The so-called Historikerstreit 2.0, in which a new debate on the singularity of the Shoah was initiated by predominantly Western academics, lacks a certain degree of precision when it comes to the concept of singularity, as such.
Hannah Arendt was already aware of the problems that would one day arise around the concept of singularity. For this reason, she created a polemic against it in her controversial and famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem, because in her eyes it deprived humanity of the idea that a crime of such magnitude could be repeated. What is singular, i.e. unique, remains so. This leads to a fatal conclusion and difficulty in coming to terms with these crimes. Instead, Arendt argued in favour of the concept of unprecedentedness, as it is not only more precise, but also hold up the possibility of such a mass crime as a warning to the future: something unprecedented need not necessarily remain unprecedented.
At times, the complexity of this conceptual debate and the uproar it caused may have led to a persistent silence about another unprecedented crime linked to the Second World War. Whether this is due to the crime having been committed by the allied USA or – unlike the Shoah – because it lacks a racial component, remains to be seen, at least for a moment. For the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are related to the Shoah in that both crimes mark the beginning (and not the end, which is what the term ‘singularity’ would like to suggest) of a tendency towards mass, mechanised killing in which the moment of irreparability anticipates itself. In his work Education after Auschwitz, Adorno already pointed out ‘that the invention of the atomic bomb, which can literally wipe out hundreds of thousands in one fell swoop, belongs in the same historical context as genocide.’
The task of a pluralistic culture of remembrance would therefore be to consistently draw attention to these connections, not only to keep the memory of these crimes alive, but also to serve as a permanent warning to a present in which the danger of nuclear annihilation is greater than it was in the days of Hiroshima.
