Scholars console themselves with the notion that calamitous acts of death and destruction such as The Holocaust, the Bengal famine, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are freak, singular aberrations. Psychologically, it’s reassuring to pigeonhole these as exotic historical events for academic study and push them away.
In 1989, Zygmunt Bauman published Modernity and the Holocaust, in which he argues the opposite: that these events are intrinsically linked to modernity. A symptom of the nightmare of modernity can be seen in Shlomo Sternberg’s Dynamical Systems, where he includes a photo of Felix Hausdorff, with a caption explaining the latter’s suicide (to avoid an extermination camp) amid his brilliant mathematical analysis.
At the end of World War II, Allied forces agents detained ten leading German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany’s nuclear program. When one of these men, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Otto Hahn, heard about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he is said to have had a nervous breakdown, feeling guilt for his discovery and its use in this tragedy.
The Harvard Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen focused on the Bengal famine. In Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, he explained that the Bengal famine was not the result of food shortages due to flooding, locusts or crop failures, but rather resulted from income shortages and lack of political clout.
The rise of bureaucracy, entwined with modernity, has removed any sense of culpability, as technological breakthroughs can be used to cause horrific events. You may have seen the 2023 film Oppenheimer, which depicts the American theoretical physicist’s guilt over developing atomic weapons amid Congressional hearings. In this framework, Fritz Haber was instrumental in developing the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives and is considered the “father of chemical warfare” in contrast to the advances he gave us in agriculture.
To quote Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce’s Ulysses, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”