Mechanisms of Defense and Narrative Authority in Holocaust Fiction: Imagining the Perpetrator in David Grossman’s See Under: Love

Abstract

While perpetrator fiction, which centralizes the perpetrator’s experience, perspective, and mind, is commonly studied through the peril of readers’ possible identification with the executioner, this paper considers the challenges that writers face in creating these characters. First, the question of narrative authority—who is authorized to imagine the Holocaust?—arises anew: do nonsurvivors hold the public and moral legitimacy to imagine perpetrators? Second, there is the risk of writers’ identification with the humanized executioner to the point of losing their moral judgment and critical perspective. Utilizing Holocaust historiography (Yitzhak Arad, Christopher Browning) and recent theoretical work on perpetrator fiction (especially by Erin McGlothlin), this paper identifies some of the textual mechanisms that contemporary authors employ in response to these challenges: metapoetic discourse, the fantastic mode, creative uses of historical facts, first-person and unreliable narration, and alternating textual forms. Following an introductory presentation of the theoretical problem, the paper closely explores mechanisms of defense and narrative authority in the “Wasserman” part of David Grossman’s See Under: Love (‘Ayen ‘erekh: Ahavah), before turning to a briefer consideration of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and other second-generation Holocaust narratives. A more extensive analysis of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones concludes my discussion.

Keywords:

• Perpetrator fiction
• holocaust literature
• fantastic mode
• narrative authority

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Wiesel, “For Some Measure” 314; Rosenfeld 14; Langer 1.

2 My discussion focuses on fiction, but the growth of the perpetrator character is evident clearly in cinema as well. Take, for instance, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg 1981), where Arnold Ernst Toht is a well-mannered Nazi villain who speaks excellent English with a strong German accent, and wears the iconic leather jacket. Typically, he understands only brute force, especially torture which he was about to inflict upon the fair Marion with a joyful giggle of sadistic fascination. Three decades later, Hans Landa is an intelligent, merciless, and quite charming SS Colonel in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino 2009). “I’m a detective. A damn good detective,” he explains his perspective in his own voice. “Finding people is my specialty. So naturally, I worked for the Nazis finding people. And yes, some of them were Jews.” It is an opportunity, not ideology, that made Landa a reputable Jew-hunter, and once the war turns against the Germans, he does not hesitate to switch sides. The Colonel, then, illustrates both complexity and agency. While both Toht and Landa are caricaturistic, exaggerated figures, the difference in their makeup—the flat stereotype and the multifaceted, even enigmatic individual—is striking.

3 Alan Mintz makes a similar critique of the novel’s moral dimension in Translating Israel, 205.

4 The “Concentrationary Universe” (L’Univers concentrationnaire) is David Rousset’s conceptualization of the world of Nazi camps, drawn from his memoir by that name and translated as The Other Kingdom.

5 See International Military Tribunal 326; Arad 122.

6 See Wiernik 44; Arad 205.

7 See Sereny, especially 136–7.

8 Grossman assigns Staukeh two different ranks: Obersturmführer (See Under 204) and Sturmbannführer (See Under 446).

9 Suleiman places the time of writing between the 1960s and the 1980s (4).

10 Yehoshua’s unique novel is composed of five mono-dialogues (conversations only one side of which is provided to the reader). Consequently, the text gains the appearance of first-person narration, and the narrator is known only through his own speech. Martin Amis is relieved from the challenge of psycho-narrating commandant Paul Doll by the two modes of this character’s appearance: as a first-person narrator in the novel The Zone of Interest (2014), and as a character whose personal and familial life unfold on screen in a film by that name (Jonathan Glazer (Dir.) 2023).

11 Translation adjusted for accuracy (see Grossman ‘Ayen ‘erekh 251).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Or Rogovin

Or Rogovin is Silbermann Family Associate Professor in Modern Hebrew Language and Literature at the Department of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. He publishes on Israeli Holocaust writing, especially fiction by David Grossman, Savyon Liebrecht, and Ka-Tzetnik.