Narrative Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents: Interpreting Closure in The Stroop Report.

This chapter discusses the Nazi documentary compilation known as The Stroop Report. On May 16, 1943, the final day of the month-long Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, SS commander Jürgen Stroop and his staff assembled a commemorative album entitled ‘Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr!’ (“There is No Longer a Jewish Quarter in Warsaw!”). Comprised of daily military reports documenting the German military response to the uprising, several dozen photographs depicting combat and captured ghetto fighters and residents, and a narrative summary, the album was compiled as a commemorative souvenir for Heinrich Himmler. Employing a lexicon of bureaucratic inventory and military conquest, The Stroop Report frames the narrative of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as one of glorious triumph and German valiant self-sacrifice for the racial hygiene of the nation.

Readings of The Stroop Report by scholars of literature and culture have tended to focus principally on the photographs included in the album, particularly the iconic photograph that depicts the capture of a young Jewish boy. However, McGlothlin stresses, fewer critics have investigated the report’s narrative and the ways in which it attempts to achieve closural mastery over the events it documents. This chapter examines the rhetorical strategies Stroop employs in his report to discursively induce closure through its construction of a straw enemy deserving of the full brutality directed at it and through symbolic and performative declarations of the vanquishment of that enemy. McGlothlin’s conclusions demonstrate the value of a literary-hermeneutical approach to the narrative construction of perpetrator-authored bureaucratic documents, which can provide an alternate reading of the events they convey, puncture the truth effect they produce, and posit narrative possibilities that challenge their hegemonic control over the historical record.

Erin McGlothlin, “Narrative Mastery over Violence in Perpetrator-Authored Documents: Interpreting Closure in The Stroop Report.” Interpreting Violence: Narrative, Ethics, Hermeneutics. London: Routledge, 2023: 104-118.