The Fictionalisation of the Holocaust

Abstract

An interesting phenomenon for those of us who find ourselves still churning in the choppy backwash of the Demidenko affair is the concurrent appearance of two books which, presumably, have been nurtured quite independently: Abraham Biderman's Holocaust memoir, The World of My Past (1996), which won the 1996 Banjo prize for non-fiction and even more recently the new 1996 biennial National Biography Award; and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), a book which has won the highest praise from luminaries like Jonathon Miller and Richard Bernstein and yet hardly raises a yawn from at least one of its recent Australian reviewers.