Ep. 61- Writing about Holocaust Perpetrators with Erin McGlothlin

How do we write about Holocaust perpetrators?  What does that tell us about not only the historical figures themselves but also the ways in which we approach, describe, and analyze them.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Erin McGlothlin about how writers have dealt with perpetrators in both fiction and non-fiction and also about the ways in which fiction narratives influence how we tell non-fiction stories.

Erin McGlothlin is Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Holocaust Studies  and Vice Dean of Undergraduate Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis.

McGlothlin, Erin. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (2021)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.686)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waittman Born. I have to start with an apology. I know it's been a while since I've had some episodes out. I fell into the British black hole of summer and holiday and I didn't do any recording in August. But we are back with our Holocaust History Podcast. And today we're talking about literature and the ways in which perpetrators and their minds, the way that they think,

are portrayed in literature, both fiction and nonfiction. I think one of the things that's really interesting about the book that forms the basis conversation is that it really, it combines both of those genres together in a certain sense. And so with me, have a fantastic scholar of the Holocaust of literature of representation, Aaron McLaughlin, to talk about this particular work. And so Aaron, thanks so much for coming on.

Erin McGlothlin (00:57.022)
Yes, great. Thank you for having me, Waitman. I'm excited to talk about this.

Waitman Beorn (01:01.43)
Yeah, so can we start maybe just with how you got interested in this particular topic, sort of generally, but then a specific topic of this book, because you commit the Holocaust from a different sort of discipline and genre than some of other guests.

Erin McGlothlin (01:10.154)
Mm.

Erin McGlothlin (01:18.782)
Yeah, so I, if you're right about that, I'm a scholar of literature. My background is German and Jewish studies. so I'm trained in literary analysis and especially the subfield of narrative theory. So I look at, I'm really interested in the mechanics of narrative, how narratives are created, how they're structured and what their effects are on the reader.

And as a grad student, I figured out pretty early that I was interested in focusing specifically in Holocaust literature. And so that's been kind of my career since, I consider myself a scholar of Holocaust literature, Holocaust representation more broadly and Holocaust narrative. Because as you point out, I really see fiction and nonfiction on a spectrum.

And I'm interested in the ways in which representations of the Holocaust jump across that fiction, nonfiction barrier. And this project, so this book, The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction, really has a long history. When I was a young assistant professor at Washington University,

I was invited to contribute a piece to a volume on representations of the Holocaust that had a lot of senior scholars and I was interested in contributing something, something maybe going in a new direction for me. had my first book was on second generation Holocaust literature. So, but even then I was looking at

literature by and about children of survivors and literature by and about children of perpetrators. I've always been interested in sort of those two kind of dynamics. But when I started conceiving of this project, I was interested in looking at some texts that featured a perpetrator narrating his own experience.

Erin McGlothlin (03:28.714)
And I realized as I was, you know, I specifically was looking at Martin Amis's Times Arrow. I was also interested in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, although in that text you don't have a first person perpetrator. It's narrated by the former lover of a perpetrator. But I was really interested in how these texts kind of created these characters and

and probed their motivations, their subjectivities, the way they thought about what they did. And as I was getting into this, I realized that literature had fully ignored this aspect of Holocaust representation. I think especially the big heyday of Holocaust literary studies in the 90s and early 2000s, where you really see this burst onto the scene of all these people

working on Holocaust literature, and that's the moment I became, I was a grad student and a junior scholar. There was so much focus, particularly on trauma, the origins of trauma, the contemporary trauma theory, the ways of witnessing, testimony, the voice of the survivor. These were the things that formed the backbone of Holocaust literary studies. And there was almost a complete

disregard or turning away from any kinds of investigations of perpetrator subjectivity, which was interesting given that historiography goes in almost the opposite direction, right? We have such a focus on, you know, from the beginnings of Holocaust historiography, perpetrator documentation.

the bureaucracy of perpetration, the big figures of perpetration, Hitler, Himmler, Heidrich, all of those people. And then this late turn toward victims' experiences, victims' voices, and that really has shaped this Holocaust historiography today. I'm sure that's, in fact, that turn has shaped your work as well, from what I can tell.

Erin McGlothlin (05:47.082)
And the opposite happens in literary studies. You don't see anybody looking at perpetrators until basically 2010.

Waitman Beorn (05:54.528)
Yeah, and that's a fascinating observation too, because it's, I mean, it's totally different, right? Particularly when people are doing, you know, fiction versus nonfiction writing. But certainly, I think in the Holocaust history world, you're absolutely right. Like in the beginning, it's all perpetrators all the time, you know, because everyone's... mean, on the one hand, that makes a certain amount of sort of just procedural logical sense, because if you want to understand what happened sort of factually, you have to look at who did what when and that kind of stuff.

And then later on, there's a swing back. And then of course you have what I've mentioned on the show in the past, what I aspired to in my most recent book, but Saul Friedlander's sort of challenge that we should be able to write an integrated history, right? One that includes everyone's of perspective experience simultaneously in the same kind of text. So rather than being a perpetrator historian or a Jewish historian or whatever, you would sort of...

Erin McGlothlin (06:37.407)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (06:52.834)
be able to include all these things. And ironically, we'll talk about this later on because one of the books that you talk about is one of my favorites that I recommend a lot, which is Gitteserenis Into That Darkness. And in a strange sort of way, she's way ahead of the curve at writing one of these integrated histories because she doesn't just, and I'm getting ahead of things, but she doesn't just take the perpetrator's narrative. She actually intentionally interrupts it throughout with survivors and witnesses and even his wife and sort of bystander-y kind of people.

Erin McGlothlin (07:05.512)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (07:22.574)
But we will talk about that because I found the Serenian discussion to be really, really fascinating and challenging in all the good ways. Can you talk a little bit just about, and this is like a hard question because it's very general, but the genre of Holocaust literature as it develops, I guess from a certain perspective during, but mostly after the Holocaust, because in some ways even in the

Erin McGlothlin (07:26.131)
Okay.

Erin McGlothlin (07:46.986)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (07:51.436)
the most sort of iconic works like Wiesel or Levi, Borowski. There's an element of sort of memoir. There's also kind of an element of not fiction in the sense of untruth, but know, remembrances and these kinds of things, literary approaches to writing. And then where does perpetrator fiction fit into that? Because one of the things that I noticed reading your book is that, you know, there's a particular book we'll talk about probably later.

which sort of was trumpeted as the first real perpetrator fiction, but actually, like most things we discover, that people have actually been doing this, you know, for a fairly long time. It's just that people weren't necessarily registering. That's a lot of verbiage, but can you perhaps give us a little overview into sort of the development of Holocaust fiction as a genre, and then maybe where perpetrator fiction fits into that, generally speaking, and then we can sort of dive in a...

Erin McGlothlin (08:30.538)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (08:50.37)
some of these other issues.

Erin McGlothlin (08:51.934)
Well, this is a really interesting question because we often think of Holocaust fiction as a more recent phenomenon. And to a certain extent, the bulk of Holocaust fiction is coming from the last 40, 50 years. Although what we also know is that, again, and for me, know, fiction, nonfiction have a relationship to each other because as you just said, you know, even the memoirs are using fictional techniques.

They're recreating conversations, they're recreating events. Primo Levi, I'm teaching that right now in my graduate course on Holocaust representation. So Primo Levi is a great example. He is, you know, creating figures who in, if this is a man or survival in Auschwitz, figures that are kind of amalgams of other people who represent a particular.

aspect of what he's trying to get at in representing the lager. So, you know, we've always known that people use fictional techniques that even though we would call Primo Levi's text, I would never call it a fiction. It's absolutely a memoir. It needs to be labeled as such, but he is exploring through the writing process. And when one does that, one naturally avails oneself of fictional techniques.

As I look, you know, argue in the book, that's true of a lot of nonfiction writers like Hannah Arendt or Gita Sreni, for example, they use fictionalizing techniques. But what we also know is that, you know, fiction was central to how the victims understood their experience at the moment. So the Ringelblum archive, the Oine Shabes archive of the Warsaw Ghetto,

We have all of these very bureaucratic texts telling us about soup kitchens and the economics of the ghetto. But we also have some really creative texts that we would recognize as literary, if not again, fictional, fully fictional, but literary. So that's been with us from the very beginning, since 1933. But I think that we really start to see writers

Erin McGlothlin (11:11.402)
turn toward using fiction as a way of getting at the essence of the Holocaust or the dynamics of the Holocaust. That really starts happening in the 1960s. And then it really continues into today. But of course, that has created anxieties. every time, and it's an interesting dynamic, every time you have a new kind of representation, a new kind of fiction, you have this big

wave of, you know, hand wringing and worrying. this appropriate? Is this a travesty? Can we fictionalize the Holocaust? Is that allowed? Why should we have fiction? We have so many survivors' voices telling us what's their experience. And, you know, that starts early on and it goes to, you know, recently

We have Jonathan Glazer's film, The Zone of Interest. You have a new wave of, this allowed? Is this good? Is this bad? Is this, you know? And I think that that's just baked into representation and literary representation. I find it fascinating that text that we now see as really standard works of the Holocaust, like Art Spiegelman's Mouse. When it first appeared, there was, you know, this moment of, this allowed?

And for me, it's usually the best texts. They're really provocative ones that are doing something, always create that first impression.

Waitman Beorn (12:36.087)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (12:46.61)
it's worth pointing out too that you just made an excellent case for why this matters. You know, this is not just sort of intellectual navel gazing. You know, these things come out and they influence people, real people, normal people, you know, not just nerdy academics like ourselves, but normal people to engage with the past and in a certain way, right? And to have questions, you know, is it acceptable to show this on film?

Erin McGlothlin (12:53.823)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (13:09.375)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (13:15.33)
You know, like there was in Schindler's List, right? There was the gas chamber scene, which was not a gas chamber scene, but even that was like, this, you know, is this, is this okay? And, and, you know, these literary texts coming out, you know, Jonathan tells what we'll talk about, but all of them, you know, that these are not just sort of the, and I'm stereotyping here, but these are not sort of the classical like Shakespeare that sort of sits on a shelf in the library and people, you know, study it academically. mean, these, these texts are both artistic and that sort of, you know,

Erin McGlothlin (13:17.759)
Yes.

Erin McGlothlin (13:21.278)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (13:39.879)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (13:45.39)
high level formal sense of the word, but they're also influential in not only reflecting how society is thinking about the past, but also influencing. And one of the things that you do, we'll talk about it in your book is, know, some of these fictional sort of techniques, many of which predate obviously, or not specific to the Holocaust, but they actually influence how nonfiction is written.

And I think about, for example, there was a recent sort of breathless new study of Rudolf Hürbaut that came out. And I'm thinking, that's great. But he actually wrote an autobiography that was a bestseller about his experience at Auschwitz. And so again, there's something about, even with nonfiction, we'll talk about this, the ways in which we write it that take something and...

Erin McGlothlin (14:23.294)
Nah.

Waitman Beorn (14:40.738)
package it and present it in a new way or in the sense of sort of more artistic, I guess, literary fiction, they challenge us to think about not only how do we understand the past, but is it okay to understand the past in this sort of way? Is it okay to present it in this sort of way? And we'll talk about that as well, because that's one of the things I'm really interested in is sort of this question of ethics, right? Like how do we...

Erin McGlothlin (14:57.471)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (15:08.494)
Is it okay? Because one of the things that I sort of see going throughout your discussion in the book, but also in lots of Holocaust fiction, particularly when it comes to perpetrators, is that the fiction grants you the ability to create a sort of Holocaust sandbox, which is not a... You're not tied specifically to what in sort of the military history world we'd call like the rivet counters, or like, well, that's not right, because Auschwitz didn't do that.

Erin McGlothlin (15:26.442)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (15:37.314)
you can sort of create an environment and in that environment, you can explore precisely the issues that you talk about in your book. Because you're not tied with someone coming back and saying, well, actually, I don't think, you know, Rudolph Hess would have thought that or whatever, because you can say, this is not, this is just a person and I've made up this person. But what I'm, what I'm talking about is, particularly potentially truth. You know, I'm thinking about, and I'll be quiet, but I'm thinking about the

Erin McGlothlin (15:37.546)
Mm-hmm.

Erin McGlothlin (15:54.25)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (16:05.486)
the epigram in Charlotte Dubbo's book where she sort of says something to the effect of, not everything I've written in this book is factual, but it's all true. You know, this idea that, you know, it may not be factually accurate necessarily, but there's the truth of what it means is in there. So I guess starting from that then, can you talk a little bit about how, we'll start with nonfiction and we'll go into fiction, how nonfiction work

Erin McGlothlin (16:15.838)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (16:36.296)
is influenced by fiction. Because I think that's a really, really cool observation that you've made in the book.

Erin McGlothlin (16:43.614)
Yeah, so well, I just want to say you bring up a lot of great stuff here. The ethics of representation, the ethics of literature, think that has become more and more sort of my focus is what are we doing here? And the answers aren't straightforward. Because as you point out, literature offers ways of seeing things in new ways.

And it doesn't necessarily have limits. Fiction doesn't have limits. That's a good thing. humans, as a species, we use fiction to perform simulations of our experience. That's how we cognitively come to terms with it. And so it's not a surprise that we would do that with the Holocaust. However, it's got a danger. And the danger is that that simulation

takes us away from what actually happened. And I think, you know, I've had so many good conversations with historians over the years, many of whom started out when I can remember a friend of mine, 20, over 20 years ago saying, Holocaust fiction shouldn't exist. And I would laugh and say, but it does. So that's my job to look at it. But I also understood that, that reaction because

I think for historians, there's such a focus on documentation and really there's so much, you have to restrain yourself. Your interpretation has to be based on what you're able to find from the historical record, what is available from the archives. And writers don't have to do that, literary writers don't have to do that. And that provides freedom. But again,

it can go in the wrong direction and you can end up with something like the boy in the striped pajamas, which is ethically a travesty, right? It's a travesty. It's not bringing us closer to the truth, as you say. It's taking us away from the truth and completely crapping all over the facts of the Holocaust, the basic facts. And I think most fiction tries to at least adhere to that.

Erin McGlothlin (18:57.552)
understanding of the Holocaust that we, at least I'd say most good fiction, most fiction that brings us closer to something, tries to at least adhere to the basic framework that we understand to be the Holocaust and not take it into some kind of fantasy world that relieves us of ethical responsibility. In any case, that was just engaged with that to get to your question about fiction and nonfiction. So yeah, you know, I

have become more interested in this question of nonfiction because for me fiction and nonfiction again are on a spectrum. If you consider them both forms of narrative you start to realize that they have a lot in common with each other that they're not like completely separate universes that don't have overlap and nonfiction especially the kind that I'm looking at so I'm looking at nonfiction not

historians' accounts. I specifically don't look at historians' accounts because I think they do use interpretive frames and narrative frameworks. mean, that's Hayden White. That's what Hayden White argued, right, and others. But I'm not interested in necessarily what historians are trying to weave together through their recourse to the archives.

I'm interested in these non-fiction writers who are trying to bring the story of the Holocaust to a wider audience, and particularly, you know, stories of perpetrators. And what you see is that they are trying to tell a story. They're not just, you know, we don't, we can't just throw documents up or we don't have this like access to reality.

that we can get there directly. It's always mediated and it's mediated through storytelling. And what we see is somebody like Hannah Arendt or in the book, I'm actually looking at three different interpreters of Adolf Eichmann, Harry Muelich, the Dutch writer, William L. Hull, who was the minister who counseled Eichmann in the weeks before his execution. And

Erin McGlothlin (21:11.85)
and they're all availing themselves of the different kinds of fictional techniques that we use to tell a story, even as they're telling a story of a clearly real person and they're not trying to fictionalize that story. The same happens with Gita Sarenja and I think that you see the fictional techniques really clearly where she's

bringing in, and as I argue, the techniques of detective fiction. She's trying to suss out what he's done and how he feels about it, and kind of leading the reader like a detective. We're following the detective through all of these clues to get to some revelation.

And so that on the one hand and on the other hand she uses the literary form of the confession, which is such an important, mean going all the way back to Augustine, especially going through the medieval and early modern periods that the confession is a prime genre of literature. And she uses that she's trying to get

Stangle, Franz Stangle, the book is about Franz Stangle, the former commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka. She's trying to get him to confess something, which is interesting because he both acknowledges he was there and also disavows any kind of culpability. And so she's trying to get him to have some kind of experience and to confess that and to she wants to come to Jesus moment, as it were.

And she uses these techniques throughout. And I find that really fascinating so that you can look at that, you you can look at what it produces in him, but you can look at how the techniques both enable her to tell the story and limit her from seeing other aspects of what's going on in his story.

Waitman Beorn (23:15.468)
Yeah, I mean, and again, like I've mentioned before, know, Serenny's work, think it's one that I always used to assign undergraduates because it's accessible, it's integrated. But you're right. mean, as you say in the book, I think it's a really astute observation. You're like, it's a detective story. But the problem is that we already know the outcome at the beginning, right? Because it's not who done it, because Stangl done it. And it's not, is he going to be found guilty? Because he is already guilty. And so then the

Erin McGlothlin (23:35.178)
Mm-hmm.

Erin McGlothlin (23:42.932)
That's right.

Waitman Beorn (23:44.11)
The reveal at the end is meant to be something else, which I think you just suggested. The reveal at end is supposed to be, I think she's hoping it will be him, as you say, having this come to Jesus moment and recognizing that everything he's done is wrong and saying it, then he doesn't really do that. So you're left with this kind of, instead of a bang, it's just kind of a poof at the end, because he doesn't really do that.

Erin McGlothlin (24:01.492)
Mm.

Erin McGlothlin (24:07.912)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, she indicates he does. And she says, you know, in the last lines of Into That Darkness, you know, he finally became the man that he tried to be through this confession, basically. But, you know, it's a pretty weak confession. I mean, it's really lame because he kind of stutters and says, wasn't there. You know, I shouldn't have been there. And I didn't really do anything. And OK, I did it with others. And, you know, he's constantly

like deferring any acknowledgement. And so it's just pretty weak. It's like you're and you're waiting the whole book, she's sort of into into into me. It's okay, we're getting to this point. But I would even argue, which I think was for me, Revelation as well is that I don't think he could have said anything that would have constituted what we would recognize as a true and honest and

Waitman Beorn (25:03.416)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (25:03.698)
valid and sad, especially satisfying confession, right? How the hell could you craft anything that would be commensurate with the, what is it, complicity and murder of 900,000 people? I think that was his sentence.

Waitman Beorn (25:20.748)
I mean, it's back to that whole Ra-Hilberg thing that I never began basking the big question because I was afraid it would come with small answers. And it's like, the big question is how can you possibly kill almost a million people? But the answer is even if we could rate it 100 % truthful, would still be something lame. It wouldn't be some grand earth shattering discovery. It would be, well, I was too cowardly to say no or whatever.

Erin McGlothlin (25:27.134)
Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Erin McGlothlin (25:49.032)
Yeah, and I liked my cool white linen writing suit, know, that Stengel had and that my wife admired me and that, you know, I was up. I mean, I think that for me, that's where the, you know, especially historians of perpetration have really shown. the guys don't, nobody has anything really satisfying to say about this. And how could they? The human, think, you know, human

Waitman Beorn (25:52.524)
Yeah, right?

Erin McGlothlin (26:17.786)
The humans are so singularly unable to acknowledge the harm that they caused to other humans in any real way. It almost doesn't happen.

Waitman Beorn (26:28.664)
Yeah, I mean, in a certain sense in Gittus Reni's work, some of the, think, you know, as a Holocaust scholar, or when I'm teaching the book, some of the most insightful things are kind of, it's not that she brushes them to the side because she clearly picks up on them, but they're not highlighted. you know, when she asks him and his wife separately if he would have refused to participate, if either one of them had, you know, if his wife had said, look, it's either me or being a commandant, you know, would you have said,

No. And I thought, you know, again, for the time, you know, in a time before gender received sort of the recognition that it needs as a way of, and thinking about what German wives did, German women did as perpetrators' wives, I mean, that's a really, I thought, amazing sort of session where he, she sits with his wife and says, and his wife literally says, I think he probably would have stopped if I had asked him to.

Erin McGlothlin (27:12.362)
Thank you.

Erin McGlothlin (27:24.498)
Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (27:25.262)
I mean, that's a huge thing. that's something that is now just, I mean, not just, but with Claudia Koontz and Wendy Lauer and that kind it took probably what, 30 more years for scholars to sort of begin to ask those kinds of questions of the wives or of gender in particular.

Erin McGlothlin (27:44.958)
Yeah, I mean, to me that is a really interesting moment because twice his wife finds out about different, you know, she goes there, she's at Sobe Bore, but she's sort of, you know, several miles away and somebody tells her, another SS guy tells her, and it's so upsetting to her that she refuses to have sex with him. And there's a second time that she refuses. So she has this like,

power over him and Serenny kind of acknowledges that they have a very passionate relationship. And so there's this kind of moment in which the wife does kind of push it, like say no, like you, this is not, I'm not being a part of this, but somehow she is pulled back into it as well. And I find that really interesting. There's a interview with Serenny at the, at the USHMM and I've,

I gave a paper on this several years ago. I need to write it up as an article. I really want to. It's where Sorenny goes even harder at Stangl's wife and said, I blame her, not him, because she had the power to stop it. And I find that fascinating. The wife was not the person walking around Treblinka every day and ordering whatever the supplies and shipping all the gold and the clothing back to Germany. And so I just find it.

I find that fascinating. So there's a story to be told there as well.

Waitman Beorn (29:17.964)
Yeah, I and I want to get, want to stay on this, this line of questioning sort of about writing about perpetrators in nonfiction. We will get to the fiction, promise. Because it happens with Arendt, it happens with the people you described writing about Eichmann, but also about Sreni. And it's this question as somebody who started out, you know, I started out working on primarily perpetrators. It's this question of sympathy versus empathy. And I found it really interesting.

Erin McGlothlin (29:42.922)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (29:47.714)
that someone, I'm forgetting whom, that you quoted in the book, said that empathy is actually the more dangerous thing than sympathy. Because I always thought that sympathy was basically like, feel sorry for them and I don't need to feel sorry for them. But empathy is, can kind of imagine or put myself in their shoes to think about the decisions they were making, which I always sort of felt like that's what I should be doing as a writer.

Erin McGlothlin (29:56.586)
Mm-hmm.

Erin McGlothlin (30:01.354)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (30:12.046)
when I'm writing about perpetrators is not just because another thing you point out, I think it's really great in the book is this. I think you mentioned this in the book, that sort of this idea that evil is not like a really useful concept. know, evil, what that is, I I've always thought that's kind of a distancing mechanism. if somebody's evil or a monster or whatever, they're not like us. They're not understandable because they don't function under the same sort of rules that we do. And I always think that's a cop-out. But anyway, can you talk a little bit about this idea of

Erin McGlothlin (30:22.516)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (30:29.362)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (30:42.126)
how the writers that you've written about and studied approach this issue of empathy, sympathy, you know, with the people that are writing about, because it also comes through later on in the fictional stuff, because when we're reading a fictional perpetrator, at some level, and same in the movie sometimes, we put ourselves in their shoes and now we're sort of thinking about them and like, how are they doing and all that. That was great for them. They had a win or whatever, right?

Erin McGlothlin (31:00.905)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (31:07.55)
Yeah, and I think for me, empathy, and that's one thing I kind of, you know, draw out at the in my introduction is that there are different kinds of empathy and different degrees. you know, some empathy can just be to recognizing, okay, that's another human being. And therefore, that human beings experiences is like mine, I'm a human being. But you can get even

you know, even further to different kinds where there's, where we really look at the events through their eyes. And that's what I call perspectival empathy, where we're really willing to say, okay, we're going to use this framework. We're going to understand where if Stangl says, you know, I would have been killed if I had said no. Of course, now we know that very unlikely to have happened that he would have been himself.

put into the gas chamber and he sort of intimates that exactly what would have happened. we have, but okay, we're willing to take his perspective on this. There's emotional empathy where we may actually, you know, when he, and I think there are moments in Seregni's book where you feel her actually empathizing with his emotional states. He gets very emotional at times, oddly enough, not about killing people.

but about his own kind of being drawn into ever greater complicity.

Waitman Beorn (32:33.73)
mean, and there are ways in which, sorry to interject, but there are ways in which he is kind of a tragic figure. He's painted that way, he's by Serenny, right? As a guy that just sort of gets caught up in things and doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to get out of it. so he just, and that may be in some sense true of Stongel, the reality, but also it is very much the way that Serenny writes it, that he is a...

a guy that's sort of caught up in the course of events and is unable, it's almost as if he doesn't have any agency, which I think is a problematic element of the way she writes it up.

Erin McGlothlin (33:10.984)
Yeah, right.

And that's the way he tells the story. so again, that's the empathy thing is, I mean, she resists sometimes his explanation, but often other times she goes with it because she's fully in his story with them. And then there's ideological empathy. And I think that that one is the one that I think...

a lot of the works that I'm looking at and the fictions make draw that, draw that hard line that, you know, we are going to follow these people and follow how they understand the events, but to also have that ideological distance so that we can make clear that they are ethical relationship, which is that, you know, when Stangl basically, you know, he compares

the victims of Treblinka to Lemmings, we're not going to go there. And Sorenny doesn't go there as well. She refuses to go there. So I think there are degrees of that kind of empathy. But in general, if we're at all going to try to understand what motivated people, how they were drawn into it, I think

whatever the truth of it is, know that Stangl was not, you know, rah rah, joining the Nazi party early on, as far as we understand it in Austria, right? And he did, we have no evidence in any case that he was a convinced ideologue or a rabid or publicly rabid anti-Semite. We don't have evidence of that.

Erin McGlothlin (35:03.028)
So there is a sense in which we know that he's drawn in, but the way he tells it, and of course he's the hero of his own story, so everything comes back to him. The victims are marginal. He's in the lower camp and they're in the upper camp being murdered, right? And even that spatial distance, like he refuses to even acknowledge that he was spatially coexisting with them. And that's kind of his...

framework. just, they're a marginal part of the story. And the part of the story that actually brought him all this pain because his, in the end, he lost the trust and admiration of his wife. And that seems to be like the tragic thing for

Waitman Beorn (35:51.318)
Yeah, I mean, and again, I think the spatial thing is really interesting because I found that even reading actual perpetrator testimony to police, where they'll sort of say, like in my first book, I was looking at German soldiers and they would say, I saw that I was watching this shooting at the mass pit and I saw the girl in the red dress get shot by this guy and I saw this particular person shooting. And then they would say I was 400 meters away. And it's like, well, you couldn't have seen any of that.

Erin McGlothlin (36:05.578)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (36:21.506)
from that far away. But like in your mind, you've literally spatially but also morally distanced yourself. I couldn't be morally complicit because I was so physically far away from the act, even though I wasn't. And same thing with Stronghold, as if Stronghold never visited the upper camp or didn't know what went on there. This idea of how often he was on the ramp is kind of immaterial because he's in charge of the whole thing.

Erin McGlothlin (36:21.918)
Yeah, that's interesting.

Erin McGlothlin (36:29.95)
Yeah, that's great.

Erin McGlothlin (36:35.337)
over.

Erin McGlothlin (36:51.274)
Yeah, right. what we also know, I mean, this is where you have, you know, it's always helpful for me as a literary scholar, always read these accounts alongside, you know, the historiography. So Yitzhak Arad makes clear that it was, that, you know, April was the commandant before, before Stangl and in August, sometime in August,

Waitman Beorn (36:51.598)
You know, and so like, doesn't really, you

Erin McGlothlin (37:17.982)
He's like relieved of his duties because Glamacznik thinks he's stealing a lot of the goods and he's terrible. Yes, it's a mess. It's truly, the great deportations are happening and it's chaos, right? And Shango comes in and suddenly it's all organized. Shango doesn't say that he organizes it, but I mean, at least for me, must be, that is implied anyway.

Waitman Beorn (37:23.022)
Well, he's terrible at it. mean, there's like dead bodies everywhere and there's like, it's just a mess.

Erin McGlothlin (37:47.792)
is that in Sireni's book, but certainly if you read Arad and others, that's implied that Stangu was the guy who figured out how to make it work.

Waitman Beorn (37:57.122)
He fixed it. Yeah. I mean, he made a better mousetrap, you know, and even, and again, it gets back to that idea of small answers to big questions, you know. He didn't have to be a sort of, you know, a himmler or a hydric to do it. He was just a guy that was presented with a job and not only did the job, but improved, you know, the way things worked, which.

Erin McGlothlin (38:13.066)
Mm-hmm.

Erin McGlothlin (38:21.576)
and became the best commandant. I mean, that was given a citation for being the best. So I mean, it's crazy. It's the ways in which, and that's hard. I the hard part with Serenny is she's writing this in the early 70s and there's, she doesn't have, there's not a lot of, there's not, I mean, even today you and I have talked about this separately, but.

Waitman Beorn (38:24.311)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (38:43.757)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (38:49.962)
There's not a lot of historiography to go to on Treblinka. So she's interviewing some victims. She's interviewing Franz Zuckermel and a couple of perpetrators. She's interviewing some villagers. And there's not much, so she can't push back on some of those things.

Waitman Beorn (39:09.91)
Yeah, but I mean, as I said, to her credit, mean, that's sort of what we now, what we now, all of us Holocaust scholars sort of see as the ideal narrative, know, one that includes all of those things. wanna, wanna, Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is one of the things as an aside, you know, that I regret being born when I was born because I think it would have been an amazing opportunity.

Erin McGlothlin (39:18.984)
Yeah, yeah. And she went out and got him to talk to her. Like that's a feat in and of itself. It's amazing.

Erin McGlothlin (39:38.207)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (39:38.478)
to have these people still around and go talk to them. As somebody that at least started out sort of interested in perpetrators, we no longer have that that option. But speaking of, I wanna move on a little bit because I wanna get to the fiction and I also wanna talk a little bit about Eichmann because the Hannah Arendt piece on Eichmann in Jerusalem has obviously raised all kinds of controversy about, and I know that

Erin McGlothlin (39:40.5)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (40:08.11)
The goal of your book is not to, of that chapter in the book, is not to of adjudicate, you know, is Chris Browning right, that Hannah Arendt is right in theory but wrong on the person, which is kind of also my take, or was he actually just sort of this mindless bureaucrat functionary? But he's somebody who has been, I think wrongly and in a historical sense, but whatever, elevated as like this key perpetrator

Erin McGlothlin (40:19.796)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (40:37.332)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (40:37.472)
in history of the Holocaust. I'm just doing a presentation for something else. I'm writing it up for next week. And I'm talking about Holocaust remembrance. And obviously the 61 Eichmann trial is always a key point whenever you're talking about flash points of Holocaust memory and remembrance, cetera. And as you mentioned, there's three people that do in-depth stories about him. So how are narratives about him interesting?

from our literary perspective and what happens in them, what are the questions we need to worry about?

Erin McGlothlin (41:11.946)
Yeah, and mean, in some ways there are, you we have a lot of accounts of the trial and very interesting people from, you know, because we had so many journalists there and not some, many of them were writers, you know, not just like filing, you know, 30 lines in a newspaper, but they were actually thinking in bigger terms than they have written books. And I focus on three of those. felt like you can't, I mean,

know, Arendt is the elephant in the room on this because she becomes the authoritative voice on Eichmann and I think she's incredibly perceptive, incredibly thoughtful, very problematic, right? So and she's also she's basically, you know, basing her what she knows on Hilberg just

recently appearing, you know, so it's, she's also groping in the dark a little bit. You see all of these people groping in the dark. But she is really interested in, in sort of Eichmann as a performative, a performative entity. She's really interested in like what he's performing and this banality that she's performing. It may not be that he was actually banal, you know, I think, you know,

She kind of makes the argument that he's just a ventriloquist for a bunch of empty stuff. think he did use a, you he is not, he wasn't a super thoughtful human being. he, but, but as the Tina Stognath and others have really shown us that he knew he had a strategic performative goal at the trial. I mean, Browning says that as well, that he was, and so we,

We have to understand the situation. It's a defense tactic. But she's really interested in the way in which he sort of refuses thought. He refuses to actually engage in any kind of, she sees them as all surface, no depth. just not, he's not going to give us any kind of thoughtful, again, that desire we have for a perpetrator to really plumb

Waitman Beorn (43:04.086)
It's a defense tactic, essentially.

Erin McGlothlin (43:32.596)
their own depths and to try to figure out how this all fits together. He's not going to do that. And so she's really interested in the ways in which he just stays on the surface. But that's kind of her perspective on it. And what I think is interesting is she focuses a lot on his language. And my argument is that she's really interested in this

this bureaucratic language and this language he's always trying to kind of get to this educated German, like, you know, he'll sort of cite Kant, but get Kant wrong. know, he's always so he's, which is a very petty bourgeois German thing to do at that time is to avail oneself of this German tradition of literary scholars, literary writers and thinkers.

Waitman Beorn (44:13.155)
Right.

Erin McGlothlin (44:29.89)
And so this combination of this bureaucraties and this sort of this like I German idealism that he kind of reaches for but doesn't get to I think that's a really interesting way. And I think that that does tell us something about how perpetrators, you know, this the bureaucracy and then the German intellectual tradition. I think those two things are very fundamental.

to the perpetration of the Holocaust because the one is how it gets done and the other is how it's justified as a grand historical vision. And I think that's really interesting. She kind of gets there with him. Yeah, and then the other two writers, think William L. Hull, he's a fascinating figure and I'm surprised that more historians haven't written about him.

Bettina Stagnis does a little bit in her book Eichmann before Jerusalem. But he's the last guy to hang out with Eichmann. And this guy is such a huckster. He is so interested in being and writing this tell-all. And a little bit like Serenny, he goes into it wanting Eichmann to confess. He wants this confession.

But the confession he wants is not, he wants a religious confession. He doesn't really, I mean, for his worldview, for Hull's worldview, which I am quite critical of in my book, he believes that if Eichmann will acknowledge what he's done and then ask for forgiveness from Jesus very performatively and pointedly, that that's

Waitman Beorn (45:56.462)
It's like a religious one.

Erin McGlothlin (46:22.216)
will mean that he's saved and he can go to heaven and his sins will be washed away, which I'm just outraged by that that and I, you had not a theological person that haven't done a lot of thought about this, but the idea that one could be complicit in genocide or mass murder in the way that Eichmann was and simply say, well, I've come to understand.

my sins and I beg forgiveness and then then holds view that washes him clean. I'm just outraged by that.

Waitman Beorn (46:58.222)
But also, if I remember correctly from your book, he was like the pastor of an evangelical mission in Jerusalem. So he's like the Jews for Jesus. He's out there to really, really proselytize. And so you can sort of see, I guess, how this fits. If Eichmann can find Jesus, then anybody can. So then we can get more people to sort of convert and that kind of thing.

Erin McGlothlin (47:10.004)
That's right.

That's right.

Erin McGlothlin (47:20.456)
Right, that's right. Yeah, and that's a good point. And you know, he somehow, he worms his way in. It's a really fascinating story that he's made, even though he's proselytizing in the Holy Land, in Israel, he's somehow been able to create a good relationship with the government. he kind of goes to them and says, you're gonna look bad if you don't let...

some spiritual minister minister to Eichmann. Eichmann's a Christian. You're going to look bad. Everybody's going to criticize you if you don't allow me in. And so he convinces them to allow him to speak to Eichmann. Eichmann doesn't want it, doesn't want a spiritual advisor. Eichmann doesn't want, I mean, it's really, that, the speaking of empathy, that's a really interesting moment where you're kind of like, poor Eichmann, this guy is badgering him and bullying him, and Eichmann doesn't want to be a part of it.

And so there's this weird dynamic. Bettina Stagnis has a really interesting footnote in her book where she says, yeah, like you're almost against your will. You're forced into aligning with Eichmann because Hull is such a pest, he pesters him so much.

Waitman Beorn (48:34.328)
Yeah, I I guess you could imagine, you've been sentenced to death and the last thing you want is to involuntarily have a guy come in and try to throw a religious conversion at you. It has to go through his wife, who I noted in the book is referred to as Mrs. Hall. And it's that whole thing about in the acknowledgments, the great white historian who says, and thanks to my wife who typed up all of my work and everything.

Erin McGlothlin (48:44.968)
who doesn't even speak German. That's the other thing.

Erin McGlothlin (48:53.225)
Yes.

Erin McGlothlin (48:58.73)
Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (49:01.07)
So he sort of checks all blocks there for problematic people. Let's move on to fiction because that's the other half of the book. And again, it's really interesting. And here you really get to see authors making choices because they can about, know, who am I going to portray? How am I going to portray them? In some ways, doing some of the similar things that you mentioned, for example, the Prima Levi does. It's sort of like

Erin McGlothlin (49:18.601)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (49:30.71)
if they're creating a fictional character, like the character in the Kindly ones, they're allowed to kind of make that person a composite, you know, of the various kinds of people that they want to talk about. Or in the case of the, which book was it? I think it was not Ami, but the Devil and the Barber book, right? Where you can make it a caricature sort of of a person and make it somewhat absurd, but.

Erin McGlothlin (49:53.672)
Yeah, the Hilton rat.

Waitman Beorn (50:00.43)
Can you talk, I mean, with that opening, that wasn't a great volley handoff, but how do we look at the way perpetrators are developed in fiction?

Erin McGlothlin (50:10.922)
Yeah, and so as you pointed out the very beginning, I'm really limiting myself to perpetrators as first person narrators, because they're perpetrators do exist throughout Holocaust fiction. Sometimes they're a distance also from the victim's perspective who only see these, you know, these commanding, you know, figures in the distance that near the barbed wire or wherever they are.

And so that's throughout Holocaust fiction, but I was really looking at perpetrators telling their own story. And in a way, it's sort of like the Serenity issue. It's like the Arendt issue. It's like, how do these guys tell their story? And one of the things that I argue is, in the nonfiction, we have this explainer figure. We always have this figure who mediates. It's Arendt, it's Muelish, it's Serenity, it's Hull, right?

In the fiction, I feel like what these authors do to both bring us in and kind of following, you know, we have empathy, we're following the account of this guy, we're in his world, we're in his mind, but there's always some kind of externalized figure or some kind of technique that allows some externalization that mediates it so that we aren't actually

truly completely aligned because that would be ethically problematic for us to go, wow, okay, it all makes sense why this guy did this. Yeah, I would have done the same thing, right? We want something. And so in all of the texts, and they do it in very different ways. mean, three of the texts I look at, Jonathan Littell's, The Kindly Ones, Edgar Hilsener's, The Nazi and the Barber, and Martin Amis's first Holocaust fiction, Time Zero,

there's always some kind of disruption in the perspective. So in the case of Max Aue in the Kindly ones, yeah, I mean, that is a really interesting story because like it's such a long novel. I don't know if you've read it. like.

Waitman Beorn (52:22.05)
Kindly ones.

Waitman Beorn (52:30.318)
I to admit I made it like 35 to 40 % through it, but I never finished it.

Erin McGlothlin (52:34.826)
And that's the interesting thing. the 35 to 40 % is the first, I'd say half of it, is where we have this very lucid account that is very, as a historian, you probably can check off all of the historiography. You can be like, okay, that's Browning and that's Hillberg and oh yeah, that's the guy who wrote on Werner Best. You know, can probably check on all of these.

Thanks, because he really does bring in so much. I mean, that's one reason I think historians took this text so seriously is because he really weaves a lot of really good history in and some really important historiography. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (53:19.032)
But it's almost overwhelming in a sense. It's kind of almost like, I kind of compare it to Bretty Sinellas, you know, in, what's the book? There you go. Where like, you know, whereas in the movie, there's like a five minute diatribe on Huey Lewis in the news, but in the book, it's like an entire paragraph or an entire chapter on like, know, Phil Collins or whatever. And I kind of feel like that was kind of something that was going on a little bit with the Kindly ones where,

Erin McGlothlin (53:27.559)
Mm-hmm.

American Psycho.

Erin McGlothlin (53:38.718)
Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (53:48.982)
You're almost overwhelmed by the level of sort of detail and sort of self-absorption of this guy who's like over and over and over again, talking about stuff.

Erin McGlothlin (53:54.475)
Yeah. And it just goes on and on. But what's interesting is that that sort of historical lens, which really is so finely textured in the first half of the book, breaks down in the second half. And we have all these crazy hallucinations. mean, also learn, I mean, spoiler that, or we, we, we infer that he has killed his mother and stepfather.

Waitman Beorn (54:11.928)
Mm-hmm.

Erin McGlothlin (54:22.21)
and that he himself is not aware of it or does not acknowledge it. But especially in the latter part of the book, there's like all this weird fantasy, all this truly sexual where he's alone at a state and you're not sure what he sees or does, he fantasizes, he hallucinates. So this like really...

reliable witness we have in the first half that historians immediately know where he is, what he's referring to, it breaks down. And so for me that breakdown I think is Littell's way of giving us some distance, mediating, because otherwise how do you end this history of this guy who's going through it? mean you start to believe him, yeah, well he's trying to up the calories, know, his job is to

increase the calories for the inmates of various concentration camps and Auschwitz because the labor demands are so severe at the end of the war. That's his job. Meanwhile, everybody's fighting him on that because they want to, they're trying to carry out a genocide.

Waitman Beorn (55:35.444)
It's kind of like when everyone around you is a bad Nazi, then you start to think, well, he's not the worst of them. like maybe he's not as bad. Whereas like objectively, they're all bad. You don't need to feel sorry for any of them.

Erin McGlothlin (55:42.675)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (55:46.044)
Yeah, and he's critical of men.

Erin McGlothlin (55:54.472)
Yeah, yeah, and there's some intimation as well that he himself is traumatized. know, he's at Babi Yar, he participates. There's some dissociation. He talks about his arm, you know, taking off on his own and shooting. You get the sense that, so there's a lot going on and you do have empathy.

Waitman Beorn (56:15.502)
And I think this is what's really interesting. I think this is what's really interesting about that because I think it's fair to say that there were definitely people that were traumatized. mean, you know, like there certainly were, even amongst the Einsatzgruppen shooters, people who did not want to be there. That was not their job. They had no, I'm not saying this a lot or whatever, but there were people. And even, and we've seen, you know,

Erin McGlothlin (56:29.384)
Absolutely.

Waitman Beorn (56:44.97)
even people that were more motivated, that is a traumatic event. And I say traumatic in an objective sense, not in a, need to feel sorry for them necessarily, but it's traumatic and it's mentally damaging. And even Himmler recognizes this, right?

Erin McGlothlin (56:53.93)
Absolutely.

Erin McGlothlin (56:58.282)
Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I have done some work more recently since this book in into perpetrator trauma. I wrote an article and and what's so interesting is the ways in which the trauma category has become an ethical category where it's actually a psychological, it should be a psychological category and one can be traumatized by many things. And we do know I if you I mean, I went back and read Ordinary Men and it's all about trauma.

you you recognize it. And I think Chris wasn't necessarily ready to go there yet, but more recently, he's acknowledged the ways in which, you know, coping mechanisms, of these things, dissociation, all of these things were present. And so we do know that perpetrators were traumatized. I would argue that that's one reason. And this is where I probably part ways with Ed Westerman, but I'm not a historian, so I can say this.

is that alcohol use, think, was a, the rampant alcohol use that Ed really tracks well in his book was a traumatic coping mechanism. He rejects that, but I think it was. And I think that that's one thing that the kindly one shows very well is the ways in which these perpetrators were both experiencing symptoms of trauma for killing because

we're not really well suited as humans for killing. It does something to us to kill and functioning at the same time, like learning to function. And then that's, think, how genocide happens. You do it, it's disruptive, and then you normalize it and you learn to function.

Waitman Beorn (58:49.25)
I mean, that's exactly right. I mean, I think about that scene, this is going in a complete different genre, but in the scene of the, don't know, the act of killing, right? The film about Indonesia and there's a perpetrator and he's sort of asked to reenact some of his killings and he gets literally physically ill doing it. And I think you've absolutely hit the nail on the head that sort of explaining genocide from a...

Erin McGlothlin (59:02.099)
Mmm.

Waitman Beorn (59:17.166)
not necessarily from a why every individual wants to do it, but it's solving the two problems, which is why do you want to do it in the first place and how do you keep doing it after you start doing it? And I think that that's exactly right. That's how, but again, if we accept the premise, and I've said it on the show a lot, if we accept the premise that 99 % of perpetrators were not psychologically abnormal human beings.

Erin McGlothlin (59:44.286)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (59:44.482)
meaning like sociopaths or like incapable of human feeling, et cetera, then it means that, you know, they must have to a certain extent, to a greater or lesser extent, been traumatized in some way. And I like your comment there that it's taken on kind of a moralistic meaning, which is not necessarily helpful because, you know, I can be, if you asked me to, if you brought a cow into my yard and said, I want you to kill this cow and make a hamburger, I would be traumatized by that.

but I have no problem eating meat, right? So you can be traumatized by something and have suffered very real emotional harm while at the same time not being sort of opposed, you know?

Erin McGlothlin (01:00:27.464)
Yeah, and I think we got there to this moral thing because trauma discourse really developed in especially in Holocaust studies, but it's in the 90s as almost an ethical solidarity with the pain and the suffering of victims. so once you and acknowledging the ways in which this experience was world shattering and at the moment and that

Waitman Beorn (01:00:43.606)
The victims,

Erin McGlothlin (01:00:56.08)
impacted their selves later and it impacts their writing. And for as a literary scholar, we were really interested in the ways in which trauma manifests in the act of writing. And so there's an ethical solidarity. And I want to, you know, make clear that I have that ethical solidarity. And you do too, I know, right? We're in Holocaust studies, not because we think perpetrators are cooler, we admire them, or because we don't care what they've done or, or

Waitman Beorn (01:01:14.285)
Yeah, for sure.

Erin McGlothlin (01:01:23.882)
because we're not attending to what the victims experience. So I believe that, but once you start to realize trauma is a psychological reaction and this other stuff is our ethical solidarity, then we, I'm not saying we have any ethical obligations to perpetrators at all. I don't believe we have ethical obligations, which is why I admire in a way Claude Lansman going in there and

tricking them and lying to them. I don't have as much of a problem because I think they've given up their right to our ethical empathy or ethical identification. But we have to recognize what perpetration does to a human being. And I think that that's again where literature can explore that because as you know quite well, we don't have a lot of perpetrators telling us this.

You have, you have, especially historians have to be incredibly creative to figure this out because we don't have a lot of perpetrators just talking about it at length afterwards. And that's where fiction, fiction imagines that experience and tell, gives that perpetrator testimony that is so scant in reality.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:41.068)
When I think about this in the context, even of my own stuff where, know, I noticed early on, because I would read all of these sort of police interrogations. And of course, they all have, they all start with like a little bit of like life history and sort of demographic information. And just a sheer number of these guys were divorced, you know, after the war. kept thinking, I mean, this is just, this is just purely conjectural.

Erin McGlothlin (01:03:00.443)
No

Waitman Beorn (01:03:07.214)
But we know that being in a war, as a regular soldier or whatever, I mean, these are traumatic and then you bring that home with you and that can affect your interpersonal relationships. And I just wonder, you know, if that's part of it. And I've talked to family members of, for example, the SS men at UNOSCA who said, you know, who could testify that these weren't very nice guys when they came home. You know, one of them.

Erin McGlothlin (01:03:10.505)
That's right.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:31.426)
shot the family dog in front of them because it was annoying him and this kind of stuff. That kind of a person, right? And that one of these guys sons committed suicide later on in life, these kinds of things. And so I think it's a great point that we don't have to feel sorry for them, but we do recognize that this sort of, that of course the victims are the victims and this is not a comparative thing, but that the act of victimization also traumatizes the...

Erin McGlothlin (01:03:37.15)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:03:55.764)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:01.282)
the person doing it unless they are sort of a sociopath and they lack the ability to sort of understand that.

Erin McGlothlin (01:04:02.601)
and it's

Erin McGlothlin (01:04:08.872)
Yeah, and if they simply don't have that conscience or that, but yeah, and so you really, recognize, you know, and as historians point out, Himmler pointed that out, right? That this was not, this was dirty business. And I think that for understanding the long effects of genocide, it's really important to point that out, that like, this did not create this,

Waitman Beorn (01:04:22.028)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:04:38.602)
utopia for German men who returned to their families. That was not, yeah, it's not a case.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:46.766)
Yeah, I I want to pull one question back to the fiction piece because I'm curious how, because for me, reading both your book and having read some of the fiction, I'm always, I'm very intrigued about the person that sits down to write from the perspective of a perpetrator, which in some sense, and think, again, this goes back to the way you've done in the book, which I think is really good.

Erin McGlothlin (01:05:09.546)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:15.628)
It's kind of the way I think about Serenny, you know, because Serenny also chose to kind of put herself and, you know, other people that interview perpetrators get sort of have that close interpersonal relationship. They've chosen to really put themselves in this really difficult emotional position. On the one hand, you know, the historian or the getter Serenny is because she has to deal with the human being and experience that firsthand. And then the fictional writer, because they have to imagine it and they have to inhabit that character.

Erin McGlothlin (01:05:24.926)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:45.984)
in a certain way, which means that they have to at some point think like a perpetrator. And I'm curious with that as a starting point from the books that you talked about, which are the first-person narratives, can you compare those with how the rest of Holocaust literature has treated perpetrators? Do people writing in the third person, I mean, for example, I only remember very briefly, but, or very vaguely, but I do think the perpetrators in her book,

her set of short stories do tend to be kind of faceless Nazis. And she doesn't really try to think about or even intimate by their actions or their behavior really why or what they're thinking. Is that a fair generalization for the rest of sort of, we'll say non-directly perpetrator focused Holocaust fiction?

Erin McGlothlin (01:06:21.524)
That's right.

Erin McGlothlin (01:06:37.874)
I so. mean, there's probably always exceptions and I'm trying to see if I can think of any. But often, you know, there's a Holocaust survivor writer in German, his name is Fred Wander and he's written an amazing memoir and a few other books. The Seventh Well, and it recently got a really good translation. So if you're interested in the new sort of...

It's a fictionalized Holocaust memoir, he turns to fiction. But he always refers to the guards at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in the sub-camp of Buchenwald. He refers to them as the booted ones. And I find that really interesting, you know, he only can see their boots. You can just imagine that he's looking downward. He's not allowed to kind of either look straight ahead, but

there's no eye to eye contact, there's no really acknowledgement of mutual humanity there, right? And so for him, they just become almost faceless uniforms and that, you know, the power invested in the uniform. So I think that that does happen a lot because, you know, especially for people interned in

something, a place like Auschwitz or in concentration camps, they often don't have much intercourse with the German SS or the guards, right? It's the kapos, it's the block functionaries, the elders, they're the ones who are enacting all of the rules and often the violence. so perpetrators are

very often seen from a distance unless there's a reason to engage with a particular person. And in fact, I think sometimes in memoirs, see the survivor being surprised when a perpetrator shows an act of kindness or consideration because that is the anomaly, not the rule. so you don't have, and although, and Mark Roseman has written this about this, you know, the,

Erin McGlothlin (01:08:56.17)
the ways in which victims tried to infer what their perpetrators, what the perpetrators wanted from them. So they had that still kind of talk about this theory of mind. They're trying to project into them often so that they could behave in the right way and to ensure their safety. But you do have victims really interested in what the perpetrators are thinking. But it's not that kind of full blown psychologizing.

that you're seeing in this fiction. And I think for somebody like Edgar Hilsenrath, who was a survivor, to turn around and write in the late 60s, early 70s, a book fully from the perspective of a perpetrator is so stunning and so almost unheard of.

because he is willing to really go there and it's not a pretty memoir, pretty fiction. Yeah, then let's see the Barbara.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:51.822)
That's the Nazi and the barber, right? mean, the twist, spoiler alert for listeners, but the twist that that book takes at the end where he becomes a Jew, basically he pretends to be a Jew in Israel. I mean, that's just, yeah, of his friend, yeah. Who he had killed in the camp, right? So mean, like.

Erin McGlothlin (01:10:06.206)
Yeah. He steals the identity of his former best friend. Whom he kills. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:16.086)
Yeah, I mean, that's an amazing twist. I guess I to close maybe with just a question about, again, going back to that idea, have the authors of any of these books talked about what it's like to inhabit that space? Because that seems interesting to me as well.

Erin McGlothlin (01:10:31.144)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:10:35.358)
You know, I have done a little bit of, but I probably could have done a little bit more digging around in interviews with, I did a little bit with Martin Amis. I think Martin Amis is an interesting figure. created this first, this Times Arrow in the 90s, this book that tells, but it also has this like filter as I call it, because it's narrated in reverse. And then he created the Zone of Interest, which,

Waitman Beorn (01:10:58.424)
Goes in back, goes in reverse.

Erin McGlothlin (01:11:04.906)
is sort of the idea upon which Jonathan Glaser creates his film, but has actually very little in common. He created a much more, what we call realist or a novel in, what was that, over 10 years ago. And he's talked a little bit about wanting, he just felt like the Holocaust was an unfinished business for him.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:12.824)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:11:34.506)
But he just, he wasn't able, and maybe that's, know, Amos is a very sardonic, ironic writer, and so he couldn't find that voice in the victim. He has a victim narrator in the Zone of Interest who's a Zonderkommando, and it's the only place where he's not lampooning or sardonic. He really has this poignant figure.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:50.243)
Mm-hmm.

Erin McGlothlin (01:12:01.812)
But he's much more interested in these self-deceptions and self-aggrandizations that perpetrators exhibit, and that's where he wants to go. He wants to really show that bitter, grotesque, ironic side of the Holocaust.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:21.934)
Well, and also the sort of, I mean, the fact that I haven't, to be fair, haven't read that book, but I did read the descriptions in your book about it. And, you know, if he's portraying this guy as kind of clumsy, incompetent, you know, stumbling around, making mistakes, you know, to me, that's actually quite realistic as well. you know, these guys are not like sort of all genius, evil geniuses that have like...

Erin McGlothlin (01:12:44.179)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:12:49.098)
Teutonic gods, right. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:50.19)
that have figured all this out. I mean, it is very much amateur hour across most of the Holocaust. And so like actually, you know, showing this guy is kind of an idiot who, or not an idiot, but someone who just doesn't quite get it or doesn't anticipate things. Like the example that you quote in the book of, you know, him getting a transport and he's getting all prepared with like all the, for any eventuality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then it's only like a hundred people. And he's like, ah, I look like an idiot now. And like, I mean, I could, you know,

Erin McGlothlin (01:13:11.496)
Yeah, yeah, I look like an idiot because I brought all these weapons to the ramp.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:16.674)
You know, yeah, I mean, that may be seen by some readers as like, that's P's being really sort of over the top satirical. But I'm like, actually that sounds a hundred percent realist to me. Like, I mean, that's a thing that could happen. And the guy would be like, damn it. Like, you know.

Erin McGlothlin (01:13:23.433)
Yeah.

Right.

Erin McGlothlin (01:13:29.748)
Well, and I think that's important to show, you know, like some of these guys that they just get to their positions because they're there and they're willing to do it, right? And this short duration of Nazi rule means they have to mobilize guys and they got to get them in where they need to go. And sometimes they're Averils and sometimes they're Stongles. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:38.306)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:49.934)
Well, and it goes back to what you said about Eichmann too, that in many ways these are people who are elevated above what position in life they could have achieved in like a normal society. Like the commandant of Yanovska is basically functionally illiterate and he's just kind of a jackass. But he gets to live like a king in charge of this camp, et cetera, et cetera. And I feel like Eichmann's kind of the same way.

Erin McGlothlin (01:14:12.575)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:14:18.44)
Yeah, that's right.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:19.84)
And the quoting of great literature, but in an ape-ish kind of way, aping at someone who is intelligent quoting big literature is an attempt to sort of grow into the role that, the level of role that you now have, but you're not really ready for it, either societally or educationally or whatever.

Erin McGlothlin (01:14:24.51)
Yes.

Erin McGlothlin (01:14:30.942)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:14:35.496)
You see that, yeah, I mean, that's really clear in the film, The Zone of Interest. I love the actress that plays Hedwig Hirst. Her name is Sandra Hüller and she has this crazy kind of peasant gate. She's kind of lumbers around. She is not a grand dame. She is like this woman who was propelled to, she becomes the queen of Auschwitz, but like, it really shows the ways in which these people are not, this is not a meritocracy and it's.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:50.06)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:15:03.632)
And it's so it's yeah, it's really interesting. The one thing I will say and I hadn't thought about it before was that speaking about this is I think in some ways, it's harder to write a fiction today from in the voice of a survivor or the voice of the victim. That in some ways is ethically more problematic. A first person fiction, right? A first person then to write it in a perpetrator. Because in a way I find that

Waitman Beorn (01:15:25.453)
gonna say yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:15:33.224)
the hubris of trying to even imagine what a victim is going through. That's even more, it's more hubristic than to imagine the inner perspective of a perpetrator.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:46.222)
But there's also the challenge, I think, in doing that, of actually portraying a whole person. Because survivors, not all survivors are nice people. Not all survivors did the right thing for the right reasons. And I'm not judging, this is no judgment there. But if you're writing about it and then you're imagining a survivor and you...

Erin McGlothlin (01:15:53.096)
Yeah, yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:15:59.369)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:13.656)
For example, don't put them in a situation of choiceless choices even, or show them only sort of holistically good choices and decisions and thoughts. That's also kind of a form of distorting the history. But then as you say, if you show a survivor who has blemishes, I suppose, if you want to put it that way, on their sort of record, or had to make difficult decisions, or they...

Erin McGlothlin (01:16:17.236)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:16:28.948)
That's right.

Erin McGlothlin (01:16:38.546)
or had to make difficult choices.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:41.678)
they stole somebody's bread or they pushed somebody out of line or whatever, which is totally realistic. Something could totally happen. And again, we're not necessarily judging anybody for that. But I could see the audience saying, gosh, how dare you imagine this survivor who has done something that we're considered to be sort of inappropriate or immoral or whatever. And then that makes, you've made this choice. Whereas like if you're dealing with perpetrators, no one really cares.

Erin McGlothlin (01:16:53.695)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:17:00.53)
And yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:17:07.326)
That's right. And that's a sanctification of survivors. mean, with my first year students I teach every year and there, we read Primo Levi and they're always shocked because they have this fantasy of like this victim group that is has solidary complete solidarity and helping each other instead of realizing that like, you know, the regime created the situation in which there was so much pressure pushing down on the individual victim that that there was no chance or very little and chance for solidarity. And when it happened.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:10.595)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:21.111)
Yeah.

Erin McGlothlin (01:17:37.042)
It's extraordinary because of that, but that's a hard thing to write. I would feel hubris writing that.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:42.52)
Well, and also, yeah, I mean, and also when you try to kill an entire group of people, you catch everybody in the net. You know, you get the Janusz Korsak, but you also get the Heimann-Mamkowski's, you know, you get the heroes and the villains and everybody in between, know, child molesters, everybody else, they're all there because it's an entire community of people. But if you were to write about that, then you're making a choice, right?

Erin McGlothlin (01:17:51.827)
Yes, that's right.

Erin McGlothlin (01:18:00.254)
That's right. The petty thieves and the pimps and everybody. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:12.182)
in a fictional sense to say like, I'm deciding to add this element to the person's character that people may be uncomfortable with. And I think that's probably a good point. It's easier to write from a purported perspective. Before I go on to our last question, I do wanna note that this is actually kind of a nice, know, completing the circle. The first episode of this podcast was with Omar Barthoff about his fictional book or quasi-fictional book.

Erin McGlothlin (01:18:37.002)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:42.474)
And I think actually this is a nice tie-in. So if you're listening to this podcast, you might go back and listen to that one as well, because he talks to me as an historian, but also then as kind of a fiction writer about what he was trying to accomplish via fiction and how he thought that fiction could allow him to tell a story in a different way than sort of writing an historical scholarly voice. And I think everything that Aaron has said really sort of...

jives well with a lot of those comments. Sorry, go ahead.

Erin McGlothlin (01:19:12.746)
Mm-hmm.

Well, and just to also say, just to kind of, that makes me really, really hopeful for at least, you know, the ways in which Holocaust studies is embracing these methodologies across the disciplines. I'm thinking through literature. mean, the turn of historians toward literature and fictional texts is to me showing that kind of more holistic view. it really encourages me because...

I think we're starting, our interests are all the same and we're really starting to discover that.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:47.768)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, it's a different way of thinking. I mean, I'm thinking now, I will not belabor this point, but with my digitalization project, in a way that there isn't when I'm writing a scholarly monograph, there's aesthetics involved. There's artistic decisions. Am I becoming kind of an artist? And what looks good, whatever that means, right? So that maybe for another time, we could talk about that. But yeah, I think it's great to sort of

Erin McGlothlin (01:20:04.01)
Mm-hmm.

Erin McGlothlin (01:20:14.826)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:17.326)
whatever we can to sort of think about this concept in different ways. But before I let you go, let me ask a question I always do, which is what is one book on the Holocaust that you would recommend? And again, you're not tied to this tomorrow, but for today, what is the one that you'd recommend?

Erin McGlothlin (01:20:30.28)
Nope.

Erin McGlothlin (01:20:35.946)
Yeah, and I thought about this a lot. I'm sure everybody who does this, it's like, how do you make the choice? I have to say that one book that I really still enjoy and that I think is so well written and so thoughtful and it spoke to me really very deeply was Simone Gigliotti's The Train Journey, because it helped me think about the ways in which what we think of the spatiality of the Holocaust, sites of killing, sites of suffering in new ways. And I really

I just think it's a very beautifully written book and it includes some really great materials. And yeah, I just admire it.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:15.918)
Yeah, absolutely. No, I know Simone's worked quite well. She was also a member of the Geography's Collaborative that I'm a member of. So I have to give her a shout out for that as well. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And also for our listeners, again, I know we've been on a little bit of break, but I'm not leaving you all. We're gonna keep doing this. So please, like I said, give us a like, leave a comment.

Erin McGlothlin (01:21:22.152)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:42.13)
If you have suggestions, people that you'd like to hear about or topics you'd like to hear about, let me know. This is not unlike a lot of things that Erin talked about in her book. This is not a narrative chronological study of the Holocaust. So I can jump all around if you have any topics or areas that you'd like to talk about. And once again, Erin, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us.

Erin McGlothlin (01:22:02.376)
It was really great talking to you, Waichman.