Modernity and the Holocaust

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Zygmunt Bauman ( / ˈ b aʊ m ə n/; 19 November 1925 – 9 January 2017) was a Polish-born sociologist and philosopher. [2] He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity. [3] Life and career [ edit ] Since the turn of the millennium, his books have tried to avoid the confusion surrounding the term "postmodernity" by using the metaphors of "liquid" and "solid" modernity. In his books on modern consumerism, Bauman still writes of the same uncertainties that he portrayed in his writings on "solid" modernity; but in these books he writes of fears becoming more diffuse and harder to pin down. Indeed, they are, to use the title of one of his books, "liquid fears" – fears about paedophilia, for instance, which are amorphous and have no easily identifiable reference. [35] The essence of modernity is to suppress base human instincts and emotions, enshrining reason in their place. We tend to think of this as obviously a good thing, but this is a dangerous simplification. As Hannah Arendt noted, for example, it is a normal human emotion is to feel basic pity for the pain of other people when they are in distress, especially the young, weak or enfeebled. The Nazi system succeeded in suppressing this “animal pity” in the German population through the effective use of bureaucracy and technology. Germany society under the Nazis put people at a distance from the Jews, while slowly transforming them into an abstraction on spreadsheets and databases. They were spoken about in dehumanizing ways and framed by German leaders as effectively a problem to be solved. While people may have had individual Jewish friends, the abstracted “Jew” became first a public health issue, then later a unit of production for national industry. The only difference is that instead of producing fridges or helicopters, the German industrial machine and all its components was geared to producing dead human beings. Zygmunt Bauman, sociologist who wrote identity in the modern world, dies at 91". The Washington Post . Retrieved 24 September 2017. This book dismantles the idea of Nazis as a bunch of sadists who just happened to be around at the same time and place and due to exceptional circumstances, managed to get together. It's difficult to quantify the percentage of the population that can be classified as pathologically sadistic, figures vary wildly from 2 to 30%, but even in the worst-case scenario of the highest percentage, it takes something more than pure chance to get them all to work together for an evil purpose.

Aside from the people at the top, most ordinary Germans were not aware of the totality of what they were taking part in. They did not have a personal sense of responsibility, even if something bad was happening in Germany as a whole. Someone working at a railway station dealing with the management of spare parts does not see themselves as a murderer, or personally responsible for the crimes that some “higher-up” in their organization may be privy to. When everyone is merely a cog in a machine, no one feels responsible. People could go home after their job transporting materials used for the manufacture of bullets and sleep soundly knowing that their neighbors, colleagues and close family held them in high-esteem and considered them to be kind and moral people. Only in retrospect can we see that the Germans were not who they thought that they were. The Nazi regime encouraged and supported race science and constantly based its legitimacy on it. Yet, Germany was not a première or an isolated case of cohabitation between fascism and race science. It is not a secret, writes Stone somewhere else (2), that in the two decades that preceded the Holocaust, calling oneself a fascist was far from inviting the stigma this notion bears (or should bear) today; fascism appeared convincing especially to large numbers of intellectuals who were easily captivated by its verdicts and message. A través del ensayo, también muestra la lucha entre lo legal y lo moral, porque no siempre es lo mismo, no siempre lo moral y lo legal están juntos, y aquí se debe hacer un paréntesis, pues si los alemanes hubieran ganado la Guerra, otra historia se contaría, una en la que no son criminales y actuaron de acuerdo a la ley y la moral. Between Structure and Event: Slow Catastrophe in Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust’ – Jonathon Catlin (Princeton University)Klasa, ruch, elita: Studium socjologiczne dziejów angielskiego ruchu robotniczego [Class, Movement, Elite: A Sociological Study on the History of the British Labour Movement]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. As I started reading this, I realized it was going to be a great, thought-provoking book. As I read on, I realized it may be one of the most important works of non-fiction I've ever read.

The Holocaust, which caused so many resignifications and dissolutions of post-war cultural forms and paradigms, from the deconstruction of grand historical narratives to the shattering of the idea of progress, has not exhausted its capacity to urge reflection or attempts at explanation, as well as fascination, obsession, hypocrisy and often despair. The last two decades witnessed the opening of the archives in post-communist countries and, consequently, the appearance of new directions of enquiry and the exponential growth of historiographical research. The overwhelming quantity and diversity of publications and perspectives has constantly increased the need for their systematization. The year 2010 marked the appearance of such a synthesis. Although he announces, modestly, that his book Histories of the Holocaust is primarily conceived as a supplement to Michael Marrus’ remarkable The Holocaust in History published in 1987 (1) – in other words, a historiographical guide of the last 20 years of research and its outcomes – in fact Dan Stone examines critically and insightfully the post-1989 literature in question, together with the schools of thought and areas of debate. The impressive range, quantity and diversity of the material discussed makes Stone’s book the first interpretive guide to this vast literature. Dale M. Coulter, First Things, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/05/the-benedict-option-and-mediating-structuresLaurea honoris causa a Zygmunt Bauman: materiali (Honorary degree to Zygmunt Bauman: resources)" (in Italian). 17 April 2015. Archived from the original on 9 January 2017 . Retrieved 9 January 2017. PART 4: 'That world that was not his' - on Janina Bauman 8. Janina Bauman: To remain human in inhuman conditions 9. Janina and Zygmunt Bauman: a case study of inspiring collaboration 10. Reading Modernity and the Holocaust with and against Winter in the Morning Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociological Compassion: Beyond Modernity and the Holocaust’ – Dr Jerzy Kociatkiewicz (University of Sheffield) and Prof. Monika Kostera (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) Richard Kilminster, Ian Varcoe (eds.), Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman. London: Routledge; ISBN 0-415-08266-8 How does Modernity reflects its responsibility for disabled people as victims of the NS-Mass Murder? Relevance for the participation of disabled people in society today’ – Prof Marianne Hirschberg (University of Applied Sciences, Bremen)

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 The Holocaust was driven by the modern drive towards rationally “perfecting” society, unopposed by any countervailing moral or ethical forces. The anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party naturally resulted in Jews becoming the primary target of their malevolence. But xenophobia was a necessary, rather than sufficient, cause to actually carrying out a crime on the scale of the Holocaust. As Baumann notes, Germany was far from being the most anti-Semitic society in Europe. To the contrary, for many European Jews it was viewed as a relatively tolerant place. It is not obvious that Germany was more anti-Semitic for example than Dreyfuss-era France. Indeed one of the frustrations expressed by the Nazis was that their anti-Semitic propaganda was failing to generate sufficient zeal among the masses. 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.' – Shaun Best, Sociology The complex radiography carried out throughout Histories of the Holocaust points out, as main characteristic of Holocaust literature, the central place occupied by race – regarded either from scientific, or mystical points of view – and grasps the change in contemporary historical studies, that is, the shift from social history to the study of ‘ideology’ in general, and that of ‘race’ in particular. At the same time, Stone detects the recent indicators that signal the beginning of the latter’s marginalisation too. He opposes those who reject the literal approach but also queries the coherence of Nazi discourse which places race at the core of the Third Reich.The six chapters of the book, ‘”The final solution”: a German or European project?’ (1); ‘The decision-making process in context’ (2); ‘The Holocaust: child of modernity?’ (3); ‘Race science: the basis of the Nazi world view?’(4); ‘Genocide, the Holocaust, and the history of colonialism’ (5); and ‘The Holocaust as an expression of Nazi culture’ (6) converge to a conclusion (‘Into the abyss’) revolving around the idea that, ultimately, efforts to understand the Holocaust will entail the confirmation, constantly deepened and explicated, of its definition given by Hannah Arendt as early as 1946: that of ‘an organized attempt to eradicate the concept of the human being’ (p. 287). Notes There is, however, another lesson that we need to learn from the Holocaust. In some ways it’s an even more unsettling one, since it seems that most of us have not learned it at all. Most importantly, it hasn't been learned by the type people who actually committed the crime. The Holocaust was carried out by educated, rational, thoroughly modern citizens of a bureaucratically-organized society. It was carried out by people who were completely “normal” by our contemporary standards and who would probably have no problem today working at a major American corporation or government agency. Rather than a frenzied pogrom committed by millions of sociopaths, the Holocaust was a bureaucratic endeavor that prized reason, organization and rationality, while disdaining and even sometimes penalizing people who expressed passion or rage. Z zagadnień współczesnej socjologii amerykańskiej [Questions of Modern American Sociology]. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza. Shaun Best, The Emerald Guide to Zygmunt Bauman (Emerald Guides to Social Thought), Bingley, Emerald Publishing Limited {978-1839097416}