Holocaust uniqueness debate
The assertion that the Holocaust was a unique event was important to the historiography of the Holocaust, but has come under increasing challenge in the twenty-first century.[1] Related claims include that the Holocaust is external to history, beyond human understanding,[2] a civilizational rupture (German: Zivilisationsbruch), and something that should not be compared to other historical events.[3][4] Uniqueness approaches to the Holocaust also coincide with the view that antisemitism is not another form of racism and prejudice but is eternal and teleologically culminates in the Holocaust, a frame that is preferred by Zionist narratives.[5][6][7]
History
The uniqueness of the Holocaust was advanced while it was ongoing by the World Jewish Congress (WJC), but rejected by governments of countries in German-occupied Europe.[8] In the early decades of Holocaust studies, scholars approached the Holocaust as a genocide unique in its reach and specificity.[9] Holocaust uniqueness became a subject for scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, in response to efforts to historicize the Holocaust via such concepts as totalitarianism, fascism, functionalism, modernity, and genocide.[10]
In West Germany, the Historikerstreit ("historians' dispute") erupted in the late 1980s over attempts to challenge the position of the Holocaust in West German historiography and compare Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union. Critics saw this challenge as an attempt to relativize the Holocaust.[11] In the 1980s and 1990s, a set of scholars, including Emil Fackenheim, Lucy Dawidowicz, Saul Friedländer, Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz, Deborah Lipstadt, and Daniel Goldhagen—mostly from the field of Jewish studies—authored various studies to prove the Holocaust's uniqueness.[12] They were challenged by another set of scholars from a wide diversity of viewpoints that rejected the uniqueness of the Holocaust and compared it to other events, which was then met with an angry backlash from uniqueness supporters.[13] Around the turn of the twenty-first century, polemical approaches for the debate were exchanged for analytical ones relating to claims of uniqueness in Holocaust memory.[14]
In the twenty-first century, several scholars including Alon Confino and Doris Bergen have described uniqueness claims regarding the Holocaust as outdated or no longer relevant to academic debate.[15] In 2021, A. Dirk Moses initiated the catechism debate, challenging the uniqueness of the Holocaust in German Holocaust memory. The same year, in his book The Problems of Genocide, Moses argued that the development of the concept of genocide based on the Holocaust led to disregard of other forms of mass civilian death that could not be analogized to the Holocaust.[4][16]
References
- Blatman 2015, p. 21.
- Rosenbaum 2009, p. 1.
- Bomholt Nielsen 2021.
- Stone, Dan (4 January 2022). "Paranoia and the Perils of Misreading". Fair Observer. Retrieved 22 March 2022.
- MacDonald 2007, p. 5.
- Morgan 2017.
- Judaken 2018, pp. 1125, 1130, 1135.
- Moses 2021, pp. 195, 206.
- Stone 2010, p. 206.
- Rosenfeld 2015, pp. 80–81.
- Stone 2010, p. 207.
- Rosenfeld 2015, p. 81.
- Rosenfeld 2015, pp. 85–86.
- Rosenfeld 2015, pp. 86–87.
- Rosenfeld 2015, pp. 78–79.
- Moses 2021, p. 236.
Sources
- Blatman, Daniel (2015). "Holocaust scholarship: towards a post-uniqueness era". Journal of Genocide Research. 17 (1): 21–43. doi:10.1080/14623528.2015.991206. S2CID 144542220.
- Bomholt Nielsen, Mads (2021). "Contextualising colonial violence: Causality, continuity and the Holocaust". History Compass. 19 (12). doi:10.1111/hic3.12701. S2CID 244559549.
- Judaken, Jonathan (2018). "Introduction". The American Historical Review. 123 (4): 1122–1138. doi:10.1093/ahr/rhy024.
- Kansteiner, Wulf (2009). "The Rise and Fall of Metaphor: German Historians and the Uniqueness of the Holocaust". Is the Holocaust Unique?. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-49513-7.
- MacDonald, David B. (2007). Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-08572-9.
- Morgan, Katalin (2017). "Is it possible to understand the Holocaust? Insights from some German school contexts". Holocaust Studies. 23 (4): 441–463. doi:10.1080/17504902.2017.1284376.
- Moses, A. Dirk (2021). The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-009-02832-5.
- Rosenbaum, Alan S. (2009). "Introduction to the Second Edition". Is the Holocaust Unique?. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-49513-7.
- Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. (2015). Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-07399-9.
- Stone, Dan (2010). Histories of the Holocaust. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-161420-0.