Event date: Wednesday 8 April 2015, 2 – 3.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Auditorium B

“Rivalrous Memories in British Holocaust Novels,” given by Prof. Sue Vice (University of Sheffield)

In this talk, I will examine the representation of the Holocaust in contemporary British fiction, revealing the tension between memories of the war with those of genocide. In these examples, the British national myth of heroic wartime struggle against evil is shown to be at odds with knowledge of the murder of European Jews which Britain could not prevent.

I will start with novels which represent the possibility of British complicity in Nazi racial policy. C.J. Sansom’s Dominion (2013) is a counterfactual thriller imagining the consequences of Britain’s surrender to Nazi Germany in 1940, and the nature of Britain as a satellite nation in relation both to political history and the fate of the Jews. However, its generic conclusion means that the question of a genocidal British state is effectively sidestepped.

Both David Baddiel’s The Secret Purposes (2004) and Alison MacLeod’s Unexploded (2013) represent the notion of camps located on British soil, in their focus on the historical phenomenon of interning ‘enemy aliens’. Here, the plot device by means of which a non-Jewish protagonist falls in love with an imprisoned Jew, smoothes away the uncomfortable implication of an equivalence between Britain and Nazi Germany. Rhidian Brook’s The Aftermath (2013) scrutinizes British self-conceptions of wartime moral superiority in Hamburg in 1946, where the roles of German aggressor and British victim are reversed, at the expense of representing the Holocaust at all. It is, perhaps surprisingly, Martin Amis’s recent novel, The Zone of Interest (2014), which is most clearly centred on the Holocaust, in its intertextual reimagining of Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz.

In conclusion, I will ask what is specifically British about these novels, the role that the Holocaust assumes in each, and what this suggests about the future of novelistic representation of this kind.

Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her publications include Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era (EUP, 2014), the co-edited volume Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (Vallentine Mitchell, 2013), Shoah (BFI Film Classics, 2011), Jack Rosenthal (MUP, 2009), Children Writing the Holocaust (Palgrave, 2004), Holocaust Fiction (Routledge, 2000), and Introducing Bakhtin (MUP, 1997). She is also the editor of Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (Polity Press, 1996).

All are welcome. Admission is free, and registration is not required. For more information, please contact Stef Craps.