Black Earth(147)

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Although this is not a book about science, I do make certain claims about the relationship between science and politics. Insofar as I have made sense of these connections I owe a debt to practicing scientists, especially my friends Matthew Albert, Olivia Judson, and Carlo Maley, my cousin Steven Snyder, and my brother Philip Snyder. My brother Michael Snyder, a student of Native American literature, has expanded my own thinking about the global character of the history I aspire to recount in this book. Throughout its writing I have been grateful for the love and support of my sisters-in-law Lori Anderson Snyder and Mary Snyder and have thought often of my nieces Cora and Ivy and nephews Benjamin and Thomas. I would not be able to broach the metaphysical questions that bound this history without my parents Estel Eugene Snyder and Christine Hadley Snyder. I think also upon my grandparents and great-grandparents, to whom I owe what understanding I have of living from the land. As I wrote in the hills of Podlasie I thought of the hills of Ohio.

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Mira, lily of the valleys. Marci Shore understands much of this subject better than I. She knows languages, sources, shadows that do not flee away. Her translation of The Black Seasons demonstrates what can be said about this history in English. Her historical writing on ideas is for me exemplary, and the philosophical questions posed here are ones that she keeps alive in my mind. I thank her for her loving-kindness: to me, and before all and after all to Kalev and Talia.





Notes


Introduction: Hitler’s World


Nothing can be known Space: Second Book, 8. “Innere abgeschlossenheit” and desire of nature for races to separate: Mein Kampf, 281–82. See Chapoutot, Le nazisme, 428; Chapoutot, “Les Nazis et la ‘Nature,’?” 31. The American consul general Raymond Geist was right to speak of an antisemitic “cosmology”: Husson, Heydrich, 121. The argument of this book proceeds from an idea of a planetary Jewish threat to the enabling condition of statelessness by way of the new forms of politics that united the antisemitic idea and the anti-political condition. Sémelin (in Purifier, 135) is right that the history of mass killing must be international. But in the special case of the Holocaust, it seems important first to define how its originator understood the planet. Hitler’s scheme of international relations was derivative of his ecology. The ideas do seem to have been fundamentally constant; as Kershaw writes, “Hitler retained at the core an extraordinary inner consistency.” End, 281. Burrin speaks similarly of “la consistence et la continuité étonnantes que manifesta cette vision du monde.” Hitler et les Juifs, 19.

In Hitler’s world For English and French thinkers such as Hobbes and Rousseau, an imaginary state of nature is a literary device to enable us to consider human choices about power. We are to imagine, as an exercise, what life must have been like before humans came together to make rules. Then we should think our way through to the structures we actually desire. Hitler’s understanding of nature also had little to do with German traditions of thought. For Kant, perfect knowledge of an external natural world is unattainable, and wisdom consists in striving towards it in full awareness of our limitations. For Hegel, the state of nature was a barbaric stage of prehistory that gave way to institutions that man is constantly perfecting. According to Marx, nature is that which surrounds us and resists us. We know it and ourselves insofar as we work to change it. On Schmitt, see Zarka, Un détail, 7, 36. See also Neumann, Behemoth, 467.

“Nature knows,” wrote Hitler Quotation: Mein Kampf, 140. Charles Darwin did on one occasion write that empire would eliminate “the savage races.” Descent of Man, 1:201. From context it can be seen that his concerns in making this remark were far from political. Darwin, the author of the powerful notion of evolution by natural selection, did not think that races were like species; on the contrary, he held that all humans belonged to a single species capable of applying reason and thereby selecting for survival on grounds other than the biological. See Tort, L’effet Darwin, 75–80. I am distinguishing between Marx and Engels, his friend and popularizer, who codified the “scientific” version of Marxism. On the long encounter of second-generation Darwinism with second-generation Marxism, see Ko?akowski, Main Currents, vol. 2, Golden Age.

Yet these liberals “Feige V?lker”: Mein Kampf, 103. See Koonz, Nazi Conscience, 59. Cf. Sternhell, Les anti-Lumière s, 666–67.

Hitler’s worldview dismissed Daily bread: Mein Kampf, 281; Second Book, 15, 74. See also Hilberg, Destruction, 1:148. Riches of nature and commandment: Table Talk, 51, 141. One aim of this presentation is to avoid a problem identified by Arendt: “the failure to take seriously what the Nazis themselves said.” Origins, 3. See also Jureit, Das Ordnen von R?umen, 279.