Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's 'Nazi' Novels and Their Films

摘要

A world-wide best-seller and translated into thirty-seven languages, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader is the most successful literary text dealing with the Holocaust and Germany's Nazi past in recent years and has become a curriculum staple in German schools as well as German departments internationally. Paradoxically as it may sound, however, this success may be, William Collins-Donahue argues in his Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's 'Nazi' Novels and Their Films, the result of 'a broad cultural desire to shift the Holocaust from its position of trauma-inspiring singularity back to a place of considerable historical distance' (p. xii).