Modernity and the Holocaust

the long version

A new afterword to this edition, "The duty to remember, but What?," tackles difficult issues of guilt and innocence on the individual and societal levels. 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 same of safety; the insidious efects 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 and with the passing of time lost a good deal of its urgency and practical edge, the one big remaining question is the innocence of all the rest- not the least innocence of ourselves."--publisher description.