ABSTRACT
In popular imagination and cultural memory, the potent phrases “Final Solution”
and “Six Million” impart to the genocide a monolithic quality, a single all-
encompassing crime perpetrated against a symbolically composite victim. And
this tendency to deal with the unfathomable enormity of the Holocaust by
reducing it to a singular act has important consequences for how the genocide
is understood. Some ascribe “the Holocaust” to mystery and give it the singular
quality of a radical and inexplicable (see Bauer, 1990) disjuncture in history
(e.g., Fackenheim, interview with Rosenbaum, 1998, p. xvi; Wiesel, 1989, 2006).
A variant on this theme is the view that the Holocaust is an aberration in the
otherwise generally upward progress of Western civilization (e.g., Moore, 2005).
Others believe “No Hitler, No Holocaust” (Himmelfarb, 1984) and emphasize
the driving force of a singular will (e.g., Fleming, 1984), while in stark contrast,
Goldhagen (1996) controversially argued that a desire to eliminate the Jews was
a “monolithic” (p. 33) German cultural axiom that the dictator merely catalyzed.
Still others see in “the Holocaust” not a singular mystery but a singular con-
tinuity-whether a tragic culmination of great social forces rooted in the sweep
of European history, as analysts (e.g., Freud, 1939; Lyotard, 1990; Sartre, 1948;
Steiner, 1971) and historians (e.g., Cohn-Sherbok, 2002; Fischer, 1998; Mosse,
1978) of anti-Semitism point out, or the horrific denouement to generations of
lived experience, a reality lived by the actual Jewish victims and by their descen-
dants in the Jewish Diaspora of today. All of these perspectives offer their own
contributions to our attempts at understanding the genocide. For they rightly draw
our attention to what was radical and unprecedented about the Final Solution;
or to the dynamics of a totalitarian dictatorship; or to the interplay between
cultural attitudes and individual actions; or how a potential for genocide was
latent in European anti-Semitism; or how any history of the Shoah that ignores
the victims’ experience is inadequate and incomplete.
