Sartre, Goffman, and Fictional Nazis: Homogeneity as Identity in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) and Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber (1971)

This article seeks to consider the role of homogeneity as a character trait in literary representations of Holocaust perpetrators. It will engage with Erving Goffman’s “on face-work” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. The drawing together of these two distinct theoretical approaches, while not new, is based on the conceptions of “social performativity” and “nothingness” that inform both methodologies. Thus, this article is concerned with the depiction of Nazi protagonists whose identity is enmeshed with that of the wider social discourse but who, at the same time, display the potential for other versions of selfhood (what I call self-potentiality). The analysis concludes by examining the possible ethical implications of this kind of characterization.