Representing Perpetrators In Holocaust Literature And Film

Synopsis

The Majority Of Books On Holocaust Literature And Film Focus On Its Victims Or Survivors. The Essays In This Collection, By Established Academics As Well As Newer Voices, Take The More Unusual Method Of Analyzing Representations Of The Holocaust Perpetrators. In Doing So, They Explore What Has Until Now Held Critics Back From This Topic, Including Moral And Emotional Distaste, The Dangers Of Confusing Understanding With Exculpation, And The Possibility Of Problematic Identification. Acknowledging And Moving Beyond These Concerns, The Contributors Develop Instead A Range Of Innovative Approaches And Conclusions, Emphasizing The Ethical And Aesthetic Challenges Of Representing Evil And The Ways In Which These Are Negotiated By Writers, Filmmakers, And Others. The Ethics Of Such Representation Are Explored By A Series Of Cases Studies, Analyzing, For Instance, How The Nazis And Nazism Are Shown In: German Museums; In Fiction, Such As Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones And Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate; In Films, Including Downfall And Shoah; In Ghetto Diaries; And In The Paintings Of Francis Bacon.--publisher's Website. Violence, Aesthetics, Complicity. Avoiding Evil In Perpetrator Fiction / Robert Eaglestone ; Reading (as) Violence In Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones / Jenni Adams ; Claude Lanzmann's Einsatzgruppen Interviews / Sue Vice ; Screening Women's Complicity In The Holocaust : The Problems Of Judgement And Representation / Adam Brown -- Representation And Understanding. The Perpetrator Occult : Francis Bacon Paints Adolf Eichmann / Lyndsey Stonebridge ; The Modern Haman : Ghetto Diary Writer's Understanding Of Holocaust Perpetrators / Amy Simon ; Reading The Female Perpetrator / Antonly Rowland -- Politics, Form And Genre. Downfall : The Nazi Genocide As A Natural Disaster / Matthew Boswell ; 'repetition, Boredom, Despair' : Muriel Spark And The Eichmann Trial / James Bailey ; The Prisoner (1952) And The Perpetrator In Early Post-war British Television / James Jordan -- Memories, Sites And Contexts. Visualising 'everyday' Evil : The Representation Of Nazi Perpetrators In German Memorial Sites / Caroline Pearce ; 'we Shall Be Punished' : Positionality And Postmemory In Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room And Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow / Christine Berberich ; Bruce Chatwin, W.g. Sebald And The Red-brown Skin / Laurence Piercy ; Perpetration, Guilt And Cross-genre Representation In Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir / Eleanor Kent. Edited By Jenni Adams And Sue Vice. Includes Bibliographical References.