Agency, Ethics and Responsibility in Holocaust Fiction. Child Figures as Catalysts in Bruno Apitz's Nackt unter Wölfen (1958) and Edgar Hilsenrath's Nacht (1964)

Abstract

In Holocaust fiction, narrated children act as catalysts for adult behaviour, which reinstates agency and thus responsibility in the persecuted and largely powerless adults. Since child figures help reclaim an ethical dimension for human interaction, they point to the ethical foundations of the texts. Thomas Scanlon's contractualist approach to moral philosophy in his What We Owe to Each Other (1998) is used to compare two German Holocaust novels: Bruno Apitz's successful Nackt unter Wölfen (1958) and Edgar Hilsenrath's Nacht (1964), a book with a far more protracted and conflicted reception history. Exploring the relationship between (1) the role of child figures in these books, (2) the ethical issues thus raised, and (3) the publication and reception history of the texts concerned, shows that the radically different responses to the novels are rooted in their fundamentally different ethical cores: while Apitz reassuringly uses his communist Buchenwald prisoners' heroic saving of an infant boy to demonstrate that moral motivation is rationally grounded and that the demands of rational choice do not conflict with those of morality, in Hilsenrath's dire ghetto Prokov, chances for making ethical choices such as those posed by children in need are recognized as such – but mostly not heeded in the inexorable struggle for survival, so that the ethical is equated with the irrational, and the unethical with the rational. Child figures create opportunities for adult characters to respond to moral dilemmas, which is more significant than their potential as generic, iconic figures of suffering in the service of the Holocaust ›industry‹.