German society is once again in an uproar over the Holocaust. This time, however, it has nothing to do with coming to terms with its past. Rather, the current controversy surrounds someone who is generally far away from the continuous debates in Holocaust studies: Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe. The storm surrounding Mbembe, a widely-respected public intellectual and scholar of colonial legacies, illuminates one of the major fault lines in Holocaust studies and in Jewish public life: the question of Holocaust exceptionalism.
The widespread controversy surrounding Mbembe began with the publication of his essay “The Society of Enmity,” which first appeared in German three years ago. In one of the essay’s earliest passages, Mbembe compares the case of apartheid in South Africa with the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Later in the essay, he links South Africa’s brutal system of apartheid with the murder of European Jewry, claiming that “the apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe — the latter, though, in an extreme fashion and within a quite different setting — constituted two emblematic manifestations of this fantasy of separation.” This linkage led to allegations of antisemitism by individuals such as Germany’s right-wing Free Democratic Party spokesperson Lorenz Deutsch and the rapid defense of Mbembe by prominent intellectuals such as Aleida Assmann and Michael Rothberg.
It should be noted that nowhere in his essay does Mbembe seek to equate the Nazi project of racial murder with the continuing plight of Palestinians. Indeed, he notes that the destruction of European Jews was “extreme” and took place “within a different setting.” However, the fact that such a controversy often arises after the invocation of the Holocaust demonstrates a core cleavage in Holocaust memory: the hazards of viewing the Holocaust as incomparable.
