Description
Book SynopsisA new afterword to this edition, The Duty to RememberBut What? tackles difficult issues of guilt and innocence on the individual and societal levels. Zygmunt Bauman explores the silences found in debates about the Holocaust, and asks what the historical facts of the Holocaust tell us about the hidden capacities of present-day life. He finds great danger in such phenomena as the seductiveness of martyrdom; going to extremes in the name of safety; the insidious effects of tragic memory; and efficient, scientific implementation of the death penalty. Bauman writes, Once the problem of the guilt of the Holocaust perpetrators has been by and large settled... the one big remaining question is the innocence of all the restnot the least the innocence of ourselves.Among the conditions that made the mass extermination of the Holocaust possible, according to Bauman, the most decisive factor was modernity itself. Bauman''s provocative interpretation counters the tendency to reduce the Holocaust
