Mark Brodie

From Darwin to the Death Camps."": a Collage of Holocaust Representation Focusing on Perpetrator Atrocity Discourse in Literature, Drama and Film Mark Brodie

The Holocaust in the words of survivor Elie Wiesel is unimaginable." Most of the memoir and research of the Holocaust focuses [and rightly so] on the voice of the victim but for this book I chose to zero in on the voice and portrayal of the perpetrator the "ordinary German" vis-a-vis Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge as well as the Death Camp bureaucrat Adolph Eichmann and the careerist Albert Speer to name a few. As a professor and scholar I have always been fascinated by the everyday existence that many SS and Wehrmacht soldiers went about their lives after a day at a place like Auschwitz or Treblinka. The horror of a machine-like death camp administration and business fits a postmodern matrix of banality and commonality that makes the SS and Germans involved in Hitlers' "Final Solution" more frightening because they are not the "monsters" we want them to be but average people making their way in a system that espoused "murder for advancement" in the Death Camp heirarchy of those dreaded concentration lagers in Hitler and Himmler's Nazi Germany."