Event date: 4-8 September 2012
Location:ESSE 2012 Istanbul

Seminar title: “The Other Witness? Imagining the Perpetrator”

Organizers: Stef Craps and Antony Rowland (Salford)

This seminar will address the recent turn to the perpetrator’s perspective in trauma, Holocaust, and genocide studies, fields that have traditionally advocated identification with victims. While the perpetrator had already been the subject of important studies by Hannah Arendt, Christopher Browning, Robert Jay Lifton, and others, a series of high-profile trials (including those of John Demjanjuk, Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic, and Charles Taylor) and a spate of often controversial films (e.g., Downfall and The Grey Zone) and literary texts (e.g., novels by Jonathan Littell, Bernhard Schlink, and Rachel Seiffert) focusing on those responsible for extreme violence and suffering have propelled the complex and troubling issues surrounding the figure of the perpetrator to the centre of public and scholarly attention in recent years. Papers are invited that explore the aesthetic, historical, political, and ethical challenges faced by literary, cinematic, and other artistic treatments of the perpetrator experience, whether understood in terms of direct perpetration or of complicity, failure to prevent, or inherited guilt.