ABSTRACT
The great transition that took place since the Enlightenment was the move away from Paul Johnson’s death to David Hume’s death. Hume’s death is that of the secular individual who entertains no hopes of immortality but expects to be remembered for some considerable time, depending on his or her achievements, and to be commemorated by a tomb in a well-kept cemetery. Mass death through deliberate extermination was a novel occurrence in the twentieth century. National Socialism drew much of its strength from its perpetuation of the infinite debt of death to the war dead, becoming in turn the death machine that demanded ever more sacrifices to its millenarian myth of salvation and regeneration, involving a coming apocalyptic conflict as the passage to a new world. The fear of the afterlife the Enlightenment had presumed to banish forever had returned to the life in a very concrete form as terror.
