“comprehend the incomprehensible, compare the incomparable”

“Comprehend the incomprehensible, compare the incomparable” expresses the tension at the center of Michael Berg’s reflection on the Holocaust: he rejects any comparison that erases the decisive difference between victims and perpetrators, but also questions whether revulsion, shame, and guilt can be the second generation’s only response to historical knowledge.

The Limit of Comparison

Michael frames the expression as a prohibition against claiming mastery over the extermination of the Jews. To compare perpetrators, victims, the dead, the living, survivors, and descendants risks turning the horrors into material for discussion, even when no one intends to question the horrors themselves. The expression therefore sets a boundary around inquiry: understanding cannot mean making the event fully comprehensible or commensurable with other experiences.

That boundary does not erase moral distinctions. Michael says that any linkage between people must preserve the critical difference between being forced into the world of the death camps and entering it voluntarily, and between enduring suffering and imposing it on others. The phrase holds together two demands that can pull against each other: resist easy comparison, but do not let the limits of comparison blur responsibility.

Inquiry and Silence

The expression appears within Michael’s account of his own intellectual unease. He recalls that, during the trial, he had begun to ask what his generation should do with knowledge of the extermination. He had not lost the seminar’s eagerness to explore and cast light on things once the proceedings began. Yet the demand to inquire seemed to collide with the conviction that the horrors should be met with silence, revulsion, shame, and guilt.

His repeated question—whether silence could be all there was—makes the expression more than a rule against careless analogy. It marks an unresolved problem in historical understanding: inquiry can risk reducing atrocity to an object, while refusing inquiry can leave the next generation without a way to confront what it has inherited. The phrase names that impasse rather than resolving it.

Moral and Narrative Significance

Michael’s reflection insists that linking generations or experiences is not the same as making them equivalent. Its insistence on difference guards against relativizing the crimes, while its demand to ask what knowledge requires prevents moral revulsion from becoming a final substitute for thought. The expression consequently works as both restraint and provocation: it limits what understanding may claim, yet leaves open the obligation to examine the past.

The phrase also condenses the narrator’s conflict between the language of legal and historical examination and the felt inadequacy of that language before mass murder. Convictions and punishments may follow a trial, but Michael wonders whether they can answer the larger question facing those who came afterward. “Comprehend the incomprehensible, compare the incomparable” gives that question its sharpest form without pretending that a neat answer is possible.