How the Holocaust narrative is appropriated and distorted

[Translation of transcript generated automatically]
This presentation ultimately consists of preliminary work. Please don’t expect too much. This is a collection that I would also like to present to you, but which is perhaps also impressive as a collection. As Max has already said, I have become a renegade of the university. So please don’t expect a proper academic lecture. But I’m very excited when we start talking afterwards, especially as I haven’t had much to do with the practices of comparison as a scientific discipline.
And I hope you’ve brought reasonably strong nerves with you, because I’m going to show you some things here that are not without their challenges. If it somehow gets too much, let me know. Let’s say someone says to you, “You’re like Socrates.” You feel flattered, but to be on the safe side you ask again how the comparison is meant. Whereupon you hear: “You have a beard.” That’s a blow you weren’t expecting. You would have expected it to be about deep wisdom. But at least Socrates had a beard, so the comparison still makes some sense. But if you didn’t have a beard at all, the answer would perhaps be: “Well, your name also starts with S.” Or perhaps even better: “Well, you exist too.”
Is that actually a legitimate and meaningful comparison? The tertium comparationis here obviously does not include the particular singularity of Socrates, not the differentia specifica, to speak with his pupils. One could have used any other, or preferably the set of all other existing entities for the comparison, not the one with the very concrete qualities. The comparatum used was therefore too specific, which is why the comparison becomes diffuse. Nevertheless, this comparison, even if it should be made more precise, evokes the specifically Socratic, the wisdom or even the beard for my part. I would therefore like to call this kind of comparison dirty, in the sense of blurred, because prima facie it does not focus on the tertium, but to a certain extent creates a referential diffuseness, even to the extreme form in which an apparent comparison is actually intended to invalidate the comparatum.
That’s actually all the theory I have to offer. And, as you have probably realised, this is also very amateurish theory. But we’ll certainly talk about that. My thought now is that the Holocaust comparison, especially in media discourse, is generally such a dirty comparison, albeit with different contours and profiles. And that this dirty diffuseness also serves strategic purposes. Now, before I go back to a few case studies and then delve deeper, I would simply like to demonstrate a few examples.
In 2012, a procedure went all the way to the European Court of Human Rights and involved a campaign designed back in 2004 by the animal rights organisation PETA. The slogan of this campaign was “The Holocaust on your plate”. This is what a picture looked like with a quote referring to the Third Reich. But that’s still relatively mild. Here you can actually see this quote “The Holocaust on your plate”. What I have cut away is the picture of a concentration camp inmate, an emaciated concentration camp inmate. I didn’t want to present that. It is actually the case that a Holocaust survivor recognised himself in one of these pictures. This was one of the reasons why a lawsuit was filed against it. There were obviously supposed to be even more drastic images. So you can see that an emaciated animal, factory farming and animal slaughter are directly parallelised with the Holocaust. This advertising campaign was therefore banned in Germany. But at least an advert was played on MTV anyway and in this advert it said: “They came for us in the dark and drove us into the wagons with blows”. Referring to the animals, but I think the moment of comparison is clear.
Why does it have to be the Holocaust in a matter like this? I will always come back to this question, of course. But just to start with: I read a very insightful article on the subject, which is actually more about the legal situation, and in it the journalist Martin Rath says that there is a traditional obsession of animal rights activists with Judaism and the Jews. I quote: “The obsession of animal rights activists went so far that prominent representatives of their movement accused the National Socialist state of being too hesitant in its procedures against Jews.” One of these animal rights activists claimed in 1951, quote: “For tens of thousands of Germans, there will be no solution to the Jewish question as long as the Jews insist on their cruel method of slaughter.” Rath therefore speaks of a historically very firmly established amalgam of animal protection and anti-Semitic, today often anti-Muslim misanthropy. So there seems to be a certain connection, which can also be traced in the form of long lines of tradition.
I’ll move on to the next example of the “chicken holocaust”, as it is often called in this context, to the so-called “Babycaust”. And I’ll quote another slogan, a sick green demand: “Ban the shredding of chicks, legalise the shredding of children, i.e. abortion”. That’s what it says on the “babycaust.de” website. So you can see how a competition of victims is being set up here to a certain extent, a competition of Holocaust comparisons, if you like. This fits very well with a quote from the Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, who said in this context: “Everyone having their own preferred Holocaust”.
Well, these abortion/Holocaust comparisons are relatively old. The historian Ernst Nolte, who drew the initial line in the sand, so to speak, and who, as we must say today, provoked the first historians’ dispute at the time, saw the danger of abortion obscured by the fixation on German guilt. In this respect, what we are experiencing with these abortion slogans and Holocaust comparisons is not entirely new. But it has been particularly prevalent in recent years. One of the reasons for this is that some court cases only took place a few years ago. In 2018, a photo collage was displayed in the window of a bookshop in Cologne. A children’s cemetery, above it an archway modelled on the Auschwitz concentration camp with the words “Abortion makes you free”. The German Centre Party included the same picture in its invitations to a memorial service at the “Memorial to the Children Murdered in the Womb in Germany”. I think you can hear what that alludes to. And this invitation appeared on television in the hands of an AfD MP. You can see that in the background. As you can read on the website “Kindermord.org”, the aforementioned memorial site is nothing other than the children’s cemetery itself. It was merely proclaimed a memorial by the anti-abortion activists.
An article appeared on the same website in 2022 under the title “Abtreiben macht frei!” (Abortion makes you free!), which links National Socialist legislation with today’s legislation and genocide with abortion. This website is run by Karl Noswitz, who I will come back to later. One of his projects ending dates is the travelling exhibition “Fetus Christus”, which was to make stops in Dachau and Auschwitz, among other places. You can see that there is an interesting list of cities: Berlin, Dortmund, Nuremberg, Rotterdam, Rome, but also Dachau and Auschwitz. Believe it or not, there is also an actual memorial to the aborted foetuses. It was founded by the anti-abortion activist Franz Graf from Pösing in the Upper Palatinate, who built a chapel there “In honour of aborted children”. Memorial stones and plaques there bear inscriptions such as “The greatest genocide in the history of mankind”, “The Holocaust of unborn children” and “Auschwitz is today in our hospitals and abortion clinics as well as in gynaecological practices”.
Here is another memorial plaque that is there. In a speech to mark the 10th anniversary of the chapel, Graf went even further and asked “What is Auschwitz compared to this mass murder of children?” You have to let that melt in your mouth. But I’ll come back to this exaggeration in a moment. Even more drastic is the website run by Klaus Günter Annen, which I have already mentioned, “babycaust.de”. Let me show you a few excerpts. There is also a poem here, as you can see. At the bottom is another picture of the entrance to the concentration camp and here we also find a veritable argumentation on the apologetics of the Holocaust comparison. This is very exciting because a kind of metapoetics, so to speak, is already taking place here on the subject of Holocaust comparisons, because of course various court cases were brought and various accusations arose and, according to the operator of the website, he then felt called upon to legitimise and justify them. “Why should a comparison between the Holocaust and the Babycaust not be appropriate to open the population’s eyes to these crimes”, it says here, “against the human rights to life for all?” That is interesting. We have to ask ourselves: is it necessary to compare abortion with the Holocaust in order to educate people about abortion? I think an answer is unnecessary, at least at this level.
Here are some more interesting comments on the subject of comparisons. How does the comparison work? “A comparison virtually involves,” for whatever reason, “two things. Our comparison does not refer to the perpetrators, but to the extent of the people murdered. In other words, the motives for the murders may be different, but we are equally horrified by each murder.” I think perhaps you can now guess why I gave the example of Socrates and the beard and the existence of Socrates. Things are similarly diffuse here. The comparison is scaled in such a way that it ends up referring to a tertium that is so General that one wonders: why? To what extent does this legitimise a comparison with the Holocaust? In my view, these are of course rhetorical tricks.
In many cases, this obsession with comparing abortion and the Holocaust, as I said, goes as far as a comparison of outdoing. I have illustrated the best representation of this exaggerated comparison here: “Equating the Babycaust with the Holocaust would mean relativising today’s abortion murders.” This is, so to speak, a retort to the accusation of relativising the Holocaust. In fact, one has to ask oneself, of course this is a legal term, Holocaust relativisation, but one has to ask oneself whether, if we now proceed interpretively and hermeneutically, whether this is the right term for what is happening here. But I don’t want to deal with that any longer now.
In any case, it is clear that we are reacting to this accusation of trivialising and relativising the Holocaust. And it says, “No, it’s the other way round, if you compare abortion with the Holocaust, then you relativise abortion because it’s much, much worse.” I read two more such relativisations, such passages of exaggeration: “Some people see the comparison as a trivialisation of abortion, because for all the cruelty of the Holocaust, not even the National Socialists murdered their own children”. Which is also not entirely true. This quote comes from the aforementioned Karl Noswitz. And a pastor in a diocesan newspaper writes: “Nazis took advantage of innocent people who were largely adults and could be outraged by the injustice done to them”. Abortion involves dismembering, cutting up and strangling unborn children who cannot speak a single word for themselves.” So there too, “Abortion is worse than the Holocaust.”
On his website “Privat-Depesche.de”, the aforementioned Karl Noswitz also places abortion in continuity with Hitler’s Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. This shows that it is not very coherent in itself. In fact, one could just as well attest such continuity to the Holocaust-comparative abortion opponents, because in their fight against abortion they regularly refer to paragraph 219 A, which was introduced in 1933 after the seizure of power, among other things with the aim of ensuring a sufficient supply of soldiers for the Wehrmacht.
More importantly, according to conspiracy theories, Jews of all people are behind the increase in abortions. Why? Because Jews, according to the usual conspiracy theories, are pursuing the goal of exterminating the respective non-Jewish population. Well, perhaps you are familiar with these conspiracy theories about the great population exchange. This is something that is also on the rise. It is very interesting to observe that on the one hand it is anti-Muslim, because of course it is mostly directed against the increase in the Muslim population, but if you look a little further, you will often read: “Who is behind this mass immigration? It’s the Jews, they are controlling the immigration of Muslims to Europe.” It’s really very difficult for my brain to comprehend this level of absurdity, but it’s true. And these are all very, very old topoi of anti-Semitic incitement and propaganda. I’m really only quoting here from the Stürmer as an example. There it says, yes, in 1944: “It was Jewish doctors who earned huge sums of money from abortion.” So you can see that there are clear continuities here too.
And now I would like to go into a little more detail about the Holocaust comparison in the corona sceptic, anti-vaccination and lateral thinking scene. I’ll start by quoting from the RIAS annual reports “Antisemitic incidents in Germany for the year 2022”: “There were, for example, equations of state measures in the course of the coronavirus pandemic with antisemitic legislation during National Socialism. In Zwickau, a speaker at several so-called anti-corona walks relativised the Shoah by comparing the situation of people not vaccinated against corona with that of persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany.” This is what it could look like, for example. Again, the same inscription that is instrumentalised and changed of programme. It could also look like this: “Inoculation equals Zyclon B”, the gas that was used for gassing in the death camps. If you memorise this image, you might have an aha moment at a later point where I display something similar, but which allows you to understand the background a little more precisely. And this one is also exciting. “Anne Frank would be with us.” So I’m sure you’ve also heard these comparisons with Sophie Scholl and so on, it’s all in roughly the same vein.
Also exciting: doctors who administered vaccinations were labelled “Mengele’s grandson” at a Dresden demonstration that also passed by the new synagogue in Dresden. There were also stickers showing virologist Christian Drosten next to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. I could go on and on, but for now I will concentrate on one comparison that I find particularly revealing, namely the comparison using so-called Jewish stars. This is what the Jewish star looked like when reinterpreted by vaccination sceptics. It has to be said that this also has numerous precursors. There were such Jewish stars in all kinds of contexts, they even existed for diesel drivers who saw themselves as victims of a dictatorship. There was also one for AfD people, for example, who have also attached themselves to something like this. So anyone who wasn’t too lazy.
Now one could question whether the self-comparison with the victims of the Nazi regime using the Jewish star is a genuine comparison at all. For it is particularly dirty in the sense formulated at the beginning in that it evokes its own reversal. That sounds a bit postmodern, but it is meant quite specifically. The comparison is not simply a clumsily limping comparison, but one that is turned on its head. It is a so-called inverse comparison, which is regularly used by ideologues and demagogues of all stripes and which is in no way intended to create a genuine analogy with a victim group, let alone an identification. Perhaps you have also followed and noticed this. For example, there was a prominent column by Harald Martenstein that caused a stir, which the Tagesspiegel then withdrew, so to speak. Martenstein then republished it on his own website. As a result, it was widely received. And in this column he ultimately expressed the idea, “Yes, it’s not anti-Semitic at all with the Jewish star, they just want to, well, it’s tasteless, but not anti-Semitic, they just want to act like victims.” That may even be the case in individual cases, you can do that, you would have to find out psychologically somehow, and we can’t do that. But if you look at the overall context and see exactly where these comparisons come from and how they are used and by whom they are used, I think a completely different picture will emerge. And that’s what I’m going to try to do now.
The sole purpose of such comparisons is the appropriation and reinterpretation of a narrative. A show appropriation, as you could say, an appropriation of the Shoah. The star bearers stage themselves as the new, actual Jews, i.e. the true victims of today, while the old Jews in their phantasms, conversely, function as the string-pullers of the crisis and its capitalist profiteers. This is, so to speak, the part that remains a little below the surface and often becomes invisible and is then either deliberately or unintentionally ignored by naive or deliberately trivialising people, as in Martenstein’s case. But you only need to do a little research to actually find this larger part of the iceberg. I’ll give you a few clues in a moment.
Relevant comments and posts prove that this is the main intention behind the appropriation of the Jewish star in such a drastic manner that it should leave no room for doubt. “Yellow vaccination pass for all Goyim, i.e. for all non-Jews. What is happening here, what is happening here is Jewish revenge.” There is no comma. That’s why you have to be careful with the syntax. That’s what it says on a conspiracy-theory Telegram channel. And Attila Hildmann, who is probably also known to everyone, chimes in. “The Jews are celebrating their final victory against the Goyim, who are murdering them with lethal injections.” So now, of course, you can see through this “yellow star for Jews, yellow vaccination card for all Goyim”. Yes, you can see very clearly what this Jewish star actually means in the reinterpretation of the vaccination sceptics. Or at least what it is directly associated with. Another quote from the Telegram channel: “Patriotic Europeans against the Zionisation of the West. In the past, the Jew poisoned the well and today there are vaccinations. The Jew was and is a poisoner.” Yes, you may be familiar with this well poisoning topos, it’s ancient and you’d have to go back to medieval times to talk about it.
At a coronavirus demonstration in Dresden in 2022, one participant carried an anti-Semitic sign that read “Stop coronavirus gene therapy.” So “Stop!”, probably, “Corona gene therapy and the power of the elites Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Soros and consorts”. There, too, you can see the capitalist profiteers of the pandemic, as I put it earlier, all of whom are Jews, of course. A small leap: a completely different group, which believes it urgently needs relief and justification, is currently achieving top performances in the appropriation of the Jewish star. Quote: “Just as the Jews were hunted in the 20th century, the Russians are being hunted in the 21st century. The Russians are the new Jews.” So writes a political scientist and Duma deputy close to Putin, who is on various sanctions lists. Russians loyal to the regime repeatedly use sanctions and travel restrictions as an opportunity to portray themselves as victims of global Russophobia, a Russophobia that could lead to a holocaust tomorrow.
Here, too, there are endless quotations. I’ll just mention one particularly memorable and impressive example: one of Russia’s most popular musicians, Sergei Schnurov, who has produced clips that have been clicked on 100 million times, uses the same mental image. One of his more recent music videos shows two dancers in traditional Russian garb with a Star of David sewn on, which are not yellow but blue, but are clearly recognisable as stigmatising Jewish stars in their function. This is what it looks like. Traditional Russian robes, as you can see, and a blue Star of David on top. But the way it is placed. And if you consider the lyrics, it becomes clear that the yellow people are actually meant. In the lyrics, the singer wonders whether the Russians in the West won’t soon be wearing identifying marks on their clothes. And at this moment, one of the dancers points to his star. “The Russian,” sings Schnurow, “is now like the Jew in Berlin in 1940.” A singer joins in with a chorus: “The bastards are starting the genocide piece by piece.” At the end of the song, Schnurow demands, “Europeans tell it like it is, don’t keep quiet. The Russian is the new sow-Jew for you. You’d love to burn us all in the oven.”
The article by a francophone pro-Russian blogger is particularly characteristic. “The Russians of today,” it says, “are the Jews of yesterday.” That’s the headline for a start. The text tells of a globally orchestrated suppression of Russian culture and Russian people, whose ultimate goal is the destruction of their nation. One of the illustrations is a collage. What you are about to see is so abstruse that I can hardly put it into words. Yes, ultimately everyone is a Nazi and the Russians are the new Jews and the Red Square in the background is obviously being bombed. So Macron is also interesting, as Hitler here with an armband on which the party abbreviation, LREM is written, is arranged as a swastika.
This depiction shows how self-image and enemy image are intertwined within such thought patterns in the form of the Jewish star. As I said, if someone stylises themselves as a new Jewish victim, whether of the Western world, whether of vaccination regulations, whether of the diesel ban, whatever, if someone stylises themselves in this way, they inevitably suggest that this enemy, like a fascist and National Socialist, can be nothing other than the ultimate evil, which requires and also legitimises ultimate counter-violence. This function of legitimising violence and war is always, or at least almost always, enrolled in such dirty Holocaust comparisons. To brand the enemy as a Nazi means to dehumanise him, because such an inhuman would have gambled away his humanity to a certain extent. This is precisely the narrative framework of Russian war propaganda, which has been persistently calling for the denazification of Ukraine for years. The RIA news agency repeatedly refers to the “genocide of the population of Donbass” in inverted commas, as Putin claimed shortly before the war began. Margarita Simonjan, the head of the propaganda channel RT, formerly Russia Today, constantly warns that Russians in Ukraine are to be deported to concentration camps and poisoned with gas. Fake war crimes and mass murders of Russians by today’s Ukronazists and Ukrofascists are juxtaposed with historical accounts of Nazi atrocities everywhere. This follows the same principle of inversion as the use of Jewish stars for self-stigmatisation. And so, in the case of Russian propaganda, it finds its logical culmination in the fact that the Jewish president of Ukraine, whose family only partially survived the Holocaust, appears as the supreme Ukronarist. To the propaganda believer, this probably seems no less plausible than people who administer vaccinations and can be described as Mengele’s successors, Mengele’s grandsons, for example.
The Putinist myth of the ukrofascists became readily accessible within the German lateral thinking scene. For example, a user who has since been convicted, not for this but for other things, posted an unvaccinated Jew star on Facebook with the caption “The hunt for humans can start again.” Although I think he had a fine for that too, I can’t remember exactly, but I think he was also fined for it. This was later followed by a picture showing Selenski next to Hitler and suggesting a resemblance. Underneath, the comment: “At least the one on the right was wearing a suit and wasn’t begging.” Such juxtapositions and comparisons of Zelensky and Hitler can be found in overwhelming numbers in the Russian-language segment of the internet, often even enriched by the insinuation that Zelensky and Hitler are distantly related, of course via Hitler’s supposed Jewish ancestors. This is also a topos that you may have come across before. Hitler was of course also Jewish. A fake book cover shows Selenski’s portrait and the title “Mein Kampf”. And sometimes it is said that Selenski was even worse than Hitler.
All these continuities, which could be traced endlessly, show all too clearly the highly dangerous web of extremist ideologems, the use of the Jewish star and similarly instrumentalised Holocaust comparisons are integrated into. Even if, at a superficial glance, it may disguise itself as a selective, less significant, diffuse historical borrowing, the radically symbolic reverse comparison using the Jewish star is, as the cases described show, a dirty metaphor; it not only voices the actual moment of comparison, i.e. victimhood, but also invokes the entire anti-Semitic conspiracy theory world view. And with it, not least, the age-old archetypal image of the Jew as a devious schemer and well-poisoner who is said to be responsible for all epidemics from cholera to Covid, for all wars and crises.
On the subject of war: in protest against the UN resolution on the situation in the Middle East and the silence about the atrocities committed by Hamas, Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan also pinned a yellow Jewish star to his lapel in front of the UN Security Council. Even if, as a descendant of Holocaust survivors and representative of the Jewish state, he may feel a certain justification for doing so, he was rightly reprimanded for this action, including by representatives of Jewish memorial organisations. Given his office and his family history, he should have respected the sanctity of this symbol. And that brings me to the subject of the Gaza war. In this context, Holocaust comparisons are booming. Last year’s Holocaust memorial days were not yet over when the hashtag “gazaholocaust” ascended to the top trends on German Twitter with several thousand posts. The examples are legion. This now far surpasses anything we have seen before, even though the topos is very old, long before the high number of victims, long before the new flare-up of the Gaza war. These topoi that we’re going to see have been around for many, many years. I’ll just go through a few of them now to give you an idea. Of course, you can also see a certain similarity in principle here. Also in the form of a swastika. That’s also interesting and that’s how it was interpreted in Dortmund. “The irony of becoming what you once hated”. That’s my favourite. Not the person, but the image. One of the Hamas leaders saying here: “This new Holocaust must stop.”
“I know that Germany must inevitably sympathise with Israel, because it is due to our past history, the years before 1945, if you remember, and since then Germany is no longer allowed to speak negatively about Israel, because as soon as Germany does, it gets the N-stamp. But what have we learnt from the years before 1944? Let’s be honest. My vote doesn’t count…” That’s enough. Yes, there are plenty of videos like this on TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, on all networks. This is an image from a demo. You can see here, you can see here the shower heads from the facilities in the death camps. They’re being put together with the bombs and people are asking: “What’s the difference?” Auschwitz and Gaza.
Yes, and that brings me to my last example, which I’m sure you’ve also noticed. I would now like to focus on this example towards the end. It was vehemently discussed. A comparison that the journalist Masha Gessen made in an essay shortly before she was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize in Bremen, but then without the involvement of the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the City of Bremen, which had withdrawn at short notice. As you have no doubt seen, this went through all the feature pages and of course numerous accusations of censorship were levelled. It was said that Hannah Arendt would not receive the Hannah Arendt Prize today and so on and so forth. And all this despite the fact that she received the prize despite everything, just not under the sponsorship or not under assembled sponsorship.
The emotional and dramaturgical culmination of the essay in question is an equation between Gaza and the ghetto. Compared to open-air prison, ghetto must be considered the more appropriate term. Gaza is, quote, “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.” And about the current war, it says “The ghetto is being liquidated.” How does Gessen attempt to justify the legitimacy and even necessity of such comparisons, both in her award speech and in the numerous interviews she has given since her article was published? An epistemological line of argument seems to be essential for Gessen. I quote: “We make sense of the world through comparisons,” she says in her acceptance speech. I would argue that this is an anthropological triviality. However, her considerations are based on conceptual vagueness, which leads to contradictions.
Whether out of intellectual carelessness or manipulative calculation, Gessen mixes completely divergent meanings of the word comparison. On the one hand, it means the process of comparing, which is of course also absolutely trivial, the process of comparing, but on the other hand it also means its linguistically manifested result and, thirdly, it is used indistinctly in the sense of an equation, which in turn contradicts, fourthly, the narrower literary understanding of the term as a metaphor linked by comparative words. When it comes to the trivial epistemological indispensability of comparisons, as Gessen says, “Only next to other colours does a colour become a colour”, what is meant is the activity, the procedure of comparing, the observation of several objects with regard to their similarities and differences. In fact, Gessen claims to the taz that her Holocaust comparison was intended to establish an essential similarity, “Sameness”. She then articulates this alleged identity between the ghetto and Gaza in a particularly unambiguous way, namely as an equation, but summarises the conditions in Gaza with the formula “In other words, a ghetto.”
In her essay itself, this equation is already counteracted in a distorted way by various restrictions and thus appears to be partially retracted. Gessen immediately admits that there are essential differences. In the SZ interview, she even emphasises “A comparison is not an equation, but rather highlights the differences.” Interesting. The differences, which Gessen’s text obscures rather than clarifies, are in fact so essential that a precise comparison procedure should have led to the equation being rejected. For it is precisely the essential, the specific nature of the Holocaust, “the counter-rational”, as Dan Diner calls it, of the extermination of the Jews as a fundamental difference, as Saul Friedländer calls it, that Gessen leaves out of her comparison. This corresponds roughly to the example above, in which the essential thing about Socrates, namely his wisdom, was subtracted from the comparison. You are like Socrates because you exist, except that you are not wise, you are not a philosopher and you are not bearded. And so Gessen then has to admit in the Spiegel interview: “Of course a one-to-one comparison is absurd.” So you see, this contradicts itself at every point. In view of this disparity, there is at least one point on which you have to agree with Gessen. In her award speech, she says: “If we use bad metaphors or analogies, we miss the point.” It’s a good sentence. The only question is why Gessen is going against her own commandment.
As Hannah Arendt’s biographer, Thomas Mayer, aptly points out in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Gessen follows a general equation mania between Israel’s war in Gaza and the hits of the National Socialists. This equation mania may be collectively psychologically explainable, but first and foremost Holocaust comparisons, thanks to their explosiveness, promise attention and scandal. By possibly speculating on this, Gessen is doing her cause a disservice. Because in the scandal, the discourse shifts from criticism, from the critical conditions in Gaza to the semi-academic question of comparability. And above all to the media persona of Masha Gessen, as could be seen in the days following this scandal in all of Germany’s feature pages.
Her affinity for polite and gimmicky rhetoric becomes even more blatant when Gessen invokes a kind of “German ban on comparison”, as expressed in the talk of the incomparability of the Holocaust. This topos, which has its origins in national conservatism and historical revisionism, is arousing the new right and, since the so-called Historikerstreit 2.0 at the latest, also post-colonial minds. Gessen thus perpetuates a pseudo-subversive, populist gesture of defiance that could be reconstructed as “one is still allowed to compare”. Incidentally, Gessen’s campaign against the windmills of an imagined comparison ban machinery is also based on the above-mentioned confusion of comparison procedure and comparison result.
Unless they were malicious, no reasonable person would come up with the idea of understanding the incomparability of the Holocaust in a procedural sense, i.e. that the Holocaust should not be compared with other historical events in terms of similarities and differences. The very concept of incomparability contradicts this absurd idea per se, because incomparable, and therefore singular or specific qualities only become recognisable as such through comparison. And this is what Gessen herself says with her anthropologically trivial observation. Incomparability can only be the result of a comparative operation. If, for example, I judge that a certain work of art is incomparable in its originality, this presupposes a prior comparison with other works known to me. Only comparative results that relativise the Holocaust through sweeping analogies – inappropriate equations, as Volker Weiß calls them – are incriminated in the sense of the incomparability of the Holocaust. As a reaction to such erosion efforts, Habermas postulated the incomparability and singularity of the Holocaust in the first place in the course of the first historians’ controversy.
This actually brings me to the end, which will be very brief, because I hope to enter into dialogue with you and also talk about this with the experts on comparisons present. The singularity thesis that I just mentioned, which was formulated by Habermas, serves to protect the commemoration of the crime against humanity of the Shoah from its ongoing strategic instrumentalisation, as is displayed in the examples I have listed. This also shows that the Holocaust comparison generally serves no enlightening or analytical purpose, but rather scandalisation and, as I would like to call it, revealing concealment. The anti-Semitic narratives operating in the background repeatedly act as a cement between the most diverse ideologies. That’s something you realise when you look at a cross-section or a passage through the different areas. There are many others. But more than that, I think this is a discursive vehicle of reactionary, misanthropic and conspiracy-theory ideologems. A vehicle that whisperingly insinuates what cannot be said directly by means of a diffuse, dirty comparative strategy.
That is my meagre conclusion. I hope it was bearable, both in terms of the visual material and my presentation. Thank you for your attention and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how we can discuss this further.