LIBRARY
September 1, 1939: Łódź, Poland is on the brink of invasion. When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café …
In this work of historical metafiction, a present-day narrator recounts the story of Viktor Bauman, a disillusioned academic forced into the Łódź Ghetto, Elsa Dietrich, a captive Gestapo secretary, and Lieutenant Carl Becker, a troubled policeman whose fixation with Elsa is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.
Slim and The Beast: A Novel
Two best friends, a country bar, a famous burger and a bloodstained floor
Sergeant Chandler Dykes is obsessed with two misfits: Slim, a former cadet with a brutal neck scar, and his best friend, The Beast, a college basketball star with a proclivity for cooking. When Slim and The Beast take shelter from a hurricane in a country bar, they learn that Sgt. Dykes has been haunting the place, raving about opossums, bathtub whiskey, and his estranged cadet, Slim.
As the bartender swaps tales with Slim and The Beast in hopes of understanding Dykes’ obsession, the two young men are forced to confront their own troubled pasts. With dexterous prose and unflinching humor, wrapped in the rich dialect of the South, the conversations at Lockart’s traverse art, love, sex, and philosophy, warily observing the savage storm and the ghosts it seems to be dredging up. A remarkable first novel that recalls the liveliness of Wells Tower and packs the punch of Denis Johnson, Slim and The Beast lays out what’s at stake in a friendship, recalling the decisions we make on the edge of adulthood that define the person we become.
History is Dead, Long Live History! Postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction
We tell ourselves stories to make sense of our existence. We tell ourselves stories to prove that we once lived. When we look at the past, we do it through a lens that seeks to explain the present, an attempt to imbue history with clear and defined meaning. We want order and explanations. We want to believe in cause and effect. But in life, as in history (and so too in literature), the most commonly accepted narratives are not those that represent the truth, but rather those that narrativize the past in a way that provides meaning to our current epoch.
[…] Enter the quintessentially postmodern genre known as historiographic metafiction. The literary genre, first defined by Linda Hutcheon in 1988, suggests that as with literature, history too is subjective, caught up in a system of references to other histories, subjectivities, and self-serving meta-narratives. Broadly speaking, historiographic metafiction challenges the notion that history can be objectively documented, and hence known. Instead, historical writing is a conversation, a means to an end that by definition can never be reached. “It is a contemporary critical truism,” Hutcheon writes, “that the representation of the real is not the same as the real itself.” And yet another contemporary truism—“the more we know, the less we know”—is a truth that historians and historical fiction writers are often loath to admit.
The Humanness of Cruelty: Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl and the Psychology of Genocide
Viktor Frankl and Alfred Adler were renowned theorists of the human condition. Both were protégés of Sigmund Freud and both proposed nuanced explanations of human behavior. Although their work is grounded in humanistic psychology (primarily focusing on human potential), Adler and Frankl also explain the human capability for cruelty. As a result, their theories should help qualify the behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a Hamburg police unit of average citizens that slaughtered 38,000 human beings in Nazi occupied Poland. Although historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men furthers the understanding of what led these men to kill, few scholars studying the psychology of cruelty have given explicit credence to Adler or Frankl.
[…] If we hope to better understand how and why human beings are capable of genocide, even the extreme example of RPB 101 must be seen as a representation of rather than a deviation from the human condition. As Adler states, “the hardest thing for human beings to do is to know themselves and to change themselves.” Without knowing what we are capable of, it is exceedingly difficult to improve and understand what we are like.
The Jewish Councils of Poland: The Evolution of Historical Interpretation
On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the German Security Police, sent an urgent letter to the chiefs of the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) in occupied Poland. In the preface, Heydrich referred to a distinction between a “final aim” for the Jews and the stages leading up to this final aim. Part one of the letter demanded that all Jews be expelled from the countryside and then concentrated into ghettos with the aim of “[establishing] only few cities of concentration.” In part two, Heydrich expressed the need in each community for a Council of Jewish elders, which was to be made up of “the remaining authoritative personalities and rabbis.” These Jewish Councils were to be made fully responsible “in the literal sense of the word,”1 for the exact execution of all German directives. The councils were to take a census of the Jews in their areas and would then be informed of the dates of evacuation into the ghettos. The Germans’ plan was to concentrate the Jews into ghettos by using the support of these Jewish Councils. They were created to assist the Germans in carrying out various orders and at no time were they considered to be autonomous.