Inhumanity, techno-rational regimes of death, and a "banality of evil" 
succinctly capture the governing principles of the modus operandum of modernity 
in the twentieth century, and, moreover, reveal the formation of a new kind of 
subjectivity: the increasing atrophy of empathy. Emotional anesthesia, or the 
devolution of feelings, as I suggest in this paper, is integral to a cultural 
apparatus that feeds on the labor of the negative. In Germany, in the aftermath 
of the Holocaust after 1945, the social fabric came to be marked by an 
emotional void. Its symptomatology was evident in the "inability to mourn", as 
Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich (1967) observed, that is, notable erasure of 
empathy with the victims of war and genocide. Such an "absence of any sense of 
sadness following a national catastrophe" is integral to a "psychic economy" 
that labors toward the unmaking of feelings 䴋 an "obstruction against any 
emotional partaking in the events of a rejected historical past" (ibid: 9). 
The institution of a collective "day of mourning" (Volkstrauertag) in 1952 in 
West Germany marked the ritualized closure of emotionality by a shift toward 
the official commemoration of death (Kaiser 2004). My paper builds on these 
observations by analyzing the intersections between historical trauma, memory, 
and the logic of empathy.

In everyday life, in West Germany, as my research suggests, subjective 
expressions of empathy are negatively sanctioned: sensitivity, compassion, 
sympathy, concern, and pity are socially censured as inappropriate feelings, 
as emotions "out of place", a dangerous "spillage" of an interior subjectivity 
that must be reigned in and controlled. Ideal personhood is composed by an 
unchanging fa̤ade, the mask, which projects a sense of reserved emotive 
distance toward the social life of others. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann 
(2000), moreover, observed a dialectical disposition of emotional regimes in 
contemporary Germany: rampant racial antipathies coexist with excessively 
ritualized protests on behalf of the elsewhere-victims of injustices (the 
extinction of animals, the pollution of the environment, the oppression of 
peoples in faraway lands 䴋 a "cult of concern" [Stephan 1990]) 䴋 a simultaneity 
of contradictory feelings that, according to Luhmann, reveals both the limits 
and paucity of empathic abilities.

The cultural historian Helmut Lethen (1994) traces the beginnings of such 
emotional regimes to World War I, where he locates the initial formation of the 
unfeeling "German" subject 䴋 a phenomenology of "coldness": the interiorization 
of "techniques of emotional distance", the turn against "eruptive" 
expressionism, the negation of pain, the training of the "fortified, reserved 
self", and the disciplining of affectual practices are integral to a logic of 
emotions that takes form at this historical moment, in the era of the Weimar 
Republic, an era marked by war, violence, and defeat. According to Lethen, the 
dissociation of empathy or "feeling for others" and the subsequent construction 
of the "cold persona" was further nourished during the "Third Reich", and 
continued in the aftermath of German militarism and genocide.

Building on these schematic observations, my paper attempts to examine the 
cultural techniques that contribute to the perpetual unmaking of empathy after 
1945: within particular fields of affect negation, "compassion" is regarded as 
"paralyzing" (Mitgef̹hl macht lahm). Emotional regimes, I suggest, are part of 
post-Holocaust culture, and "catastrophic nationalism" (Geyer 2002) in general. 
I attempt to trace the intersections of empathy and memory in concrete 
ethnographic sites, specifically to reveal the productive labor of negation. 
In this context, my research brings to light the problematic of writing about 
the politics of emotional regimes.