Ecrire la Shoah face au démon de l'analogie

From the first testimonies on the camps and, more broadly, on what in French we would end up forty years later by calling the Shoah, we needed to resort to external models. How to understand this incomprehensible, how to represent this unrepresentable, how to say this unspeakable? So many questions that have gradually turned into doxa during the confrontation with this questioned but insoluble problem. Analogy was one of the answers. Because this event, this catastrophe, this disaster, this cataclysm, this "holocaust", it was necessary to bring them closer to something in order to define the thing. Analogy, by which we identify a similarity between two elements of a different nature, then came to mind almost spontaneously. But the reconciliations it authorizes can, as this file highlights, turn into an unfortunate escape.