In his acceptance address for the 1980 Theodore Adorno Award, the widely influential essay “Modernity - An Incomplete Project,” Jöurgen Habermas marks the twentieth century as the historical moment during and after which widespread faith in the progressive improvement of human culture through the means of secular enlightenment becomes increasingly untenable. In his context, he is stating an obvious fact and thus provides no details. Yet it is useful occasionally to belabor the obvious: what specific events of the twentieth century have made the project of modernism, understood as a trajectory of historical improvement, so vexed? Certainly, the Holocaust is one inevitable meaning of this twentieth-century interruption. The specter of the tools of enlightened technology turning the factory from a site of production to a site of sheer destruction haunts any subsequent evocation of the inevitability, or even probability, of human progress. No other single event of the twentieth century may have the interruptive power of Auschwitz. Yet in many ways the unprecedented mass slaughter of the First World War inaugurates the twentieth century as a disruption of enlightenment. The products and techniques of industrial culture turn on their users: what had been tools for the efficient production of goods become weapons in the efficient production of death. Mass armies of draftees are marched to their mechanized destruction with all the organization that industrial capitalism has learned from the factory and the abattoir.