AustLit

'The essay engages with ongoing debates about the validity of comparing Holocaust memory, situating these in the context of Australia's History Wars. Looking at Markus Zusak's The Book Thief (2005) as a recent fictional attempt to confront the effects of both Holocaust memory and German perpetrator trauma, it also considers the novel's status as a displaced (Australian-authored) German survivor's account. Arguing against a facile assimilation of the novel to the contemporary 'Holocaust industry', the essay asserts the value of a transnational approach that insists on the cultural and historical specificity of the Holocaust while showing its continuing usefulness in energising discourses of traumatic memory not necessarily related to the Shoah itself. At the same time, it sounds a cautionary note against using the Holocaust, either as a form of screen memory to avoid confronting colonial violence or as a negative analogy to assert the relative innocuousness of the Australian past.' (Author's abstract)