Social Theory After the Holocaust

zygmunt bauman
human dignity, much too treacherous to be sought and much too likely to breed
dependency to be desired.
So there are good enough reasons to be nervous, anxious and angry. It is not
clear, though, whence the ambient fear derives, what one is truly afraid of, where
the danger lies and what one can do to mitigate it. Anxiety seeks a peg and may
easily be hung on a wrong one and so prompt actions glaringly irrelevant to the
genuine cause of trouble. When genuine reasons for agitation are difficult to
locate and even less easy to control if discovered, there is a powerful temptation
to construe and name putative, yet credible culprits against whom one can wage
a sensible defensive (or better still offensive) action. One would bark up a wrong
tree, but at least one would be barking.
Throughout the United States, ‘self-help’ groups were formed by the
‘children of the Holocaust’; the self-invigorating group discussions added the
extra dimension of a collectively sustained interpretation (and thus the authority
of numbers) to the zealous search for the collectively hidden, yet exceptionless,
Holocaust trauma, which would put the missing sense into the present personal
troubles. This search was also given authority by the psychiatric profession; all
over the country, psychoanalysts told their patients in no uncertain terms of the
Holocaust roots of what in the psychiatrists’ vocabulary they described as their
‘maladjustments’. Some therapeutic experts, like Harvey and Carol Barocas
(quoted by Karpf and prestigious enough to contribute to the International
Review of Psychoanalysis 10 ) went so far as to suggest that ‘the children of survivors
show symptoms that would be expected if they [had] actually lived through the
Holocaust’. And so the ghost has been issued with the official permission of
domicile, recognised as the lawful plenipotentiary of the ‘real thing’, and so (in
tune with the spirit of our time) the troublesome and worrying distinction
between the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ reality has been declared null and void.
For those involved, the message hammered home by the psychiatrists, and
sunk ever deeper in the course of the self-help sessions, could not but be richly
rewarding. In Anne Karpf’s words, ‘there’s undoubtedly something satisfying in
joining the ranks of the unequivocally wronged, those with an irrefutably
legitimate claim on our sympathy’. 11 To acquire the right to sympathy and
benevolence before one earns them through personal exertions is an opportunity
few people would willingly forfeit. The side effect of all this is, however, a sort
of ‘competition for victimhood’, a ‘pecking order of pain’, reminiscent of the
rivalry among the tuberculous residents of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain,
who quickly established their own eerie hierarchy of prestige and influence
measured by the size of their pulmonary caverns.
There is something else, though, to the status of a ‘victim by proxy’ – one of
belonging to a sui generis ‘aristocracy of victimhood’ (that is, having a hereditary
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