The word Auschwitz is multifaceted. Indeed, Auschwitz is a site of mass atrocity, a museum, a cemetery, a focal point of Holocaust memory, a place of education, a town in south west Poland, a tourist "must-see," and a place where complex negotiations of identity and morality take place. Overshadowing all of these nuances, the word itself has entered common vernacular as shorthand for the Holocaust or, even more generally, as an example of an uncomplicated ethical binary. In this way, the word masks a complex and difficult history, often functioning as a linguistic and historical reduction that relies on its symbolic currency over and above historical accuracy. These complexities were the focus of the second conference of the European Association for Holocaust Studies, held in Kraków in November 2017. The present volume aims to continue the fruitful discussions that began at that conference, and to spark further discussion on the question(s) of Auschwitz. Since the contributions all revolve around the same theme, some overlap and repetition is inevitable. However, as will become clear, each of the articles in the volume offers something new to the extensive criticism that already exists on the topic of Auschwitz.
In this article, I argue that fiction that centralizes the perpetrator perspective should be understood as a central part of the canon of Holocaust fiction. However, as I aim to show, greater distinction needs to be made between different kinds of perpetrator writing. Comparing fiction about generic Nazis with stories that centralize the figure of Adolf Hitler, I attempt to outline some of the key similarities and differences. Ultimately, perpetrator fiction works by drawing connections with the reader: the implication is that readers also have the capacity for wrongdoing and could, under the necessary conditions, act in atrocious ways. This has implications for reader responses, especially those concerning empathy and judgement. On the other hand, Hitler fiction relies on the ‘otherness’ of the Nazi leader, whose character resists easy normalization. This raises important questions about Hitler’s place in the Western cultural imagination.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.