The uniqueness of the holocaust

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 65-83

  Margalit, Avishai ^a   Motzkin, Gabriel ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002046194     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.1996.tb00076.x     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (New American Library: New York, 1987), pp. 18-25.
2. Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death Before the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 27-63.
3. For the notorious Historikerstreit see: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit. Ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit" (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988).
4. Also: Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
5. 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 Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992);
6. Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991);
7. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
8. Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (New York: New American Library, 1977), pp. 88-89.
9. Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists: The Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).
10. At Nuremberg, the standards by which German actions were evaluated stemmed from the Hague Rules (1907), the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919), and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928). The primary criminal act was waging war. Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgment, p. 17.
11. One of the authors (Gabriel Motzkin) heard him discuss this term at a conference in Jerusalem in 1986. See also: Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Herrschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1986) p. 132.
12. Also: Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangeheit, p. 100
13. Complex and different attitudes are shown in the documents collected in: "The Good Old Days": The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, ed. Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess, trans. Deborah Burnstone (New York: The Free Press, 1991).
14. Original German edition: "Schöne Zeiten" (Hamburg: S. Fischer Verlag, 1988).
15. It could also be argued that the Nazis viewed the extermination of the Jews as a desirable goal, without necessarily believing in the ideology. Certainly this position, which is based on the Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Avishai Margalit's distinction between holding true and holding as true, between acting as if something were true, and really believing in it, would help explain the sudden collapse of the ideology after the war (Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Avishai Margalit, "Holding True and Holding as True," Synthese, 1992). Very few Nazis actually defended the extermination of the Jews after the war. However, this illuminating distinction does not vitiate the difference drawn in the text between acting out of either obedience to orders or opportunism and acting from conviction. It rather explains why some convictions disappear together with their historical context, and others do not.
16. Nazi race theory was never very clear. See: K. Sailer, Die Rassenlehre des Nationalsozialismus in Wissenschaft und Propaganda (Darmstadt: Progress-Verlag, 1961), p. 33: "Es ist einigermaßen schwierig, über die Kardinalbegriffe von Volk und Rasse aus dem nationalsozialistischen Schriftum ganz klare Vorstellungen zu gewinnen."
17. See also: Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll, and Kurt Bayerz, Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988).
18. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
19. "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.
20. While we generally agree with Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: 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. 21). Humiliation was a central motif of the Nazi view of humanity in general.
21. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979),
22. trans. Allan Sheridan. Original French edition: Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
23. Raul Hilberg, Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz (Mainz: Dumjahn, 1981), trans. Gisela Schleicher from unpubl.
24. English manuscript entitled: "The Role of the German Railroads in the Destruction of the Jews." Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon, 1985).
25. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: Collins, 1986), p. 615.
26. The Gypsies were also subjected to unimaginable medical experiments. Benno Muller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany, 1933-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), trans. George R. Fraser, pp. 58-62, esp. p. 71.
27. Orig. German edition: Tödliche Wissenschaft (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984).
28. Homosexuals were also subjected to medical experiments. Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit. Dokumente einer Diskriminierung und Verfolgung, hrsg. Günter Grau (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1993), pp. 345-58.
29. 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.
30. Peter Adam, The Arts of the Third Reich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), p. 124.
31. The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections, ed. David Altschuler (New York: Summit Books, 1983), pp. 24-37.
32. Leon Poliakov and Joseph Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden. Dokumente und Aufsätze. 2d Edition (Berlin-Grunewald: Arani Verlags-GmbH, 1955), pp. 378-80.
33. On the preservation of Jewish bodies: Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), p. 609.
34. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 30-37.
35. See also: Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen "The Monument Vanishes. A Conversation with Esther and Jochen Gerz," in: The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (Munich and New York: Prestel and The Jewish Museum, New York, 1994), ed. James E. Young, pp. 69-75.