Memory and Narrative Ethics: Holocaust Testimony, Fiction, and Film by JakobLothe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. xiv + 424 pp. 90. 00 (hardback). ISBN: 978‐0‐19‐757950‐3

This volume brings literary tools from the field of narrative studies to bear on the Holocaust. The term ‘memory’ in the title may raise expectations for a historical study; however, the main examples of narrative are creative products and fictional accounts, and indicative of the disciplinary diversity, the book appeared in a series, Explorations in Narrative Psychology. Theories of narrative by such major authors as Emmanuel Levinas, Michael Rothberg, Cathy Caruth, Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer undergird reflection on Holocaust ethics and memory. The chosen examples of narrative mix genres, combining survivor interviews, documentary and dramatic films and novels as case studies. Rather than take one ethical position, Lothe experiments with narrative analysis in various ways to explore what results it produces and how it is valuable for reflection on Holocaust ethics. Subject positioning is an essential element of this study. The first example of narrative in the introduction is a 1942 photograph of a ship leaving the Oslo harbour, the Donau, which held 532 Jewish Norwegians who were taken to German-occupied Poland and then transported to Auschwitz. For Lothe, who is Norwegian, the delayed identification of the photo, which surprisingly was an undeveloped negative for 50 years, makes it emblematic of repressed memory and avoidant perpetrator psychology. Also, relating to the author's identity, the second chapter covers his interviews conducted with Jewish women Holocaust survivors, most of whom settled in Norway. In examining these testimonies, some of the main themes are the construction of narrative authority and ethical urgency. Historical footage is involved in three of the films Lothe chose, which are related to the genre of documentary film (more or less). In one chapter, it is startling to place the Nazi propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl, The Triumph of the Will (1935), alongside the post-war French film with words by Mauthausen survivor Jean Cayrol directed by Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1956). The narrative ethics of Riefenstahl and Resnais seem opposite, centred on perpetrators or victims, but Lothe points out similarities for the film viewer regarding the voyeuristic position of the spectator, addresses collective responsibility in displaying Holocaust images. In the third film, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), the director rejects labeling his film a documentary and does not use archival footage deliberately. Instead, Lanzmann trains the camera on human voices, faces and real places. Lothe extrapolates narratives from the films to reflect on the aesthetic depiction of evil, silence and distance. In the last section of the book, four novels are studied in four chapters: The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (Les Bienveillantes, 2006), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) alongside James Ivory's film The Remains of the Day (1993), W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001) and Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days (Aller Tage Abend, 2012). The first-person narrator of The Kindly Ones is a former Nazi officer Maxmilian Aue who recounts his memories about wartime, which are often unreliable, but Lothe finds this psychological portrait useful given the dearth of actual perpetrator narratives. While Aue is a creation of a French and American author, Lothe compares this character to the former guard at Treblinka interviewed by Lanzmann and ponders narrative reliability. In contrast, The Remains of the Day takes place in England at the estate of Lord Darlington, a Nazi sympathizer, who dismisses his Jewish staff. Although the book and film explore unrequited love between the butler and housekeeper, the subplot about the Darlington's dismissal of two Jewish housemaids allows Lothe to reflect on the ethical positions of bystanders. The final two novels considered are German. Renowned author W.G. Sebald has written numerous books exploring World War II and the Holocaust, and in Austerlitz, the eponymous character is a Jewish boy sent to England on a Kindertransport in 1939, who returns to Czechoslovakia in 1975 to trace his family history. He meets a German man born post-war, who serves as a frame narrator, then the two men travel together to concentration camps and through Holocaust landscapes, as Austerlitz searches for what happened to his parents. This work of narrative fiction anchored in history is set alongside The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, a novel organized by five imagined scenarios experienced by a Jewish woman starting in the 1890s. Exploring hypothetical worlds, the story explores the persistence of antisemitism before, during and after the Holocaust, and the loss of memory between three generations. Major themes Lothe highlights are the fragmentation of memory, forgiveness and forgetting. Approaching the volume as a Holocaust study, it is unexpected to find the juxtaposition of literature, films of different genres, one Norwegian photograph and survivor interviews. With such a wide variety of case studies, it would be helpful to have more rationale given for why this group of writings and films was brought together. With disparate narrative analysis, the book ponders wide-ranging questions, not about what happened, as much as about whether a given narrator is reliable and how the reader imposes current concerns in remembering the Holocaust. The book treats ethical questions raised in fiction and film as similar to those raised by survivor testimony and non-fiction. Lothe is adept with the meticulous treatment of multiple narratives, visual, verbal or imputed. Ethics comes to the fore in exploring the many angles of narrative analysis, and in Holocaust studies, the book makes a methodological contribution to prove the subtlety of an interdisciplinary approach to narrative psychology.