Fictional Truth in Feuchtwanger's Novels

The Holocaust roughly spanned from January 30, 1933 to May 8, 1945, that is when Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party became the Chancellor of Germany to the time the war in Europe officially ended. The Jews, who were blamed for Germany’s ills were supposed to be subjected to total annihilation through a propaganda campaign which ultimately led to the destruction of the Jewish community on a very large scale. Schindler’s Ark (1982) by Thomas Keneally and The Book Thief (2005) by Marcus Zusak provide a narrative account of the Holocaust which led to the deaths of two thirds of European Jews and one third of the total Jews worldwide. This paper demonstrates the horrors in the reign of Adolf Hitler and how well the two novels retrace history. It entails to rediscover the ‘truths’ which are represented through fictional accounts of the events that took place during the genocide.

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2021

The Jewish Quarterly Review, 2018

2017

, Ernst Jünger wrote to his brother Friedrich Georg: "Wir müssen uns […] bemühen, die literarische Tätigkeit als Kriegsmittel zu betrachten." This project analyzes the result of said activity: viz. text understood as a means of war. That is to say, it does not aim at answering questions regarding Jünger's political stance as it is mostly the case with scholarly literature on the subject matter at hand, but instead, it addresses a lacuna in the relevant scholarship by systematically examining the textual material as a subversive means of action that allows Jünger for the continuation of war. The examination at hand therfore begins with an analysis of Jünger's Kriegstagebuch, in order to fathom the basis on which he will translate, transform, and instrumentalize the "Sprache der Materialschlacht" as a literary means of expression. Subsequently, it turns to the textual strategies that Jünger employs in his literature, which ought to facilitate the initiation of those who did not directly participate in the Great War to the circle of the 'Frontsoldaten.' Following this, the analysis of his Politische Publizistik shows that Jünger is continuously striving for a dynamic modern nationalism that always already aims at protruding beyond the borders of the state. And lastly, an examination of Der Arbeiter will show that Jünger conceptually dissolves those borders, by heralding the planetary era of the worker based on a new concept of language that stems from the CHAPTER I »MICH REIZT DIE WILDE SCHÖNHEIT DER GEFAHR«-Baring the Roots of Ernst Jünger's Aggressive Aesthetic .

Central European History, 2010

Journal of Modern History, 2019

A review of Tom Weber's important and innovative new addition to Hitler biographies

Revista Amazonía investiga, 2020

Artículo de investigación The German Novel of the 1960-70s: Artistic Conception of History

Post-Fascist Fantasies : Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany. , 1997

This book critically analyses the role of Communist exile and GDR-era literature in the creation of East Germany's anti-fascist narrative. The analysis is faced on Claude Lefort's theory of totalitarianism to which the author adds a psychoanalytic lens.

The German Quarterly, 2019

Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz functions something like a handbook, in that it pursues a narrowly defined purpose and can be read as an introductory guide to German-language works "that establish positive Nazi stereotypes in nationalist and National Socialist texts in juxtaposition to Nazi constructs in exemplary antifascist works in which these stereotypes are modified and repurposed to express opposition" (1). Working from the observation that, in contrast to historical figures and actions related to World War II and the Hitler regime, Nazi characters as "ideological signifiers" (1) have thus far received minimal scholarly attention, Lorenz sheds light on literary and filmic representations of Nazis as a way of exploring the vision-not necessarily the reality-of National Socialism, as interpreted by both its adherents and opponents. Working chronologically, Lorenz divides her study into three chapters, each of which focuses on representations of Nazi characters that appeared at particular moments in time. The first chapter, "The Origins and Conceptualizations of Nazi Figures after World War I," explores the nascence and proliferation of positively construed images of idealized Aryan Germans that gained in popularity concomitant with the formation and rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany. Lorenz lays the groundwork for the texts she investigates in the study by providing a brief overview of the program of the National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP) with its racist and anti-Semitic platform, highlighting the National Socialist emphasis on the Aryan male and his ostensibly ideal physical and psychological attributes. Drawing from this ideal as a template, proponents of National Socialism sought to (re)imagine the German Volk along the lines of an exclusionary utopian vision. Lorenz explains that the "Party Program was integral to Nazi writing, which included primarily manifestos, speeches, programmatic memoirs tracing the