The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction
Author: Erin McGlothlin
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0814346154

Examines textual representations of the consciousness of men responsible for committing Holocaust crimes. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfictioncontains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators’ performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator’s experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator’s consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one. The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars, and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.

From Victim to Offender

From Victim to Offender
Author: Freda Briggs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020-08-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000257207

Tom was the only adult who gave me the attention and affection that I so badly needed. I loved his caresses and the times he comforted me. I loved talking to him because he was the only adult who listened and understood. - Neil's Story From Victim to Offender shows how victims of child sexual abuse become juvenile and adult offenders. The stories told by these offenders reveal the vulnerability of boys to paedophiles and pederasts who provide the male attention lacking in some children's home lives. They show how early sexualisation damages children's sexual development, their relationships and their adult lives. The story of a female offender reveals that this problem is not confined to boys. These stories highlight the inadequacy of current child protection programs for the protection of boys. The editor's introduction and the chapter from a psychologist who specialises in the treatment of offenders emphasise the need to improve child protection and treatment programs for offenders. From Victim to Offender offers unique insights into the experiences of victims and offenders of sexual abuse, and is essential reading for professionals who are concerned about child protection and those responsible for the rehabilitation of offenders.

Perpetrator Cinema

Perpetrator Cinema
Author: Raya Morag
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231851170

Perpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate horror of the autogenocide enables post–Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians to propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide. These films break with Western tradition and disrupt the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to atrocities of the past. Rather, transcending the perpetrator’s typical denial or partial confession, this extraordinary form of “duel” documentary creates confrontational tension and opens up the possibility of a transformation in power relations, allowing viewers to access feelings of moral resentment. Raya Morag examines works by Rithy Panh, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, and Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, among others, to uncover the ways in which filmmakers endeavor to allow the survivors’ moral status and courage to guide viewers to a new, more complete understanding of the processes of coming to terms with the past. These documentaries show how moral resentment becomes a way to experience, symbolize, judge, and finally incorporate evil into a system of ethics. Morag’s analysis reveals how perpetrator cinema provides new epistemic tools and propels the recent social-cultural-psychological shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator.

Medicine in the Enlightenment

Medicine in the Enlightenment
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2020-02-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 940120019X

The interpretation of eighteenth-century medicine has been much contested. Some have view it as a wilderness of rationalism and arid theories between the Scientific Revolution and the astonishing changes of the nineteenth-century. Other scholars have emphasized the close and fruitful links between medicine and the Enlightenment, suggesting that medical advance was the very embodiment of the philosphes’ ideal of a practical science that would improve mankind’s lot and foster human happiness. In a series of essays covering Great Britain, France, Germany and other parts of Europe, noted historians debate these issues through detailed examinations of major aspects of eighteenth-century medicine and medical controversy, including such topics as the introduction of smallpox inoculation, the transformation of medical education, and the treatment of the insane. The essays as a whole suggest a positive reading of the transformations in eighteenth-century medicine, while stressing local diversity and uneven development.

‘Star Men’ in English Convict Prisons, 1879-1948

‘Star Men’ in English Convict Prisons, 1879-1948
Author: Ben Bethell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2022-09-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000648230

This book tells the story of the star class, a segregated division for first offenders in English convict prisons; known informally as ‘star men’, convicts assigned to the division were identified by a red star sewn to their uniforms. ‘Star Men’ in English Convict Prisons, 1879–1948 investigates the origins of the star class in the years leading up to its establishment in 1879, and charts its subsequent development during the late-Victorian, Edwardian, and interwar decades. To what extent did the star class serve to shield ‘gentleman convicts’ from their social inferiors and allow them a measure of privilege? What was the precise nature of the ‘contamination’ by which they and other ‘accidental criminals’ were believed to be threatened? And why, for the first twenty years of its existence, were first offenders convicted of ‘unnatural crimes’ barred from the division? To explore these questions, the book considers the making and implementation of penal policy by senior civil servants and prison administrators, and the daily life and work of prisoners at policy’s receiving end. It re-examines evolving notions of criminality, the competing aims of reformation and deterrence, and the role and changing nature of prison labour. Along the way, readers will encounter an array of star men, including arsonists, abortionists, sex offenders and reprieved murderers, disgraced bankers, light-fingered postmen, bent solicitors, and perjuring policemen. Taking a fresh look at English prison history through converging lenses of class, sexuality, and labour, ‘Star Men’ in English Convict Prisons, 1879-1948 will be of great interest to penal historians and historical criminologists, and to scholars working on related aspects of modern British history.

In the Vortex of Violence

In the Vortex of Violence
Author: Gema Kloppe-Santamaría
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520975324

In the Vortex of Violence examines the uncharted history of lynching in post-revolutionary Mexico. Based on a collection of previously untapped sources, the book examines why lynching became a persistent practice during a period otherwise characterized by political stability and decreasing levels of violence. It explores how state formation processes, as well as religion, perceptions of crime, and mythical beliefs, contributed to shaping people’s understanding of lynching as a legitimate form of justice. Extending the history of lynching beyond the United States, this book offers key insights into the cultural, historical, and political reasons behind the violent phenomenon and its continued practice in Latin America today.

Punishment, Places and Perpetrators

Punishment, Places and Perpetrators
Author: Gerben Bruinsma
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135998469

This book brings together an influential group of academics and researchers to review key areas of research, theory and methodology within criminology and criminal justice, and to identify the most important new challenges facing the discipline. The contributors focus on the three central themes of punishment and criminal justice, location and mobility, and perpetrators and criminal careers, on which much cutting edge research within criminology has been taking place. A particular strength of the book is its multidisciplinary and international approach, with contributors drawn from Europe, the UK and the United States.

For Tranquility and Order

For Tranquility and Order
Author: Laura M. Shelton
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2010-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816528071

On Mexico’s northwestern frontier, judicial conflicts unfolded against a backdrop of armed resistance and ethnic violence. In the face of Apache raids in the north and Yaqui and Mayo revolts in the south, domestic disputes involving children, wives, and servants were easily conflated with ethnic rebellion and “barbarous” threats. A wife’s adulterous liaison, a daughter’s elopement, or a nephew’s enraged assault shook the very foundation of what it meant to be civilized at a time when communities saw themselves under siege. Laura Shelton has plumbed the legal archives of early Sonora to reveal the extent to which both court officials and quarreling relatives imagined connections between gender hierarchies and civilized order. As she describes how the region’s nascent legal system became the institution through which spouses, parents, children, employers, and servants settled disputes over everything from custody to assault to debt, she reveals how these daily encounters between men and women in the local courts contributed to the formation of republican governance on Mexico’s northwestern frontier. Through an analysis of some 700 civil and criminal trial records—along with census data, military reports, church records, and other sources—Shelton describes how courtroom encounters were conditioned by an Iberian legal legacy; brutal ethnic violence; emerging liberal ideas about trade, citizenship, and property rights; and a growing recognition that honor—buenas costumbres—was dependent more on conduct than on bloodline. For Tranquility and Order offers new insight into a legal system too often characterized as inept as it provides a unique gender analysis of family relations on the frontier.