ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the important uniqueness-comparability debate on the Holocaust from a postmodern perspective. By treating the Holocaust as a modernist event, White has contributed to dethroning it from its position of uniqueness. Other important historians of postmodernism have also contributed to this direction during the 1990s: in 1994, the journal Theory of History has hosted an interesting debate between some of them and Berel Lang, an important Holocaust historian, and critic of postmodernism, in which the moral significance but also the need for comparison of the Holocaust were both highlighted. In the same years, the work of Dominick LaCapra has shed light on the psychological aspects of the Holocaust and their impact on its representation, while he also emphasized the importance of this event in the construction of public memory. On similar lines, Frank Ankersmit has argued that the Holocaust as an event has changed the way we can understand our past and, therefore, it cannot be left out of the general historical narrative of the 20th century. These ideas have coexisted with the important work of Holocaust and genocide scholars, such as Dirk Moses, who have promoted a more open and comparative view of the Holocaust. These theoretical debates have been put into practical use by the Holocaust historian Dan Stone who has written extensively on the Holocaust, consciously adopting some of postmodernism’s assumptions on historical narration and interpretation while developing some original narratives on different aspects of it.
