'Guilt ran through me like lightning': Holocaust Complicity in Popular Fiction

Although popular novels about the Holocaust are often ambivalently received, this article will claim the ability of works of this kind to represent the subjective experience of complicity. In the novels discussed here, the protagonist is a non-Jewish German woman who witnesses at close quarters the atrocities of the Third Reich, requiring reflection upon the possibility of her own implication in those crimes. These examples, Mandy Robotham’s A Woman of War (2018), Louise Fein’s People Like Us (2020) and John Boyne’s All the Broken Places (2022), depict the changes in the protagonist’s self-understanding and judgements on individual responsibility by means of first-person narrative. The novels use the dramatic or fantastic dilemmas befitting genre fiction, including taboo birth, forbidden love and personal vengeance, as a framework to draw connections between Holocaust history and concerns ranging from eugenics to sexual violence. The article concludes that, despite its liabilities, genre fiction’s leeway to depict extreme scenarios and states of mind allows it to reveal, and take part in constructing, modes of contemporary engagement with the Second World War and the Holocaust.