The Nazi and the Barber (also published as The Nazi Who Lived As a Jew, in the German original Der Nazi & der Friseur) of the German-Jewish writer Edgar Hilsenrath is a grotesque novel about the Holocaust during the time of National Socialism in Germany. The work uses the perpetrator's perspective telling the biography of the SS mass murderer Max Schulz, who after World War II assumes a Jewish identity and finally emigrates to Israel in order to escape prosecution in Germany.
Because of choosing the perpetrator's perspective the author had difficulties in publishing the book in Germany. It was first published in the U.S. in 1971 by Doubleday, one of the largest book publishing companies in the world, and then in Germany in 1977. The original manuscript is written in German.
Edgar Hilsenrath (born 1926) is a German-Jewish writer living in Berlin. His main works are Night, The Nazi and the Barber and The Story of the Last Thought.
Hilsenrath was born in Leipzig. In 1938 his mother escaped with her two children to Siret (Sereth), in Romanian Bukovina, where they enjoyed a respite from persecution. At the time that he should have received an entrance card to higher education, he and his mother were interned in the ghetto of Cernăuţi (Czernowitz).
He began to write about the Holocaust after his liberation when he moved to Paris. Hilsenrath also lived in Palestine, Israel, and New York.
According to Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Simon Wiesenthal Center, "Hilsenrath calls things by their proper names and portrays life first and foremost as physical existence, of whose details the reader is constantly made aware: birth, nursing, feeding, sex, and excretion accompanied by feelings of pleasure and pain. The rhetoric of politicians and political theory are shown to be the schemes of beings ultimately dependent on these bodily processes and subject to physical desires. Hilsenrath's very approach is a protest against disrespect toward the mortal body, against the tyranny of the mind over matter."
Night describes life and survival in a Jewish ghetto in the Ukraine. In the grotesque novel The Nazi and the Barber, published in 1971 in the U.S., a German SS mass murderer, who later assumes a Jewish identity and escapes to Israel, reports about the cruelties committed by him.
Hilsenrath has received many prizes for his works. For his novel The Story of the Last Thought on the Armenian Genocide, Hilsenrath received the State Award in Literature of the Republic of Armenia from its president.
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