Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's ''Nazi'' Novels and by William Collins Donahue

By William Collins Donahue

Holocaust as Fiction seeks to give an explanation for and seriously overview the intense luck of Schlink's across the world acclaimed novel, The Reader, the commonly learn “Selb” detective trilogy, and renowned movies established heavily on his paintings. With the aid of wide-ranging reception facts, the paintings of Holocaust students, in addition to cultural and criminal reflections at the idea of guilt, Donahue elucidates not just those works, however the wider serious weather that has fostered their luck.

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By William Collins Donahue

Holocaust as Fiction seeks to give an explanation for and seriously overview the intense luck of Schlink's across the world acclaimed novel, The Reader, the commonly learn “Selb” detective trilogy, and renowned movies established heavily on his paintings. With the aid of wide-ranging reception facts, the paintings of Holocaust students, in addition to cultural and criminal reflections at the idea of guilt, Donahue elucidates not just those works, however the wider serious weather that has fostered their luck.

Show description

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Additional resources for Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's ''Nazi'' Novels and Their Films

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At the forceful urging of the federal prosecutor Gerhard Selb, both are quickly convicted of treason and the latter is hanged. It turns out, as Selb discovers only many years later, that Weinstein, prompted by the power-hungry Korten, had knowingly provided false testimony in the hopes of preserving his own life. ”27 Also noteworthy is the way Schlink moves Selb into a position analogous to that of Weinstein vis-à-vis the villainous Korten: both are manipulated pawns in Korten’s dastardly scheme to take over the reins of corporate power.

I employ this “Aphrodite strategy” heuristically to help us identify a whole series of similarly structured hermeneutic options in Schlink’s novels. This semiotic technique of “both-and” (sowohl-als-auch) not only allows readers to see a thing from two distinct points of view, but it usually requires us to do so from two diametrically opposed perspectives that not only enhance but also, in a sense, require each other. , the gestures of modesty) in a manner that provides “plausible deniability” to the first option.

What we have witnessed throughout the trilogy, then, is a two-pronged strategy in the representation of perpetrators. On the one hand, evil is concentrated in the person of one or a very few highly placed superiors and thus safely isolated from midlevel bureaucrats like Staatsanwalt Selb.

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