UBC: "Life Unworthy of Life"

[truepenny]

Glass, James M. "Life Unworthy of Life": Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler's Germany. N.p.: New Republic-Basic Books, 1997.

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Interesting ideas, badly expressed and badly organized. Also, he misrepresents Arendt (because she's such a useful straw man if you pretend that she meant the "banality of evil" to apply more broadly than to Eichmann himself) and Freud (the uncanny (unheimlich) is not what Glass persists in claiming it is), and although he doesn't misrepresent Kristeva (to the best of my memory), he only sort of throws around the idea of abjection without really digging into how he thinks it applies to Nazi Germany. Also, in a book that's all about purification and taboos and scapegoats, failure to mention Mary Douglas and Purity and Danger is, well, it makes me a little dubious. But mostly, this book is long on polysyllable buzzwords and woefully short on organization. (Also, if you're going to claim Germans had a phobia about touching Jews, it would help if you provided some evidence to back up that claim.) Which is a pity, because the idea that the Holocaust is about the rationalized expression (gussied up with the pseudo-science of eugenics) of a contamination phobia is one that I'd like to see dealt with by someone with the chops to do it right.

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My hind-brain is telling me that somewhere I came across a book (or a long article) on this topic. I will give it a good shake and see if I can remember a title. (It was probably on somewhere like Bosnia, rather than Germany.)