Evil

Evil—the Nobel laureate William Golding wrote that anyone who lived through the years of the Second World War ‘without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head’. Why, then, do accounts by Holocaust perpetrators and fictions that focus on perpetrators and which appear to teach us about evil fail to do so, swerve from the issue, and seem shallow and unproductive? By working through Hannah Arendt’s changing view of evil, this chapter develops a way to answer this question and examine the significance of evil, first in relation to texts by perpetrators (often, like Speer with Sereny, by or with proxies) then in relation to fiction about perpetrators, concluding with the most significant work of Holocaust fiction in recent years, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

The Public Secret

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.

Disorientalism Today

While Chapter 4 explored the benefits of using ideas from Holocaust studies to analyse a novella about a colonial genocide, this chapter analyses the risks involved in such a process. Looking at a range of texts from the 1990s to the 2010s about genocide and atrocity in Africa, and drawing on postcolonial scholarship, it suggests that there are ambiguous limitations in using the ideas taken from our readings of the literature of the Holocaust, widely defined, to understand accounts of the Rwandan genocide and other atrocities in Africa and begins to advance some concepts for reading these other accounts of genocide. The authors evaluated include, amongst others, Ishmael Beah, Gil Courtemanche, David Eggers, Uzodinma Iweala, and Paul Rusesabagina.

Introduction

‘Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?’ asked Imre Kertész, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance lecture. He continued: one ‘does not have to choose the Holocaust as one’s subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades’....

Conclusion

What good is literature? ‘Perhaps’, wrote Sebald, ‘only to help us to remember, and teach us to understand that some strange connections cannot be explained by causal logic.’1 This book has followed Kertész’s suggestion that the ‘broken voice’ of the Holocaust will remain through culture: it has also explored the role of literature in memory and analysed some of the strange links between the past and the present which shape the meaning of both. Some themes have recurred....

Stasis

The idea of ‘working though’ the past has played a central role in many literary, historical, philosophical, and wider cultural debates about the Holocaust. However, this chapter argues that two major writers, in different ways and for divergent reasons, refuse ‘working through’ and aim instead at ‘stasis’: the Nobel laureate and survivor, Imre Kertész (with a focus on his Fateless and Kaddish for an Unborn Child) and the hugely celebrated German writer W. G. Sebald (focusing on his The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz). This stasis is a turn, in the name of memory, against the flexibility and fluidity of memory itself. However, its meaning for the two writers differs profoundly in relation to issues of trauma, evil, complicity, temporality, and responsibility. The chapter concludes by contrasting these with Otto Dov Kulka’s award-winning Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death.

Post-Holocaust Kitsch

The divide between the events of the Holocaust and its representation has been a source of controversy since the sixties and is an inevitable result of the growth of Holocaust consciousness. One particularly influential and worrying area is the growth of post-Holocaust kitsch. Though very different, the celebrated narrative sculpture, Hell, by Jake and Dinos Chapman, and the phenomenally successful novel for children, John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, are both contemporary examples of this. This chapter analyses the complexities of these responses to horror, and discusses what they mean for our understanding of the Holocaust. In the case of Boyne, this is an issue of special concern because this book is so widely used in schools.

Disorientalism

How far is it possible to bring together the scholarly insights of postcolonialism and Holocaust and genocide literature? The aim is not to subsume either but to place them together into a dialogue to explore the literary subjectivity of the ‘disoriented’. To explore this idea, the chapter reads Joseph Conrad’s canonical novella Heart of Darkness as a text by a low-level perpetrator of a colonial genocide, and argues that this illuminates some of its celebrated and famously obscure characteristics, especially those of complicity and secrecy, as well as making some very counter-intuitive suggestions about the role of Kurtz.