Social Theory After the Holocaust

zygmunt bauman
many ears. And for this reason we cannot be sure whether the lasting legacy of
the Holocaust was not the very opposite of that hoped for by many, and
anticipated by some: the moral re-awakening or ethical purification of the world
as a whole or any of its parts.
The pernicious legacy of the Holocaust is that today’s persecutors may inflict
new pains and create new generations of victims eagerly awaiting their chance
to do the same, while acting in the belief that they avenge yesterday’s pain and
ward off the pains of tomorrow; while being convinced, in other words, that
ethics is on their side. This is perhaps the most awesome among the Holocaust’s
curses and the greatest of Hitler’s posthumous victories. The crowds which
applauded Goldstein’s massacre of the Muslim worshippers in Hebron, which
flocked to his funeral and go on writing his name on their political and religious
banners, are the most terminally afflicted, but not the only bearers of that curse.
The phenomenon of hereditary victimhood ought not to be confused with
genetic kinship, or with the family tradition preserved through the parental
influence over the educational setting. Heredity in this case is mainly imagined,
acting through the collective production of memory and through individual acts
of self-enlisting and self-identification. Thus the status of the ‘Holocaust
children’, that is of hereditary victim, is open to every Jew, whatever his or her
parents might have been ‘doing in the war’ (in fact, embracing this status has
turned for many into a main vehicle of Jewish self-definition). Psychiatrists
conducted ample studies of the biological descendants (and/or educational
objects) of the inmates of concentration camps and the inhabitants of ghettos;
but the swelling numbers of the ‘sons and daughters of the Holocaust’, who are
not children of either, still await a comprehensive study. There are many clues,
though, to what such study may reveal. It may well transpire that the complexes
of such ‘imagined children’, ‘children pretenders’, ‘self-appointed children’ (and
for the same reason ‘children manqués’ – flawed, if not fraudulent, children) are
more severe and vicious, and burdened with more sinister consequences, than
those which the psychiatrists have described thus far.
One may say: this stands to reason. For the ‘children manqués’, the site they
occupy in the world, from which they view the world and in which they want to
be viewed by the world, is that of martyrdom; but it so happens that they are
not, nor have been, personally, the butt of anybody’s wrath and wrongdoing.
They do not suffer, or do not suffer enough for the victims-by-birth that they
are. The world seems reluctant to harm them and make them suffer, and under
the circumstances such a world is too good to be acceptable – since the reality
of a harmless world means irreality of life which derives its sense from the harm
done to it and the harm yet to be done.
Living in a not-hostile and harmless world means the betrayal of the sense-
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