Exploring the Fictions of Perpetrator Suffering

In this article I will ask whether there is evidence in literary and filmic representations of the Holocaust years that the perpetrators of genocide underwent suffering or trauma as a consequence of their actions, and how best to conceptualize such a notion. Such an exploration can be seen as an instance of the so-called turn to the perpetrator of recent years in Holocaust studies, a development that has had a mixed reception.¹ Some commentators argue the case for considering the perspective of perpetrators as a crucial element of historical or cultural approaches to the Holocaust. Others may follow the view that to understand or analyze a perpetrator perspective is to exonerate or to encourage inappropriate identification, or they may fear that there will be an implication, however unwitting, of “equivalence” between the testimonies by, or representations of, the victims and the perpetrators of genocidal violence.²

The historian Christopher Browning argues for the analytical usefulness of perpetrator testimony, in this case Adolf Eichmann’s autobiographical writings and trial testimony, subject to the application of four tests to estimate the likelihood of its reliability.³ From a different disciplinary perspective, the filmmaker Luke Holland claims that his interviews with former Nazis are valuable for such reasons as helping to identify patterns of genocidal behavior, for challenging Holocaust denial, and as a way of honoring the victims’ memory.⁴ The philosopher Gillian Rose has argued that representations of the compromised and morally suspect perpetrators constitute a greater ethical challenge to readers than the contemplation of heroic or sentimentalized survival. She uses as her example the first-person account by the butler Stevens, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day, of unquestioning loyalty to his employer, Lord Darlington, a fascist sympathizer.⁵ I aim to follow Rose’s approach in suggesting that some of the unease readers may experience on contemplating perpetrators, and the psychic cost of their actions, arises from the uncomfortable and challenging nature of the self-scrutiny that this entails.

I have taken as my examples some literary and filmic representations of members of the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen were the mobile security squads that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union during the invasion in the summer of 1941 and killed by shooting 1.3 million Jews and other so-called racial and ideological enemies of the Third Reich. I have chosen the Einsatzgruppen because the extreme brutality with which their executions were conducted makes perpetrator trauma a likely outcome; yet representations of these events, in the form of testimony or fiction, are scarce. Such paucity contrasts with the more common eyewitness accounts—whether from the point of view of survivors or perpetrators—of other experiences of the Holocaust years, such as existence in the ghettos and camps. There are various reasons for this absence. First, there are very few survivors of the Einsatzgruppen killings, and thus few testimonial accounts. Only one such survivor could be described as well known: this is Dina Pronicheva, who survived the Babi Yar massacre of September 1941. Her story has appeared in a variety of forms, including several versions of her own testimony, in fictional form in Anatoli Kuznetsov’s 1966 Babi Yar, and as the origin of the character Lisa Erdman in D. M. Thomas’s 1981 novel The White Hotel.⁶ Yet Pronicheva is the exception to the rule of “victims who left little record.”⁷

Regarding imagined representations of the Einsatzgruppen, the Russian writer Vasily Grossman includes an acknowledgement of the existence of the killer of his mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, in a letter he wrote to her after she had been shot along with the other Jews of Berdichev in September 1941: “I have tried, dozens, or maybe hundreds of times, to imagine how you died, how you walked to meet your death. I tried to imagine the person who killed you. He was the last person to see you.”⁸ The bleak irony of a son almost envying a murderer for the “last” view of his mother has something in common with the motivation for the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s interviews with...