Reading the victimizer: towards an ethical practice of figuring the traumatic moment in Holocaust literature

Abstract

Fully characterized representations of perpetrators in Holocaust literature are rare. Influential critics have deplored projects that would advance the ‘understanding’ of victimizers, in part for fear that victimizers might thereby be absolved, to some degree, of responsibility for their crimes. Others deem certain representations of traumatic events in the Holocaust to be intrinsically ‘unspeakable’. Surviving victims are supposed to be unable to grasp cognitively the traumas that were visited upon them and therefore to lack the capacity for transmitting their experiences, thus depriving authors of an authentic basis for their fictional representations of traumatic encounters between victimizers and victims. Furthermore, even if successful, narratives that would focalize on perpetrators might carry with them a risk of empathic unsettlement as readers are invited to identify empathetically with subjects that are guilty of genocide. The result of these and other taboos has been, paradoxically, a diminution of our understanding of the victim. Quite simply, the victim was brought into being as a victim by and through the will of his victimizer. We cannot therefore turn our reading gaze from the victimizer, and, in particular, from his encounter with his victim, without blinding ourselves to an essential aspect of the victim. Behind these taboos lies the horror of the events of the Holocaust. Too little attention has been paid to the psychological demands that literary representations of trauma place on authors. Careful readings of canonical Holocaust texts reveal distortions in representations of victimizers that raise profound ethical questions.