Perhaps what happened cannot be comprehended, or, rather, shouldn’t be comprehended, because to comprehend is almost to justify. Let me explain: “to comprehend” a human intention or behavior means . . . to contain it, to contain the author, put oneself in his place, and identify with him. Now, no normal man will be able to identity with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and innumerable others. This burdens us, and yet it brings us relief: because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) not be comprehensible to us. They are words and deeds that are not human but, rather, counter-human, without historical precedent, barely comparable to the cruelest events of the biological struggle for existence. War can be traced back to this struggle, but Auschwitz has nothing to do with war; it is not an episode of war, it is not an extreme form of war. War is an everlasting terrible fact: it is deplorable but it is in us, it has a rationality, we “comprehend” it.
But there is nothing rational about the Nazi hatred: it’s a hatred that is not in us; it’s outside of man, a poisonous fruit arising from the deadly trunk of fascism, but outside and beyond fascism itself.
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