Trans-historical Crime Fiction as a Complement to the Historiography of the Holocaust: Christian von Ditfurth’s A Paragon of Virtue
摘要
This chapter examines von Ditfurth’s novel (2008, originally published as Mann ohne Makel in 2002) as primarily focused on educating readers about a lesser-known aspect of the Holocaust: the role of Nazi officials, aided by civil servants in the taxation office, in stripping Jewish Germans of their businesses before deportations to the death camps began. While von Ditfurth is clearly driven by a commendable desire to illuminate an overlooked part of Holocaust history, his ambition to uncover hidden truths leads him into the trap of adopting the nineteenth-century illusion of being able to reveal “how it really was.”