In “Signature,” the last piece in Difficult Freedom, Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) tells us that the list of items in the first paragraph, his biography, “is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror.” Hitler, Auschwitz, and Nazi fascism meant a great deal to Levinas, to his life, of course, to his philosophical thinking, and to his thinking about Judaism. Yet at times, Levinas talks about Nazism – Auschwitz in particular – as part of or characteristic of a larger phenomenon, one that encompasses the horrors of the twentieth century overall – before, during, and after the Holocaust. In this chapter, I will first set out and discuss what Levinas says about this larger phenomenon and later focus on the Holocaust in particular.

Levinas's ethical and philosophical views provide him with a perspective on human living and the everyday world that expresses itself often in his occasional writings, interviews, and more popular essays. A particular focus of this perspective is Auschwitz and twentieth-century life. We have not looked yet at his ethics and philosophy, but we can consider its expression, one of its manifestations, even prior to examining its details, and that is what I will do here, without any preparation or theorizing. What does Levinas say about life in the twentieth century, especially about the “decline of the West” and the crisis of modernity?