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Twenty years ago the Polish-born sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman observed that future generations
might talk about the historical sequence of the
seventeenth to the twentieth centuries as the ages
of Reason, Enlightenment, Revolutions, and the Age
of the Camps. While the twentieth century appeared
first as an epoch of “modernity” in which humankind
produced more, travelled faster, and became richer,
the more significant achievement of “modernity”
was a totalitarianism that embraced a thoroughly
“modern” solution to the presence of undesirable
ethnic or social groups—“fast and efficient killing,
scientifically designed and administered genocide.”
Therefore Bauman predicted that the shadows cast
by “Auschwitz” and “the Gulag” would dominate
future generations’ understanding of the twentieth
century because they had been so unexpected
and hence bewildering to a civilization which had
learned to see the past in terms of “the relentless
and exhilarating progression of the ages of reason,
enlightenment, and emancipatory, liberating
revolutions.” 2
67 HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN PEDAGOGY, HISTORY, AND PRACTICE