In his notorious statement from The Differend (1998), the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard likens the Holocaust to a powerful earthquake that has demolished not only the physical landscape but also the very instruments that can measure the earthquake, which, in the case of the Holocaust, include documentation that might help the historian analyze and reconstruct the event (56–58). Although Lyotard's analogy is widely known and quoted, scholars, in particular historians, have vehemently objected to it, for it appears to ignore the massive amount of data gathered on the events of the Nazi genocide of the European Jews, information that not only takes the form of facts and documents but also is expressed in testimony, historical reconstruction, and imaginative literature. Moreover, Lyotard's image of the earthquake, which Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi calls “a metaphor to beat all metaphors” (122), collides like all metaphors with the limits of its own ability to adequately contain the object it is meant to represent and thus dramatically demonstrates the danger inherent in the metaphorical process. For the Holocaust was not an earthquake, not a geological disaster. It was not the result of the unleashing of the powerful but disinterested forces of nature, but rather a series of events in which the German nation systematically identified, isolated, and murdered millions of Jews who were both its own countrymen and citizens of other, sovereign countries.