ABSTRACT
Receiving the Adorn Prize in Frankfurt in 1998, Zygmunt Bauman called himself a ‘student’ of its namesake, the German-Jewish theorist Theodor W. Adorn, and spoke of their ‘spiritual affinity’, centred on a critical sociological approach and exilic experience and sensibility. Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust drew inspiration from a number of earlier social theorists, philosophers, and historians, not only Adorn, but also Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Raul Hilberg. This work theorised a fundamental problem in thinking about the nature of social catastrophes ‘after Auschwitz’. For Bauman, the Holocaust was not an aberration from the technical progress of modern civilisation but rather a possibility thereafter immanent within all modern societies. Precisely this thesis characterised the thought of a generation of German-Jewish intellectuals and achieved its most influential articulation in the work of Adorno. Bauman described Modernity and the Holocaust as an attempt ‘to wrap historical and sociological flesh around the “dialectics of enlightenment” skeleton’. Despite their different and at times conflicting intellectual approaches, these thinkers collectively share the distinction of considering the Holocaust in a fundamental tension between conceptual frameworks of singularity and universality, Germanness and humanness, enlightenment and anti-enlightenment. Reprising Bauman’s insightful theory of modernity and violence for the present, the chapter concludes with a reflection on the relevance of Bauman’s theory of the processual and structural nature of catastrophes for the era of climate change.
