ABSTRACT
In his Modernity and the Holocaust, the eminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that instead of signifying a retreat from modernity, the Holocaust was actually a distinct expression of it, emerging directly from modern worldviews and the structures of modern existence. Bauman returns to the bureaucrat as a characteristic figure of the modern era. The concept by which hatred of the Jews became “a gardener’s job” of weed and pest extermination, as part of the project of population engineering, was a clear modern scientific concept – racism. According to Bauman, the Holocaust is neither merely the specific story of the Jews in Europe nor an account of insane anti-Semitic hatred that released primeval instincts and ended in tragedy. Modern trends of ethnocentric nationalism that were not necessarily racial in the strict scientific sense of the word had a decisive influence on the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust.
