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Doch das lateinische Wort ›sacer‹ hat seine Verständlichkeit verloren. Die Moderne überblendet es mit einem ethnologischen Tabubegriff, der die Leitdifferenz heilig/profan mit der Binnendifferenz rein/unrein verbindet und so die Faszinationsgeschichte eines anziehenden Schreckens schreibt, der sich im Deutschen nicht durch ein einzelnes Wort wiedergeben lässt. Von William Robertson Smith, James George Frazer, Sigmund Freud und Rudolf Otto über Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss und Claude Lévi-Strauss bis zu Georges Bataille und Antonin Artaud zeichnet das Buch diesen Diskurs nach.
Doch das lateinische Wort ›sacer‹ hat seine Verständlichkeit verloren. Die Moderne überblendet es mit einem ethnologischen Tabubegriff, der die Leitdifferenz heilig/profan mit der Binnendifferenz rein/unrein verbindet und so die Faszinationsgeschichte eines anziehenden Schreckens schreibt, der sich im Deutschen nicht durch ein einzelnes Wort wiedergeben lässt. Von William Robertson Smith, James George Frazer, Sigmund Freud und Rudolf Otto über Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss und Claude Lévi-Strauss bis zu Georges Bataille und Antonin Artaud zeichnet das Buch diesen Diskurs nach.
Taking the Holocaust as its central topic, The Kindly Ones is a disturbing novel: disturbing in its use of explicit sexual descriptions, in its construction of a perverted psychic world, in its combination of accurate historical descriptions and myths, and in its repeated suggestion that Nazism does not, in fact, lie outside the spectrum of humanness. Due to its striking monumental proportions and the author’s provocative choice to recount historical events from the perpetrator’s perspective, this opus marks a significant shift within Holocaust literature.
In this volume, fourteen leading literary scholars and historians from eight different countries closely study this unsettling work. They examine the disconcerting aspects of the novel including the use of the Nazi viewpoint, analyze the aesthetics of the novel and its contradictions, and explore its relations with several literary traditions. They outline Littell’s use of historical details and materials and study the novel’s reception. This compilation of essays is essential to anyone intrigued by The Kindly Ones or by the Holocaust and who wishes to gain a better understanding of them.
Taking the Holocaust as its central topic, The Kindly Ones is a disturbing novel: disturbing in its use of explicit sexual descriptions, in its construction of a perverted psychic world, in its combination of accurate historical descriptions and myths, and in its repeated suggestion that Nazism does not, in fact, lie outside the spectrum of humanness. Due to its striking monumental proportions and the author’s provocative choice to recount historical events from the perpetrator’s perspective, this opus marks a significant shift within Holocaust literature.
In this volume, fourteen leading literary scholars and historians from eight different countries closely study this unsettling work. They examine the disconcerting aspects of the novel including the use of the Nazi viewpoint, analyze the aesthetics of the novel and its contradictions, and explore its relations with several literary traditions. They outline Littell’s use of historical details and materials and study the novel’s reception. This compilation of essays is essential to anyone intrigued by The Kindly Ones or by the Holocaust and who wishes to gain a better understanding of them.