The Uniqueness of the Holocaust Author(s): Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin Source: Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), pp. 65-83 Published by: Wiley Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2961917 Accessed: 28-03-2020 05:17 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy & Public Affairs This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Sat, 28 Mar 2020 05:17:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms AVISHAI MARGALIT The Uniqueness & GABRIEL MOTZKIN of the Holocaust I. INTRODUCTION Was the Holocaust a unique event in history? The question can be triv- ialized. Every event is unique in the sense of being nonidentical with any other event. Yet the question, and the debate around it, are not trivial. The question is whether there is an important distinctive feature of the Holocaust that makes it unique., We believe that the answer is Yes. We also believe that the distinctive feature of the Holocaust in human expe- rience has eluded many of those who took part in the debate. This is what we shall argue. Uniqueness has several possible meanings: among others it can mean incomparable or it may mean unprecedented. The alleged incompara- bility of the Holocaust assumes that the Holocaust cannot be compared either to past or to future events. This view, which makes the Holocaust into an event that will always be unique, has served as a trigger for mys- tifying the Holocaust, for transforming the Holocaust into the focus for a new civil religion. For a Jewish consciousness in search of a metaphys- ical interpretation of history, of a sense of identity that is not anchored only in empirical history, the Holocaust serves as a new ineffability. It replaces God's election of His chosen people by another unworldly presence in history. In contrast, the notion that the Holocaust is unique because it is un- precedented has triggered a different reaction based on a comparison 1. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (New American Library: New York, 1987), pp. 18-25. Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. i: The Holocaust and Mass Death Before the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 27-63. This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Sat, 28 Mar 2020 05:17:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 66 Philosophy & Public Affairs of brutality in different places at different times. Some Germans view the Holocaust as a statistical deviation in the graph of human cruelty, ex- treme, to be sure, but not unprecedented.2 Construing the uniqueness of the Holocaust as meaning that it was unprecedented suggests that even if the Holocaust may have been unprecedented, new brutalities in the future may relegate the Holocaust to being merely the first instance of a new form of social behavior. We take exception to both views, to a Holocaust-centered secular the- ology and to the normalization (Normalisierung) implicit in a compara- tive statistics of cruelty. In this article, we will seek to understand the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a human experience, one which escapes theological or statistical characterization. Both the interpretations of uniqueness as incomparable and as unprecedented focus on the scale of the atrocity, and not on the special quality of the experience. What is unique about the Holocaust is its particular fusion of collec- tive humiliation and mass destruction. In the liquidation of large groups of people, there is a tension between humiliation and death. Perpetra- tors will seek to inflict either the one or the other. Stalin aimed to destroy the class enemy, while Mao's cultural revolution sought its humiliation. For ideological reasons, the Nazis sought both the humiliation and the death of the race enemy. Since the Nazis had a unique racial conception of their Jewish enemies as questionably human, they devised a unique fusion of humiliation and death in order to destroy them. II. THE REACTION TO THE HOLOCAUST Intense interest in the Holocaust has grown dramatically during the last fifty years. But different groups have grown more interested in the Hol- ocaust for different reasons. Jews have discussed the Holocaust in order to cope with their trauma, perhaps in the dubious hope that retaining the memory of the Holocaust may help prevent future atrocities. Ger- mans have discussed the Holocaust in order to rehabilitate their relation to the past. Yet for others, the Holocaust has mainly served as a symbol of the limit-case of the human condition. 2. For the notorious Historikerstreit see: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit. Ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit" (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988). Also: Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Sat, 28 Mar 2020 05:17:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 67 The Uniqueness of the Holocaust These explanations for the growing interest in the Holocaust are an- chored in the period after 1945. This emphasis on the Holocaust's post- war reception has been intensified by two features. First, in 1945 the Holocaust was viewed as relatively marginal in comparison to the war itself. The shift of interest from the war to the Holocaust seems to have taken place afterwards. Second, while many atrocities have taken place since World War II, none has drawn the same interest. Though it is clear that the significance of the Holocaust cannot be explained merely in terms of its reception, nonetheless many analyses have taken postwar atrocities as their starting-point for confronting the Holocaust. Because the reaction to the Holocaust has been so dramatic, some have empha- sized the uniqueness of the reaction to the Holocaust as an essential component of its uniqueness.3 In Jesus' time, many others were cruci- fied, but the reaction to Jesus' crucifixion was definitely unique irrespec- tive of the question of whether the crucifixion itself was unique. Indeed, in 1945 the Holocaust appeared to many people to be a very sad but minor event. At Nuremberg, the Holocaust was only one issue among others. The prosecution devised the Nuremberg trials as a forum for con- demning Germany for waging World War II; only during the trial did the enormity of the Holocaust fitfully begin to penetrate the consciousness of those gathered in the courtroom.4 For most people at the time, the fact that the Germans started this second war was their great sin. After World War I, even many non-Germans had adopted the German view that the allies were as guilty for the war as the Germans.5 The pol- itics of appeasement in the 1930S could be explained in part by the wide- spread acceptance among the Allies of the idea that some injustice had been rendered Germany at Versailles. For many Germans, any injustice that they inflicted in World War II was no more than a compensatory injustice for the injustice of World War I. Many Germans would later 3. The abundant literature on the special problems of the transmission of the Holocaust into a future collective memory all point in this direction. Notable collections of essays: Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedlan- der (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Lessons and Legacies: The Mean- ing of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern Uni- versity Press, 1991); Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 4. Bradley E Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (New York: New American Li- brary, 1977), pp. 88-89. 5. Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists: The Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967). This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Sat, 28 Mar 2020 05:17:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 68 Philosophy & Public Affairs argue that the subsequent emphasis placed on the Holocaust was merely an additional stick with which to beat the Germans. Immediately after World War II, since most people still interpreted World War II in the context of World War I, they did not want to use this stick at all.6 The Holocaust slowly turned into a central event of World War II during the 1950S and 1960s, when the specter of World War I began to fade from memory. While this first reception of the Holocaust placed it firmly on the other side of the historical abyss of 1945, the relocation of the Holocaust in the frame of contemporary atrocities detached it from its time and inserted it into the postwar world. In our century, as throughout history, many other atrocities have taken place. In some of them, more people were killed (Stalin's forced collectivization). In others, the brutality on display has been no less (Pol Pot's Cambodia). And some even meet the criteria for genocide, the murder of a people (the Armenians). Moreover, some have been not much less successful than the German murder of the Jews (Timor).