Surviving the Holocaust: Emil Utitz’s ‘As-If Technique’

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to present the work of Emil Utitz, the Czech-German Jewish philosopher and psychologist, who was also a survivor of Theresienstadt. The power of the imagination and its intensification by the daily reality of the concentration camp was central to Utitz’s conception of life, which reveals the influence of the then popular ideas of Hans Vaihinger, and especially his theory of the importance of the human ability to act as though something was true. More specifically, the article reconstructs and contextualizes Utitz’s thought along two axes: the Kantian philosophical tradition, and Viktor Frankl’s and Hans Günther Adler’s conceptions of the Holocaust experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Emil Utitz
• Holocaust
• Vaihinger
• Kant
• Theresienstadt
• fiction
• phenomenology

Notes

1. The musician Leo Strauss wrote “As If” in Theresienstadt where it became immensely popular after it was performed by the Ghetto Swingers jazz band. In October 1944, Strauss was killed in Auschwitz. For a summary of his life and work, see “Leo Strauss” on the Music and the Holocaust website. For the background of this poem, see Mehring, “Zum Leben und Werk von Emil Utitz,” 25f.

The movie Life Is Beautiful (dir. Roberto Benigni, 1997) belongs to this category as well. Based on the work In the End, I Beat Hitler by Holocaust survivor Rubino Romeo Salmoni, it tells the story of a father who devised a method of refashioning the situation of the concentration camp into an adventurous play for his small son. This tribute to the human imagination hasn’t, however, only won acclaim, it has also been criticized for denigrating the horrors of the concentration camp. Despite his critical attitude, in his review, Tom Dawson nonetheless notes that “comedy here does capture something of the absurdity of the death camps.”

2. Eppstein’s dissertation was entitled “Beitrag zur statistischen Methodologie auf der Grundlage der Philosophie des Als-ob” (A contribution to the statistical methodology based on the philosophy of the “as-if”). In Theresienstadt he was Judenältester, head of the Jewish council. He used as-if motifs in his talk “Theresienstadt as a Task Held in the Ghetto.” Together with Utitz, he participated in the lecture-series “Sense of History” in the ghetto. He was shot by the Gestapo on September 28, 1944. For a summary of his life, see Makarova, Makarov, and Kuperman, Univerzita přežití, 203.

3. Levi, If This Is a Man, 24.

4. Mehring edited the treatise and published it in 2015 with a commentary and extensive introduction on Utitz’s life and work. In 2018, Mehring published Philosophie im Exil in which he discusses Utitz’s life and hitherto unknown documents related to it.

5. Utitz, Die Sendung der Philosophie, 71.

6. Kleist, “An Ulrike von Kleist,” 636.

7. In “Truth and Politics” Arendt does not deny that truth is important nor does she subscribe to any version of nihilism. In a Kantian vein, she maintains that absolute truths are not of this plural world: “All truths—not only the various kinds of rational truth but also factual truth—are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting validity. Truth carries within itself an element of coercion, and the frequently tyrannical tendencies so deplorably obvious among professional truthtellers may be caused less by a failing of character than by the strain of habitually living under a kind of compulsion” (302).

8. Krastev applies this insight to politics in After Europe: “In predemocratic times—in other words, for the vast bulk of human history—disputes were not settled by peaceful debates and orderly handovers of power. Instead, force ruled. Victorious invaders or the winning parties in a civil war had their vanquished foes at their mercy, free to do with them as they liked. Under liberal democracy, the ‘conqueror’ gets no such satisfaction. The paradox of liberal democracy is that citizens are freer, but they feel powerless” (75).

9. Jacobi, “Jacobi an Fichte,” 191‒258.

10. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: “[T]he idea that being, like all speculative ideas, means nothing more than that reason bids us consider every connection in the world according to principles of a systematic unity, hence as if it had all arisen from one single all-encompassing being, as supreme and all sufficient cause” (A 686/B 714, 614).

11. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 353 f.

12. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 106.

13. Palmquist makes this point in “Philosophers in the Public Square”: “Without embracing religion at whatever level we find ourselves in our moral development, the gargantuan task of obeying the moral law would have to be given up as a lost cause” (239).

14. For a good summary of Vaihinger’s life and work, see Neuber, “Einleitungm,” 7‒18.

15. For Einstein’s reception of Vaihinger’s philosophy work, see Hentschel, “Zur Rezeption,” 161–84. For a discussion of as-if motifs, see Kelsen, “Zur Theorie der juristischen Fiktionen,” 630–58. For Schmitt’s conception of the “as if,” see “Juristische Fiktionen,” 804–6. Vaihinger continues to inspire work in various disciplines: the most recent reading is Appiah’s in As If. For the application of Vaihinger’s ideas to today’s economy, see Beckert, Imagined Futures.

16. See, e.g., Schlick, “Positivism and Realism,” 82‒107.

17. Vaihinger, As If, 6, 15 (original emphasis).

18. Kant, in contrast, would not call postulates, which are the counterparts to Vaihinger’s fiction, untrue or false.

19. James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” 28.

20. However adverse this might sound, considering his non-utilitarian ethics, Kant does in fact resort to a pragmatic vocabulary and suggests that adopting these ideas might have an epistemological “advantage.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 701/B 729.

21. Hacking, “Making Up People,” 99‒105.

22. Appiah, As If, 143.

23. In his review of Appiah’s book, Nagel points to a slightly different yet related problem: “This is a liberating outlook, though care must be taken not to let it become too liberating. As Appiah insists, we should not allow the plurality of useful theories to undermine our belief in the existence of the truth, leaving us with nothing but a disparate collection of stories. It is conscious deviation from the truth that makes a theory an idealization, and keeping this in mind is a condition of its value.”

24. For Eppstein, see note 2.

25. Utitz, “Psychologie des Lebens,” 38; and Utitz, “Zur Psychologie der provisorischen Existenz,” 79‒81.

26. Utitz, “Psychologie des Lebens,” 76‒78.

27. Ibid., 77.

28. Ibid., 42: in these passages, Utitz diagnoses a change in character, noting a “schyzothimic orientation” among many of the inmates.

29. Utitz, Die Sendung der Philosophie, 21‒33.

30. Ibid., 62, 59.

31. Fichte, Attempt at a Critique, 112.

32. Fichte, Vocation of Man, 67.

33. Utitz, Die Sendung der Philosophie, 5.

34. Utitz, “Masaryk als Volkserzieher,” 285.

35. Utitz, Die Sendung der Philosophie, 116.

36. Ibid., 26, 93.

37. For a thorough reconstruction of the arguments presented at this conference, see Rezek, “Patočkova fenomenologie ducha,” 137‒51. For a reconstruction by a participant, see Kraus, “Über die mannigfache Bedeutung des Geistes,” 189‒95.

38. Utitz, Die Sendung der Philosophie, 89f.

39. Cf. Rezek, “Patočkova fenomenologie ducha,” 139.

40. Utitz, however, criticized existentialism, especially of its individualism and glorification of suffering. Utitz, “Bemerkungen zur deutschen Existenz-Philosophie,” 162‒75.

41. See the title of Adler’s book: Theresienstadt 1941‒1945: The Face of a Coerced Community.

42. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 75.

43. Ibid., 66.

44. Utitz, “Zur Psychologie der provisorischen Existenz,” 97.

45. Utitz, “Das ‘unbarmherzige Schwert’,” 126.

46. Ibid., 125.

47. Schumann, The Ghetto Swinger, 56.

48. Utitz, “Psychologie des Lebens,” 72–76. Analogously, in If This Is a Man Levi conceives man as homo ludens. That it is so difficult to play in the concentration camp is, for him, a testimony of its depravity. The rare moments of play in Auschwitz are, on the other hand, moments of small victories. For him, a rare positive moment in Auschwitz is related to Italian poetry: he tries to reconstruct a canto by Dante and experiences an almost sacred moment when reciting it to his friend. “As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment, I forget who I am and where I am” (237).

49. Améry, “At the Mind’s Limits,” 13.

50. Ibid., 14.

Additional information

Funding

The work on this article was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

Notes on contributors

Tereza Matějčková

Tereza Matějčková, PhD, is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Czech Republic. Her main fields of research include German Idealism, twentieth-century philosophies of existence and the philosophy of religion. She is also a professional translator, and has translated works of Hegel, Jaspers, Tugendhat from German into Czech, and the work of Emil Utitz into German. Her most recent publication is Gibt es eine Welt in Hegels ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’?, published in Tübingen in 2018.