In April 1992, the British philosopher Gillian Rose travelled to Auschwitz. She was part of a delegation of Jewish scholars invited to advise the new Polish government on how the camp should be presented to the public. The initiative, led by the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz, came at a moment of national reckoning. Under the communist People’s Republic, which had fallen in 1989, Auschwitz had been framed primarily as a site of fascist crimes against the peoples of Europe – particularly Poles – while the specifically Jewish dimension of the genocide was downplayed. The new commission sought to redress this, asking how the Jewish history of Auschwitz might be more clearly foregrounded (without excluding its other dimensions), and how the site’s competing roles – as museum, tourist destination, place of education, and cemetery – might be reconciled.
For Rose, however, the project raised another, more unsettling question: could remembrance itself become a form of evasion? Her reflections on the “Future of Auschwitz” commission reveal a deep ambivalence – not about its aims, which she shared, but about its moral psychology. She came to feel that even this effort to confront the evils of the past risked turning into a performance: a way of feeling righteous about remembering the atrocity while avoiding the far harder task of examining the conditions that make atrocity possible in the first place.
Rose died of ovarian cancer 30 years ago today, on 9 December, 1995, at just 48. She remains best known for her remarkable philosophical memoir, Love’s Work, recently reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, a moving yet refreshingly frank and unsentimental account of what she calls her “agonistic” experiences with love, sex, Judaism, dyslexia, illness, and death. Here, “agon” refers not to agony, but to the Greek word for the necessary and generative struggle involved in confronting and working through life’s difficulties. As Rose writes of the work required by any successful love relationship: “Existence is robbed of its weight, its gravity, when it is deprived of its agon.”
Yet Rose’s wider philosophical work still has not received the attention it deserves. Most pressingly, her more challenging philosophical interventions on fascist complicity, remembrance, and moral self-deception still call for serious engagement. At a time when far-right authoritarianism is once again on the rise, Rose’s insight is stark and uncompromising: the struggle against fascism cannot begin in moral condemnations or abstract politics alone, but must start with a confrontation of the quiet compromises, self-deceptions, and moral blind spots within each of us – and, crucially, the political conditions that sustain them.
Rose later reflected on the Auschwitz visit in Love’s Work in her typically condensed style: “We were set up. Enticed to preen ourselves as consultants, in effect, our participation was staged. Conscripted to restructure the meaning of ‘Auschwitz’, we were observed rather than observing, the objects of continuous Holocaust ethnography and folk law and lore.” Rose and the other delegates, she realised, were cast less as advisers than as cultural props in a carefully staged moral tableau about how Poland might engage (or at least might be seen to engage) with the legacies of Auschwitz.
What troubled her even more, though, was how easily many of her fellow delegates seemed to embrace these roles. Failing to reckon with the true stakes of remembrance, she felt that many took comfort in their own authority and authenticity at the expense of interrogating their own potential for complicity in unjust societies – a potential, for Rose, which all of us share and must remain alert to. Marc Ellis, for instance, a scholar of Jewish political thought who was present, recalls Rose interrupting the proceedings to speak “out of turn and off the subject” to suggest that “the anger of these delegates, for the most part Holocaust scholars and rabbis, was a retrospective one that paradoxically sought the Holocaust past as a safe haven…”
This is an extremely difficult thought and one which encapsulates much of what makes Rose’s writings on Auschwitz both radical and unsettling. For her, memorialisation demands the utmost vigilance. To treat Auschwitz as incomprehensible, as a diabolical evil beyond human understanding, is paradoxically comforting: it allows us to imagine that we are nothing like the perpetrators or the society which enabled them. But the danger of this, for Rose, is that it obscures the ways in which fascism grows out of the everyday – out of the institutions, habits, and desires that still shape us. “To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge,” she writes, “is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable.”
She worried, in other words, that Auschwitz had become detached from its historical circumstances and transformed into a mere symbol, into what she described as the “fourth city”. In her framework, the classical cities of Athens and Jerusalem represent enduring philosophical and spiritual tensions: Athens embodies the pursuit of reason and first principles, while Jerusalem stands for revelation, love, and community. The “third city”, meanwhile, is modern political actuality itself: the compromised world of institutions, power, and violence – mix of justice and injustice – that lies between these ideals. But when Auschwitz – the fourth city – is treated as a symbol of evil in general, it becomes an emblem rather than an event, a symbolic horror that obscures this third city in which we live, along with the social, political, and cultural conditions that made such horrors possible. For Rose, unless we confront the third city as our own and try to understand Auschwitz’s place within it, we risk allowing its structures and cultures to prepare the ground for future atrocities.
Part of this problem, for Rose, lies in how modern societies condition us to think and feel as individuals, as though we were separate from the economic structures and political institutions that go on around us. We comfort ourselves that we mean well, that we would never do that – without recognising that fascism relies not only on the violent intent of individuals, but also on the quiet complicity and complacency of those who imagine themselves as “good people” and uninvolved. “Morality” is not enough. On the contrary, she writes: “it is possible to mean well, to be caring and kind, loving one’s neighbour as oneself, yet to be complicit in the corruption and violence of social institutions”.
Long before her writing on Auschwitz, her work was preoccupied with the dangers of this moral individualism. Her early work explored these dynamics through Marxist thought. She admired social theorists like Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, who analysed how under capitalism human qualities, relationships, and actions come to appear to us as things – markets, money, commodities – and the ways in which this process obscures the social and historical nature of reality. This phenomenon, called “reification” (from the Latin res, meaning “thing”), was the subject of her first book, The Melancholy Science, and early lectures, Marxist Modernism, recently collected by Verso Books.
However, Rose also criticised these thinkers for overlooking what she took to be an inherent aspect of modern life: that capitalism, while transforming human relations into things, also transforms people into persons. While a “person” may seem like a perfectly natural idea, Rose stresses how it is, in origin, a legal fiction describing a free and equal individual, abstracted from all specific detail and concrete social relations. “Personhood” is therefore an ideological ideal – and perhaps an appealing one at that. Who wouldn’t want to think of themselves as an autonomous agent, in control of their own destiny, regardless of the actions of others? But for Rose, the danger of this fantasy is that it obscures the ways in which we are not free, not equal, and not individual, but instead deeply shaped by and implicated in the social structures around us.
Margaret Thatcher’s infamous declaration that “There is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women” represents this logic of “personhood” taken to its extreme: one which denies not only that we are shaped by society, but denies that we have any responsibility towards it. But Rose also saw this logic echoed even on the left: for example, in the liberal who prioritises individual virtue or moral spectacle over a political engagement that might challenge their own comfort or privileges; or else in the revolutionary Marxist who assumes that emancipation can be achieved merely by overturning existing structures.
Finding Adorno and the Frankfurt School insufficient to think through these questions, Rose turned instead to the 19th-century German philosopher Hegel. In Hegel Contra Sociology, she developed Hegel’s argument that morality cannot be secured by separating ourselves from a corrupt world; it requires a difficult political confrontation with how deeply we are shaped by it. Our task, she insisted, is not to transcend this “third city” – what she also called “the broken middle” – but to comprehend it. Only then can the possibility of a genuine transformation emerge.
What is so unique about Rose’s argument here is that it is not about personal guilt or shame. As already argued, it is this very notion of the “personal” that is part of the problem. In relation to Auschwitz, for example, she thought that the familiar question “Could I have done this?” risks turning the threat of fascism into a private moral drama. Such examination, she writes, only “counts for one of half of this diremption in our socialization”. (“Diremption”, here, is a Hegelian word, referring to a sharp division or brokenness that cannot be immediately mended or reconciled.) Rose’s point is that this line of thinking capitulates to the idea that we are “persons” totally separate from the political institutions and processes that shape us: it accounts only for our morality – our individual intentions and actions – but not our political complicity. Instead, Rose urges that the memory of Auschwitz should provoke a more political form of reflection: not “Could I have done this” but “How easily could we have allowed this to be carried out?” It is a subtle shift, but for Rose, a crucial one: the beginning of what she calls “a questioning of our sentimentality as modern citizens”.
It is this “personalism” and “sentimentality” that Rose criticises most sharply in mainstream representations of the Holocaust – a trend she disparagingly called “Holocaust piety”. For Rose, such representations are dangerous: rather than prompting readers or viewers to confront their own potential for complicity in fascism, they offer them a position of comfortable moral detachment. We are invited to empathise with the victims, but denied the chance to recognise ourselves – our hopes, desires, disavowals, prejudices, and hatreds; in a word, our humanity – in those who inflict or profit from the violence. The boundary between victim and perpetrator is drawn and fixed, allowing audiences to reaffirm their already good consciences.
Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) exemplifies this problem for Rose. The film presents fascism as a purely moral evil and resistance as a moral good, yet it ignores the political and historical conditions that enabled Nazism, including the essential complicity of otherwise well-meaning people. In Rose’s words, the film fails “because of its anxiety that our sentimentality be left intact”. It invites the viewer to witness evil as something “other”, without ever having to confront its echoes within themselves. It leaves audiences, she writes, “in a fascist security of our own unreflected predation”. A narrative that truly confronts fascism, for Rose, would on the contrary “leave us unsafe”: it would illuminate the conditions under which fascism becomes thinkable, practicable, and even desirable – not for some distant “other”, but for people like us. Such a narrative would neither humanise the fascist in order to redeem them, nor demonise them in order to reassure us of our innocence. Instead, it would show how fascism feeds upon the very desires for order and security that animate daily life.
A more recent film which Rose did not live to see, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), has been understood by some reviewers – and by the filmmakers themselves – as belatedly fulfilling Rose’s call. When they encountered her writing on Auschwitz in post-production, producer James Wilson remarked that “it was like she was describing what we were trying to do”. Loosely adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, the film depicts the lives of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family in all their domestic mundanity – as “normal” people – with the camp next door.
But Rose might still have had misgivings. For while Rudolf and his wife Hedwig are shown in familiar settings – eating, gardening, playing with their children – this familiarity does not make them “relatable”, but rather throws into relief their monstrous disregard for human life and casual cruelty which we also witness. The effect, ultimately, is not the shock of recognition, but an uncanny dissonance. Far from fully unsettling the audience, then, the film reassures. Despite shared domestic habits, we do not share their world. The film’s surveillance-style cinematography reinforces this detachment: we watch, we monitor, we judge, but always against someone else, and always from the secure vantage of spectatorship.
Rose worried that a film capable of truly unsettling us in this way could be impossible – despite listing some surprising contenders, such as the Merchant-Ivory film The Remains of the Day. Perhaps our modern condition as “moral” subjects makes it almost inevitable that we will seek comfort in our distance from the perpetrators. But for Rose, precisely because this comfort is so seductive, philosophy and rigorous critical thinking are more urgent than ever. As she warns: “Unless this ‘necessity’ is confronted, our good intentions will continue to engender new pieties and leave untouched our fundamental – even cherished – complicities.” For it is precisely our need to see ourselves as “good” that blinds us to our complicity in systems of violence and to the small moral compromises that let oppression persist.
[Further reading: The Holocaust survivor who defended American Nazis]
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