Social Theory After the Holocaust

zygmunt bauman
genocide. Hannah Arendt pointed out long ago that in the phenomenon of the
Holocaust anti-semitism may explain at most the choice of the victims, but not
the nature of the crime. Nothing has happened since then to invalidate Arendt’s
verdict, while the monumental memoirs of Primo Levi, monumental historical
research of Raul Hilberg and the monumental documentary of Claude
Lanzman, to mention but a few landmarks, did a lot to confirm and reinforce
it.
This is not to say that the world we live in differs from the world of the
Holocaust to an extent which makes it Holocaust-proof and that the Holocaust
fears are therefore illusory. Nevertheless, it does mean that the threat of such
Holocausts as may yet come is all too often sought today in the wrong places
and our sight diverted from the grounds in which genuine threats are rooted.
These are the grave risks of living in a haunted house.
Notes
1 Though on no account the only ones. For instance, it has been pointed out by many
authors that the curious phenomenon of ‘anti-semitism without Jews’, so widespread
today in Eastern Europe, once teeming with Jewish communities and culture and now
relatively emptied of both, can be explained at least in part by the soi-disant redistribution
of wealth, accomplished by the Holocaust and being a lasting legacy of the gas chambers.
A wholly new native middle class has emerged through the appropriation of Jewish
businesses and real estate, and its heirs now live in fear of Jewish retribution or, purely
and simply, of the Jews reclaiming their property. This is no doubt the case, yet another
aspect of the Holocaust’s lasting legacy, embracing a much wider population than those
who benefited personally from the perdition of Jews, needs to be considered: forced to
witness the murder of their neighbours, and threatened with capital punishment for any
attempt to rescue the condemned, the native population as a whole was cast into an
excruciating ethical choice without good options – a challenge transcending ordinary
moral capacity, and one that most other people seldom face. I wonder whether, for
instance, the Poles (the case I know best) will ever forgive the Jews the fact that the Jewish
extermination they were forced to watch imbued their conscience with guilt for which –
to a moral person – there is no atonement and no absolution. Forgiving would not come
before forgetting – and for the time being there is little prospect of either.
2 E.M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, London: Quartet
Books, 1990, p.71.
3 In Brian Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds), Modernity, Culture and the Jew,
Cambridge: Polity, 1998.
4 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1973, pp.290–93, 544.
5 Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff,
University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
6 Ibid., p.
7 Anne Karpf, ‘The War After: The Psychology of the Second Generation’, Jewish
Quarterly, Summer 1996.
8 Ibid., p.5.
9 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity, 1997.
10 Harvey A. Barocas and Carol B. Barocas, ‘Wounds of the Fathers: The Next
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