Abstract
The chapters in the book were initially presented as papers at two events held in September 2019 to mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). The book is not an uncritical celebration of Bauman as a major European social thinker or an uncritical celebration of Modernity and the Holocaust as a masterpiece and his crowning achievement. The chapters in the book give the reader detailed, informed and often critical evaluation of Bauman’s work on the Holocaust including regarding the motivation of perpetrators and victims, the role of the Judenräte and the Sonderkommandos and their ‘co-operation’, their agency, proximity and face to face cruelty particularly against women.
The arguments are placed in the context of later research in the field, but which do not judge the arguments developed in Modernity and the Holocaust to be irrelevant. The editors’ introduction presents a brief outline of the central arguments in Modernity and the Holocaust, including modernity as enthusiasm for order, the gardening state, the influence of Hannah Arendt, the substitution of moral responsibility by technical responsibility and the consequent adiaphorisation of action that allowed genocide to become the potential of any modern state rather than a particular political form that the modern state takes. Bauman’s preoccupation with the Holocaust is located at the intersections of allo-Semitism, binary separation, the practice of setting the Jews apart, Janina Bauman’s account of her wartime experiences in Poland and Bauman’s informed arguments about the unfolding of 20th-century history.
Larry Ray is critical of Bauman’s all-encompassing, ‘broad-brush’ theorising of the concept of modernity, which he describes as too one-dimensional and lacking specific structural and historical reflection on the different configurations that modernity can take. Ray also questions Bauman’s ‘attenuated’ concept of the rational, Bauman’s assumption that bureaucratic obedience is central to understanding the Holocaust and that Bauman conferred modernity the status of agency in several places. Ray draws attention to the degree of ‘vivisectionist violence’ within the death camps, the intimately violent politics of the body, including the institutionalised sexual violence against women that was part of a communitarian ethical code of extreme violence and cruelty.
Three chapters focus on Janina Bauman’s wartime experiences as providing the motivation and point of departure for Modernity and the Holocaust. Opening with an intriguing account of a photograph taken in Poland in 1968 of her mother, Lydia and twin sister, Lydia Bauman’s chapter provides a reflection on her mother’s account of life in the Warsaw ghetto drawing on her mother’s published work, diaries and unpublished poetry. The chapter focuses on the strategies adopted by Janina to remain human in inhuman conditions, followed by an account of her mother’s life and career in post-war Poland and how by 1968, antisemitism began to hinder both of her parents’ careers. What is striking about Janina’s writing is the focus is very much on the negative impact of social forces on individual people with a focus on their decision making and how their choices were limited by the organisations that wanted to cause them harm. The emphasis is on the lives of individual people, life strategies and painful choices individual people had to make presented in habitual, ‘ordinary’ terms ignored in Modernity and the Holocaust. Similarly, Griselda Pollock focuses on the lessons of Janina’s book, and argues that the gendered aspects on the Holocaust were ignored by Zygmunt. Janina focuses on women’s moral courage and the moral choices made in extreme circumstances. As Izabela Wagner points out in her chapter, Zygmunt did not adopt the insider’s point of view and: ‘it is regrettable that he largely omitted the voices of critical insiders in his analysis, and never cited Janina’ (p. 163).
For Pollock: ‘If the Holocaust became possible through a rationality identified with modernity – modernity defined as a rationality – then we moderns have no defence before it as a process’ (p. 185). In Collateral Damage (2011), Bauman draws a parallel between the Holocaust and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both episodes are described as products of bureaucratic rationality and the separation of technological capacity from moral imagination. For me, the central critique against Bauman’s position in Modernity and the Holocaust is not addressed in the book. Bauman rejects the ‘monster hypothesis’, the idea that the Holocaust was the product of Nazi’s evil intent. If the Holocaust were not a uniquely Nazi inspired series of events but a product of bureaucratic rationality within modernity, why did the allies not complete the process of genocide, rather than liberate the camps? The allies were no less rational and no less bureaucratic than the opponents, but they did not have desire or the political will to engage in genocide.
