Giuseppe Genna’s Hitler and the Ethics of (Re)Presentation

This essay provides a close reading of Giuseppe Genna’s novel Hitler. It situates Genna’s work within the theoretical debate on the representation of the Holocaust and explores how it makes a strikingly original contribution to this discussion. In dialogue with Emil Fackenheim, Claude Lanzmann and Primo Levi, Genna answers the challenge of representation by developing a style that fosters an unrelenting ethical watchfulness, while immersing the reader in a compelling narrative that combines rigorously documented history with myth and imaginative re-enactments of key events in the biography of the Nazi leader. In the end, the ethical potential of literature is vindicated and narrative emerges as an invaluable tool in the effort to return to our ethical foundations which the Holocaust has stripped bare, and imagine a project (both ethical and political) that is adequate to the contemporary predicament

Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Presentation (obstetrics · Reading (process · Representation (politics · Sociology · Style (visual arts · The Holocaust · European history and politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law