Dismantling hegemonic conceptions of victimhood: German and peripheral narratives of wartime suffering in contemporary World War II fiction

Abstract

In recent years, scholars Michael Rothberg and Stef Craps have dedicated much of their work to the discussion and dismantling of competitive memory – a term that has featured prominently in Holocaust studies. In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), Rothberg emphasises how we can use the memory of the Holocaust as a platform to articulate other, lesser-known forms of trauma and suffering, such as historical sites of colonial violence and genocide. His theory is fundamentally concerned with the narrative of the marginalised Other (for example, Native Americans or African American slaves) and how we can contribute to the dismantling of hegemonic narratives of suffering through recognising the Other’s suffering. The central argument presented in this dissertation is that the selected fictional texts, Eva Weaver’s The Puppet Boy of Warsaw, Jim Shepard’s The Book of Aron, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, are multidirectional in nature because they are fundamentally concerned with discussing other, lesser-known World War II narratives of suffering (i.e. they dismantle the hegemony of the Holocaust narrative). While I also discuss French and Polish suffering, I mainly focus on German suffering during the wartime period. I analyse German suffering in each of the texts through the lens of Primo Levi’s concept of the gray zone and by discussing the figure of the ordinary German. By drawing on Levi’s concept of the gray zone and reading the characters in the selected texts in an empathetic manner, my study aims to contribute to a growing body of literature that has begun to rethink German and other peripheral World War II narratives of victimisation and suffering that were largely overshadowed by the memory of the Holocaust. This dissertation, therefore, contributes to broadening the field of Holocaust memory in memory studies, extending literature on multidirectional memory, and demonstrating how memories of the past can interact productively and thus enable us, in the contemporary moment, to think dialogically and help us recognise that not all memories are equally (and fairly) represented in both the public and scholarly sphere.