Abstract
British Holocaust literature forms an expansive and wide-ranging canon of work. This is perhaps surprising, given the country’s political and historical relation to the events of the time. Apart from the Crown Dependencies of the Channel Islands, Britain was not occupied during the war, and its national literature of historical violence and self-scrutiny tends, rather, to focus on postcolonial topics. Yet Holocaust literature in Britain spans all literary genres, including reportage on war-crimes trials, testimony by refugees and survivors, fiction, poetry, drama and screenplays, and there is little to suggest that the end of such production is in sight.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
See Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
- 2.
Rebecca West, A Train of Powder: Six Reports on the Problem of Guilt and Punishment in Our Time (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1955), p. 9.
- 3.
William A. Schabas, ‘Origins of the Genocide Convention: From Nuremberg to Paris’, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 40 (1, 2008): 34–55, available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/jil/vol40/iss1/4; Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 4.
Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
- 5.
West, A Train of Powder, p. 5.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 20. See also Lyndsey Stonebridge’s discussion of ‘the only piece of evidence for Nazi crimes that [West] writes about’, a fragment of tattooed skin, in an instance which ‘exceeds her frame of rhetorical reference’, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 104.
- 8.
Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination, p. 41.
- 9.
Elaine Ho, ‘Everyday Law in the Court Writing of Sybille Bedford’, in Marcus Wan (ed.), Reading the Legal Case: Cross-Currents Between Law and the Humanities (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 61–79, 76.
- 10.
Susha Guppy, ‘Interview with Sybille Bedford’, Paris Review 126 (1993): 230–249, 239.
- 11.
Letter from Hannah Arendt to Sybille Bedford, 4 July 1966, Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mharendt&fileName=02/020150/020150page.db&recNum=0. Arendt cites Bedford in her ‘Auschwitz on Trial’, reprinted in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2005), p. 253.
- 12.
Sybille Bedford, As It Was (London: Picador, 1990), p. 219.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 221.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 223.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 249.
- 16.
Julia Pascal, The Holocaust Trilogy: Theresa, A Dead Woman on Holiday, The Dybbuk (London: Oberon, 2009), p. 43.
- 17.
Edward Bond, ‘If’, in Hilda Schiff (ed.), Holocaust Poetry (London: St. Martins, 1996), pp. 155–156.
- 18.
Ruth Gilbert, Writing Jewish: Contemporary British-Jewish Literature (London: Palgrave, 2013), p. 42.
- 19.
Joanne Sweeney, ‘Actress Joan McCready Tells Story of Her Friend Helen Lewis’s Auschwitz Survival’, Irish News 6 March 2017.
- 20.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 1939–1945: The Documented Experiences of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen (London: Giles de la Mare, 1996), p. 144.
- 21.
Theodor Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 34; Theodor Adorno, ‘After Auschwitz’, in Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 362.
- 22.
Gerda Mayer, Treble Poets 2 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), p. 56.
- 23.
Geoffrey Hill, ‘September Song’, New and Collected Poems, 1952–1992 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
- 24.
See Robert Potts, ‘The Praise Singer’, The Guardian 10 August 2002.
- 25.
Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 8.
- 26.
Antony Rowland, ‘Reading Holocaust Poetry: Singularity and Geoffrey Hill’s “September Song”’, Textual Practice 30 (1, 2016): 69–88, 79.
- 27.
Claire Tylee, ‘British Holocaust Poetry’, in Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 598.
- 28.
Marjorie Perloff, ‘Can a Contemporary Poet Write About the Holocaust?’ Michigan Quarterly Review XLV (2) 2006.
- 29.
Joseph Heininger, ‘Micheal O’Siadhail’s Inscriptions of Holocaust Survivors’ Writings in The Gossamer Wall: “A Summons to Try to Look, to Try to See”’, in Helen Maxson and Dan Morris (eds.), Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), p. 155.
- 30.
See Victoria Stewart, ‘Glimpsing the Holocaust in Post-war Detective Fiction’, Patterns of Prejudice 53 (1, 2019): 74–85.
- 31.
Gaby Wood, Review, The Telegraph, 28 August 2014.
- 32.
The original phrase by Rabbi Hillel appears in the Mishnah.
- 33.
Dyson, What Happens Now, p. 48.
- 34.
Sara Horowitz, ‘The Literary Afterlives of Anne Frank’, in Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (eds.), Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 215–253, 215.
- 35.
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition (New York: Book Club Associates, 1999), p. 184.
- 36.
Dyson, What Happens Now, p. 62.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
See Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004), on this image from the Stroop Report.
- 39.
Howard Jacobson, Kalooki Nights (London: Cape, 2006), pp. 19, 472.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 49.
- 41.
Sam Jordison, review, The Guardian, 20 September 2010.
- 42.
Jacobson, Kalooki Nights, p. 5.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 59.
- 44.
Ibid., pp. 59, 437.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 61.
- 46.
Ibid., pp. 5, 440.
- 47.
Thanks to Robert Eaglestone for discussing this with me.
- 48.
Aleida Assmann, ‘Transnational Memories’, European Review 22 (4, 2014): 546–556, 546.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vice, S. (2020). British Holocaust Literature. In: Lawson, T., Pearce, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-55931-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-55932-8
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)