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outside the normal dimensions of our terrestrial history,beyond all historical explanation and appraisal. It is,they say, not merely unique; it is, to use the Eckhardts'phrase, "uniquely unique. "~Menachem Rosensaft sums up this view succinctly:the "Holocaust stands alone in time as an aberrationwithin history. "~ And Elie Wiesel writes that "theuniverse of concentration camps, by its design, liesoutside if not "" beyond history. Its vocabulary belongsto it alone. In Bauer's striking characterization, theHolocaust is viewed "" by these writers as an "upsidedownmiracle. These absolutists see the Holocaustas unique simply because it happened, and concerningtheir view nothing needs to be added.ContextualistsThose reluctant to accept either the trivialist orthe absolutist position may be termed "contextual ists. "Contextualists find that, although there may be distinctfeatures of the Holocaust that set it apart and that mightremain of more importance than its similarities andresemblances to other events, it is central to their thesisthat the Holocaust always be examined within thecontext of history. Comparison, many state, does notpreclude uniqueness. Often it is the very act of compar-ison, the examination of the Holocaust against thebackdrop of history, that serves to highlight thosefeatures that render the event unique, but only relativelyso. Other turning points in history, other great crises,they suggest, contain elements both comparable withand related to the Holocaust.With this approach the Holocaust is neither "extrahistorical, " in the sense claimed by the absolutists, norjust another atrocity, as the trivialists maintain. Thismeans that it is possible to view the Holocaust asunprecedented in many respects, that it is an event ofcritical and transformational importance in the historyof our world, and yet it is still an event that must beaddressed as a part of that history. It can and shouldbe compared to other genocidal incidents, describedand analyzed in language free from the "mystification"that only blocks our understanding, and made asaccessible to explanation as possible. It should not beassumed, on a priori grounds of its absolute "uniqueness," that what caused the Holocaust is forever beyondthe reach of the tools of historical analysis, or that theconsequences cannot be explored by means of socialtheory.The HistorikerstreitHere we must note what has become known asthe Historikerstreit [historians' debate]. In this debate,a group of reknowned German scholars, most of whoseessays and hooks have not yet been translated from theGerman, consider many important issues of substanceand method, including those of the role of the ThirdReich in German history, the place of Germany inworld politics, as well as issues of German nationalpride. All of these works deal on some level with justhow and to what extent the Third Reich and theHolocaust can be contextualized within German andworld history. But from our perspective it is importantto note that "of all the issues raised by the controversy,the singularity of Auschwitz "" is the most central and themost hotly debated.It was Ernst Nolte's essay of 1986 together withJurgen Habermas'" response that first triggered theHistorians' Debate. Habermas was responding to somehistorians," such as Ernst Nolte, Michael Sturmer andAndreas Hillgruber who he believed had used thecontextualization of the Holocaust in such a way aseither to completely eliminate or to relegate to insignificanceany of its unique aspects. Nolte, for example,takes the idea of contextualization to such an extremeand so relativizes the events of the Holocaust that herenders it a rather normal happening of our era, almostto be expected when examined in the context of otherhistorical events of our time, highly analogous in manyrespects to the Russian Revolution and so not evenunique in the sense ofbeing unprecendented. Peter Gayhas called Nolte's approach "comparative trivializa-tion"" in which the unique qualities of the Holocaustare reduced to features of insignificant implication.The uniqueness of the Nazi crimes, their comparabilityto other atrocities, becomes a crucial questionfor German national identity and Germany's place inworld history. As Charles S. Maier has explained it:If Auschwitz is admittedly dreadful, butdreadful as only one specimen of genocide... then Germany can still aspire toreclaim a national acceptance that no onedenies to perpetrators of other massacres,such as Soviet Russia. But if the Final Solu-tion remains noncomparable. .. the past maynever be "worked "through, the future nevernormalized, and German nationhood mayremain forever tainted, like some well foreverpoisoned. ~Habermas and others consider that Nolte and theconservative historians have used extreme historicizationor relativization of the Holocaust and presentedit with apologist intent to help Germany "regain a senseof the lost national identity. ""Other positions regarding the uniqueness issue andthe contextualization or comparability of the Holocaustand the Third Reich emerged from Habermas' confron-The Issue of the Holocaust as a Unique Event 51