Le génocide dans la fiction romanesque histoire et représentation
Analyzes the image of the Holocaust in the fiction of Romain Gary, Saul Bellow, Heinrich Böll, and William Styron. The attitudes of Styron and Böll are viewed as problematic. Böll's Catholicism does not allow him to see the Holocaust in its true proportions, but merely as one of many other persecutions. He emphasizes that Catholics and Jews were equally persecuted by the Nazis. In Styron's "Sophie's Choice", antisemitic myths and stereotypes remain and his denunciation of the Holocaust is ambiguous. Styron is a supporter of the theory of "universal evil" in which Auschwitz is no longer a symbol of the particularity of the Jewish Holocaust and thus Germany's responsibility is minimized.