Modernity and the Holocaust

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Between Structure and Event: Slow Catastrophe in Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust’ – Jonathon Catlin (Princeton University)

Jump, Paul (3 April 2014). "Zygmunt Bauman rebuffs plagiarism accusation". Times Higher Education . Retrieved 3 April 2014. This ... obviously requires history to be painted with a broad brush, but I hope to show in my overview of the historiography that the Holocaust developed differently in different places; the extraordinary geographic spread of persecution cannot be understood if one thinks in terms of a blueprint for genocide. I show too that although there was no clear plan for genocide until as late as 1941–42, nevertheless the logic of the Nazi Weltanschauung ... [was] inherently genocidal. (p. 6)

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Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-132531-5Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (Key Contemporary Thinkers). Cambridge: Polity; ISBN 0-7456-1899-5 Janina and Zygmunt Bauman as a Case Study of Inspiring Collaboration: From Ethnography to Theory’ - Prof. Izabela Wagner-Saffray (University of Warsaw & Institut Convergences Migrations, Paris) Memories of Class: The Pre-History and After-Life of Class. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-9196-6 with Szymon Chodak, Juliusz Strojnowski, Jakub Banaszkiewicz): Systemy partyjne współczesnego kapitalizmu [The Party Systems of Modern Capitalism]. Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza.

The truth is that every ‘ingredient’ of the Holocaust-all those many things that rendered it possible -was normal…in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilizations, its guiding spirit, its priorities…of the proper ways to pursue human happiness together with a perfect society. (Bauman 1989)

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The creation of gas chambers is an example of a task intended to segment the horrible final task of killing as much as possible, breaking up responsibility to the point where it simply “floated” and clearly attached to no one involved. It took a huge supply chain and technological apparatus to create the chambers. Many people were involved, far more than the number needed for an ordinary murder or even an execution by firing squad. Thanks to technology, the monumental act of killing a human being was in fact wedded to the reassuringly small and inconsequential act of pushing a button. As a result even those tasked with actually releasing the gas didn't truly feel that they were personally responsible for as grave an act as mass murder. They were just parts of a machine and effectively saw themselves as such. It had no impact on how they viewed morality in their personal lives. Stone does not leave aside the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on Western culture, our obsession with memory, or the post-war hypocrisy and fascination toward the genocide of the Jews. His impressive number of books and articles already recommends him as an authority in the field, a remarkable analyst of what he calls, following Dan Dinner, the event that ‘shattered the elementary bases of civilization and culture’ (p. 286). Modernity's struggle with ambiguity, resulting in the Holocaust · postmodern ethics · critique of "liquid" modernity · liquid fear · Allosemitism

Further, Stone’s analysis places the Holocaust within the context of comparative genocide studies (chapter five). To the ‘uniqueness of the Holocaust’ thesis, which was for a long while indisputable within academic circles, Stone suggests an alternative perspective: although it does not represent an appropriate ‘ideal type’ for reflecting on genocide in general, the Holocaust was a genocide, albeit a radical one, sharing many features with genocides that occurred in the past and on other continents: PART 3: Extensions and reevaluations 6. Reassessing Modernity and the Holocaust in thelLight of genocide in Bosnia 7. The Rwandan genocide and the multiplicity of modernity Richard Kilminster, Ian Varcoe (eds.), Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman. London: Routledge; ISBN 0-415-08266-8As a conclusion, the author warns us that, instead of increasing our optimism and comfort (entailed by deepening the knowledge of human condition), reflection on the Holocaust should ‘chill us to the bone’ as we increasingly realize that the resources employed for the ‘final solution’ are similar to those so familiar to us today – ‘censuses and the categorization of people, technology, medicalization, “biopower”’ – and that our ‘rational’ lives are in fact impregnated with ‘magical’ thinking which ‘under the right circumstances can be put to terrible use: fear of immigrants and disease, hygiene fetishism, body-culture obsession’ (p. 287). The result is the irrelevance of moral standards for the technical success of the bureaucratic operation.” The pretense of moral thinking is retained, but morality is redefined in terms of the rational-technical instead of good and evil. One is a "good" worker when one carries out his duty with excellence and according to plan, in submission to the expert prescriptions of the workplace authority. The tasks of individual workers are narrowly defined, as in an assembly line, reducing the possibility of moral assessment of the task, and making it interchangable with others. One can manage personnel in a weapons plant, or manufacture a necessary widget, with roughly the same skillset as in a car dealership. From understanding victims to victims’ understanding: rationality, shame and other emotions in Modernity and the Holocaust Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust is an essential contribution both to contemporary debates on the Holocaust and to the understanding of Bauman’s thinking.' – Anca Bălan, Holocaust. Studii şi cercetări