Zygmunt Bauman’s “Modernity and the Holocaust” and the Unexplored Research Perspectives in Studies about the Holocaust in Polish Lands

Abstract

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 absent from our understanding of the Holocaust in this region is a broader and deepened historical perspective, taking into account the preceding decades as well as the challenges of peripheral modernity in this part of Europe and its impact on relations between Christians and Jews both before and during the Holocaust.