A Plea for Commemorative Equality: The Holocaust, Factual Specificity, and Commemorative Prioritisation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that there exists an undesirable link between the factual specificity of the Holocaust and its commemorative prioritization. Following a discussion of the rise of the Holocaust to the moral pinnacle of global memory culture, two primary examples of the enduring nature of this problematic link are advanced. In the first place, the importance afforded to factual specificity functions as an obstacle to the betterment of Eastern European memory. Though disingenuous actors certainly seek to play down local responsibility for the Holocaust, the commemorative primacy afforded to the Holocaust, on the basis of its factual specificity, clouds efforts to distinguish between collaborator apologists and those who inaccurately draw factual comparisons between the Holocaust and other events in order to attain commemorative equality. Second, present-day historians retain the use of words such as “unique”, “unprecedented” and “singular”. These words are often applied to the Holocaust in such a way that implies that the Holocaust is the only such event, thus mixing the inherently political into scholarly debate. This article argues that both sides of, for example, the recent “German Catechism Debate”, ought to abandon the notion that the facts of an event are relevant to commemorative prioritization. Instead, scholarly disagreements over comparative studies should be definitively separated from commemorative decisions. A failure to achieve this separation has repeatedly blocked intellectual progress. Importantly, in criticizing the link between factual specificity and commemorative prioritization, this article avoids a universal denunciation of Holocaust memory (which is often multidirectional) and instead offers a way forward.