Was the Holocaust Modern?

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Peter Hayes

Abstract

When discussing the Holocaust, the terms “factories of death,” “white-collar murderer,” and “bureaucratic efficiency” are frequently used, leading to a distorted idea of what really happened. This work contends that far from being an impersonal and purely systematic process the Holocaust was often a rather chaotic labor. Where the horrors it perpetrated in some sense “modern”? Was the Holocaust an expression or outgrowth of the terrible powers implicit in modernity? New empirical findings are shifting our attention away from what made the Third Reich emblematic of general patterns of modern society and remind us of the ways in which that regime was profoundly aberrant and atavistic. Although this swing of the interpretive pendulum hardly represents the last word, it deserves a careful consideration that shows how the primitivism of the Nazi project exceeds by far its modern attributes.

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How to Cite
Hayes, P. (2016). Was the Holocaust Modern?. Revista Mexicana De Ciencias Políticas Y Sociales, 61(228). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0185-1918(16)30044-7

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Author Biography

Peter Hayes, Northwestern University

Doctor en historia por la Universidad de Yale y maestro en política, filosofía y economía por la Universidad de Oxford. Miembro del Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation, profesor emérito de la Northwestern University (Estados Unidos) y presidente del Comité Académico del United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Referente mundial en historia de Alemania en el siglo XX, en particular del período nazi y el Holocausto, lo que cobra una especial dimensión al considerar su origen no judío. Autor y editor de once libros, entre ellos el premiado Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (1987); también de Lessons and Legacies I: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (1991) y del más reciente How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader (2015). En el otoño de este año, WW Norton & Co. publicará su duodécimo libro, Why? Explaining the Holocaust. Actualmente está trabajando en una investigación sobre las grandes empresas de Alemania y la persecución de los judíos y un manuscrito sobre las élites alemanas y el nacionalsocialismo. Sus publicaciones han aparecido no sólo en inglés y alemán, sino también en francés, italiano, japonés, polaco y español.

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