A few words from Hannah:
I am delighted to have been awarded the Holocaust Studies prize, which recognises the best article published in the journal each year. My article offers the first scholarly account of Fils du Shéol [Son of Sheol], a 2015 novel by the Algerian author Anouar Benmalek. Benmalek’s extraordinary ghost story follows a German-Jewish boy called Karl, who dies in the Holocaust at the very beginning of the narrative. Upon entering the afterlife, Karl starts falling backwards through time and retracing his family history in reverse: from his childhood in wartime Berlin to his parents’ meeting in interwar Algeria and finally, to his grandfather’s role in the Herero and Nama genocide, which was perpetrated in the German colony of South-West Africa in 1904-08.
My article examines how the novel’s unusual temporal structure brings memories into dialogue, engaging recent debates on the significance of German colonialism as a potential pre-history of Nazism. In so doing, I argue, the text raises challenging questions for the ethics of remembrance today.
You can read my article here:https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rhos20/collections/holocaust-studies-journal-prize