The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction by Erin McGlothlin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction by Erin McGlothlin Katharina von Kellenbach Erin McGlothlin. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. 346 pp. We will never be able to fully understand the mind of another person. This is especially true of people involved in atrocity, who are both eminently “ordinary” (Browning) and “monstrous” (Mohammed). “Perpetrator studies” has emerged as a new field of inquiry with its own scholarly networks, journals, and book series. The scholarly and popular fascination with the minds of perpetrators is partly driven by their inscrutability. Perpetrators are notoriously obtuse, in part because of their vested interest in keeping their crimes hidden from critical view, but also because their hearts and minds have become impenetrable—even to themselves. Acts of violence involve a “hardening of the heart,” to use a biblical term, as perpetrators avert their eyes and block their ears from seeing, feeling, and responding to the suffering of others. The ability to shield against empathy is integral to codes of conduct that allow agents of mass violence to dehumanize and degrade [End Page 217] victims. And generally, they show little awareness of culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities create force fields that suck entire communities into moral indifference, complicity, and denial. Erin McGlothlin, professor of German and Jewish studies at Washington University in St. Louis, analyzes fictional and nonfictional approaches to the mind of the perpetrator, distinguishing “mind-reading” from “imagination.” “Mind-reading” refers to practices of nonfiction writers attempting to penetrate and intuit the thinking and feeling of individual perpetrators in direct interaction. Fiction authors, on the other hand, use “imagination” to invent and envision the interior world of Holocaust perpetrators. Choosing her samples was, I am sure, the hardest part of writing the book. McGlothlin settles on four writers to make her case about “mind-reading.” Three observed Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt, the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, and the American Pentecostal minister William Hull; the fourth author, Gita Sereny, interviewed Franz Stangl in the early 1970s. The second part of the book examines Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber (1971), Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009), and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and The Zone of Interest. Out of the profusion of possible titles, this choice of authors serves McGlothlin to develop a theoretical framework that bridges fictional and nonfictional literature. This linkage of fiction and nonfiction is startling and somewhat disturbing at a point in history when the boundary between fact and fiction is hotly contested, and the objective truth is systematically challenged by peddlers of conspiracy myths and purveyors of alternative facts. But McGlothlin is right to point out that fact-driven historical descriptions of perpetrators also follow narrative conventions. While Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is different from Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, both authors enter into the imagined interior world of a perpetrator. McGlothlin proposes the “theory of mind” to ground the human capacity to decode the thoughts and feelings of others in order to anticipate their plans and actions. Human beings learn early on to interpret facial expressions, behavioral cues, and body language to predict behavior, especially in situations of vulnerability and moments of danger. This, argue cognitive psychologists, is a critical survival skill. Literature, argues McGlothlin, builds on this human ability to experience the world through the eyes of others. Authors of perpetrator literature must enter into a depraved mental world of cruelty and dehumanization. This requires “empathetic identification” and “intersubjective intermediation” that filters mendacity and maintains ethical adjudication. It is probably no accident that most of McGlothlin’s authors are Jewish (except for Amis and Hull). There is little appetite among German non-Jewish fiction writers to enter into the minds of Holocaust perpetrators, which involves impossible balancing acts between intimate familiarity and disassociation, fears of contamination and apology. For Jewish authors, entering into the Nazi universe is tempered by embodied identification with the victims. Gita Sereny, for instance, can extend sympathy to Franz Stangl, because she is also mediating his thinking against her own experience and ethical position. Her strategy of eliciting a confession from Stangl...