Scholarship often presumes that texts written about the Shoah either by those directly
involved in it or those writing its history must always bear witness to the affective
aftermath of the event the lingering emotional effects of suffering. Drawing on the History of
Emotions and on trauma theory this monograph offers a critical study of the ambivalent
attributions and expressions of emotion and emotionlessness in the literature and
historiography of the Shoah. It addresses three phenomena: the metaphorical discourses by which
emotionality and the purported lack thereof are attributed to victims and to perpetrators the
rhetoric of affective self-control and of affective distancing in fiction testimony and
historiography and the poetics of empathy and the status of emotionality in discourses on the
Shoah. Through a close analysis of a broad corpus centred around the work of W. G. Sebald
Dieter Schlesak Ruth Klüger and Raul Hilberg the book critically contextualises emotionality
and its attributions in the post-war era when a scepticism of pathos coincided with demands
for factual rigidity. Ultimately it invites the reader to reflect on their own affective
stances towards history and its commemoration in the twenty-first century.
