The Literary Representations of Holocaust Perpetrators and Its Ethical Dilemma.

This essay discusses the representations of Holocaust perpetrators in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room. The narrator/protagonists in the two stories are thrown into ethical chaos upon realization of the multiple identities of their loved ones and they strive to gain ethical judgment by exercising reason and through different ways of education before finally taking ethical action to accept the past of their perpetrator (grand)fathers. Their experiences reveal that the second and third-generation German war descendants find diversified ways of recognizing the contradicting identities of their ancestors. The essay further argues that the writers of the two stories use similar writing strategies to sustain the basic ethical position in treating materials in relation to mass killing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]