The perpetrators' past
de Peter Becker
My dissertation addresses the formation, conceptual implications, and ethical alterations of historical consciousness. It is based on a conceptual model I develop in readings ranging from Cicero to Augustine and Kant, in which I suggest that any understanding of the past builds on specific juridical and ethical templates. Examining American and German historical novels from the twentieth century, I analyze how these narratives respond to the representational and ethical challenges posed by the catastrophic historical experiences of slavery and the two twentieth-century World Wars, events outside the norms of the classical historical novel. Thus, the dissertation seeks to break open the dichotomies of history and memory, fact and fiction. The historical novel is a genre concerned with the retrospective portrayal and evaluation of historical processes. Its specific epistemological premises--the detached and neutral historical observer, the concept of sovereign judgment and authorship--imply a particular approach to the past that acknowledges change over time from a position of resignation and excludes direct ethical accountability. Beginning with a sense of crisis early in the twentieth century, a process of redesigning these premises of historical consciousness became imperative after the experience of World War II and the Holocaust. In my analyses of novels by Walter Scott, Margaret Mitchell, William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, and William Styron, I claim that the modes of judgment inherent in the historical novel serve as a point of departure for the new genre of a perpetrator literature. They make intelligible the need to reformulate the position of the historical observer, the role of authorship, and the notion of ethical accountability in an extralegal form.
