Albert Camus and the Critique of Violence by David Ohana

Author:David Ohana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2016-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Church of Nihil

The destruction of the democratic values of the Weimar republic had received official authorisation. In the Germany of continual war all values collapsed, and the morality of gangsters overcame the morality of Goethe. In his Letters to a German Friend, Camus disagreed with his friend, who said, “Don Quixote is powerless if Faust feels like attacking him” [RR, 23]. Camus claimed that Don Quixote and Faust were never meant to defeat each other. Hitler and his regime were unable to do without their enemies because they defined themselves solely in relation to their enemies. The demonic “other” gave validity and justification to perpetual battle, and Hitler thus embodied the life force, a biological policy. The logic of National-Socialist dynamism went from conquest to conquest, from enemy to enemy. As long as there were enemies, the terror would continue: there would be enemies as long as the dynamism existed. All the enemies were unbelievers, and they had to be brought back to the faith through sermonizing and propaganda or destroyed through an inquisition or a Gestapo. Camus quoted a newspaper from the time of the party congress, an official declaration of the party: “National Socialism is the only faith which can bring our people to salvation” [R, 182]. Thus, the worship of God and paganism, redemption, and nihilism were amalgamated.

Camus saw the destruction of Lidice by the Nazis as the first attempt in history to found a church on negation. The houses of the village were burned down, the men were shot, the women banished, the children reared in the religion of the Führer. Special regulations were enforced, and months were devoted to razing the area by dynamite, clearing away stones, sealing a reservoir with tar, changing the road, and diverting the course of a river. Finally, Lidice became nothing but the future. The cemeteries were cleared of the bones of the dead: nothing had existed before in this place [R, 184]. Hitler’s crimes, including the murder of children, were without precedent in history, because in Camus’ opinion there was no example in the past of a doctrine of total destruction. It was the first time that the rulers of a state used their power to create a mystique beyond all moral considerations, to base a religion on nihilism.

The belief that nihilism lay at the heart of Nazism was also central to Walter Benjamin. Like Camus, Benjamin traced the roots of the fascist movement to the violence of the First World War, the experience of the battlefield, the new nationalism and modern technology. In 1930, he reviewed an anthology entitled War and Warrior (Krieg und Krieger), a collection of eight essays that took its title from Friedrich Georg Jünger, the editor’s brother. All the authors emphasised the experience of the first mechanised war, the republic of the trenches, and the experience of the front, as having shaped their postwar political and social consciousness. Benjamin’s critical review, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays, War and Warrior,

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