For those of us whose own family members were killed in the death camps, the temptation can be overwhelming to say that this crime was unique and that no analogies could possibly be valid. Especially among the children and grandchildren of the victims, this conception of the Holocaust seems to have hardened into a fixture of contemporary identity. A taboo now envelopes even its nomenclature. No other atrocity in modern times has gained the singularity of a proper name, with such biblical resonance and an entire field of academic study to ensure that its horrors are not forgotten. It has become our secular proxy for evil, an absolute in an age that has left all other absolutes behind. But those who would characterize the Holocaust as “evil” forget that this term belongs to the lexicon of religion, not history. Once the Holocaust is elevated beyond time as a quasi-eternal standard, all comparison must appear as sacrilege.
Confronted with such moral difficulties, it can hardly surprise us that some public intellectuals and politicians have adopted the posture of gatekeepers against comparison. But yielding to the idea of the Holocaust’s incomparability leads us into a thicket of moral perplexities. It is sometimes said that the Holocaust must remain beyond comparison because the traumas that were visited upon its victims cannot be compared to other traumas without somehow diminishing the particular horror of the Holocaust. But this argument is based on a category mistake. Every trauma is of course unique, and the suffering of each individual has a singularity that cries out against comparison. Yet the uniqueness of individual suffering is not diminished when the historian begins the grim task of understanding.
There is, after all, at least one common element in every trauma: it belongs to the common record of human events. Hannah Arendt’s description of Nazism’s evil as “banal” was not meant to diminish its horror but to magnify it, by reminding us that its perpetrators were not monsters but ordinary men. She feared that, in the public mind, the sheer magnitude of the Nazis’ crime would remain so opaque that it would be depoliticized and lifted free of political history, as if it had not been perpetrated by human beings at all.