Empathetic Identification and the Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction: A Proposed Taxonomy of Response

Abstract

Recent literary texts in English, French, and German represent the Holocaust through the autodiegetic narration of Nazi perpetrators, a strategy that emphasizes the humanness of their protagonists and complicates the reified image of Holocaust perpetrators that has developed in the decades since the war. Questions of reader identification, affect, and empathy are of critical ethical importance when examining such texts, providing new challenges for the currently flourishing discourse on narrative empathy. This article considers how narrative depictions of the perspective of perpetrators actuate complex and varied processes of empathy and identification in their readers. First, it situates its inquiry within recent research on narrative empathy, which offers a compelling framework for understanding readers’ empathetic engagements with admirable or suffering characters but has only barely begun to investigate empathy for victimizers. Second, it reconsiders the notion of reader identification as an umbrella concept that better accounts for complex readerly engagements with ethically charged characters. Third, it suggests a taxonomy of identification that combines cognitive, affective, and ethical components and allows for the itinerant fluctuation between types and degrees of reader investment in a character at different points in a given narrative. Finally, by taking a closer look at Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest, which pits two ethically dubious perpetrator-narrators against each other in a bid for the reader’s ambivalent identification, this article demonstrates how texts narrated by Holocaust perpetrators have mobilized and managed reader identification and considers the ethical issues that arise from it.

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