Reviews : Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Polity Press, 1989)
Abstract
ReviewsZygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Polity Press, 1989) SAGE Publications, Inc.1993DOI: 10.1177/072551369303400116 Sue Rechter It is only in moments of raw awareness that any of the uncountable large and small scale human sufferings happening in our own time stirs our senses. Removed in time and place, the Holocaust is even easier to forget. With its own interpretive industry, the Holocaust has become part of the cultural furniture, as a specialty of Jewish history, as a byword for the horrors of the 20th century life, even as a soap opera. Zygmunt Bauman's book reads as if written in a sustained moment of raw awareness. Passionate, occasionally polemical, it has the sense of an urgent personal and scholarly offering, almost of a reparation for the Holocaust victims. Modernity and the Holocaust is a coynplex, not always coherent, synthesis of many themes. These converge in an attempt to explore the questions "how was the Holocaust possible?" and "what does this mean for our understanding of modernity, of human action and society?". Bauman begins with an historical and theoretical discussion of anti-semitism and modernity, and ends with a critique of the eviction of morality from sociological discourse and social life, including