ERIN MCGLOTHLIN
Washington University in St. Louis
Narrative Transgression in Edgar Hilsenrath’s
Der Nazi und der Friseur and the Rhetoric of the
Sacred in Holocaust Discourse1
Der Nazi und der Friseur (1977), a satirical novel by the German-Jewish Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath,2 opens in the year 1907 with the birth of
two boys—one Jewish, one non-Jewish—on the same day in the same street
in the town of Wieshalle, East Prussia. One of the boys is named Max Schulz,
who, as an adult, is the narrator of the novel, which is presented as his autobiography. The other child is Itzig Finkelstein, Max’s best friend throughout
childhood and youth. As Max tells us at the beginning of the novel, the
Jüdische Rundschau announces Itzig’s birth in the following manner:
“Ich, Chaim Finkelstein, Friseur, Besitzer des eingeführten Friseursalons ‘Der
Herr von Welt,’ Ecke Goethe- und Schillerstraße, Wieshalle, Vorstand im ‘Jüdischen Kegelklub,’ stellvertretender Generalsekretär der ‘Jüdischen Kultusgemeinde,’ Mitglied des ‘Deutschen Tierschutzvereins,’ des Vereins der ‘Pflanzenfreunde,’ der Liga ‘Liebe deinen Nächsten’ und der ‘Wieshaller Friseurinnung,’ Verfasser der Broschüre ‘Haarschnitt ohne Treppen,’ … erlaube mir, die
Geburt meines Sohnes und Nachfolgers ‘Itzig Finkelstein’ bekanntzugeben.” (8)
At the end of the novel, the narrator reproduces for the reader a similar announcement, this time composed by an adult Itzig Finkelstein in anticipation
of his own son’s birth:
“Ich, Itzig Finkelstein, Friseur, Besitzer des eingeführten Friseursalons ‘Der Herr
von Welt,’ ehemaliges Mitglied der Schwarzgruppe, Haganahsoldat, Sergeant
der Israelarmee, Veteran vom Jahre 48, erster jüdischer Soldat, der an der Spitze
seiner Leute am 30. Dezember 1948 den Suezkanal erreichte, Präsident des
Tierschutzvereins von Beth David, Präsident der örtlichen Antiwiedergutmachungsliga, Erfinder des berühmten Haarwuchsmittels ‘Samson V 2,’ erlaube
mir, die Geburt meines Sohnes und Nachfolgers Judas oder Jehuda Finkelstein
bekanntzugeben.” (295)
Extracted from the larger context of the novel and juxtaposed together, these
two short texts, narrated in the first person and separated by an interval of
over sixty years, not only tell the story of three generations of the Finkelstein
family, but also appear to relate a particular narrative of German-Jewish expeThe German Quarterly 80.2 (Spring 2007)
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rience in the middle part of the twentieth century. In the first text, we find
Itzig Finkelstein in a middle-class acculturated family, whose members, as
evidenced by Chaim Finkelstein’s social connections, identify with both the
local Jewish community and the larger non-Jewish society in which they live.
As such, they can be seen to represent the way many Jews preferred to see
themselves in pre-1933 Germany: as a hyphenated identity that consisted of
almost equal parts German and Jew. The second birth announcement mediates another history, that of the Jews in Germany after 1933 and especially
after 1945. It does not tell us exactly what happened to the Finkelstein family,
but its mention of Itzig’s leadership of the local Antiwiedergutmachungsliga lets
us know that Itzig somehow survived the Holocaust. We also learn that he
emigrated to Palestine and was instrumental in the creation of the state of
Israel. By reading these two passages together (that is, apart from the rest of
the novel), we can extrapolate to a certain extent Itzig’s fate, which mirrors
the experiences of hundreds of thousands of European Jews who survived the
Holocaust. These two birth announcements thus appear to encapsulate
Itzig’s story as Max Schulz relates it in the novel; considering the narrative
they relate jointly, we might be led to believe we need read the entire book
only if we want to learn the details of Itzig’s childhood and youth in Germany,
his survival of the Holocaust, and his experiences as an immigrant to Palestine
and in the young state of Israel. The important facts we appear to already
know, and from these facts we can form an interpretation of Itzig’s experience, one that the narrator Max encourages us to make with his insertion of
the two texts. As the gap between the first and second announcements indicates (a gap that signifies not only the greater part of Itzig’s life, but a large
portion of the novel as well), Itzig’s life is marked by incredible rupture and
displacement. At the same time, however, the replication of the first text by
the second connotes a measure of continuity, for Itzig is able to recreate his
father ’s barber shop—indeed, his father ’s life—in Israel and pass this way of
life on to a son. The narrative of Itzig’s life that his friend Max thus mediates
with the two inserted texts is one in which forced displacement, hardship and
suffering play a role, but also one that tells of the reconstitution of pre-war
European Jewish life in modern Israel. The story of Itzig related by the birth
annoucements is to a large extent a redemptive narrative of Holocaust survival. Despite the destruction of his family’s life in Germany, Itzig survives to
experience the birth of a new Finkelstein in a new Jewish homeland.
With its two birth announcements, Der Nazi und der Friseur thus constructs what might be considered paradigmatic narratives of German-Jewish
life before the Holocaust and the rebirth of European Jewish life in Israel after
the Holocaust. At the same time, however, it radically calls into question such
narratives by revealing them to be simplistic, deterministic, and, though true
on the most literal level, ultimately false constructions that serve to disguise
both the Finkelsteins’ perceived otherness as Jews in Germany and the lie of
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Itzig’s eventual regeneration in Israel. Hilsenrath’s novel accomplishes this by
unraveling the narratives of pre- and post-Holocaust Jewish life even as it
knits them together.
The first narrative that the text reverses is that of the announcement of
Itzig’s birth, which mediates an image of a Jewish family that is fully integrated in the German society in which they live. After establishing in the birth
announcement Chaim’s status as a prototypical German Jew (as defined by
an adherence to the cultural norms of the German bourgeoisie and a rejection
of the customs of the Ostjuden), the novel proceeds to complicate this notion.
As we learn only a dozen pages after Itzig’s birth announcement, Chaim and
his wife Sarah emigrated to Germany from Poland and speak Yiddish at home.
The extent of the Finkelsteins’ retention of their Eastern European Jewish
heritage thus at least partially contradicts the distinct impression given by the
short announcement of their identification with German culture. Seen in this
light, the birth announcement is not a document of the Finkelsteins’ unproblematic relationship with the German culture in which they live, despite both
its flawless wording in High German and Chaim Finkelstein’s prominence in
various community organizations. It rather reveals a scenario in which the
Finkelsteins endeavor to “pass” as German Jews by erasing the identifying
markers of their status as Ostjuden. Moreover, for the novel’s readers, situated
as we are in the post-Holocaust era, the Finkelsteins’ seamless integration into
German culture is further complicated by our awareness that the so-called
German-Jewish symbiosis, as mediated by the birth announcement, was
largely an idealized construction of the relationship between Jews and
non-Jews in Germany before 1933. We know very well the particularly brutal
fate that awaits Itzig and his family in the coming decades, and so it is no surprise for us to find him, in the second text, displaced from his childhood home
in Germany.
Moreover, Der Nazi und der Friseur reverses the happy ending of Itzig’s
survival and the rebirth of the Finkelstein legacy implied by the two texts that
Max includes for us. The problem with inferring Itzig’s history of survival
solely from his own and his son’s birth announcements (which of course
requires one to ignore Max’s narration in the rest of the novel) is that the two
texts are signifiers of continuity that only appear to be extrapolated from the
larger novel. In actuality, the two texts taken alone are misleading with regard
to Itzig’s experience. Although they are truthful about the basic facts they
relate—an Itzig was born into the Finkelstein family in Wieshalle, and an Itzig
Finkelstein did see the birth of a son in Beth David—these facts do not tell the
entire story. For the Itzig of the first announcement is not identical to the Itzig
in the second. I refer here not to the fact that Itzig has somehow changed as a
result of his experiences and that he has become a different person than he was
when he lived in Wieshalle; rather, the statement should be read literally: Itzig
Finkelstein of Beth David is not Itzig Finkelstein, son of Chaim Finkelstein.
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The continuity that appears to exist between the two texts is an illusion.
Although each birth announcement is a factual account, the narrative of
familial regeneration that we could interpret from the interplay between the
two texts is fallacious. Max’s story of Itzig is thus not the story of Itzig’s
survival.
In reality, Itzig’s story is a very different narrative than the one mediated
solely by the two birth announcements; in fact, it is the diametrical opposite
of any narrative of survival and familial continuation. For neither the Itzig
Finkelstein of Wieshalle nor the Itzig Finkelstein of Beth David survived the
Holocaust. As we learn late in the novel, the Itzig of Wieshalle was murdered
in a concentration camp by an SS guard who is none other than Max Schulz,
his childhood friend and the narrator of our story. By virtue of the story he tells
and how he comes to tell it, Max is the unreliable narrator par excellence; as one
of the characters comments to him, “Bei Ihnen weiß man nicht, was wahr und
was nicht wahr ist” (98), a remark that could be applied to Max’s entire function as narrator. Moreover, the Itzig of Beth David turns out to be Max Schulz.
Because he is wanted for mass murder after the war, Max has himself circumcised and tattooed with an Auschwitz number and then appropriates Itzig’s
identity for himself, a process made all the more easy by the fact that Max
happens to look like the anti-Semite’s ideal image of the stereotypical Jew
(while Itzig, paradoxically, reflects the blonde, blue-eyed ideal of the Aryan).
It is as Itzig, under Itzig’s name and in Itzig’s place that Max travels to Palestine (a trip financed by a sack of gold teeth that were looted from his victims),
where he helps found a Jewish state, becomes a model Israeli citizen, marries a
Holocaust survivor, and writes his autobiography. Itzig is thus the victim not
only of murder, but also of identity theft. Max literally assumes Itzig’s voice as
his own (he even appropriates the language of the Finkelstein home, Yiddish),
and in doing so, effaces the authentic Itzig from public memory and rewrites
Itzig’s story, inserting himself in the position of Itzig’s I-narrator. His radical
assumption of Itzig’s voice is a synecdoche not only for his murder of Itzig,
but also for both his own massacre of multiple victims (a grotesque number
that Max himself estimates to be 10,000) as well as the Nazis’ entire project of
destroying millions of European Jews.
Der Nazi und der Friseur is thus not a chronicle of the Finkelstein family’s
survival and continuation in Israel, although at times Max disingenuously
tries to manipulate the reader into believing as much. Rather, Max’s autobiography tells of his own opportunistic development as a Holocaust perpetrator
and identity thief. The irony of Max’s replication of the announcement of
Itzig’s birth with his own announcement (apart from the fact that Max is
never able to print it, because his child dies immediately after birth) is that,
despite the unbridgeable gap between himself and the authentic Itzig, the
second text is only marginally false. Except for the assumption of the firstperson announcement “Ich, Itzig Finkelstein” and the qualifier “jüdisch,” the
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text is factual, for Max alias Itzig does actually accomplish all the things of
which he boasts (or at least he narrates these events as if he accomplishes
them; of course, we might be a bit skeptical about his claim that he bathes in
the Suez Canal almost twenty years before Yossi Ben Hanan does in the Six
Days’ War). The novel’s narrative transgression thus lies not in the second
text’s disturbingly close resemblance to the first, but in the small but significant difference between the two narratives, namely the non-identical assumption of the pronoun “ich,” which represents the unbridgeable gap of
personal experience that even the mostly artfully created tattoo or most
idiomatic Yiddish cannot bridge. Critics have labeled Hilsenrath’s novel an
anti-Bildungsroman, the inversion of the classical novel of development.3 Like
the hero of the Bildungsroman, Max achieves something in the course of the
novel. However, his achievement is not the development of a harmonious
identity, but the radical rewriting of his own murderous history as the diametrically opposite tale of survival and heroism. Max’s transgressions as a character are many—he murders thousands of European Jews; he evades all judicial
accountability for his crimes; he inverts moral accountability by passing
himself off as a victim; he identifies himself unproblematically as a Jew,
announces his solidarity with other Jews and commits himself to Judaism and
the creation of a Jewish state; and he steals the identity of his former best
friend. As a narrator, however, his transgression is singular: it is the hubristic,
radical assumption of the voice of the victim by the perpetrator. In this way,
Max thumbs his nose at the project of autobiography (especially Holocaust
autobiography) and its ostensible pact of authenticity with the reader.
Although Max’s autobiographical violation is the novel’s principle travesty, it is but one of several offensive, taboo-breaking elements in Hilsenrath’s
text. Critics have labeled Der Nazi und der Friseur transgressive on account of
its irreverent style, which has been described as pornographic, scatological,
bizarre, obscene, grotesque, perverse and monstrous. Heinrich Böll, in a positive review in 1977 in Die Zeit, writes:
Ich gestehe, daß ich Ekelschwellen in den ersten Kapiteln des Buches nur
mühsam überwunden habe; erst später glaubte ich mir über deren Funktion klar
zu sein. Ein Dickicht von Greueln und Abscheulichkeiten, durch die man
hindurch muß, notwendigerweise; nein, nichts Edles, weder Edelnutten noch
Edelnazis, keine Andeutung von Nachkriegsromantik. (77)
The novel presents a series of what Böll calls “Greuel und Abscheulichkeiten,”
references not only to the expected abomination of the Holocaust, but also to
the grotesque and violent depictions of prewar and postwar life. In particular,
critics have deemed Hilsenrath’s narrative transgressive because it portrays
the Holocaust in the form of a biting satire that includes elements of black
comedy and the picaresque adventure, genres that, at least in the German climate in which the novel appeared, were considered off limits for representing
the Holocaust. One of the most obvious examples of this type of transgression
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is the novel’s depiction of its female characters, all of whom are in some way
exceedingly grotesque, such as Max’s corpulent prostitute mother; Veronja, a
crone reminiscent of a witch from a Grimm fairy tale who rapes Max while he
is in hiding in a Polish forest; Frau Holle (whose name also refers to a Grimm
character), a widow who hobbles around on a wooden leg and has sex repeatedly with an American officer until he dies of a heart attack; and Mira,
Max-cum-Itzig’s wife in Israel, a Holocaust survivor so traumatized by her experience that she becomes “eine stumme Freßmaschine” (262) and silently
gorges her way to severe obesity. In addition to numerous instances of black
humor and depictions of violent sexuality and bodily abjection,4 the novel
offends with what Jennifer Bjornstad calls “the crassness of the narration,”
which “teases, taunts, and openly insults the reader ” with “grotesque exaggeration and oversimplification, earthy details and disconcerting references”
(35). In short, in Der Nazi und der Friseur, Hilsenrath creates a story of the Holocaust and its aftermath that is unbelievably, almost unbearably ugly. With its
outrageous transgressions, the novel thus violates almost every agreed-upon
precept about how stories about the Holocaust should be told and raises a
number of questions. Why exactly does Hilsenrath write in such an egregiously obscene style that, rather than inviting the reader ’s sympathy and
identification through means of overwrought emotional scenes or aesthetically pleasing descriptions, invites the feelings of disgust and abjection that
Böll identifies? What purpose does Hilsenrath’s transgressive representation
of the Holocaust serve? And finally, what sort of story does the novel mediate
about the process itself of representing the Holocaust?
Hilsenrath’s novel employs what I term “narrative transgression” in an
effort to both circumvent and protest a particular rhetoric that, in the last
several decades, has increasingly come to dominate critical discourse about
the Holocaust and its representational limits. Historians and literary scholars
alike have invested a great deal of energy trying to articulate how the Holocaust in particular challenges conventional notions of historiography and
artistic representation and how contemporary generations can best respond
to these challenges. Saul Friedländer, one of the most respected historians of
Nazism and the Holocaust, convened a conference on this problem in 1990,
and in the resulting edited volume, Probing the Limits of Representation, he
writes, “The extermination of the Jews of Europe is as accessible both as representation and interpretation as any other historical event. But we are dealing
with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational
categories, an ‘event at the limits’” (3). Other critics, such as George Steiner,
Lawrence Langer and Berel Lang, have endeavored to determine whether one
can or should speak of the Holocaust and how one might define the absolute
boundary of acceptable discourse on the Holocaust, beyond which one ventures into the realm of transgression and taboo. Conferences, monographs
and edited volumes continue to be published that either call for the establish-
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ment of limits to Holocaust representation, or, conversely, argue for expanding the boundaries of what is considered acceptable. For my part, I am less
interested in defining the limits of how one can narrate the Holocaust or what
exactly might constitute transgression of these limits. Rather, I am curious
about the rhetoric of limits: how these limits have been constructed in discourse about the Holocaust and how they have affected cultural production.
In particular, I am interested in how limits to literary representation of the
Holocaust have been delineated as a result of a particular construction of the
Holocaust as an unspeakable, ineffable, sacred event that lies outside history.
Such a conception of the Holocaust implies that humans—and thus writers—can have nothing to say about it, since it lies beyond the capacities of
human understanding and imagination.
One of the most vocal proponents of the idea of the Holocaust as a sacred
event has been Elie Wiesel, the influential novelist, critic and survivor of
Auschwitz.5 Of the relationship between the experience of the Holocaust and
attempts to depict that experience in literature, Wiesel writes:
And now a few words about the literature of the Holocaust or about literary
inspiration. There is no such thing, not with Auschwitz in the equation. “The
Holocaust as Literary Inspiration” is a contradiction in terms […]. Between our
memory and its reflection there stands a wall that cannot be pierced […]. A novel
about Treblinka is either not a novel or not about Treblinka. A novel about
Majdanek is about blasphemy. Is blasphemy. (“The Holocaust as Literary
Inspiration” 7)
In Wiesel’s view, literature is inadequate to the demands of representing the
extremity and atrocity of the Holocaust, for neither those who experienced it
nor those spared the experience can hope to transform it into imaginative narrative. The best one can achieve, in Wiesel’s opinion, is the sober, unadorned
testimony of the witness. Wiesel has since qualified his statement, but his
insistence that literature about the death camps represents blasphemy has
been integrated over the last several decades into Holocaust commemorative
culture and quoted repeatedly by scholars of Holocaust literature and
discourse. In short, it has achieved the status of a dictum, a critical prohibition. However, few critics have looked past his near ban on aesthetic representation of the Holocaust to investigate the philosophical and theological
underpinnings of his rhetoric or to determine the precise object of the blasphemy perpetrated by literature about the Holocaust. According to Wiesel,
not only is literature unable to traverse the epistemological and experiential
barrier that divides the Holocaust from the post-Holocaust world, its very
project is anathematic to what he sees as the sacred quality of the event.
Wiesel characterizes the Holocaust as a dominion apart from the mundane
world, “a universe outside the universe, a creation that exists parallel to
creation” (“Trivializing Memory” 165), relegating it to a negative theological
domain that mirrors that of God. Wiesel implies here that the Holocaust is
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structured as the inverse of the Hebrew divinity and, like God, exceeds the capacities of human language and cognition. Any attempt to explain it in human terms must end not only in failure, but in blasphemy as well. Just as the
Torah forbids not only the visual representation of God, but also the very pronunciation or transcription of his name, Wiesel believes that to imagine the
Holocaust and to attempt to represent it in language violates its profound incomprehensibility as the divine Other and drags it into the domain of the profane, becoming, in his words, “an act that strikes all that is sacred”
(“Trivializing Memory” 169). For this reason, Wiesel issues an injunction
against imaginative representation of the Holocaust that reads as a theological proclamation of the divine: “just as no one could imagine Auschwitz before
Auschwitz, no one can now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz” (“Trivializing
Memory” 169).
Wiesel is not the only critic to employ religious rhetoric in arguments
against representation. Other influential scholars and critics have expressed
similar reservations about the dangers of figurative language and the possibilities of narrative in general, often using language with recourse to the
transcendental or the sacred. George Steiner, for example, writes that “The
world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason” (123). According to the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann,
The Holocaust is first of all unique in that it constructs a circle of flames around
itself, the limit not to be broken because a certain absolute horror is not transmittable: to pretend to do so, on the other hand, is to become guilty of the most serious transgression. One must speak and be silent at the same time, to know that
here silence is the most authentic mode of speech, to maintain, as in the eye of
the cyclone, a protected, preserved region in which nothing must ever enter.
(quoted in Roth 219)
Lanzmann characterizes the Holocaust here in religious language as well, figuring it as the negative equivalent of the burning bush and insisting on a limit
that surrounds a certain conception of holiness that must be marked off from
the impure and the profane. There is of course also the famous (and most
grossly misquoted) dictum by Theodor W. Adorno, who wrote that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz (a position that Adorno later qualified
and then even recanted, a fact that critics often neglect to mention).6 In their
arguments, these critics employ argumentation and rhetoric that are similar
to Wiesel’s statements in two respects. First, they posit the Holocaust as an
absolutely unique event that in its intrinsic unspeakability borders on the
transcendental or the sublime. Second, they argue that attempts at representation—by which they mostly mean imaginative representation, or more
simply put, fiction—are doomed to fail. Even critics, like Adorno, who largely
avoid Wiesel’s mysticism and language of sanctification, end up reproducing
both the rhetoric of the divine and an attendant anxiety about the
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appropriateness and feasibility of narrative about the Holocaust. As Irving
Howe writes,
Perhaps dimly, Adorno wished to suggest that the Holocaust might be regarded
as a secular equivalent—if there can be such a thing—of that which in the
ancient myths could not be gazed at or named directly; that before which men
had to avert their eyes; that which in the properly responsive witness would
arouse the “holy dread” Freud saw in the essence of taboos. (181)
As Howe argues, although Adorno would likely reject the notion of the Holocaust as a negative counterpart to the divine, his anxiety about the appropriate limits of poetic representation aligns itself with a certain conception of the
Holocaust, one that Dominick LaCapra describes as “a secular displacement of
the sacred in the form of a radically transcendent, inaccessible, unrepresentable other ” (214). Secular critics following Adorno have increasingly
employed a religious rhetoric in discussing the limits of Holocaust representation. This rhetorical mode regards the Holocaust as an almost transcendent
event, a mysterium tremendum that, like God, defies human understanding and
rational explanation and thus resists representation. The concept scholars use
almost universally, especially in the discipline of literary criticism, is that of
the Bilderverbot (or some variation on the word Verbot, such as Darstellungsverbot, Fiktionalisierungsverbot, Sprachverbot), which refers to the prohibition
on images in the second commandment. Despite their habitual appropriation
of such a charged religious concept, however, scholars have largely failed to
reflect on the biblical context of such language and its appropriateness and
validity in the context of Holocaust representation.
With little reflection, critics have thus displaced the religious discourse of
sacredness and the incomprehensibility and unrepresentability of God onto
the historical events of the Holocaust and developed an orthodoxy that insists
on strict representational limits. For the most part, however, scholars have
failed to identify this religious, mystical conception of the Holocaust, although a number of critics, including Dan Magurshak, Adi Ophir, Alan
Rosenberg, Peter Haidu, Christoph Münze, Giorgio Agamben, Thomas
Trezise, Marvin Prosono and Naomi Mandel, have written about the problems of the related rhetoric of unspeakability and incomprehensibility in
Holocaust criticism. Fewer scholars have taken a closer look at how critics
have employed religious rhetoric to construct the Holocaust as a negative
sacred event, although this situation has recently begun to change.7 Moreover, literary critics have neglected altogether to examine the implications of
this rhetoric of the sacred for how writers engage with the Holocaust and how
we read their texts.
Despite the sacred prohibition by Wiesel and others against literature
about the Holocaust—in particular fictional literature (an injunction that
Wiesel himself violates with his own fictional novels)—the last several decades have seen a wave of imaginative writing about the Holocaust (Der Nazi
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und der Friseur being just one example). In particular, Jewish writers such as Edgar Hilsenrath have ignored the critical interdiction against narrative and
transgressed against the consecration of the Holocaust, thereby contributing
to what Wiesel laments as “a period of general desanctification of the Holocaust” (“Trivializing Memory” 166). In contrast to Wiesel, these writers
choose to violate the critical injunction against figurative narrative in order to
expose the Holocaust as inherently incompatible with the sacred and the divine. Hilsenrath’s novel, as we have seen, punctures the sacred aura of the Holocaust by foisting upon the reader the grotesque figure of Max, the perpetrator who steals his victim’s identity. In his public role as Itzig, the Holocaust
survivor, Max speaks fluently the language of sacred respect for those who
experienced or perished in the Holocaust. At the same time, he profoundly
undermines this respectful rhetoric with his astonishingly easy and unproblematic transformation from a self-admitted mass murderer into someone
who is universally recognized and accepted as a survivor. Max’s successful
metamorphosis thus points to the ways in which the postwar world, even as
its discourse about the Holocaust progressively has taken on the character of
the sacred, has betrayed both the victims and the survivors by allowing the
perpetrators to go unpunished for their crimes. Max himself is aware of this:
Die meisten Massenmörder leben auf freiem Fuß. Manche im Ausland. Die
meisten wieder in der alten Heimat […]. Es geht ihnen gut, den Massenmördern!
Die sind Friseure. Oder was anderes […]. Viele machen wieder Politik, sitzen in
der Regierung. Haben Rang und Ansehen. Und Familie.
[…] Das ist die volle Wahrheit! Sie leben auf freiem Fuß und machen sich über
Gott und die Welt lustig. Und auch über das Wort “Gerechtigkeit”! (315)
With Max and his manipulation of language, which he twists in order to evade
punishment for his murders, Hilsenrath thus illustrates the tensions between
the sacred and the profane in Holocaust discourse. In his role as Itzig, Max
speaks the sacred, but both his actions and his narration betray these utterances as a cynical performance of the type of rhetoric he knows the world
wants (and even expects) to hear. In the context of Der Nazi und der Friseur,
Max’s very existence thus mocks any attempt to link the Holocaust with the
sacred and the divine.
Hilsenrath is not the only Jewish writer whose work questions the dominant critical rhetoric about the Holocaust. Leslie Epstein, whose novel King of
the Jews blends documentary evidence and novelistic imagination in its representation of the Lodz ghetto, objects to characterizing the Holocaust as a
sacred event for much the same reason that Hilsenrath inverts this discourse
in his depiction of Max: such a notion of the Holocaust necessarily lifts the
event out of the realm of human ethics. According to Epstein, “What is being
denied is the one crucial fact: that those who suffered, and those who inflicted
suffering, were men, and that the Holocaust did not occur in a fantasyland, or
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outside of history, […] but in the only world we can hope to know, the only
one we can experience and be responsible for—our own” (266–67). As Epstein
argues, characterizing the Holocaust as sacred and unspeakable mitigates our
responsibility to try understand what happened and tacitly absolves the
people who perpetrated it. By allowing it the status of the “inhuman,” we
leave it inexplicable. In addition, in Epstein’s view, the circumscription of
imaginative representation of the Holocaust unwittingly replicates the attitude of the perpetrators, who sought to destroy the imagination so central to
Jewish theology:
If to some degree civilization began when a man settled for screaming at his enemy instead of stoning him to death, then the task for the Third Reich was to
turn words back into rocks; that is to say, to drain them of their imagistic and
metaphoric properties […].
I have suggested that the Jews, who after all did not cling to a vision of hell or tortured afterlife, were consigned to it precisely because they took the greatest
imaginative leap of all, that of comprehending, out of nothingness, a burning
bush, an empty whirlwind, the “I am that I am.” In an age when the belief was no
longer tenable, when the supreme fiction, which is that we matter, became a
rebuke to the countervailing belief, which was that everything was possible,
then the extermination of the Jews, who in their finite minds conceived of the infinite, becomes an attack on the imagination itself. (262–63)
For Epstein, the Nazi attack on the Jewish imagination must be answered
with an affirmation of that very same quality; otherwise the post-Holocaust
world will have unwittingly acceded to the Nazis’ goal of not only eradicating
an entire people but also of covering over the crime with silence. To affirm the
role of the Jewish imagination with regard to the Holocaust would be to at
least partially recover a history that was almost extinguished. (Although
Epstein does not address this specifically, his insistence on the qualities of the
Jewish imagination relates to theological tradition in yet another way: the
prohibition on the imagination of a sacred Holocaust, while in keeping with
the Torah’s ban on representing God, ignores the rich tradition of Talmudic
commentary, which circumvents the injunction on fixed representations of
God by creating a narrative, interpretive, dialogical mode of discourse on the
divine.) Epstein locates the problematic response to the Holocaust in what he
calls “the failure of imagination” (269), the relegation of the Holocaust to the
realm of otherness, “a fantasyland […] outside of history” that resembles
Wiesel’s inverse divinity. Epstein believes that the Jewish writer, in particular
the writer of fiction, bears special responsibility to break the sacred taboo that
surrounds the Holocaust and reintegrate it back into human terms. To be sure,
Epstein admits some skepticism about the ability of some fictional narratives
to achieve such lofty goals. However, rather than view the deployment of
imagination in Holocaust writing as somehow blasphemous against a sacred
order, Epstein sees the Jewish imagination as necessary and even productive in
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231
its potential for resistance against the Nazis’ genocidal attack on the
imagination.
I am aware that the term “Jewish imagination” might be considered problematic by virtue of its possible essentialistic undertones. I would like to retain
Epstein’s term but make it clear that I am not arguing that there is a single
definable quality known as the “Jewish imagination” (an idea that would be
very difficult to pin down historically, given the long duration and decentered
quality of Hebrew and Jewish culture). Rather, I posit the notion of a Jewish
imagination as a heterogeneous, performative process characterized by negotiations with the prohibition against fixed representations of the divine, and,
as Epstein points out, a corresponding emphasis on metaphor. My use of the
term “Jewish imagination” is indebted to Geoffrey Hartman’s work on the
subject. Hartman associates the notion of a Jewish imagination with attempts to circumvent the prohibition of graven images found in the
Decalogue, which he regards as “the most explicit biblical statement on imagination” (452). Hartman connects these circumventions to literature in particular, which he sees as the uniquely Jewish response to the injunction: “The
productive side of that prohibition may, however, have channeled imaginative energies into writing, into graphic rather than graven forms […]. [T]he
Jewish imagination has been dominated by a turn to the written word” (453;
459). Furthermore, in his conception of a Jewish imagination, Hartman acknowledges the specific historical interaction between theological injunctions and diasporic history that broadly informs Jewish culture and points to
the Holocaust in particular as an experience within the greater context of Jewish history that has contributed to the tension between imagination and profanation. Finally, in his notion of the Jewish imagination the role of transgression is especially critical, for as he argues, the potential for violation of the sacred commandment against representation is always already inscribed in the
very act of imagination: “There is no imagination without distrust of imagination […]. Jewish fantasy is thus always shadowed by profanation” (451;
463). In this way, Hartman traces the outlines of a concept of a Jewish
imagination that is channeled through writing and exists in constant tension
with prohibitions that would limit it.
I have been tracing here what I see as two modes of thinking involved in
the narrative representation of the Holocaust—the prohibitive and the
transgressive. However, it is important to stress that these forces are not
mutually exclusive opposites, but rather two shifting, interacting points on a
spectrum without resolution. As Berel Lang notes, the notion of profanation
or transgression is already inscribed in the limits that have been imposed upon
Holocaust representation, characterizing transgression “as a condition for representation” (301). Transgression in Holocaust writing is not an absolute or
static moment, but a moving process by which writers attempt to negotiate
certain limits imposed by both the process of representation itself and cultural
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discourse on the Holocaust. According to Michel Foucault, this movement is
characteristic of transgression in general: “transgression crosses and recrosses
a line and thus is made to return once more right to the horizon of the
uncrossable” (34). Thus, in Foucault’s view, transgression and its limits are
mutually constitutive and exist in dialectical tension with one another; “their
relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust”
(35). Translated into the context of Holocaust writing, this means that narrative transgression is thus not a singular act of rebellion, but a repetitive process
that shifts according to the circumstances of particular representations and
their perceived limits. We thus have writers like Aharon Appelfeld, who have
issued seemingly contradictory statements, even within the same essay. On
the one hand, Appelfeld writes,
There is a tendency to speak of the Holocaust in mystical terms, to link the
events to the incomprehensible, the mysterious, the insane, and the meaningless. That tendency is both understandable and dangerous, from every point of
view. Murder that was committed with evil intentions must not be interpreted
in mystical terms. (39)
At the same time, however, Appelfeld insists, “I hesitate to say it, but one
must: The apocalyptic horror of the Holocaust was felt by us as a deeply religious experience” (46). Even Elie Wiesel, who insists that novels about the
Holocaust are blasphemy, has issued statements that contradict this assertion:
Any writer may, if he so chooses, deal with the subject of the Holocaust. This
area is not limited to survivors alone. In this respect, there are no taboos […]. If a
novelist believes himself capable of imagining the unimaginable, so much the
better for him. (“Does the Holocaust Lie Beyond the Reach of Art?” 126)
Writers of Holocaust fiction are thus often ambivalent about their literary
engagement with the Holocaust: they object to the idea of a mystical, sacred,
religiously determined event, but they are also wary of turning the Holocaust
into the mundane. As with Appelfeld and Wiesel, many Jewish writers,
including Hilsenrath, display a tension between representing the Holocaust
as an event outside history and allowing it to become a normal historical event
(in Hilsenrath’s novel, this tension results in an idiosyncratic form that
includes elements of, among other genres, both the grotesque fairy tale and
the realistic historical novel). This ambivalence is often thematized or
poeticized as transgression in the texts they produce. Many of these texts
employ various forms of blasphemy and travesty in order to undermine the
notion of the Holocaust as a sacred, religious event akin to divine creation.
They thus both participate in the dialectic between the sacred and the profane
and at the same time attempt to subvert it, highlighting the inherently
performative interaction between representations of the Holocaust and the
discourse that governs them.
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233
Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur participates in and manipulates
the tensions between the sacred and the blasphemous I have identified in
discourse about the Holocaust, transgressing against narrative convention in
order to expose the problems that arise from a sanctified conception of the
event. The novel’s primary transgressions, as we have seen, are Max’s murder
of Itzig, his self-transformation into a paradigmatic Holocaust survivor, and
as I stressed earlier, his hubristic assumption of Itzig’s voice to tell his grotesque story. However, Max commits his violations not only physically, in the
fabula, or story world, of the text; he also transgresses on the level of the text’s
discourse as the narrator of these events by parading before the reader not only
his iniquities and his uncanny ability to evade capture and judgment, but also
his astonishing lack of shame or guilt for the crimes he has perpetrated. On the
contrary, rather than attempting to conceal his violations, as Max the character does within the fabula, Max the narrator constantly foregrounds them;
throughout the text, he repeatedly reminds his reader of his murderous theft
of Itzig’s identity with such references as “Ich, Itzig Finkelstein, damals noch
Max Schulz” (171), an enunciation that reproduces this crime each time he utters it. In this way, rather than attempting to camouflage the narrative evidence of his crimes, Max flaunts it before the reader and mocks her helplessness in the face of her knowledge of Max’s identity. She alone knows about his
true past, yet she is unable to intervene in the fabula to alert the characters
(especially the Jewish characters) who trust him. Max himself alludes to his
mockery of the reader by paradoxically and innocently insisting that he is only
telling the truth:
Sie glauben wahrscheinlich, daß ich mich über Sie lustig mache? Oder Sie
glauben es nicht, und Sie werden sich sagen: “Max Schulz spinnt! […] Was will
Max Schulz? Was will er mir einreden? Wem will er die Schuld in die Schuhe
schieben? Seiner Mutter? Den Juden? Oder dem lieben Gott? […] Unsinn!
Sowas gibt es nicht! Ein Alptraum! Nichts weiter!” Aber ich will Ihnen nur
meine Geschichte erzählen […] obwohl ich Ihnen nicht alles erzähle, sozusagen:
nur das Wichtigste, oder das, was ich, Itzig Finkelstein, damals noch Max Schulz,
für ganz besonders wichtig halte. (12)
With his convoluted tale that travesties the story of both Itzig’s death and the
death of millions in the Holocaust, Max asserts in mock innocence that his
aim is not to taunt the reader, but rather to merely tell his story as he sees fit.
In so doing, Max reminds the reader that he not only retains the upper hand in
the fabula, but also controls the novel’s discourse and consequently the reader
as well.8 He is thus able to blaspheme against the memory of his victims and
conscript the reader to implicitly do the same.
However, the violation of narrative norms in Der Nazi und der Friseur does
not end with the transgressions of its narrator. Max’s trespass against Itzig’s
memory with the brutal theft of Itzig’s voice, which takes place on the level of
the text, is mirrored by a similar assumption that takes place on the level of
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authorship, marking a further, extratextual instance of transgression associated with Hilsenrath’s novel. For just as Max possesses the hubris to write
Itzig’s story as if it were his own, Hilsenrath, the Holocaust survivor, presumes in his novel to write the story of the perpetrator in the first person as
well. The positions of the author and the narrator of the text are thus parallel;
both attempt to write in the voice of someone who lies at the diametrically opposite end of Holocaust experience; in the first case, the perpetrator-narrator
writes the perspective of the victim; in the second, the survivor-author writes
the perspective of the perpetrator. Max’s appropriation of Itzig’s voice and
perspective is the most blatant and certainly the most disturbing of the two,
for he kills not only the person whose voice he assumes, but thousands of
others as well. One of the reasons Max’s narrative transgression enrages us is
that, because of the ease with which he slips into the role of the victim, he
appears to mock or make meaningless the categories of victim and perpetrator
altogether, distinctions on which we insist not only for ethical reasons, but
also out of solidarity with those who were persecuted in the Holocaust. However, just as there is something offensive about the non-Jewish perpetrator
Max appropriating the voice of the Jewish victim Itzig, there is an implied
transgressive element in the Jewish survivor Hilsenrath taking on the perspective of the German perpetrator Max. In postwar German discourse on the
Holocaust in particular, which has tended to define the categories “German”
and “Jew” as almost mutually exclusive, the notion of a Jewish writer taking
on the perspective of a German perpetrator is almost as shocking as its opposite. Just as, at one time, Jewish historians of the Third Reich were seen by
some of their German counterparts as unreliable because they were thought
to be unable to be objective about their object of study,9 there has been a correlative anxiety about the ability of Jewish writers to do justice to the exploration of German perspectives on the Holocaust, as if their history of suffering
and feelings of revenge might distort their representations. (Such a view of
course assumes that non-Jewish Germans are themselves better able to be objective about German perpetrators, an assumption belied by problematic engagements with the Nazi past such as the Historians’ Debate of the 1980s.)
This anxiety is operative in the German reception of Hilsenrath’s text as well,
which is why it would appear in the German context as doubly transgressive.
Hilsenrath’s text has been called a fantasy of revenge (Taylor), and it is this
perception that might account in part for the fact that, even after the novel
had sold more than a million copies in English, French and Italian, it was
turned down by over sixty German publishing houses (Braun 46) before it was
finally accepted by a small literary publisher. Hilsenrath’s novel violated
German norms about how one could talk about the Holocaust and, in particular, who could portray a Holocaust perpetrator. Helmut Braun, the German
publisher who enthusiastically agreed to publish Hilsenrath’s novel, argues
that German publishing houses rejected Der Nazi und der Friseur not only on
MCGLOTHLIN: Hilsenrath
235
account of its satirical tone, but also because it violated their normative notions of the narrative perspectives survivor-authors were allowed to assume:
[M]an [war] sich nun einig, daß eine Aufarbeitung der Shoah in Form einer
bitterbösen, pechschwarzen Satire—noch dazu ausschließlich aus der Täterperspektive geschrieben—völlig unangemessen und deshalb unzulässig sei. Auf
den Punkt gebracht: Die in Verlagen sitzenden “Büchermacher” beanspruchten,
dem Opfer vorzuschreiben, wie die Shoah literarisch darzustellen sei,
beziehungsweise festzulegen, wo die Grenzen für eine solche Darstellung lägen.
(47)
Moreover, by writing his story of the Holocaust through the perspective of
the former SS guard Max Schulz, Hilsenrath violates what I have identified
elsewhere as a powerful taboo in postwar writing on the Holocaust that prohibits imagining the perpetrator ’s subjectivity.10 Such a taboo requires that
perpetrators be represented not as human figures, but as abstract, one-dimensional, recondite Others whose personal motives lie outside the norms of
human discourse. By insisting on Max Schulz as a human character (albeit a
grotesquely exaggerated one) and by telling the story from his perspective,
Hilsenrath pulls the perpetrator out of some mythical, otherworldly universe
and brings him back to the scene of his crime. In so doing, he reminds us that,
in Epstein’s words, “the Holocaust did not occur in a fantasyland, or outside of
history.” With his novel of a perpetrator who steals the identity and history of
his victim, Hilsenrath writes against the notion of the Holocaust as a sacred,
transcendental event that borders on the divine and emphasizes its place
within human experience. He accomplishes this through his use of the grotesque, which, in its anti-mimetic exaggeration of Max’s experience as a perpetrator (Max’s personal death toll of 10,000 victims is but one example of the
novel’s departure from historical realism and veracity), refuses to allow the
reader to transform Max into a mythology of evil and the Holocaust into the
ineffable result of that evil. With its twisted and transgressive tale of Max’s
incredible experience as a perpetrator, the novel thus paradoxically mediates a
historical rather than mythical understanding of the Holocaust.
Der Nazi und der Friseur forces us, as readers, to confront our anxieties
about the ways in which fictional works narrate the Holocaust, an event that
we desperately believe must be portrayed carefully and above all correctly.
Hilsenrath’s novel offends our sensibilities about how both victims and perpetrators should be represented, it evokes feelings of revulsion and distaste,
and it frightens us with its contempt for our neatly delineated categories. By
arousing these feelings of disgust and unease, however, the novel prohibits us
from slipping into paralyzing awe and silence, the response encouraged by the
conception of the Holocaust as sacred. Precisely because Hilsenrath’s text
evokes such human feelings from its readers, it helps them to relate to the
Holocaust in a much more human way. In this way, Der Nazi und der Friseur
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drags the Holocaust out of the transcendent and the sacred and into the realm
of the historically human.
Notes
1
This article was made possible in part by funds granted to the author through a
Faculty Fellowship at the Washington University Center for the Humanities and
through a Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The statements made and views expressed, however, are solely the responsibility of the author.
2 Hilsenrath originally wrote his novel in German but it appeared first in English
translation in 1971 as The Nazi and the Barber. The German edition appeared in 1977.
3 For good discussions of the ways in which Hilsenrath appropriates and/or subverts the German genres of the Bildungsroman, the Schelmenroman and the fairy tale, see
Andreas Graf, Jennifer Taylor, Peter Arnds, Rupert Kalkofen, and Anne Fuchs.
4 Anne Fuchs provides a good discussion of bodily abjection and sexuality in the
novel’s portrayal of female characters.
5 Elie Wiesel’s influence on American and international Holocaust discourse is considerable. One can justifiably argue that he has contributed a great deal to the way in
which contemporary culture frames the Holocaust in religious terms. Ruth Klüger, the
literary scholar and Auschwitz survivor, describes his public image amusingly (and not
inaccurately) as quasi-divine: “Wiesel ist in den Vereinigten Staaten eine Art Kultfigur.
Wenn es ihm einfällt, von der Bibel zu lesen, sammelt sich das Volk um ihn wie um
einen Propheten” (207). Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman attribute the widespread
use of the term “Holocaust” directly to Wiesel and argue that he was very aware of the
“unmistakable religious/sacrificial overtones” (202) of the term and employed it precisely because of them.
6 Adorno’s famous statement reads in the original: “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht
zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (31). Over the course of the last several decades, critics
have written exhaustively on Adorno’s dictum and his later revisions to it in the context of both Holocaust representation and German postwar cultural discourse. Discussions I find particularly useful include articles in the volumes edited by Köppen,
Kiedaisch, and Bannasch and Hammer. Thomas Trezise’s article provides an excellent
interpretation of Adorno in the context of the rhetoric of unspeakability in Holocaust
discourse.
7 A notable recent attempt to examine the religious rhetoric in Holocaust discourse
is Bettina Bannasch and Almuth Hammer’s edited volume Verbot der Bilder – Gebot der
Erinnerung: Mediale Repräsentationen der Shoah, which devotes itself largely to the critical deployment of the Bilderverbot and presents excellent analyses of the implications
of the use of religious language in discourse about the Holocaust.
8 For a good discussion of Max’s mockery of the reader through his monopoly on
narrative perspective, see Jennifer Bjornstad.
9 This problem has been addressed in detail in the correspondence between Martin
Broszat and Saul Friedländer about the implications of the historicization of the Nazi
period. Broszat writes: “Among the problems faced by a younger generation of German
historians more focused on rational understanding is certainly also the fact that they
MCGLOTHLIN: Hilsenrath
237
must deal with just such a contrary form of memory among those who were persecuted and harmed by the Nazi regime, and among their descendants—a form of memory which functions to coarsen historical recollection” (91). Friedländer responds to
this point by asking, “But, if we see things from your perspective, why, in your opinion,
would historians belonging to the group of the perpetrators be able to distance themselves from their past, whereas those belonging to the groups of the victims, would
not?” (96).
10 Please see my forthcoming article “Theorizing the Perpetrator in Bernhard
Schlink’s The Reader and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow.”
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