Memoir, Holocaust Fiction, and Truth: Beyond 'The Cut Out Girl'. The 8th Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Memorial Lecture

Speakers: Bart van Es (Oxford); Godela Weiss-Sussex (ILCS [Chair]); Anthony Grenville (Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies [Introduction])

In 2019 Bart van Es’s The Cut Out Girl won the Costa Biography Prize and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography as well as the overall Book of the Year, but – while the book is a biography – it is also, in some ways, a work of fiction. Many of its memorable scenes, conversations, and descriptions are acts of creative reconstruction, based on what ‘must’ or ‘could’ have happened, rather than absolute fact. What are the gains of this approach and what are the potential dangers? In this lecture, van Es explores the ethics of creative writing when it comes to the Holocaust. His lecture ranges beyond The Cut Out Girl to explore the writing of W.G. Sebald, Anne Frank’s Diary, and the popular success of novels such as The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris. How does truth relate to fiction? These are, van Es argues, not straightforward opposites.