Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Perpetrator Lifewriting: Culpability, Complicity and Self-Fashioning

Perpetrator Lifewriting: Culpability, Complicity and Self-Fashioning

Nayar, Pramod K.

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralLiterary Criticism

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 30, 2026

ISBN10: 9361317709
ISBN13: 9789361317705
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic India
Published: Oct 30 2026
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.32 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
This study of memoirs by nearly two dozen 20th century individuals involved in the perpetration and commission of mass atrocities examines their strategies of self-representation. Perpetrator lifewriting, from the Holocaust to Khmer Rouge to Abu Ghraib, moves between exculpation and inculpation, with the perps claiming they were mere 'cogs in the wheel', thus accepting complicity but rarely culpability. It shows how the memoirs construct a post facto self, claiming traumas of their own at what they perpetrated. The Sonderkommando texts, emerging from the 'grey zone' as Primo Levi called it, present the ambiguous perpetrator who, as one sonderkommando put it, 'did the dirty work of the Holocaust'. The study concludes with a reading of memoirs by secretaries and office staff who served the leaders who ordered exterminations and torture.

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