Edgar Hilsenrath, 92, Writer of Unvarnished Holocaust Novels, Dies / Sam Roberts. In: The New York Times Jan. 3, 2019

Edgar Hilsenrath, a German Jewish survivor of Nazi persecution who unsentimentally stoked the embers of the Holocaust with brutally satirical autobiographical novels, died on Sunday in Wittlich, Germany. He was 92.

His death was announced by his French publisher, Le Tripode.

Mr. Hilsenrath finished his first novel, “Night,” after emigrating to New York in 1951 as a refugee from war-torn Europe. (He lived in New York until 1975.) Published in English in 1964, the novel was inspired by his dehumanizing captivity in a Jewish ghetto.

He also wrote a celebrated farce, “The Nazi and the Barber” (1971), which tells the story of an SS officer and mass murderer who kills his Jewish best friend from childhood, assumes his identity, flees to Palestine and is transformed into an ardent Zionist.

“To write grotesque things is my way of laughing at death,” Mr. Hilsenrath told the French newspaper Le Figaro in 2012.

Having witnessed and withstood many of the horrors of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Mr. Hilsenrath un-self-consciously challenged more conventional and deferential post-World War II accounts about the victims of Nazi atrocities. He said his goal was to balance the “great and weighty voices” of historians with the “little chattering voices” of ordinary Jews.

“In Germany people want to make up to the Jews for what happened by idealizing them,” he told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel in 2005. “The Jews in the ghetto were every bit as imperfect as human beings anywhere else.”

If readers criticized him for portraying some Jews in “Night” as “suspicious, miserable and mean,” he said, “it is not the Jews that I was describing, but rather the poverty of the ghetto.”

“The Nazi and The Barber” by Edgar Hilsenrath. ... [mehr] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/obituaries/edgar-hilsenrath-dead.html

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“The Nazi and The Barber” by Edgar Hilsenrath.