Editors Introduction - Through the Window Again: Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust

The analytical framework of this text is the ‘window’ metaphor, which Bauman applied in Modernity and the Holocaust to emphasise that the Holocaust can provide insight into the processes that shaped the modern world. Referring to this metaphor, the editors of this volume encourage the readers to look at Modernity and the Holocaust as a ‘window’ itself. They stress that looking through that ‘window’ now, more than three decades after this book was published, is invaluable not only in terms of the knowledge about the Holocaust but also with regard to the dark potentials of the contemporary world. The introduction is divided into four parts: the first part presents the entanglements between the biography of Zygmunt Bauman and his analyses of the Holocaust; the second part analyses his arguments of Modernity and the Holocaust in the broader context of his social and cultural theory; the third part discusses Bauman’s thought on the legacy of the Holocaust in the 1990s and in the twenty-first century; the fourth part addresses the issues of utopia and dystopia, which were particularly important to Bauman, and their intersections with his analyses of the Holocaust.