ABSTRACT
It was my great privilege (although I did not realise it at the time) to be part of a conversation with both Janina and Zygmunt Bauman which led to the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). The afterword for this anniversary collection is based, in part, on my memories of these conversations. But it is primarily an engagement with the stimulating essays in the book. I now regard Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) as Janus-faced, part time-bound, part future-oriented, part sociology, part affect. It is, I believe, somewhere between disciplinary and metaphorical thinking, as well as the particularities of individual Holocaust escapees (not least Janina Bauman’s complex testimony) and more general theories of the ‘machinery of destruction’ (pace Raul Hilberg) and Western modernity. With the help of the stimulating work in the collection, I attempt to think through these tensions and divides and to see how they came to constitute Zygmunt Bauman’s later work.
Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), followed by Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) and preceded by Legislators and Interpreters (1987), proved to be a foundational trilogy on which Zygmunt Bauman developed much of his later work (from postmodernity to liquid modernity and from ‘the Jews’ to ‘the Stranger’). My chapter is a personal reflection on Bauman’s first trilogy and on the metaphorical thinking which relates the trilogy to Bauman’s later work in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
The chapter is enriched by the response to these lectures and further written responses (see subsequently). It also contains some unique criticism including a previously untranslated 1971 OpEd piece by Bauman on the Palestinian occupation from the Hebrew language newspaper Ha‘aretz. Bauman wrote this just before he left Israel after a three-year stay and this is the first time that it has been referred to. The account of Bauman under Stalinism (both in the Soviet Union and Poland) also differs from most received accounts. Finally, the many and varied ‘windows’ through which I engage with Bauman’s Jewishness are wholly new.
