Despite the so-called 'turn toward the figure of the perpetrator in recent historical fiction' (Crownshaw 2011), contemporary trauma theory has paid little attention to the representation of perpetrator trauma in both literature and film. The discomfort of recognizing perpetrator trauma and the inclination to consider it undeserving of concern, especially when it appears to overshadow the trauma of victims, is understandable. Yet trauma, as a medical condition, does not translate cleanly into legal and moral categories of victim and perpetrator. Indeed, the tendency in criticism to focus on the victim alone speaks to not only a problematic tendency to identify with the victim, but also points to ascribing "moral status" to trauma victims. Perpetrator trauma is, despite its marginalized status, a powerful form of cultural trauma transmitted transgenerationally and mediated in various forms, similar to what Marianne Hirsch describes as "postmemory." As Erin McGlothlin points out in Second-Generation Holocaust Literature, perpetrators and their descendants feel "marked by the continued presence of the Holocaust past," (5) albeit from a completely different position and perspective than victims. The Nazi past lingers in the present as a trace, prompting powerful and dramatic reactions from later generations, who, in some cases, vehemently deny the guilt of their parents or grandparents, and in other cases harshly condemn them. Simultaneously innocent and, as Peter Sichrovsky famously claimed, "schuldig geboren [born guilty]," later generations bear this legacy affectively, often citing questions of both literal and psychic wounds, of abjection, and affects of shame, disgust, and fear in their historical fiction.
My paper interrogates how descendants of perpetrators navigate the painful and often repressed legacies of their parents' crimes. I examine in particular the extreme affective pull of various works by descendants of Holocaust perpetrators as well as perpetrators of other historical crimes, which vividly inscribe the wounds of the past directly onto the body. Such narrative attempts, which endeavor to make sense of a largely unknown and silenced past, are entangled with embodied affects and their circulation. In trying to convey the effects of a lost trauma, or that which cannot be expressed in language, new generations utilize the affective power of the material body to capture a state of feeling at the intersection of public and private. While individual pain plays an important role, these works, rather retreat from politics as they represent vivid subjective dimensions, in fact endeavor to expose the very social and political conditions that made them possible.
