Language:
English
Year of publication:
2021
Titel der Quelle:
Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2021) 237-250
Keywords:
Albahari, David,
;
Arendt, Hannah,
;
Serbian fiction Jewish authors
;
History and criticism
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
;
Identity (Psychology) in literature
;
Good and evil in literature
Abstract:
This paper deals with David Albahari’s Holocaust novel Gec i Majer from 1998. It focuses on the increasingly split and fragile narrator’s personality, his search for his family history, a new identity and his imagination of the gas van drivers Götz and Meyer, who murdered most of his Jewish relatives in World War II. Including Hannah Arendt’s well-known thesis, the paper interprets the Nazi perpetrators as typical representatives of the “banality of evil”, who see themselves as a negligible part within a larger and more complex mechanism and who are, consequently, unwilling to assume responsibility for their atrocities.
DOI:
10.7767/9783205212904.237
URL:
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