McGlothlin, Erin. Narrative Perspective and the Holocaust Perpetrator in Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

What happens when we read books about the Holocaust that probe the mind of the Nazi perpetrator, a figure that in the contemporary cultural imagination is often regarded as the embodiment of concrete evil? What is our ethical relationship to texts that ask us to imagine the mindset of genocidal murderers and to consider the events of the Holocaust from their point of view? In compelling us to view the Holocaust from the morally questionable perspective of the perpetrator, do such works ask us to betray the Jewish victims whose experience should remain central to our understanding of the event? And how can such works render the mind of the perpetrator without either reducing him to the trope of monster or transforming him into an object of sympathy? How do texts that portray the consciousness of such historically, emotionally and ethically charged figures negotiate the sometimes razor-thin line between insightful provocation and historical bad faith?  This essay will explore the implications of these questions by looking at how the perpetrator’s perspective is constructed in Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, two novels noted for their innovative first-person depictions of Holocaust perpetrators.

Erin McGlothlin,“Narrative Perspective and the Holocaust Perpetrator in Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature. Ed. Jenni Adams. London: Bloomsbury, 2014: 159-177.