‘ein Holocaust, aber eben nicht meiner’: The Armenian Genocide in the Works of Edgar Hilsenrath

Abstract

My focus is on Edgar Hilsenrath's lifelong preoccupation with the Armenian genocide, with particular reference to Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken (1989). I draw for the first time on archival papers from Hilsenrath's archive to trace the novel's genesis and identify its extensive sources. I explore how Hilsenrath interprets historical acts of racial persecution via comparison. This underpins the parallels between the Armenian experience and Jewish experience under the National Socialists and influences the textual strategies he deploys. I argue that Hilsenrath is ahead of historiographical research in the late 1980s and anticipates comparative genocide studies of subsequent decades.