Edgar Hilsenrath (1926-2018)
Edgar Hilsenrath was a novelist and a Holocaust survivor. He was born in Leipzig and raised in Halle an der Saale. In 1938 his mother took him to Romanian Bukovina. In 1941 he and his mother were interned in the ghetto of Mohyliv-Podilskyi (Transnistria), which was liberated by the Red Army in 1944. From 1944 to 1947 he lived in Palestine, and then spent a few years living in Lyon, France. In the early 1950s he moved to New York City. In 1975 he returned to Germany and spent the rest of his life there.
Hilsenrath is best known for his grotesque satirical novel Der Nazi & Der Friseur (The Nazi and the Barber, first published in English in the USA in 1971, then published in German in 1977). The novel is narrated by Max Schulz, a former SS officer and mass murderer who poses as a Jew in order to escape justice.
In 1989 he published Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken (1989) [Fairy Tale of the Final Thought] about the Armenian genocide.
Edgar Hilsenrath’s work is influenced by Erich Maria Remarque and Charles Bukowski.
A conference to mark the centenary of his birth will take place at the University of Lyon, France, on 26-27 March 2026.
His other novels include:
Nacht (1964); Night (1966)
Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr (1993) [Yossel Wasserman’s Homecoming]
Die Abenteuer des Ruben Jablonski (1999) [The Adventures of Ruben Jablonski]
Berlin … Endstation (2006)
English Translations
Edgar Hilsenrath, The Nazi who lived as a Jew (Manor Books, 1977)
Edgar Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber, trans. by Andrew White (Owl of Minerva Press, 2017)
Further Reading in English
Peter Arnds, ‘On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi Euthanasia and Holocaust in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel, Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi & der Friseur, and Anselm Kiefer’s Visual Art’, The German Quarterly, 75:4 (2002), 422-39
Stephanie Bird, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, Germanic Literatures 10 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2016), Chapter 6, pp. 167-98
Helen Finch, German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: Beyond Testimony (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2023), Chapter 3, ‘Transnational Transgression: Edgar Hilsenrath from 1980 to 2018’, pp. 108-49
Frank Finlay, ‘“ein Holocaust, aber eben nicht meiner”: The Armenian Genocide in the Works of Edgar Hilsenrath’, Modern Language Review, 115:3 (2020), 618-38
Anne Fuchs, ‘Edgar Hilsenrath’s Poetics of Insignificance and the Tradition of Humour in German-Jewish Ghetto Writing’, in Ghetto Writing: Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to Hilsenrath, ed. by Anne Fuchs and Florian Krobb (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999), pp. 170-85
Anne Fuchs, A Space of Anxiety: Dislocation and Abjection in Modern German-Jewish Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 163-76
Valentina N. Glajar, The German Legacy in East Central Europe As Recorded in Recent German-Language Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), Chapter 2: ‘Transnistria and the Bukovinian Holocaust in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Die Abenteuer des Ruben Jablonski (1999)’, pp. 49-71
Isabelle Hesse, ‘From Colonised to Coloniser: Reading the Figure of the Jew in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur and Jurek Becker’s Bronsteins Kinder’, Postcolonial Text, 9:4 (2014) [not paginated]
Bernhard F. Malkmus, The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), Chapter 5, pp. 131-52
Erin McGlothlin, ‘Narrative Transgression in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur and the Rhetoric of the Sacred in Holocaust Discourse’, The German Quarterly, 80:2 (2007), 220-39
Further Reading in German
Thomas Kraft (ed.), Edgar Hilsenrath: Das Unerzählbare erzählen (Munich: Piper, 1996)