references to the works of such scholars as Tzvetan Todorov, Anne Applebaum and Stéphane Courtois. However, even though a presentation of this debate is beyond the scope of this paper, it is impossible not to mention here Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and François Furet's Le Passé d’une illusion, as well as the latter's exchanges with Ernst Nolte, published as Fascisme et communisme.

7 Rousset.

8 A good comparative discussion is provided by Applebaum (xxxiii–xxxix). In his book Facing the Extreme, Todorov discusses comparatively the ethical aspects of life in the two types of camp.

9 One of the most reliable resources is provided by Courtois et al.

10 Applebaum xxxix.

11 Ibid.

12 It is estimated that during the Great Purge alone some 720,000 people were killed by the NKVD (Courtois et al. xvii).

13 In the Soviet Union alone, according to Courtois, it is estimated unofficially that 20 million people were killed as part of the process of political repression (Courtois et al. 4). Courtois calls these deaths “crimes against civilians” and considers them to be “the essence of the phenomenon of terror.” He lists a wide variety of methods:

• firing squads, hanging, drowning, battering, and, in certain cases, gassing, poisoning, or “car accidents”; destruction of the population by starvation, through man-made famine, the withholding of food, or both; deportation, through which death can occur in transit (either through physical exhaustion or through confinement in an enclosed space), at one's place of residence, or through forced labor (exhaustion, illness, hunger, cold). (Courtois et al. 4)

14 Applebaum xxxix.

15 The

• definition of “enemy” in the Soviet Union was always far more slippery than the definition of “Jew” in Nazi Germany. While millions of Soviet prisoners feared they might die – and millions did – there was no single category of prisoner whose death was absolutely guaranteed. (Applebaum xxxviii–ix)

16 Quoted in Todorov 134.

17 Ibid 133.

18 Todorov 75.

19 I should emphasize that the nature of this essay is not historical in a conventional sense. There is already a vast amount of historical scholarship (narrowly conceived) dedicated to both the Nazi camps and the Gulag, and my research does not in any way seek to complement, nor to compete with, it. My narrative here is of a rather phenomenological nature: based on the survivors’ “witness literature” I will seek to reconstruct what the experience of living and dying in a concentration camp might have been like. I will also do my best to avoid any obscure terminology and make this approach as jargon-free and “user-friendly” as possible. For the reader interested in the use of the phenomenological method in historical research, a good introduction is Kirby's article “Phenomenology and the Problems of Oral History.” Paul Ricoeur and Edward Casey are of great help when it comes to the application of phenomenology to the study of the past. Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, the classic collection of essays edited by Maurice Natanson, is still a good resource on the broader significance of phenomenology for the social sciences. For the phenomenological study of history of particular interest in this collection are Gerhard Funke's and Donald M. Lowe's essays, both of which are in volume 2.

20 Levi, Se questo è un uomo 18.

21 Quoted in Applebaum 102.

22 Koestler 31.

23 Ibid. 126–27.

24 An “‘enemy’ could mean anybody who opposed Stalin's rule, for any reason, even if he did not openly profess to do so” (Applebaum 102).

25 Quoted in ibid. 137.

26 Ibid. 125–26.

27 Todorov 127.

28 Ibid. 126–27.

29 Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind 63.

30 Todorov 128.

31 Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind 63.

32 In his book Todorov makes the same point: “When speaking of their prisoners, the guards avoid using words like people or individuals or men, referring to them instead as ‘pieces’ or ‘items’ or employing other impersonal turns of phrase” (Todorov 160).

33 Applebaum 277.

34 Levi, Se questo è un uomo 22.

35 Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators 27; my emphasis.

36 Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle 531–32.

37 Améry 21–40.

38 Even though Améry does not explicitly engage with the phenomenological literature in this essay, his vocabulary and terminology, his method of thinking, his whole approach is phenomenological. Here is a sample, in which one can easily find echoes of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty: “The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of my self. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel” (Améry 28).

39 “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected” (Améry 34).

40 Ibid. 22.

41 Ibid. 28.

42 “Amazed, the tortured person experienced that in this world there can be the other as absolute sovereign, and sovereignty revealed itself as the power to inflict suffering and to destroy” (Améry 39).

43 Ibid. 33.

44 Ibid. 40.

45 Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators 62.

46 Levi, Se questo è un uomo 37.

47 Ibid. 58–59.

48

• It was for this reason that all possible measures were taken in the concentration camps to ensure that face-to-face encounters did not occur, to prevent the executioner from meeting his victim's gaze. Only an individual can look at us … ; by avoiding his gaze, we can all the more easily ignore him as a person. (Todorov 161)

49 Ibid.

50 Levi, Se questo è un uomo 22.

51 “Counting heads of cattle or Jews is the same thing, a matter of ‘doing one's job’” (Todorov 174).

52 Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 22–23.

53 Ibid. 23.

54 Applebaum xv–xvi.

55 Quoted in ibid. 180.

56 Herling 41.

57 Borowski 38.

58 Ibid. 95–96.

59 Ibid. 39.

60 Ibid. 112–13.

61 Levi, Se questo è un uomo 63.

62 Ibid. 50.

63 Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators 99–100.

64 Herling 136.

65 Améry 7–8.

66 Quoted in Todorov 39.

67 Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators 213.

68 Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 24–25.

69 Ibid. 25.

70 For a recent philosophical discussion of this subject, see Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz.

71 Améry 9.

72

• Sometimes, the dying were called fitili, or “wicks,” as in the wick of a candle, soon to be blown out. They were also known as gavnoedy “shit-eaters” or pomoechniki “slop-swillers.” Most often there were called dokhodyagi, from the Russian verb dokhodit, “to reach” or “to attain,” a word usually translated as “goners.” Jacque Rossi, in his Gulag Handbook, claims the expression was a sarcastic one: the dying were at last “reaching socialism.” (Applebaum 334–35)

73 Ibid. 336.

74 Herling 54.

75 Levi, Se questo è un uomo 36.

76 Améry 18.

77 Ibid.

78 Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators 272.

79 Such a statement is obviously (and deliberately, I should add) at odds with Adorno's famous pronouncement about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. I am only making it because I think that Levi's comment that follows may in fact re-channel the whole discussion of the status of “poetry after Auschwitz” – a very important discussion that (thanks to, among others, Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has also) brought about a fresh reconsideration of Paul Celan's poetry.

80 Levi, The Voice of Memory 28.