scholarly journals Detecting the Past: Detective Novels, the Nazi Past, and Holocaust Impiety

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Christine Berberich
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Inadequate Response ◽  
Holocaust Literature ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emotional Detachment ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Gillian Rose

Crime writing is not often associated with Holocaust representations, yet an emergent trend, especially in German literature, combines a general, popular interest in crime and detective fiction with historical writing about the Holocaust, or critically engages with the events of the Shoah. Particularly worthy of critical investigation are Bernhard Schlink’s series of detective novels focusing on private investigator Gerhard Selb, a man with a Nazi background now investigating other people’s Nazi pasts, and Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case (2011) which engages with the often inadequate response of the post-war justice system in Germany to Nazi crimes. In these novels, the detective turns historian in order to solve historic cases. Importantly, readers also follow in the detectives’ footsteps, piecing together a slowly emerging historical jigsaw in ways that compel them to question historical knowledge, history writing, processes of institutionalised commemoration and memory formation, all of which are key issues in Holocaust Studies. The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, I will argue that the significance of this kind of fiction has been insufficiently recognised by critics, perhaps in part because of its connotations as popular fiction. Secondly, I will contend that these texts can be fruitfully analysed by situating them in relation to recent debates about pious and impious Holocaust writing as discussed by Gillian Rose and Matthew Boswell. As a result, these texts act as exemplars of Rose’s contention that impious Holocaust literature succeeds by using new techniques in order to shatter the emotional detachment that has resulted from the use of clichés and familiar tropes in traditional pious accounts; and by placing detectives and readers in a position of moral ambivalence that complicates their understanding of the past on the one hand, and their own moral position on the other.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

scholarly journals John Dickson Carr’s Early Detective Novels and the Gothic Convention.

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Joanna Kokot
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
World Model ◽  
The Past ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The World ◽  
Rational Order

<p>Even if the Gothic romance may be considered as one of the predecessors of detective fiction, the world model proposed by the latter seems to exclude what was the essence of the former: the irrational underlying the proposed world model. However, some of detective novel writers deploy Gothic conventions in their texts, thus questioning the rational order of the reality presented there. Such a genological syncretism is typical - among others - of the novels by John Dickson Carr. The paper is an analysis of Gothic conventions and their functions in four earliest novels by Carr, featuring a French detective-protagonist, Henri Bencolin. It concentrates on elements of Gothic horror, on the atmosphere of terror as well as the motif of the past intruding the present.</p>

The Invention of Papal History

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
Commissioned Works ◽  
The One ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
The Church

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city’s significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how history-writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualizing the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530–68), this book shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of patronage and ideology placed on them. This book sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.

Vietnamese Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Pelley
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asian ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Southern State ◽  
The Past ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Political Function ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
North Vietnam

This chapter demonstrates how the process of decolonization and the ensuing separation of Vietnam into a northern and southern state as part of the Cold War in Asia led to different types of history-writing. In both Vietnamese regimes, the writing of history had to serve the state, and in both countries historians emphasized its political function. Whereas North Vietnam located itself in an East Asian and Marxist context, historians of South Vietnam positioned it within a Southeast Asian setting and took a determinedly anti-communist position. After 1986—over a decade after reunification—with past tensions now relaxed, the past could be revaluated more openly under a reformist Vietnamese government that now also permitted much greater interaction with foreign historians.

(Re)storying Japanese Canadian Histories: Artistic Engagements

2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862098726
Author(s):  
Matthew Chin ◽  
Izumi Sakamoto ◽  
Jane Ku ◽  
Ai Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Art Making ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Common Structure ◽  
Academic History ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Japanese Canadian ◽  
Cultural Identity Formation

This paper examines how Japanese Canadian (JC) artists challenge discursive limitations of constructing representations of JC pasts. Their interventions into JC history-making are significant given the rise of interest in and proliferation of JC historical accounts, partly as a result of the accelerated passing of the remaining survivors of JC incarceration within a broader context of unsettled and unsettling discourses around incarceration in JC families and communities. Contrary to narratives of JC history premised on the conventions of academic history writing, we explore how JC artists engage with the past through their creative practices. Focusing on JC artist Emma Nishimura’s exhibit, The weight of what cannot be remembered, we suggest that JC creative history-making practices have important implications for processes of ethno-racial and-cultural identity formation. In so doing, we decenter state-bound history-making processes that reproduce colonial frameworks of JC subjectivity, temporal linearity, and “objectivity.” Instead, we focus on the temporally circuitous way that Nishimura and other JC artists engage with the past through the idiom of personal intimacy in ways that facilitate a more expansive notion of JC identity and community. Though Nishimura’s work is indexical as opposed to representative of contemporary JC art-making, it is significant in tapping into a common structure of feeling among JC artists that emphasizes a notion of JC’ness rooted in the active struggle to establish a relationship with the past. In attending to Nishimura’s work, we highlight the productivity of art-making as a method of (re)storying to expand meaning-making endeavors within and across communities.

For Science and Country: History Writing, Nation Building, and National Embeddedness in Third Republic France, 1870–1914

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Guillaume Lancereau
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The West ◽  
Academic Competition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Territorial Claims

This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.

The Code of History

Beyond Reason ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 87-112
Author(s):  
Sanjay Seth
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Simple Application ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Meaning And Purpose

Showing that history writing is not the simple application of a method to sources bequeathed to us from the past, but rather a code that constructs “the past” in particular ways, this chapter explicates the elements of the code. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose, while constrained by the social circumstances characterizing their times; this time of theirs is dead, and it can only be represented, not resurrected; the past is only ever the human past, and it does not include ghosts, gods, spirits, or nature. In outlining these core elements of the code of history, it engages with those forms of history writing—the history of art, music, and science—that do not always share all the elements of the code, but for that very reason illuminate all the more clearly what the discipline presupposes.

The Anachronism of History

Beyond Reason ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 113-144
Author(s):  
Sanjay Seth
Keyword(s):  
History Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lost In Translation

Modern historiography is a modern and European invention, yet is thought to yield knowledge of all human pasts, giving rise to a paradox explored in this chapter. It is a cardinal sin for history writing to fall prey to anachronism, and yet applying the code of history to times and places where the presumptions that define it were/are not shared is itself anachronistic. What does it mean to write histories of premodern and non-Western pasts that were not disenchanted, where gods had not been deprived of agency, where the past constantly bled into the present, and where texts were not seen as the congealed remains of the purposes and meanings of their human authors? Modern histories of non-Western pasts must, this chapter concludes, be written in recognition that such histories are translations, not better or truer representations; and with acknowledgment of and due attention to the fact that much gets lost in translation.

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