Three years ago in these pages, I wrote about the difficulties of exploring and understanding acts of human terror and brutality such as those that occurred during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany (‘Homer and the Holocaust’, ABR, November 2002). I noted that a certain etiquette had prevailed in the ever-expanding Holocaust canon, one that tended to privilege factual accounts – memoirs, histories, personal testimonies from the survivors themselves – over more imaginative treatments; how the former were regarded as more ‘morally responsible’. I noted, too, the paucity of material from German sources and how this had skewed understanding of the Holocaust. I argued that ‘sixty years on, there is something lacking in the way we have sought to understand the Holocaust; something in the approach that seems to confirm what we already know rather than illuminate the new’. What was required, I suggested, was more, not less, imaginative work.
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