The Holocaust was unimaginable because existing categories could not comprehend it.

Evidence

Just how untoward our complacency may prove in the end becomes apparent once we recall that still in 1941 the Holocaust was not expected; that, given the extant knowledge of the ‘facts of the case’, it was not expectable; and that, when it finally came to pass one year later, it met with universal incredulity. People refused to believe the facts they stared at. Not that they were obtuse or ill-willed. It was just that nothing they had known before had prepared them to believe. For all they had known and believed, the mass murder for which they did not even have a name yet was, purely and simply, unimaginable. In 1988, it is unimaginable again. In 1988, however, we know what we did not know in 1941; that also the unimaginable ought to be imagined. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 240

Categorization

• DEFINE: Serves as the definition of ‘unimaginable’ as epistemic category failure — the analytical point that the modern cognitive apparatus lacked the categories.
• XREF: Previews Arendt’s banality and the construction of the ‘Other’ — a category that later Islamophobia scholarship deploys. — connects to: Comprehending the Holocaust requires breaking its own unfamiliar code — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 15; The Holocaust rendered Western civilization itself incomprehensible, not just the event. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 238; The Holocaust question must keep its full weight and horror — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 4 (+3 more)

Related

• Comprehending the Holocaust requires breaking its own unfamiliar code (similarity 0.89)
• The Holocaust rendered Western civilization itself incomprehensible, not just the event. (similarity 0.86)
• Historical explanation of the Holocaust does not yield comprehension of its meaning for modernity. (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust must be read as integral to modernity, not as its aberration. (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust question must keep its full weight and horror (similarity 0.81)
• Exceptionalist Holocaust readings let the rest of the world off the hook. (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust is a possibility modernity contains, not its paradigm (similarity 0.80)
• Normalizing the Holocaust as one genocide among many also defuses its challenge to sociology (similarity 0.80)
• All Holocaust scholarship is ultimately a debate over modernity’s self-image. (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust’s moral categories grew more contested after consensus about the facts settled (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust failed to transform sociology’s self-understanding of modern civilization. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The Holocaust question must keep its full weight and horror #corroborates (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 4
• Historical explanation of the Holocaust does not yield comprehension of its meaning for modernity. #expands (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 629