... perpetrator as a reliable historical—and even moral—witness of the Holocaust. Whether one admires Les bienveillantes or loathes it depends largely on how one responds to this improbable combination of perpetrator and reliable witness. One problematic aspect of the novel is its use of the Oresteia theme: by...

... generations and the Nazi past may be understood as one of prosthetic witnessing. While exposing normative contours of discourses of coming to terms with the past, prosthetic witnessing in Duden's text engages Renaissance representations of Christ, rendering an encounter with her viscerally affective narrative...

... amount of time required to sit through one of his works. Wagner through Other Eyes: Parody and the Wit of Brevity in Theodor W. Adorno and Mark Twain Lydia Goehr Since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness...

...Manuel Köppen Claude Lanzmann's Sobibor (2001) and Romuald Karmakar's Land of Annihilation (2004) are contrasting cinematic documentaries that return the viewer to German concentration camps in Poland. While Lanzmann insists on the pathos of the primary witness, whose words, like the places...

... title refers. A Film Unfinished presents a paradigm of redoubled spectatorship: it is an Israeli film about the production of a German propaganda film, and it is also a film about the experience of encountering scenes from one's own past in such a film. The film's witnesses are positioned before...

... that he still triggers in his modern biographers. While Fest aims to reenact Hitler's highly theatrical and emotional style, Kershaw disrupts Hitler's aesthetical mise-en-scène in his form of narrative, drawing on quotations and witness accounts. For Kershaw, charisma cannot be understood without...

... the heart of Walter Benjamin’s early discussion of tradition. His peculiar reference to “Talmudic wit” and to Kant as a tradendum in letters to Scholem, alongside related Jewish sources, and his engagement with Kant in “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” are used to address these questions. Thus...

... 2009 New German Critique Number 106 • Winter 2009 When the Perpetrator Becomes a Reliable Witness of the Holocaust: On Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Susan Rubin Suleiman On the German Reaction to...

... designed to fill in the missing arguments in Adorno’s account.3 To provide a quick overview of how this might be, I begin with a famous passage from Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved that is pivotal for Agamben’s argument: I must repeat—we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This...

... les préjugés Michèle Lowrie 11 political upheavals in ancient history. As he lists in his account of his sources— or, as he calls them, “witnesses” (témoins) (fi rst at 38)5—Cicero, who was con- sul that year, left four speeches, all of which Mérimée...

... Elders of Zion Given the massive success of the Protocols and the deep worries caused by the text, even in levelheaded, enlightened circles, it was imperative to solve the mystery of its origins quickly. But this was the hour of the self-proclaimed witnesses and experts, the braggarts and...

... insult to those who perished and to those who survived.”3 In this sense, the dying of the last remaining historical witnesses is the essential precondi- tion for the current interpretative turn with regard to National Socialism as found in works such as Downfall and Speer and Hitler. The absence of...

... through- out Farocki’s film. He turns his attention to a filmic document and explores how it can be read. By drawing on a specific example, his film examines how the camp’s past can be made present at a time when authority over the interpre- tation of that past no longer lies with the witnesses but...

..., movies, books, and witness testimonies; for those not directly affected, it is always permanently mediated “history.” This mediation has consequences that grow and expand the more that actual events diverge from memories. The event is thus “removed” in two ways at once: through historical...

...- ing them sensibly present for those who could not witness that elsewhere. As a translator of Kafka by choice and a translator of Birkenau by neces- sity, Levi distinguishes himself from Kafka through his abiding ethical prefer- ence for the conative function of aesthetic language—the one...

... Tobias’s book, and contradictions in the voluminous trial testimony.3 Over the years the reputations of numerous witnesses and the historians engaged in the controversy have been besmirched, sometimes leading to legal battles. Though the amount of detail covering each of these aspects is...

... generals of the original audience, but equally and oppositely they are witnesses to a historical event, historical researchers, curious about the event, fascinated despite the historical distance separat- ing them, historical sound boxes, as it were, reechoing a past that is any...

... worthwhile. —Lara Kelingos David always could surprise me—not only with his wit and humor, which animated all our intellectual discourses, but also with perspectives I wouldn’t spontaneously take on. After 1989, when the former GDR became actual and historical at the same moment, it was David who...

... that leaves even less room for dissent. Simultaneously, the Euro-American architectural academy is witnessing a full-scale assault on the models of “criticality” represented by thinkers like Tafuri. This assault reso- nates with the currents of anti-intellectualism currently sweeping across Amer...

... judges, in which this sort of thing has actually happened. [We must say that evidence under torture is not trustworthy, the fact being that many men whether thick-witted, tough-skinned, or stout of heart endure their ordeal nobly, while cowards and timid men are full of boldness till...