scholarly journals Fictional Crimes/Historical Crimes: Genre and Character in Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir Trilogy

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Laura Major
Keyword(s):  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Good Story ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Detective Stories

This paper will explore Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy, composed of March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990), and A German Requiem (1991), discussing the overlap and blurring of generic boundaries in these novels and the ability of this form to reckon with the Holocaust. These detective stories are not directly about the Holocaust, and although the crimes investigated by the mordant Bernie Gunther are fictional, they are interweaved with the greater crimes committed daily by the Nazi Party. The novels are brutally realistic, violent, bleak, and harsh, in a narrative style highly appropriate for crime novels set in Nazi Germany. Indeed, with our knowledge of the enormity of the Nazi crimes, the violence in the novels seems not gratuitous but reflective of the era. Bernie Gunther himself, who is both hard-boiled protagonist and narrator, is a deeply flawed human, even an anti-hero, but in Berlin, which is “alive” as a character in these novels, his insights, cloaked in irony and sarcasm, highlight the struggle to resist, even passively, even just inside one’s own mind, the current of Nazism. Although many representations of the Holocaust in popular fiction strive towards the “feel good” story within the story, Kerr’s morally and generically ambiguous novels never give in to this urge, and the solution of the crime is never redemptive. The darkness of these novels, paired with the popularity of crime fiction, make for a significant vehicle for representing the milieu in which the Holocaust was able to occur.

Popular Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roslyn Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the history of popular fiction in Australia. The question of place has always been central to Australian fiction, not only as a thematic element but also as a critical or political preoccupation. In part, this is because popular fiction writers, wanting to attract broad audiences, either exploited their Australian content to appeal to international readers or have excised the local to produce a generic and thus more readily accessible setting for outsiders. The chapter considers works by popular fiction writers who adopt a range of positions in relation to their focus on place, but often tackle many different aspects of Australian social and historical change. These novels cover various genres such as crime fiction, historical fiction and romance, science fiction and fantasy, and include Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Damien Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980), and Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute (2001).

scholarly journals Place matters: geographical context, place belonging and the production of locality in Mediterranean Noirs

GeoJournal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Gabellieri
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Geographical Discourse ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Narrative Medium ◽  
Geographical Context

AbstractScholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer’s sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai’s theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality.

What Is Left of the Genius? Sherlockian Legacy in Contemporary Crime Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-150
Author(s):  
Jacek Mydla
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Time Of Death ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
Scientific Expertise ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Working Out

Arthur Conan Doyle famously popularised science in his series of detective stories by placing its three constitutive elements (scientific knowledge, the collection of evidence, and art of making inferences), in his protagonist Sherlock Holmes. The legacy is present in contemporary crime fiction, but the competencies have been distributed among a group of individuals involved in the investigation. This distribution has affected and changed the position of the detective vis-à-vis scientific expertise. Science, chiefly in the form of different branches of forensics, is as indispensable as the detective, and authors have been working out different ways of making the two work together. As an example of this cooperation, the paper examines Mark Billingham’s 2015 novel Time of Death.

scholarly journals Hannah Arendt's Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gerwarth ◽  
Stephan Malinowski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Sensitive Issues

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Professional Services, IBM, and the Holocaust

2003 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse F. Dillard
Keyword(s):  
Social Systems ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Instrumental Rationality ◽  
Professional Services ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Administrative Structures

IBM and the Holocaust both represent power, ideology, and rational administration. We view one as logical and commendable, the other as pathological and deplorable, and both as a manifestation of instrumental rationality. IBM and the Holocaust (Black 2001) explores the connect between IBM and its dynamic leader, Thomas J. Watson, and the program of genocide carried out against European Jewry over the 12-year reign of Germany's Third Reich. Those who controlled, applied, and supported IBM's information processing technology are implicated in operationalizing the lethal ideology of the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party. Considering relationships between the fascist and the capitalist extremes provides a starting point in a dialogue that challenges the privileged position of instrumental rationality in evaluating choices related to the development, implementation, and application of information technology. The investigation of IBM and the Holocaust illustrates the potential for technology to reinforce, and be reinforced by, a prevailing ideology through the tangible manifestations of instrumental rationality: machines, professionals, and administrative structures. The ends to which the technology and its manifestations are applied by those implementing and supporting it become lost in striving to efficiently accomplish the immediate, intermediate tasks. The technological manifestations and their complicity in the Holocaust illustrate the inability of instrumental rationality to adequately incorporate the requisite ethical and moral dimensions, a lacuna no less present, though not so obvious, in actions undertaken within the current economic and political spheres by those employing the same tangible manifestations of instrumental rationality. The inability of those most directly implicated to reflexively consider the alliance of technology and ideology assures the continuing propensity of both good and evil. Unfortunately, the social systems that spawned the impressive technological developments do not provide adequate means for discerning and ethically evaluating the destructive and the creative potential.

Jewish–Ukrainian Relations in Inter-War Poland as Reflected in Some Ukrainian Publications

1998 ◽  
pp. 232-246
Author(s):  
Shimon Redlich
Keyword(s):  
Nazi Germany ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
National Minorities ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Face ◽  
Soviet Russia

This chapter surveys Jewish–Ukrainian relations in inter-war Poland as reflected in some Ukrainian publications. The historiography of Jewish–Ukrainian relations, although quite extensive, has usually tended towards partisanship, caused by the uneasy, and at times tragic, relations between Ukrainians and Jews. To provide an understanding of Ukrainian attitudes towards Jews between the two world wars, the chapter examines the perceptions and images of the Jews in the Ukrainian press in Poland in the inter-war years. The Ukrainian press reflects traditional Ukrainian attitudes towards Jews as well as some images formed specifically during the period under discussion. It also helps one understand how Ukrainians felt towards Jews during the war years in the face of the Holocaust. Since Ukrainians and Jews formed the two largest national minorities in inter-war Poland, their interrelations reflected issues relating to Poles and the Polish state as well. Moreover, Ukrainian–Jewish relations were influenced by problems relating to Poland's most significant neighbours, Soviet Russia in the east and Weimar and later Nazi Germany in the west. Thus, an examination of the Ukrainian press in Poland also throws light on broader ideological and political issues.

Belgium

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Michael J. Bazyler ◽  
Kathryn Lee Boyd ◽  
Kristen L. Nelson ◽  
Rajika L. Shah
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Property Owners

Nazi Germany invaded Belgium in 1940 and occupied the country until 1944. More than 26,000 Jews were deported from Belgium during the Holocaust and less than 2,000 of them survived. Owing to unique aspects of Belgian law still in force during the occupation, less than 10 percent of Jewish real estate was sold by the German occupying power. Most private property that came under German administration was rented out and the proceeds put into blocked accounts for the benefit of the original property owners. After the war, there was no organized process for seeking payment of the rental account balances or for seeking restitution or compensation for real estate that had been sold by the German administration. In the late 1990s, the Belgian government’s Study Commission—established to examine the fate of Jewish property during the war—found it difficult to identify any remaining unrestituted immovable property because of the ad hoc manner of its return after the war. Notwithstanding this difficulty, an Indemnification Commission was established in 2001 to compensate individuals whose property (immovable and movable) had not been previously compensated/returned. Belgium endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.

scholarly journals Rehearsal for Volhynia: Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 and Hauptmann Roman Shukhevych in Occupied Belorussia, 1942

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-193
Author(s):  
Per Anders Rudling
Keyword(s):  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Military Experience ◽  
Commanding Officer ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Cult Of Personality ◽  
The Military

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. In 2007, Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), was designated an official Ukrainian state hero. He has since become the object of an elaborate cult of personality. Lauded for his resistance to the Soviet authorities in 1944–1950, Shukhevych is highly controversial in neighbouring Poland for the ethnic cleansing that the UPA carried out in 1943–1944, as he commanded that organization. Over a few months, the UPA killed around ninety thousand Poles, expelling hundreds of thousands of others. The brutal efficiency of this campaign has to be seen in the context of the larger war, not least Shukhevych’s training by Nazi Germany, in particular the military experience he obtained as a captain in the Ukrainian formation Nachtigall, and as a commanding officer in Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201, which served in occupied Belorussia. This article is an attempt at reconstruct Shukhevych’s whereabouts in 1942, in order to establish the context and praxis under which Shukhevych operated until deserting the auxiliary police in January 1943.

Sippenhaft, Terror and Fear in Nazi Germany: Examining One Facet of Terror in the Aftermath of the Plot of 20 July 1944

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT LOEFFEL
Keyword(s):  
German Society ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Personal Domain ◽  
Armed Services ◽  
Heinrich Himmler

AbstractThe methods used by the Nazis to control elements of German society have been the focus of intense historical debate. This paper attempts to analyse the implementation of Sippenhaft (family liability punishment) after the 20 July 1944 assassination plot against Hitler. Sippenhaft was advocated for use against the families of the conspirators involved in this plot and also against members of the armed services. Consequently, its implementation became the personal domain of the Reich leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, as well as local army commanders, army courts and the Nazi party itself. This article will argue that the inadequacies of its imposition were largely compensated for by its effectiveness as a device of fear.

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