Moral ambiguity and the representation of genocide – is there a limit to what can be depicted?
- Written by Charlotte Grace Mackay, Lecturer in European Languages (French), Monash University
On January 10 2022, the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee voted unanimously to remove Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus from the school’s curriculum, and ban it. The board cited concerns about nudity and profanity, implicitly raising broader questions about the book’s depiction of violence.
The content of Maus is inherently violent: its subject is the Holocaust. Spiegelman based his graphic novel, which depicts Nazis as cats and Polish Jews as mice, on the experiences of his parents. Built around a father-son dialogue, Maus not only depicts the horrors they and countless others endured under Nazism, it examines how the children of survivors struggle in the wake of their parents’ unimaginable suffering.
Bernhard Schlink speaking in 2018.
Wikimedia commons
The Reader explicitly deals with questions of guilt (collective and individual), generational condemnation, and what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”. It developed the theme of unresolved and perhaps unresolvable tension emanating from the inter-generational divide between those who lived through the war and those who came after, who struggle to comprehend the actions (and inactions) of their forebears. It depicts ordinary people doing terrible things.
The Reader was tremendously successful both in Germany and internationally. It has been translated into more than 50 languages and has become a set text on school and university syllabuses the world over. And like Gatore’s The Past Ahead, it has been controversial.
This is again linked to the problem of moral ambiguity. At issue is the generation of sympathy for characters who have participated, in whatever capacity, in the murder of millions of people.
The novel recounts the story of Hanna Schmitz, a German woman who is accused and convicted for her role as an SS guard under the Third Reich. Schlink presents Hanna’s illiteracy as a mitigating factor. The reader indeed feels empathy for her, identifying redeemable traits in Hanna that stand in stark contrast with her terrible actions. Once again, the novel blurs the conventional victim-perpetrator dichotomy, exposing the complexity and perhaps the inevitable fallibility of human nature.
Responses to The Reader have tended to reflect individual perspectives. German critics have defended Schlink’s novel, even applauded it, while Jewish critics have been more scathing. American and British critics have proposed both positive and negative readings of the text.
George Steiner, an influential literary critic and a Holocaust survivor, described Schlink’s novel as both “profoundly moving” and “rapidly becoming a touchstone of moral literacy”. Others have not been so complimentary. Jeremey Adler, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, denounced the novel as an exercise in “the art of generating compassion for murderers”.
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Memory and historical revisionism
No one could accuse Schlink of defending the Nazi regime. His own father, a professor of theology and a pastor in the Confessing Church, was a victim of Nazi persecution. Neither Gatore’s nor Schlink’s protagonists remain indifferent to what they have done.
But many of the accusations of historical revisionism levelled against their novels have arisen from the ways in which the subjective memories of the protagonists do not align with the accepted history. This divide between subjective memory and objective history has proved to be central to the critical reception of genocide literature.
Yet the division is problematic. For historian and scholar Enzo Traverso, the distinction between history and memory is an illusion, as history is itself a narrative process of selection:
We need to take into account the influence of history on memory itself, for there is no such thing as a literal, original and non-contaminated memory: memory is always constructed within public space, and therefore subject to collective modes of thought, but also influenced by the established paradigms for representing the past.
If we accept that the divide between history and memory is treacherously deceptive, arguments concerning the morality of representation become less pertinent. They serve to prescribe literary creativity and, in doing so, diminish the higher purpose of literature and all that it can teach us. Where else but in literature can such troubling and urgent questions be posed?
The dichotomy between subjective memory and objective history does not reflect the complexity of personal and collective representations. The distinction between victim and perpetrator is often oversimplified; it cannot account for all the nuances of responsibility. It is precisely within literary texts that these complexities can be revealed.
This is not to say that perpetrators and victims do not exist, both in history and in fiction. It is, however, to recognise that literature is a “safe” space where conventional categories – memory and history, victimhood and guilt, damnation and redemption – can be tested and negotiated. It recognises the great value of these texts, that which sets them apart from purely historical accounts.
The flexibility of literature plays a fundamental role in the cultivation of empathy, comprehension and forgiveness, the very emotions that appear lacking in the violent histories of our world. It can render the incomprehensible slightly more comprehensible and, in doing so, underscore the humanity of all.
The potential for works of fiction to make us think deeply about how we treat others, about the decisions we make and the judgements we pass far outweighs any critical condemnation on the basis of accurate or immoral representations. Readers do not have to agree on an author’s fictional portrayal, but they should defend the right to portray.
Authors: Charlotte Grace Mackay, Lecturer in European Languages (French), Monash University 
