Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
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, 19871,
pp. 16-25. Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1: The Holocaust and
Mass Death Before the Modern Age (New York Oxford University Press, 19941, pp. 27-63.
66 Philosophy G Public Affairs
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: H i s t o g Holocaust, and German National
Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: €Iarvard University Press, 1988).
67 The Uniqueness
of the Holocaust
kinds of animals. This kinds of racism asserts that Jews are not merely an
inferior race, but a different animal altogether, and that therefore they
should be treated in the way that one treats other animals. Nazi biolo-
gism confounded these two kinds of racism in a particularly virulent
fashion, for the lesson that the Nazis imbibed from the theory of evolu-
tion was that the boundaries of genus and species are not fixed, that
humans may well be on the way to becoming something else. However,
this possibility of becoming something other than human can mean ei-
ther becoming something better or becoming something worse. The
Nazis viewed the Jews as the paradigmatic example of a degenerative
evolution, one that would eventually lead to the extinction of their race.
Over time, Nazi ideology moved from the first kind of racism, the
racism of inferior varieties, to the second kind of racism, the racism of
exclusion from the human race. The SS discouraged the infliction of
excessive cruelty on Jews because it viewed them as a species fated to
die. The less the Jews were human, the less point there was in humiliat-
ing them. Yet despite this desire for clean destruction, the entire record
of German behavior in the extermination process shows that the Ger-
mans could not rid themselves of the constant process of humiliating
the Jews. The reasons for this impossibility are basic: You cannot kill
people without killing people. Some aspect of humiliation will always
inhere to the process of killing people. If there is any positive lesson to
be drawn from the Holocaust, it is that the Nazi project was self-defeat-
ing. By inflicting humiliation, the perpetrators acknowledged their vic-
tims’ humanity, and in a way that is the victims’ ultimate bitter victory.
The contradiction in Nazi doctrine between the desire to exclude the
Jews from the most universal category, humanity, and the very denial of
the existence of that category forced the Nazis to adopt two different
“logics.” When Nazism articulated its “positive”doctrine of Aryan race
superiority, it used only notions of races and nations and denied any
idea of a universal humanity. But when it criticized contemporary ideol-
ogies such as Marxism, it used their universal terms. One secret of Na-
zism’s appeal was this fusion of a sham Enlightenment universalism
with a racial self-affirmation.
The Nazis applied this dichotomy between the universal and the par-
ticular to the Jews in a perverse way. Namely, they claimed that the idea
of one human race is a Jewish invention, part of the insidious and cor-
rupting Jewish campaign for equality. The world could only be fooled
72 Philosophy 6 Public Affairs
into extending equality to the Jews by being intoxicated with the false
idea of a universal humanity.
For this Jewish invention of humanity, the Jews should be punished.
And they should be punished with their own logic. The Jews’Enlighten-
ment ideology of universalism will be applied to them in an extremely
negative fashion, namely by excluding them from something to which
they believed they belonged.
One unique aspect of the Holocaust is then the application of univer-
salistic categories to the extermination of a race. One may argue that
negative universalism has a parallel in the Marxist-Leninist application
of universalistic categories to exclude class enemies. However, there is
a crucial difference: Marxist-Leninists viewed class as an historical phe-
nomenon that will disappear, and not as a natural kind. For them, there
does exist a universal class, the proletariat, whose historical role is be-
neficent, and others may in principle join it. In contrast, Nazi ideology
emphasized the particularity of race as well as the ubiquity of races.
There are no individuals who do not belong to a race. Yet there is no
universal race. Even the Germans do not constitute a universal race:
each race is special. History for the Nazis is always race history; hence
the Jews’ role in history is antihistorical; they represent a threat to the
possibility of a future race history because they advocated an illusory
universal race. They corrupt the superior races by sapping their vitality
with their universalistic ideological teeth.
This explanation of the uniqueness of the Holocaust emphasizes the
German attitude to the Holocaust rather than the process of extermina-
tion. It goes against much German self-understanding after the war, for
which the method of destruction was not normal, but the alleged Ger-
man attitude of apathy was “normd.” Germans claimed that they were
normal people in abnormal circumstances. Yet if “normal” Germans
created these abnormal circumstances, either as instigators or as enthu-
siastic supporters, then we must question the meaning of normality
used here. German society was not an apathetic society subjected to an
intimidating reign of terror.
V. HUMILIATION
We have discussed why the Nazi theory was particular, but we wish to
argue that the way this theory functioned in practice also shows signs
73 The Uniqueness
of the Holocaust
How you die is not just a question of the mode of dying, but also of the
nexus of attitudes of killers and victims.
Humiliation requires the imposition of a collaboration between the
perpetrator and the victim. The victim should recognize that his tor-
mentor is expelling him from the human commonwealth. Thus “nor-
mal” humiliation requires the continued existence of a victim as some-
one who can recognize the fact that he is being humiliated. While there
is a destructive element in humiliation, there is a tension between hu-
miliation and destruction, for humiliation seeks to destroy some part of
the humiliated person without destroying that person. When the victim
is destroyed, there is no one left who can recognize himself as having
been humiliated. Thus keeping the victim of humiliation alive leaves
open the possibilities of sadistic enjoyment or of canceling the humilia-
tion of the victim through atonement or retribution.
Destroying the humiliated victim closes these possibilities. It does
cancel the victim’s previous humiliation, but only by imposing a final
humiliation, inherent in the imposition of unwanted death. But the mo-
tive for killing the victim is not the need to erase an earlier humiliation.
Indeed, the Nazis sought to preserve the humiliation of the Jews beyond
their destruction through creating institutions that would preserve a
memory of the Jews. Yet the contradiction between the humiliation of
degradation and the humiliation of death is insurmountable; death may
be implicit in humiliation, but humiliation cannot persist without a vic-
tim. This contradiction surfaces even when the ultimate consequence
is not death, when death remains only a possibility implicit in the act of
humiliation.12 Seen this way, the dialectic of humiliation and destruc-
tion is akin to the dialectic of master and slave. The master wants total
control over the slave, but he also wants recognition from the slave that
he is the master. But total control destroys the slave as a possible recog-
nizing agent and makes him a mere tool.
Our point is that many people have been exterminated throughout
history, and many people have been humiliated throughout history, but
it is exceedingly rare and maybe unique that a group of people has been
12. ”Poor settler: here is his contradiction naked, shorn of its trappings. He ought to kill
those he plunders, as they say djinns do. Now, this is not possible, because he must exploit
them as well. Because he can’t carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like
degradation.” Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New
York Grove Press, 1963), trans. Constance Farrington, p. 16.
75 The Uniqueness
of the Holocaust
miliating the victim might spread to the perpetrator. Like some rapist
who may seek to eliminate his victim so as not to be tainted by his rape,
the Nazis sought the elimination of the Jews in order to exorcise their
own self-humiliation. Humiliation was not merely an instrumental act
intended to secure the acquiescence of traditionally anti-Semitic
masses to the Nazi death-machine; it was an essential component in the
construction of Nazi identity.’3
In a Christian society self-abasement or self-humiliation is often
conceived as a positive virtue. There is a vast difference between the
humiliation of others and self-humiliation. The humiliation of others is
intended to establish a gap between oneself and others, whereas self-
humiliation is intended to establish a common humanity with others.
The Nazi solution to their problem of self-humiliation was an ultimate
rejection of the Christian practice of humility.
VI. TRANSPORTING
THE VICTIMS
Such a fear of self-humiliation may also help explain why unique proce-
dures were adopted for killing the Jews. In Discipline and Punish, Fou-
cault described how punishment was open and public until the eight-
eenth century, and enclosed and isolated thereafter.l4 The Germans
rarely killed in the streets, but rather transported the Jews before killing
them. In this way, they were following a “normal modern practice” and
were not unique at all. But their practice of deportation was so extreme
that the act of deportation is one of our basic synecdoches (part for
whole) for imagining the Holocaust. Wars had always been accompa-
nied by atrocities committed on site; besieged cities knew well the fate
awaiting them should the invaders succeed. However, it had always
been rare in war to take people elsewhere to be killed. For over three
years, the Nazis transported Jews across Europe for the single purpose
of murdering them. Both Raul Hilberg and Claude Lanzmann have fas-
13. While we generally agree with Berel Lang, Act and idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chi-
cago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). we do not believe that the inherent tension
between humiliation and death can be resolved through an instrumental interpretation
of humiliation as dehumanization (p. 2 1 ) . Humiliation was a central motif of the Nazi view
of humanity in general.
14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York Vintage,
19791,trans. Allan Sheridan. Original French edition: Surueiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard,
1975).
77 The Uniqueness
of the Holocaust
16. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Trugedy (London: Collins, 1986), p. 615.
79 The Uniqueness
of the Holocaust
As the war drew to a close, the Nazis both pursued their genociL,: with
ever-greater zeal and sought to hide their murders from posterity. But
from their point of view the murder of the Jews should have been re-
ceived as an heroic act of epic proportions. They did not believe, how-
ever, that their heroism would be appreciated by future generations:
they would have to conceal their heroic crime, heroic because it suc-
cessfully humiliated and destroyed the Jews while leaving the Germans
undefiled.
VIII. NEGATIVEMYTH
Not only was the Holocaust unique, so was its reception. The Nazis
could not foresee the emergence of the Holocaust as a negative myth of
origin for the postwar world. A myth of origin is a story that people tell
about where they came from and how the situation in which they live
was created; it serves as a general framework for the interpretation of the
world. Such a story may be true (the Founding Fathers), but we call it
a myth because it serves a mythic function in society. A myth of origin
is usually positive: like the story of Adam and Eve, it can even reveal the
common humanity of all peoples. It should be emphasized that this
mythic function is not a fictional one. When we call the Holocaust a
myth, we do not mean that it did not take place or that the actual event
was somehow different from the one we know. Calling the function of
the Holocaust in the postwar world a myth of origin means that we view
the Holocaust as both a caesura that separates us from the pre-Holo-
caust past and as the point in time and place at which the world of our
values has originated. It requires little acuity to ascertain that the Holo-
caust has become a universal symbol in our culture, that many other
events are constantly being compared to it.l9
A negative myth of origin, in contrast to a positive one, means a myth
that takes the moment of creation as a moment of chaos and destruc-
tion, and contrasts our order or disorder to that originary moment of
chaos and destruction rather than to any well-ordered process of crea-
tion or stabilizing harmony. The Holocaust has become such a founda-
tional moment. The current infatuation with the idea of historical dis-
19. Such a use of the Holocaust as a universal symbol, however, eventually undermines
its uniqueness. Comparing everything to the Holocaust makes the Holocaust look like
everything else.
81 The Uniqueness
of the Holocaust
memory and history. We should like to single out the relation the Holo-
caust has created between memory and negation, between memory and
its absence. The Holocaust defines this relation between memory and
absence for our culture.
In 1937 The Nazis mounted an exhibition of so-called degenerate art
(Enturtete Kunst), in which they brought together premier examples of
modern art. The point of the exhibition was to show this art’s funda-
mental degeneracy. At one stage, they even considered placing museum
directors and artists next to the works so that the public could spit at
them.*O The Nazis understood that the museum is a central forum of
public display, and they sought to use it for public humiliation.
The Nazis collected Jewish memorabilia. They planned to create a
museum of an extinct race, as they called it, so that posterity could view
what the Jews had been.21They also collected Jewish skulls and pre-
served Jewish bodies, so that the evidence of Jewish racial inferiority
would survive the destruction of the Jews.z2The humiliation of the Jews
would survive their destruction. Here again we see the uniqueness of the
Jews in the Nazi world-view: The other extinctions were not coupled
with a plan for “preserving” the humiliation of the victims in museums
and anthropological collections. One would be permitted to remember
the Jews and their humiliation in their extinct form. James Young, in The
Texture of Memory, describes a postwar German monument to the Hol-
ocaust that was periodically lowered into the ground until it vanished,
in this way commemorating vanished victims of the Nazis.*3 If we com-
pare these two ideas, the Nazi museum and the postwar German monu-
ment, we see that the postwar German monument has reversed the rela-
tions between remembering and forgetting that were the preconditions
for the planned museum. The postwar disappearing monument memo-
20. Peter Adam, TheArts ofthe Third Reich (London: Thames and Hudson, igg2), p. 124.
21. The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections, ed.
David Altschuler (New York Summit Books, ig83), pp. 24-37.
22. Leon Poliakov and Joseph Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden. Dokumente und
Aufsiitze. 2d Edition (Berlin-Grunewald: Arani Verlags-GmbH, 19551,pp. 378-80. On the
preservation of Jewish bodies: Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New
York: New Viewpoints, ig73), p. 609.
23. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 19931, pp. 30-37. See also: Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen “The
Monument Vanishes. A Conversation with Esther and Jochen Gerz,” in: TheArt ofMemory:
Holocaust Memorials in History (Munich and New York Prestel and The Jewish Museum,
New York, 19941, ed. James E. Young, pp. 69-75.
83 The Uniqueness
of the Holocaust
X. CONCLUSION
The argument concerning the uniqueness of the Holocaust could be
framed in three different ways: one could argue that the Germans are
unique, that the Jews are unique, or that the process was unique. In this
paper, we have argued that the Jews were much less unique than the
Germans, and that the uniqueness of the process of extermination de-
rived from the uniqueness of the German attitude both to the Jews and
to the way in which they would get rid of them. The Germans were
unique enough because, more radically than anyone else in the last sev-
eral millennia, they denied the idea of a common humanity both theo-
retically and practically. They embodied this denial of humanity in the
way in which they fused humiliation and extermination in their ridding
the world of the Jews. These unique aspects of the Holocaust have proved
central for postwar culture in two ways. First, the Holocaust has become
a constitutive story, a point of historical beginning. Second, after the Hol-
ocaust history is viewed as radically discontinuous. Memory has the dis-
tinct and new role of preserving the sense of this discontinuity.