Martin Amis (1949-2023) & Holocaust literature

[EtienneSC]

The English novelist Martin Amis died in May 2023. A few quotations and events in his life illustrate how he lived through the height of western Holocaust-mania and its influence on Anglophone culture. As a cultural figure with access to the media and supposed spokesman for his generation or countrymen, Amis seems to have been first captured by this mythopoesis and then to have expressed and responded to it.

One such quote is his description of the Holocaust as a "species shame". Another is the saying he adopted that "No serious person ever thinks about anything else."

Amis offered what he presented as a quote from the German author W.G. Sebald that “no serious person ever thinks about anything else” than the Holocaust. Oddly, this extreme view does not appear to be anywhere in Sebald’s published writings or interviews. Yet Amis repeated it in fictionalized memoirs and on public occasions until the quote became Amis’ own.

https://forward.com/culture/547876/martin-amis-appreciation-jewish-influences-bellow-roth-singer-mailer/

The saying illustrates the cultural centrality that holocaust theory acquired in the West. In addition, there is his confrontation with his novelist father, Kingsley Amis, one of the post-war "Angry Young Men", about the supposed anti-semitism in one of his novels, Stanley and the Women (1984) and elsewhere. This clash illustrates the sea-change in attitude to Jews that occurred in England perhaps after the Holocaust mini-series of the late 1970s.

Martin Amis wrote two holocaust themed novels, Time's Arrow (1991) and Zone of interest (2014).

[hermod]

There is a mistake in the title of this thread.

[EtienneSC]

There is a mistake in the title of this thread.

Indeed - with the dates - now corrected I see. Thanks.

[Whodunnit?]

One such quote is his description of the Holocaust as a "species shame". Another is the saying he adopted that "No serious person ever thinks about anything else."

For a long time I've been a follower of Jordan Peterson and similar figures, and these quotes could be from him. I also have very extensive personal experience with people like this. Call them "intellectuals".

Peterson likes to tell his listeners that they would probably have been Nazis themselves. There is a Nazi in everybody, and all the atrocity stories make sense, because this is also in everybody. Just a little bit of desensitization, just make killing people normal, and you don't know what you would do. Why is he saying that? In the end, his message is "don't open Pandora's box". The Germans opened Pandora's box. The communists, too.
To make it short: I think, their "Holocaust shame" stems from the fact that they see themselves in the avatar of the Nazi, both the ruthless administrator, and the mass killing henchman. They see in themselves why you'd only need a bit of desensitization and acclimation, and all of the sudden the idea of exterminating "useless eaters", handicapped people, ugly people, dumb people, annoying people, and instead building a society for the beautiful, the strong, intelligent and productive, makes sense. It makes so much sense to them that they are convinced that they would have been on "team baddies" themselves. There is only a very thin veneer of humaneness that holds it back. Maybe to some extend they even find something appealing in the (in Holocaust survivor-stories) often sexually connoted sadism of the Nazis, and their death cult (= lampshades and gloves made of human skin). In Jordan Peterson's case, his severe mental problems, his substance abuse and his mood swings, as well as his sexual perversion (if you aren't informed about it, google "Yes Grandma, soft") are well known. Maybe I miss the mark entirely here. But I think for them the "Nazis" are a reflection of their own inner dark side. Which is why they feel ashamed of something they havn't done.