Gerd Bayer’s research while affiliated with Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg and other places

This essay argues that Jenny Diski’s final novel, Apology for the Woman Writing, adds to the understanding of Diski’s view on literature and the arts, thus complementing her nonfiction writing. Drawing on notions of survival and the Freudian uncanny, the essay shows how the relationships between Michel de Montaigne and Marie de Gournay and between De Gournay and her servant Jamyn are built around notions of affective engagement, where the intellectual labor of writing conjoins physical experiences of excitement. Such a view of literature as affect is then directly connected to the force of a text to survive.

This chapter addresses the question of survival as it features in the memoir of British writer Jenny Diski. Her In Gratitude serves both as a cancer memoir and as a reckoning with an earlier moment in the writer’s life, when she moved into Doris Lessing’s household. Drawing on Derrida’s reflections about the intellectual legacies that sometimes live on beyond the author and on Ricoeur’s differentiations between biographical versions of identity, the chapter presents Diski as torn between a sense of gratitude and the resulting guilt that grew from the relationship she developed with her foster family. In both situations, Diski apparently felt drawn to the force of literature as an art form and thus as a tool for survival that can provide a form of atonement.

This introduction emphasizes the multidimensionality of the issue of ‘survival’, which frequently implies complex acts of ethical decisions. First focussing on the ‘survival of individuals’, it studies survival in the context of the philosophy of ‘natural law’, connecting it to mythology and theology. A passage on the ‘survival of groups’ exemplifies the supportive character of ‘team spirit’ in the act of survival. Survival in Holocaust camps illustrates the blurring lines of the ‘ethics of survival’. Discussing the Darwinian notion of the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the camps, ‘survivor’s guilt’ and the depressions and suicides of many survivors, the introduction develops a hypothesis about the ‘dialectics of survival’, arguing that survival often requires a high price. The introduction closes with comments about the Anthropocene, when survival can no longer rest exclusively on anthropocentric principles.

This article situates David Cronenberg’s film Eastern Promises in the context of post-Cold-War European narratives. It argues that the secret dealings of the Russian mob in London are presented in the film as the uncanny and spectral return of forms of government and business that run counter to the rationale conventionally associated with democratic capitalism and at the same time reveal much about its inherent logic. Cronenberg’s film connects private traumata with the violent reality of globalization, staging one as the ghostly realization of the other.

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture delves into the complex problems involved in all attempts to survive. The essays analyze survival in contemporary prose narratives, short stories, poems, dramas, and theoretical texts, but also in films and other modes of cultural practices. Addressing diverse topics such as memory and forgetting in Holocaust narratives, stories of refugees and asylum seekers, and representations of war, the ethical implications involved in survival in texts and media are brought into a transnational critical discussion. The volume will be of potential interest to a wide range of critics working on ethical issues, the body, and the politics of art and literature.Rudolf Freiburg is Professor of English literature at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is co-editor and editor of several books, including Swift: The Enigmatic Dean (1998), “But Vindicate the Ways of God to Man”: Literature and Theodicy (2004), Kultbücher (2004), Literatur und Holocaust (2009), Träume (2015), Unendlichkeit (2016), D@tenflut (2017), Sprachwelten (2018) and Täuschungen (2019). He has written many articles on eighteenth-century literature (Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson), and contemporary literature (John Fowles, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Sebastian Barry). Gerd Bayer is Professor of English literature and culture at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He has published on contemporary and early modern literature, including Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2015) and on Holocaust literature and film, most recently as guest editor of a special issue for Holocaust Studies (UK).

This article discusses the tension between the legal framework of copyright and the moral obligation, as framed in Holocaust studies, to remember the atrocities of the Nazi murder of European Jewry. Starting with the case study of a recent award-winning film, The Lady in Number 6 , the essay takes the movie’s difficult availability as an occasion to reflect upon the need to access and distribute this film, even if this creates conflicts with copyright laws, situating this discussion in the larger discussion about law and literature.

The aim of this article is to address a transversal topic within perpetrator studies: how subsequent generations deal with the legacy of their perpetrator ancestors. To achieve it, we analyse six recent documentary films, all produced between 2015 and 2018 that cover four different contexts: Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships. Through a comparative methodological approach, our focus is on finding similarities that define this global trend through the exploration of two closely related phenomena: (1) Personal responses and social responsibility and (2) Family dynamics. One important outcome of this new cinematic tendency, that we call the ‘post-perpetrator generation documentary film’, is that by accepting their relatives’ involvement, the perpetrator’s offspring are able to recover their personal identity, and also to reintegrate their personal experience into a broader historical context. Indeed, the social sphere is an important focus in post-perpetrator generation documentary films, because a major part of the perpetrator’s legacy involves social responsibility to the past, but especially to the future: concern for next generations is the ethical motivation of the post-perpetrator generation.

This introduction situates the present collection of critical articles both in the historical context of contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration and in the scholarly tradition of research on Holocaust cinema. The various contributions on fictional and documentary films from diverse countries address a wide range of topics, including the notion of the law and how its courtrooms are staged cinematically or how witnesses are invested with authority. Related to matters of guilt is the issue of intergenerational memory, often addressed when films evoke forms of perpetration and thereby connect forms of affect to larger ethical questions related to memory work.