ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 offers a reading of Grote Europese roman (2007) by the Flemish writer Koen Peeters, which explores the supranational character of Holocaust memory and its role as a community-building factor in Europe today. The novel tells the story of a marketing expert, Robin, who travels through Europe to acquire new marketing strategies for his company, but simultaneously develops an awareness of the traces of the Holocaust he finds all over Europe. This leads him to acknowledge his own position as what Michael Rothberg terms ‘an implicated subject’ in that history – a concept that articulates how legacies of violence reside in us across space, time, and generation. Robin’s acknowledgment of this latent omnipresence of Holocaust memory as well as his understanding that this memory travels through time and space to affect his own identity, enables him to recognize the ongoing relevance of this memory and how it fosters a transnational identity at a time when the European Union struggled for its political legitimacy. Besides analyzing Peeters’s meta-mnemonic engagement on the level of content, Lensen also shows how Grote Europese roman evokes a formal implication in Holocaust memory through a playful grafting of its structure onto Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico.
