Holocaust literature and the taboo

This essay considers taboos that have developed in and around Holocaust literature, focusing on controversial, fictional responses to the Holocaust, with a particular emphasis on the representation of perpetrators. All of the writers discussed draw on the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, and this essay takes Freud’s reading of social taboos as a model for interpreting transgressive forms of historical representation and cultural practice, arguing that the proscription of certain forms of Holocaust representation constitutes an attempt to foreclose responses to the genocide that are particularly difficult to articulate or deal with, such as the ‘fascination of Fascism’, the ordinariness of perpetrator identities, and ambivalent attitudes towards the dead. It makes a case for the value of novels and poems which engage with truths about our relationship with history that are never straightforwardly empirical, arguing that they are fundamental to what the Germans term ‘working through’ or ‘dealing with’ (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) the knowledge and cultural legacy of the Holocaust.