Shannon Evans COL 203: Trauma and the Holocaust

12/13/2010 Final Paper

Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber:

Introducing Untraditional Methods in Holocaust Literature to Help Develop Original Perspectives

What is Funny to most people? It is interesting to think about what is considered normal

when approaching humor. Does normal even exist? For instance, How about a man who was a

Nazi soldier but ironically possesses all the physical characteristics of a Jew? Or what about a

batty woman who is brainwashed into despising her wooden (Non-Aryan) leg? She even hates it

so much that she begins to think that the leg is horrific and undoubtedly Jewish. Is this funny,

insulting, pointless? Anyway one chooses to react it still presents an interesting concept. This is

just one of the many questions that can be brought on by reading Edgar Hilsenrath’s story The

Nazi and the Barber. One of the main elements he uses to distinguish his story is the element of

satire, but there are also other components that serve to enhance the story. In conjunction with

humor, Hilsenrath also integrates elements of irony, symbolism, repetition, and stereotype to

help one establish the deeper meaning of his work. The fictional text was also written in the

German narrative. It is very rare to see a satire about the Holocaust, but even more risky to write

one from the German point of view. When the novel came out these components gave Critics

fuel to chastise the story at full force. Even so it was still clear that from the beginning Hilsenrath

had every intention to challenge moral and ethical boundaries with not much concern for the

sensitivity of others. In short he was prepared for their harsh judgments, and offered no

apologies. Although some may have been appalled, the controversy generated interest to a lot of

readers, and after some time had passed it began to receive more praise than backlash. This

serves as proof that a text can open the minds of its readers. When one allows itself to be

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submerged into learning about a horrific historical event in new terms they will undoubtedly gain

a broader, more dynamic way of thinking. One of the reasons why satire can be a powerful

mechanism is because it often plays off of one’s emotional response. Its draws one in by

bringing out their feelings, and readers are more likely to be invested in a book that can make

them think critically while challenging their views and emotions. These emotional responses

whether they be anger, confusion, or sadness can lead to deeper analyzation. One motif some

readers have encountered through analysis is Hilsenrath’s representation of good and evil.

Interpretations of the main character, Max Schulz (who is an S.S soldier), have established that

there are definite complexities to his emotions, and statements. These intricacies can often blur

lines and make one wonder about the finality of good and evil, German or Jews, and even Nazis

or Barbers.

When addressing the concept of good and evil the more one knows about a subject the

more it becomes increasingly difficult to judge them as one or the other. As humans we often try

to put things into categories for easier grouping but people can be the hardest to judge. Max

Schulz is a good example of someone who on the surface should be undeniably evil but when

looking at him from all sides his character becomes harder to assess. In his untitled review of The

Nazi and the Barber, author Gregory Baer elaborates on Max Schulz. “Each of his identities is

laden with stereotypes and clichés, demanding that the reader reexamine accepted notions of

identity, guilt, and atonement.” Max has many different sides to him, and his changing of

character makes it hard to firmly grasp what his identity really is. The reader will have a hard

time evaluating how they feel about Max, but that is also one of the most intriguing parts of the

novel. When one makes the realization that they can never fully judge the intentions or

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conscience of someone else it increases the likelihood that one will become more understanding.

The finality of good or evil is always subjective. Baer continues to expands on his ideas by

adding,

While some may take issue with viewing the Holocaust through a humorous lens,

Hilsenrath is able to use comedy and exaggeration to raise important issues and reveal the

triviality of valued ideals without providing simple answers. Throughout the text, with its

storybook-like use of repetition, stereotypes are constantly recalled and turned on their

heads as Hilsenrath unmasks the clichés associated both with the victims of the Holocaust

and with its German perpetrators. In so doing he reveals psychological, cultural, and

personal barriers that have prevented us from closely examining the dynamics by which

one group victimizes another, both during the Holocaust and since.”

The contradiction of stereotyping (Max looking like a Jew), helps to retract some reader

implications about what it means to be German, or Jewish. Breaking down one’s outside

influences (Cultural, personal, etc) will help one to re-examine different concepts when learning

about genocide. It can also help to influence the reader to look at the characters as individuals

with independent identities, instead of generalizing them by their titles (Jews, Germans, Nazis,

etc).

Hilsenrath has also shed some light on this issue in is his conference with Spiegel News.

In the interview he asserts “In Germany people want to make up to the Jews for what happened

by idealizing them. The Jews in the ghetto were every bit as imperfect as human beings

anywhere else” (1). Hilsenrath acknowledging that the Jews were just as deficient as anyone else

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could provide evidence as to why he wrote in the German narrative for his book. Even though he

has every reason to consider the Germans as evil after the Holocaust he still can manage to see

the good and evil in everyone, so writing from that point of view isn’t too aberrant for him. In

her article, Edgar Hilsenrath's Novel Der Nazi und der Friseur and Charlie Chaplin's Film The

Great Dictator Astrid Klocke thinks the complexity of Max’s character in relation to the reader

is too involved. This clouds the readers view making them unable to give a thoroughly accurate

judgment of him.

“The reader becomes too personally engaged with Schulz to allow any truly critical

evaluation of his character; ….Schulz's portrayal in the novel creates a narrative tension

that draws the reader into the story. However outrageous Schulz's crimes may be, and

however skeptical we may be regarding his reliability, we see his point of view and

wonder whether—maybe even hope that—he will manage to escape from Germany.”

There are points in the novel where it is hard to contest that Max could be anything but evil. One

of these times being when Frau Holle recounts Gunther telling her “Max Schulz I mean…he

always grinned when he shot them” (104). Since Gunther is dead there is no way to tell if this is

the truth, but Max never denies it. This line is so sickening that some readers will give up on

Max right there, but those who choose to give him a second chance will see that he has times of

possible remorse, and guilt. An example of this is when he sees the old woman Veronja making a

fire he says “Thought of a large cooking pot…saw myself cooked already…looked down into the

thick brew…saw my backside…saw the backside of the mass murderer… saw my eyes…saw

millions of eyes…” (136). Max Schulz coming to the realization that he is a mass murderer

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shows that he not only considers the killing of the Jews murders but he also blames himself as a

perpetrator. When he is hallucinating his death he not only sees his own eyes, but the eyes of the

millions of Jews who have died. This can imply the guilt he carries with him about their deaths.

Max also speaks of his childhood Jewish friend Itzig and his family, The Finklesteins with

fondness. Later in the story he takes Itzig’s identity which is clearly wrong but at the very end

tries to confess what he has done. This is yet another one of Max Schulz’s contradictory

behaviors. When speaking of his childhood he says

“When I was a boy I had a Jewish Friend. His name was Itzig Finkelstein. He had blond

hair and blue eyes. And many other things that I did not have. And I had a Jewish mentor

too, called Chaim Finkelstein. And he was a real mentor, let me tell you, you’re lucky to

get his sort.”(149).

Max even imagines that when Itzig died he went to heaven, but of course he isn’t positive. One

would normally assume a person who was a former Nazi would think a Jew would go to hell but

Max uttering this thought proves he didn’t condemn Itzig for being Jewish. Also Max continues

to be a walking contradiction, this is shown through juxtaposing two scenes. In one he is

shooting down a Jesus figurine, and in the next he is talking about believing Itzig could go to

heaven. These contradictions are another reason as to why it is hard to fully believe Max is

completely execrable.

An added benefit to using the German perspective is its ability to be used as a satire.

Many were infuriated to see the humor genre invade Holocaust literature at all, so it is only

imaginable the emotional outrage that would ensue if one were to write a satire that was directed

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at the Jews instead of the Germans. The German narrative made Hilsenrath’s vision possible.

Satire is defined by Webster Dictionary as “Trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and

discredit vice or folly.” Since the Nazi’s are at fault for the Holocaust it is only fitting that

Jewish/German Hilsenrath would make a satire poking some fun at the Non Jewish Germans.

There are some great models of Hilsenrath’s style of satire in The Nazi and the Barber. One good

example is Frau Holle whoring herself out for food and a soldier telling her “The more you bang

the more you eat” (92). Another example is Frau Holle’s next action. After the American soldier

dies from over exertion, she contemplates what do “Frau Holle had no idea what she should do

with the dead body. Best thing, she thought, would be to lie him behind the oven. So that at he

would at least be out of the way.”… “He’s not very heavy. Americans are filled with chewing

gum” (95). But by far one of the most grotesque satirical lines in the novel occurs when Max

Schulz tells Frau Holle what Gunther looked like castrated; “Like a menstruating woman” (121).

As one can tell from these three examples satire can range from being moderately awkward to

very uncomfortable. They are also humorous to some readers, and offensive to others. Either

way these lines serve to make a person have an emotional response so they can feel invested in

what they are reading.

Other elements used to help strengthen Hilsenraths message came in the form of Irony,

stereotype, and repetition. One very important line in the story that reflects all three of these is

said when Frau Holle realizes who Max Schulz is. She exclaims “Max Schulz! The man with the

frog eyes. The man with the hooked nose, bulbous lips, and bad teeth! The man who looked like

a Jew but wasn’t!” (96). This line is repeated continuously throughout the story in different

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forms. It shows many stereotypes of a Jew but the irony is that the one who possesses these

characteristics is not a Jew. This carries the simple message ‘don’t judge a book by its cover.’ It

also shows how physical characteristics can be the basis of inequality. Frau Holle even treats her

wooden leg as an unequal part of her. This symbol shows the foolish intensity of the pure Aryan

race ideology. Although her hatred is intensified because the story is meant to be comedic, many

Germans during World War Two became so brainwashed into thinking they were unworthy if

they did not possess all the characteristics of an Aryan. Frau Holle goes as far as to say “In 1942

when the German troops reached Volga, The shadow of the wooden leg, which after all was not

Aryan….wore a very strange grin… it was a desperate grin, the grin of a person who would like

to cry and cannot. Then, after the fall of Stalingrad, the grin became more hopeful” (76). In

order to separate her wooden leg from her own identity she must personify it as a Jew.

The use of fiction writing is instrumental when discussing the Holocaust. It is very

beneficial because it is easier to implement tools like satire, irony and symbolism in a work of

invention. In his interview with Spiegel, Hilsenrath said “I just have a rather perverse take on the

events of the Holocaust.” (1). To write in his deviant abnormal style, a work of fiction was only

fit. For the first few decades after the Holocaust only non- fictional historical accounts or

memoirs were widely accepted. In Elrud Ibsch’s article ‘Memory, History, Imagination: How

Time Affects the Perspective on Holocaust Literature’ she claims “Finally, from the 1980’s on,

the Holocaust as a literary theme lost its poetic restrictions and became open to the imagination.

This happened not without consequences: the ‘imagined histories’ of the Holocaust are more at

the mercy of critical judgments than the genres that are deemed to be more authentic ones.” (9).

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The Nazi and The Barber was published in 1971 when stories of fiction on the Holocaust were

still somewhat rare, but as one can tell Hilsenrath was not intimidated by this. He even responded

to critics by saying “Sensitive readers do have problems with my books” (2). Ibsch offers her

own opinion of The Nazi and the Barber stating “Also “In my view the grotesque genre has been

the appropriate counterpart of the testimony. The belated acceptation by literary critics does not

contradict my analysis: we all had to learn and are still learning how to cope with inhumanity.”

(9). Although critics weren’t receptive at first, after awhile many began to see the value in

Hilsenrath’s approach. Readers didn’t know what to think at first because they were taken aback.

We are infinitely learning new methods of coping especially with matters that are sensitive and

traumatic. Max Schulz is also a symbol of a person coping with his own inhumanity. This is

shown through his acceptance that he is a ‘mass murderer’, and his emotionless state when

talking about the killings. It is also indicated in his reflections on and eventual imitation of Itzig

Finkelstein.

Living as a Jew in one’s native home of Germany after the Holocaust can lead to a very

diverse mixture of emotions. It can be liberating, frustrating, or anything in between. The process

of taking back your German identity, but also wondering how/ where you can go to fit in again

can be hard to navigate. It also can be confusing as to how one should feel towards other fellow

Germans, and whether one should act on those feelings or keep them to themselves. A

comparative literature Professor; Peter Arnds sheds light on why Hilsenrath may have chosen to

write The Nazi and The Barber with his own German/ Jewish Identity in mind. “Edgar

Hilsenrath writes to assert his claim to his own German cultural past, as well as to redefine his

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post war identity as a Jew. Writing for him is an act of assertion or even of revenge. Which

allows him to reclaim some of the German cultural inheritance taken from all German Jews by

the Nazis.” (431). In her article “Writing as revenge: Reading Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi und

der Friseur as a Shoah survivor's fantasy” Jennifer Taylor also agrees for the most part with

Arnd’s opinion that Hilsenrath partially wrote out of his desire for revenge. Here she puts it in

her own words.

“Hilsenrath's Nazi text attempts to work through the ambivalence faced by a survivor

who must pick up the German cultural inheritance, tainted by the Nazi's claims to it and

reclaim it, recreating a Jewish German cultural identity. The Jewish-German identity of a

Shoah survivor is slippery and dangerous; living with his experiences means redefining

himself not merely as a passive victim, but foremost as an angry survivor, forced to take

on the burden of a double identity, forced by history to construct a literary identity that

allows him to write in the language of his oppressors.” (443).

Part of this revenge is seemingly in the title itself. “The Nazi and the Barber” represents the

concept of a Nazi to possessing more than one identity. To many this seems borderline foolish.

Max Schulz shows this idea by saying nonchalantly that after the war he is going to go back to

being a barber. He claims “There’s only one thing to do now.” “Whats that?” Frau Holle wanted

to know. “To strike roots again….And lead a decent life again” (107). Once one becomes a Nazi

are they ever anything else? Do they ever have a title that can really override being a Mass

Murderer? A Nazi trying to live a “Decent life again” after the war seems like a cruel joke. Were

most S.S oblivious that the Nuremburg trials would ever actually prosecute them? An idea that

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seems to be present here is that a Jews can always reclaim their German identity, but a Nazi

cannot ever fully restore its original identity. This could indeed serve as the epitome of perfect

revenge.

Hilsenrath’s intentions when writing The Nazi and the Barber are undoubtedly very

intriguing, but no one knows if they will all ever be fully deciphered. For now one can only

continue to interpret and form their own opinions on if his writing was truly a process of

reclaiming his identity, or an act of revenge. Regardless of whether this question will ever be

answered, it does not take away from the beneficial complexities of his work. His choice to use

satire heavily in his fiction has not always been widely accepted. However, when one reads with

an open mind they can let their emotions be intentionally affected by this humor, and it will in

turn broaden one’s point of view when looking at the Holocaust. There is also the combined

effects of irony, repetition, stereotype (Max Schulz’s physical characteristics), and symbolism

(Frau Holle’s Leg, Max Schulz’s hallucination) that serve as developed tools to create a deeper

relationship to the reader. These tools help them think more critically about learned concepts

(Inequality, brutality of the Nazi’s, and the Aryan race ideology). One of these concepts in

particular, the good and evil complex, is hard to completely grasp but continues to be very

engaging. The multiplicity of its examples, and the individuality of the roles, help to serve as a

continuous debate on the finality of one’s character. All of these literary ideas were able to be

represented in one intellectual story because The Nazi and the Barber is a work of fiction. There

are crucial advantages to using fiction texts as learning tools, especially for traumatic historical

events. Even though this genre has only recently been accepted into works of invention, it has

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given readers the ability to create a more personal relationship with history. Therefore, The Nazi

and the Barber is the perfect example of how fiction can continue to help one to make deeper

discoveries, and develop more dynamic viewpoints.

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Works Cited

Arnds, Peter. "On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi

Euthanasia and the Holocaust in Günter Grass's "Die Blechtrommel", Edgar Hilsenrath's

"Der Nazi & Der Friseur", and Anselm Kiefer's Visual Art." The German Quarterly

Autumn 2002: 422-39. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2010.

<http://www.jstor.org.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/stable/3252212?origin=crossref>.

Baer, Gregory. "The Nazi and the Barber (Der Nazi Und Der Friseur)." Review. Reference Guide

to Holocaust Literature 2002: 521-22. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 5 Dec.

2010.<http://go.galegroup.com.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/ps/i.do?action=interpret&id=GALE%

7CCX3408200425&v=2.1&u=sunybuff_main&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&authCount=1>.

Hilsenrath, Edgar. The Nazi and the Barber. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. Print.

Ibsch, Elrud. "‘Memory, History, Imagination: How Time Affects the Perspective on Holocaust

Literature’." Italianistica Ultraiectina. Utrecht Publishing and Archicing Services, 2007.

Web. 5 Dec. 2010. <http://www.italianisticaultraiectina.org/publish/articles/000054/

article.pdf>.

Klocke, Astrid. "Subverting Satire: Edgar Hilsenrath's Novel Der Nazi Und Der Friseur and

Charlie Chaplin's Film The Great Dictator — Holocaust Genocide Studies."

Project MUSE. Winter 2008. Web. 5 Dec. 2010.

<http://muse.jhu.edu.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v022/

22.3.klocke.html>.

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McGlothlin, Erin. "Narrative Transgression in Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi Und Der Friseur and

the Rhetoric of the Sacred in Holocaust Discourse1 - McGlothlin - 2008 - The German

Quarterly." Wiley Online Library. 19 May 2008. Web. 05 Dec. 2010.

<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1756-1183.2007.tb00072.x/abstract>.

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a Shoah Survivor’s Fantasy.” History of European Ideas 20. 1-3 (1995): 439-444.

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