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ABSTRACT
The article identifies the Nazi disguised as a Jew as a recurring figure in fiction, who destabilizes boundaries between perpetrator and victim. This blurring of identity is particularly provocative in relation to the Eichmann trial and the Israeli kapo trials of the 1950s. Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth (1967) responds to the Eichmann trial and Arendt’s subsequent analysis, ultimately reinforcing the image of the monstrous Nazi. Written following the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and reflecting on the kapo trials, Emanuel Litvinoff’s Falls the Shadow (1983) offers a complex exploration of Jewish culpability and Israel’s relationship to justice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Stephanie Bird is Professor of German Studies at University College London. She has published on topics ranging from the interaction of fact and fiction in the biographical novel, the relationship of female and national identity, and the representation and ethics of shame. Her latest book, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, analyses how the comical interrogates the expectations and ethics of representing suffering and trauma. The study focuses on the work of Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, W. G. Sebald, Volker Koepp, Reinhard Jirgl, Ruth Klüger, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Jonathan Littell. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on perpetration and complicity with state condoned violence.
Notes
1 Kahana, Historical Dictionary of Israeli Intelligence, 246.
2 “Nazis Pose As Jews,” 9.
3 “Bugarian Fascists.”
4 “Police Arrest Nazi War Criminal.”
5 “Gestapo Official Posing As Jew.”
6 “Fleeing Nazi Poses As Jew.”
7 “Guard Who Married a Jew.” Rinkel’s case was extensively reported in the British, American, German, and Israeli print media in 2006.
8 Cagney and Lacey, 1:21.
9 For a full discussion of justice and perpetrator trauma in Hilsenrath’s novel, see my chapter “Edgar Hilsenrath and Jonathan Littell: Perpetrators, Comedy, and the Fantasy of Justice,” in Bird, Comedy and Trauma, 167–98.
10 See Östling, Sweden after Nazism, 8–9; and Nordlund, “The War Is Over,” 171–2.
11 Jordan, “The Prisoner,” 195.
12 Ibid., 199.
13 Baker, Harold Pinter, 70–1.
14 Jordan, Nuremberg to Hollywood, 117.
15 Adolf Eichmann, quoted in Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 221.
16 Ibid., 2–3.
17 Ibid., 15.
18 Ibid., 4.
19 Ibid., 251.
20 Ibid., 249.
21 Ibid., 247.
22 Ibid., 252.
23 Ibid., 104.
24 Ibid., 9.
25 Jordan, Nuremberg to Hollywood, 117.
26 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 111.
27 Ibid., 109 and 105.
28 See Drucker Bar-Am, “Revenge and Reconciliation,” 283.
29 Ben-Naftali and Tuval, “Punishing International Crimes,” 177.
30 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 251 and 253.
31 Cohen et al., Holocaust and the Press, 19.
32 Fulbrook, Reckonings, chap. 11.
33 Cohen et al., Holocaust and the Press, 19.
34 Fulbrook, Reckonings, chaps. 3 and 20.
35 Ibid., chap. 11.
36 Cohen et al., Holocaust and the Press, 121.
37 Wittmann, Beyond Justice, 255.
38 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 2–4.
39 Ibid., 7.
40 Skoot, The Darkness We Carry, 87.
41 “Obituary Emanuel Litvinof.”
42 Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” 91–2.
43 Ibid., 92.
44 White, “Identity in the East End.”
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust, 65.
48 Bazyler and Tuerkheimer, Forgotten Trials, 205.
49 Segev, The Seventh Million, 262.
50 Ben-Naftali and Tuval, “Punishing International Crimes,” 130 and 138.
51 Bazyler and Tuerkheimer, Forgotten Trials, 207.
52 Ibid., 149.
53 Porat, “Changing Legal Perceptions,” 315.
54 Jockusch and Finder, “Introduction,” 3.
55 Porat, “Changing Legal Perceptions,” 320.
56 Jockusch and Finder, “Introduction,” 12.
57 Ben-Naftali and Tuval, “Punishing International Crimes,” 178.
58 White, “Emanuel Litvinoff.”
59 Litvinoff, quoted by Rubin, “Precarious Fringes,” 61.
60 Ben-Naftali and Tuval, “Punishing International Crimes,” 175.
61 See Jockusch and Finder, “Introduction,” 13.
62 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 38.
63 Ibid., 44.
64 White, “Emanuel Litvinoff.”
65 Bazyler and Tuerkheimer, Forgotten Trials, 224–5.