Eugen Kogon (1903–1987)

Perhaps it can be said that theater is the French and not the German genius. (Perhaps Hitler was French.) And this is definitely ‘The Theory and Practice of Hell: Essays’ and not ‘The Theory and Practice of Hell: A Novel’. (I know I’m being absurd but obviously there is a level of metaphor. What I’m saying is it isn’t developed.) But perhaps the strength of this book is indeed that it is not theatrical. The Holocaust was vast, and vast things, that cannot easily be taken in, give themselves to a certain sort of abstraction. “One day, everybody died.” Instantaneous. Abstract. But this is inappropriate, of course. There was a sort of daily life during the Holocaust, (prisoners angling for better jobs or else dying, the SS officers conniving to get the prisoner’s mother’s money)—a sort of baseline, with dips above and below and even trends, but always a sort of everyday life-ness to it. Life and death can be ordinary as well as abstract, even though they do lend themselves to metaphor as well. This book, albeit in a thematic German kind of way, gives you that Everyday Holocaust.

…. Although I don’t mean to imply that it wasn’t horrific beyond words. It was. It was horrific beyond words, and it happened everyday.

…. It—perhaps—should be noted that since what happens to one happens to another, hatred and violence cannot really be contained, nor judgment by mortals who think they are not, so the Nazis could never really spare from themselves all Aryans or Germanics, nor be merciful and just even by their own lights. In the concentration camps you could occasionally find an English pilot, a politically suspect or ‘incurable sick’ German, and indeed common criminals in Nazi times were sent to the most inhospitable prisons, or camps—the very same.

But I say this with some hesitation, since almost always the worst fell on the non-Western, the non-Aryan. One ought to include every victim of injustice, but one often has the inclination of remembering most those of whom one is often reminded for some reason. I only include the previous paragraph to dispel the naive notion of tyrants and their witting or unwitting sympathizers that it is indeed naive to think that the Himmlers of the world all think of all the loyalists as being on the same team ultimately, just because they say ‘Heil Hitler’.

…. If they had won, would they have gone on killing people with breast cancer or alcoholism in the family, forever? Obviously that way does not lie health; that way lies more trauma-illnesses, and then more reprisals, and then more trauma-illness, ad infinitum. They could have gone on killing people forever.… (more)