The Nazi and the Barber

The work The Nazi & the Hairdresser of the German - Jewish writer Edgar Hilsenrath is a play about the Holocaust during the time of Nazi fascism. The work portrays from the perpetrator perspective, the biography of the SS mass murderer and concentration camp overseer Max Schulz who accepts a Jewish identity after the collapse of the Third Reich and eventually emigrated to Israel to escape persecution in Germany.

The grotesque is characterized by the consistent rejection of the expectations of the reader as the perversion of all current stereotypes, here the German Max Schulz and his Jewish friend and classmate Izzy Finkelstein:

" My friend Izzy was blond and blue-eyed, had a straight nose, finely curved lips and good teeth. I on the other hand, Max Schulz, had black hair, frog eyes, a hooked nose, thick lips and bad teeth. "

Another special feature is the perpetrator perspective is, for the German audience then a novelty:

"Even the German readers are familiar for years novels, stories and plays that deal with the topic of persecution and extermination of the Jews under Hitler with poetic and satirical and grotesquely comical means. But they all tell more or less from the perspective of the victims. Hilsenrath, however, chose for his novel the perspective of the perpetrators. "

Publication

Shortly after its release, Hilse Raths debut novel night of Kindler Verlag was withdrawn again. For his second novel, The Nazi & the hairdresser initially found no German publishing house ready for first publication. To avoid any suspicion anti-Semitism, was at the time in Germany, although the " well-intentioned " but nevertheless discriminatory extreme of a philo-Semitism, according to Jews in the literature of postwar Germany only positive - about as heroes - were allowed to be shown. Hilsenrath itself holds the philo for an " inverted ", ie in a hidden form continuing anti-Semitism and had it in all his works do not take to portray Jews as well as the other actors of his novels, with its positive and negative sides. Even as the Nazi and the Barber then in 1971 appeared as a translation in the U.S. and not only enjoyed great success, the manuscript in Germany was still rejected by many publishers on the grounds, so you should not write about Jews. Only six years after it was first published in the United States, the work was presented in the publishing of the then Cologne Small publisher Helmut Braun also in German language.

Reception

In the U.S., the release was a great success in Germany, however, the work was initially rejected by various sides and initially added yet correspondingly controversial after its release by critics and readers. Heinrich Böll praised in a continuous positive review in particular Hilse Raths found for this language, "the rampant and often enough hits, a grim and silent poetry unfolds ."

The Nazis & the hairdresser then learned over the years in Germany an increasing popularity. In 1979, the plant in Sweden was selected as one of the three best books of the month. In the years 2005 and 2006, re-issued as part of the Collected Works of Edgar Hilsenrath, it was by Jan Josef Liefers and Elke Heidenreich in the TV show Read! presented as a " great book ". Academic, not only this work Hilse Raths is in Germany and abroad - has long since established - especially in the United States.