Historians’ dispute: Incomparable? | nd-aktuell.de

January 27, 2024 marks the 79th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and thus the symbolic end of the Holocaust. What about remembering the Shoah? Which lessons were learned, which were not learned or forgotten and put into perspective? These questions are currently extremely explosive. This year’s commemoration is dedicated to the massacre by the terrorist organization Hamas on October 7, 2023, directed against Jews, and the subsequent counterattack by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. On the one hand, anti-Semitism is increasing again worldwide and Jews in Germany, for example, are experiencing a frightening wave of attacks. On the other hand, all of this is happening while the German federal government is tightening its racist asylum policy and anti-Semitism is being exploited for this purpose – as if it were a problem that came to Germany through migration.

The anthology “Remembering as the Highest Form of Forgetting?,” published at the end of 2023. – (Re)interpretations of the Holocaust and the “Historians’ Dispute 2.0” offers a kind of inventory of these questions. Although the contributions cannot yet address the most recent events, they do deal with the line of debate about the meaning of the Holocaust, which has been carried out in recent years as the “second historians’ dispute”. The editors Stephan Grigat, Jakob Hoffmann, Marc Seul and Andreas Stahl present a large number of articles in the volume of essays that deal with the memory of the Holocaust and its singularity – i.e. the question of the relationship between the Holocaust and colonial crimes. Their aim is to assert the Shoah as an unprecedented event that should not be relativized in comparison to other crimes. Accordingly, “two sets of topics must always be (implicitly) negotiated with the question of the precedent of the Shoah and the understanding of colonialism: on the one hand, the question of the relationship between racism and anti-Semitism, and on the other hand, positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

One genocide among many?

The anthology is divided into three large parts and begins with a historical introduction in which Stephan Lehnstaedt highlights the centrality of “Aktion Reinhardt” in order to illustrate the Nazis’ programmatic mania for extermination: “It becomes completely clear that it is not just about extermination of the Jews, but also about erasing all traces of their existence – erasing them from the earth as if they had never existed.” Rolf Pohl then criticizes common theories of perpetratorship in National Socialism and addresses the question of who can be a perpetrator. On the one hand, he portrays perpetrators, as in Hannah Arendt’s “The Banality of Evil”, as normal citizens who orientate themselves towards authorities and carry out orders without further questioning themselves and their own actions. On the other hand, Pohl contradicts the theoretical assumptions that perpetrators acted because of pathological personality disorders. With reference to Adorno’s dictum, “the belief that rationality is normal is wrong,” Pohl relativizes the understanding of normality, which already contained forms of sadism. In this normality, social reinforcement up to the point of mass murder is already established.

The American historian Steven T. Katz deals with the concept of the Holocaust as genocide. The Holocaust should be classified as genocide because its aim was to “destroy a group in whole or in part.” The debate about what counts as genocide is in a current light. After all, the concept of genocide seems to be in question again since October 7th. According to the UN definition to which Katz refers, the war in Gaza, despite its tragedy and cruelty, cannot be subsumed as easily as it seems to many. In doing so, he manages to show readers once again that a crime is not just a crime if it can be categorized as genocide, but the definition is legally and politically important in order to understand the type of crime .

The universally special

As far as Katz’s analysis of the Nazi genocide against the Sinti and Roma is concerned, this text has aged poorly. The author claims that the Nazis were only interested in destroying Sinti*zzes and Roma*nja culturally and not, unlike Jews, physically. Current research, however, shows that the National Socialists also had extermination fantasies against this group of people.

Jakob Hoffmann’s interview with the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer clearly takes up the thread again. Bauer was one of the first Holocaust researchers to describe the Shoah as unprecedented. In the interview, however, he makes it clear that this does not mean that one cannot compare the Holocaust: “The universal characteristic of the Holocaust is the fact that people were murdered. This is something that happens to every genocide and every mass murder. There is no difference between murdering a Jew and murdering another human being in such situations. This is the universal aspect of the Holocaust, and that is why comparisons are essential. As Steffen Klävers and Ingo Elbe make clear in their respective contributions and Bauer also shows, in order to understand the specifics of the Shoah, the ideology of National Socialism’s annihilation ideology must be analyzed analytically . Finally, Yehuda Bauer points out that coming to terms with the Shoah did not come from the Germans themselves, but was demanded by the victims and their descendants.

Unprecedented, not incomparable

The contributions in the second and third parts of the book show how this memory was then exploited for national purposes. Nicolas Berg, for example, writes about the different historical interpretations of the Holocaust in the early Federal Republic. His contribution shows that it was primarily the work of those affected that made it possible to come to terms with the Holocaust. Berg ends his contribution with an urgent and very relevant appeal to remembrance today: “For it is not the past that tells us what it meant; We contemporaries alone tell ourselves what it should mean, what it should mean to us. (…), I mean it epistemologically, intellectually, in relation to our thinking in general and thinking about ourselves in particular.«

Anja Thiele’s contribution emphasizes a remarkable aspect. Through her examination of the politics of remembrance in the GDR and its significance for Jewish communists, she impressively manages to fill a void that is often overlooked. Using Peter Edel’s novels, she approaches the processing of the experiences of the Shoah in order to show what it meant for Jewish people that remembrance in the GDR was primarily aimed at political prisoners and was only maintained to reflect anti-fascism’s own self-image to highlight.

Finally, Elke Rajal gives an apt insight into what educational work critical of anti-Semitism could look like that actually draws lessons from the horror. After all, as the editors quote Adorno in their introduction, the past can only be dealt with “when the causes of the past have been eliminated.”

Even if the lack of precedent does not mean that there is no incomparability, the volume offers few contributions that actually compare the similarities and differences between the Holocaust and colonial crimes. In some places it is overlooked that colonial crimes also differ significantly from one another. However, carrying out these actual analyzes is not the declared task of the anthology. In the best case scenario, he wants to provide the basis for this by making clear the problems that arise from incorrect remembrance of the Holocaust and a failure to recognize the special features of annihilation anti-Semitism.

Stephan Grigat/Jakob Hoffmann/Marc Seul/
Andreas Stahl (ed.): Remembering as the highest form of forgetting? (Re)interpretations of the Holocaust and the “Historians’ Controversy 2.0”. Criminal Publishing House, 470 pages, br., 29 €.