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In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman argued that the Holocaust had been by no means a negation of the civilising process, but was, on the contrary, its consequence. He claimed that the constitutive features of solid modernity, such as bureaucratic culture, the rise of instrumental rationality and the domination of blueprint utopia, were reflected in the genesis and course of the Holocaust...
The article describes two approaches to the Holocaust, identified with the names of Zygmunt Bauman and Timothy Snyder. In this dyad, Bauman stands for the culturalist, sociological approach focused on identifying the social conditions in which otherness is produced and tracing the significance of modernity and bureaucracy for the Shoah. In contrast, Snyder dismisses the notion that anti-Semitism and...
By reading Zygmunt Bauman’s famous study critically, this text attempts to show how both the brilliant analyses, observations, and intuitions contained in Modernity and the Holocaust and its errors and distortions can still serve as important guideposts for further studies of the Holocaust in Polish lands and in Central and Eastern Europe even today, some thirty years after publication. What remains...