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if we are to escape the mystification that frequently hassurrounded it. ' We appear to have three principaloptions:I) We can dismiss the whole question of "uniqueness," on one of two grounds. Eberhard Jackel, forinstance, suggests that the uniqueness issue adds littleof value to our understanding of the Holocaust. Heasserts the event's uniqueness but then states, "incidently,the question of uniqueness is after all not all thatdecisive. Would it change anything, had theNational-Socialist murder not been unique?"" On theother hand, Schorsch, as mentioned above, recommendsdismissal of the issue on the grounds that it only servesto add a politically divisive element to the discussion.2) We can attempt to account for why it is that the"uniqueness" claim has become integral to the discussionof the meaning of the Holocaust while it has beentreated as merely peripheral to the analysis of otherhistorical events of major consequence.3) We can concentrate our analysis upon how the"uniqueness question" helps as well as hinders us inour quest to elucidate the meaning and significance ofthe Holocaust.Though we are sympathetic with those who confinetheir strategy to the first option, we shall reject it asunrealistic. For, while it is true — as Schorsch pointsout — that the claim to uniqueness sometimes does posea difficulty for those who would gain a better understandingof. the Holocaust by comparing it with othercases of mass human destruction, it does not seem tous that we can evade the "uniqueness question" bysimply disregarding it. The "uniqueness question" ismuch too central to the literature of the Holocaust tobe igriored. The second option as listed above is ofdecisive import, for it is always helpful to understandwhat lies behind any particular perspective on an event,and especially so when the range of perspectives onthe event is so much a part of the event itself and givesrise to so much controversy. We shall be exercisingthe third option, because it builds upon the second— depending as it does upon clarification of themeaning of the claim of "uniqueness" with respect tothe Holocaust — although a full account of the matterlies beyond the scope of this chapter.Explicating the UniquenessQuestionIn the end we shall try to show why explicatingthe "uniqueness question" is the strategy that is mostfruitful in understanding the Holocaust itself. However,although we shall be adopting this third option, let usfirst sketch some of the factors that have tended tomake the "uniqueness question" itself a part of theproblem in understanding the Holocaust. Before wecan see how it can be treated as part of the "solution, "so to speak, we must see why it has become "part ofthe problem. "It seems to be beyond question that the peculiarrole that the "uniquenessquestion" has come to playin relation to the historical accounts and understandingof the Holocaust is largely due to the insistence of amajor part of the Jewish community that the Holocaustmust be viewed as unique." It was a segment of theJewish community, in fact, that devised and acceptedthe very label "Holocaust" in order to express theuniqueness of the event," literally defining it as suchby the name that they gave it. " The process by meansof which a series of historical incidents becomes knownas an "event" is well known, for it is only by gatheringinto meaningful clusters the apparently separate andunrelated facts of historical happenings that we are ableto form coherent concepts of what has happened in thepast.The naming of such a cluster is but one step inthe process of self-understanding, and so it is easy tosee why a segment of the Jewish community has cometo view the naming of the Holocaust as an attempt tocapture and preserve the uniqueness of meaning thatis implicit in the facts so named. As those facts becameknown in the aftermath of World War II they immediatelygave rise to a numbing horror in which the humanmind seemed to be incapable of dealing with them, ofgrasping them in the normal fashion in which we dealwith the factual materials of history. The awful depthand scope of these "incidents, " of these particularhistorical facts, were of such horrible dimensions asto seem completely incomprehensible. It is from thisresponse, we believe, that the claim to the "uniqueness"of the Holocaust was generated." And it is in thecontext of this response that the search for thosecharacteristics and traits that mark the Holocaust asunique must be understood. For it is precisely thissearch, and the various proposals that have issued fromit, that is responsible for making the "uniquenessquestion" a part of the event which the "Holocaust"names: it has become part of the problem of theunderstanding and comprehension of what happened.The peculiar question of "uniqueness" may not havebeen an inevitable component of the problem, but itis clearly, at this point, an inescapable one.Quite aside from the origins of the "uniquenessquestion" and its integration into the total problematicof the literature of the Holocaust, at least three othersubstantive problems concerning the characterizationof the Holocaust as "unique" can be readily stated,though they are not so readily solved. We must, firstThe Issue of the Holocaust as a Unique Event 49