Bodies in Movement: On Humanimality in Narratives about the Third Reich

Fictional and factual narratives about the crimes against humanity teem with images of monstrosity that per definitionem of that very term – that is, the ‘monster’ as someone to be displayed due to its physical abnormality – present the liminality between the human and the animal, a ‘humanimality’ so to speak. ¹ While in Rosemary Deller’s chapter in this collection human and animal also ‘slip into one another … shaking the imagined stability of the human’ (75), the fluctuating bodies in the present chapter question the character of humanity itself. Humanimality in texts about these crimes from colonialism to the fascisms of the twentieth century are steeped in mythological material and transcend national boundaries. We can observe humanimality in European tracts about the Third Reich, in texts by Günter Grass, Michel Tournier, Elio Vittorini, Jerzy Kosinski or the German Jewish Edgar Hilsenrath, and globally in narratives around genocide by Salman Rushdie and Isabel Allende, to name but a few.