ABSTRACT
As a cultural and art historian, I analyse the belated multidisciplinary process of cultural registration of the Event named Holocaust or Shoah across a range of cultural forms and intellectual disciplines that exploded in the later 1980s: a movement ‘from trauma to cultural memory’. To what extent is Bauman’s book a symptom of that process of belated recognition of trauma? Is the book, on the other hand, one of the key events that initiated the process of production of cultural memory that emerged academically and culturally after 1989? Where does Bauman’s intervention fit in relation to the terms being created to enable the Holocaust to be considered an event demanding recognition across the arts and humanities while also emerging as an event which ruptured their disciplinary models and logics? This chapter addresses these larger questions by offering a close reading of the Preface to Janina Bauman’s Winter in the Morning (1986) and the Afterthoughts to Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). I expose a radical divergence between what Janina Bauman discovered in writing retrospectively of her own experience of survival and Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘use’ of what he misread as her conclusion about cruelty and remaining human. I note the disappearance of the dimension of gender so critical in Janina’ Bauman’s analysis of the moral actions that saved her family. I also explore issues of shame and self-realisation articulated in literature which are transposed in Zygmunt Bauman’s text to his affect-ladened response to Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985). The chapter challenges Bauman’s implicit shaming of the world for its inaction by my referencing the literature written by the Sonderkommando members witnessing the cruel viciousness of the killing processes, recently used as the basis for the film Son of Saul (Nemes, 2015).
