GRGR(5) Katje and the Nazis

[Doug Millison]

Doug:
>>[snip] what's the difficulty in admitting the very
>>obvious and specific references to the Nazi Holocaust?
>>Is there some academic trend or fashion that I'm bucking
>>in making such an assertion? Is it too damaging to late
>>20th century ironic sensibilities to admit that TRP, epitome
>>of postmodern novelists as a certain group of critics and
>>theorists have crowned him, might indulge a non-ironic
>>condemnation of something as serious -- and as
>>overwhelmingly important in the 20th century -- as the
>>Nazi genocide of the Jews?
>
At 11:23 AM -0700 7/8/99, David Morris wrote:
>THIS is the real stretch.

How so?  If, as you say earlier in your post -- a point I don't necessarily
agree with -- TRP's reference to the Holocaust is so obvious as to point
away from itself and instead point to something else, wouldn't that support
the argument that TRP couldn't possibly mean us to take seriously his
references to something so banal as the Nazi Holocaust? Why the either/or
(it's not really about the Holocaust, it's about all the other instances of
genocide and what that says about the human heart) instead of the both/and
(TRP writes about the specific horrors of the Nazi Holocaust and how they
relate to specific companies and individuals who promoted the technology
that was used in those specific crimes and profited therefrom, *and also*
writes about other instances of genocide and examples of "man's inhumanity
to man" to quote a phrase that's just about disappeared from public
discourse so common has it become since news and images of the Nazi
atrocities first shocked the world)?


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