DFG Research Training Group Globalization and Literature. Representations, Transformations,  Interventions
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Bernhard Pirkl, M.A.

The Fascist Imaginary. Writing the Perpetrator in the Global Age

Dissertation Abstract

The project is concerned with what can preliminarily called "perpetrator fictions," that is, writing which focuses on perpetrators of mass political violence, especially of the genocide of the European Jewry (Amis, Littell, Binet). This recent wave of "writing the perpetrator" is set against a backdrop of the "cosmopolitanism of memory" (Sznaider/Levy) and the universalization of the holocaust as metaphor for evil per se (Neiman), and challenges the customary memorial norm of assuming the perspective of the victim (Jureit).
In particular, the project will focus on the following questions:

  • How do the works in question negotiate pertinent findings from historiography, philosophy, psychology and adjacent fields?
  • Which memory communities are addressed/excluded?
  • How do the texts create distance/proximity to the crimes?

Short CV

Since 2015 PhD Candidate at the Research Training Group

2014: M.A. Literary Translation, LMU Munich

2012: Teaching Certificate for Higher Education (Staatsexamen) in Philosophy, LMU Munich

2010: Teaching Certificate for Higher Education (Staatsexamen) in History and English Literature, LMU Munich