AustLit

'In this paper I argue that Markus Zusak's The Book Thief allows for the personal and collective exculpation of the common or ‘ordinary’ citizens of Germany who lived through the Third Reich. By drawing on the German historian Martin Broszat and his historiographical study of ‘everyday’ life under Nazi rule, I establish that the novel creates a number of contentious themes. First, it suggests that the Nazis were a group who resided on the periphery of German society, and that the rise of Hitler's Third Reich was unpopular among the general German population. Second, while Germans later became victims of Allied bombings and/or Russian invasion, the population was also victim to the nation's political situation. In arguing that German citizens were victims of the Nazis, The Book Thief separates a supposed ‘demonic’ social minority from the ‘everyday’ working class. Depicting the German lower classes as innocent bystanders or victims, the book allows its readers and, in particular, its German readers, to reflect upon this tumultuous historical period with some cultural and social moral fortitude intact. Furthermore, the paper suggests that this novel is just one example of a corpus of Australian texts that have, in recent years, reconfigured traditional literary representations of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.'

Source: Abstract.

'This article argues that some Australian fiction promotes a unique stance in regards to the Holocaust and the Third Reich. Reading Helen Demidenko/Darville's The Hand that Signed the Paper and James McQueen's White Light, I show that a cultural naivety exists in Australia, forged due to historical and cultural influences played out since the Second World War. These factors have influenced the country's memorialization of, and responses to, the Holocaust and the period's ensuing after-effects, as exampled in these two pieces of Australian fiction.'

Source: Abstract.

Kirril Shields considers how, and in what ways, specificities of Australian history and culture have influenced literary representations of the Third Reich perpetrator, bystander and victim. He argues that the depiction of these three roles, in Australian fiction published from the mid-1940s through to the present day, shows some parallels with 'shifts and changes' identified by European scholars in views of the Third Reich, and in perspectives on literary representations of this triad in cultural production. Sheild's contends that Australian fiction enables, in varying degrees, a rearticulation of what may be considered traditional representations of the triad. He argues that that these Australian literary representations also show some extensions of traditional portrayals in Australia and elsewhere, of the Third Reich perpetrator, bystander and victim, in literary and other genres of cultural production.