In 1933 German artist Max Ernst created his third collage novel, Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), which consists of 183 collages divided into 5 booklets whose differently colored covers identify the days, elements, and examples to which each chapter is dedicated. The structure can be best rep-resented in the form of Table 7.1:

If the popular serialized novels whose illustrations Ernst used as the basis for his collages were already forgotten in 1933, as German art historian Werner Spies claims, then this only applies to the individual novels. His contemporaries would have still remembered the serialized novel as a genre “that belonged to the world of the parents of Max Ernst's generation,” as German philosopher Theodor Adorno said. The narrative model and illustrations of nineteenth-century serialized novels still shaped the collective unconscious of the younger generation that grew up during World War I. In his introduction to Ernst's previous collage novel, La femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman, 1929), French Surrealist André Breton even said that they “might reveal better than all else the special nature of our dreams.”

The form and content of the serialized novel were closely interwoven with the technical means and economic conditions of its printing. In the nineteenth century the newspaper became the primary medium for the mass distribution of popular literature, and the serialized novel marked the beginning of the modern press. The conditions of production of the serialized novel, to which Ernst's collage novel refers, cannot be separated from the conditions of production of the myths and phantasms to which the illustrations testify, as they depict a world in which people are both threatened by mythical powers and subjected to industrially rationalized exploitation—a subjection that culminated in the first industrialized world war.

Ernst's unusual artistic appropriation of the serialized novel foregrounds images of crime and violence. Instead of glorifying violence, instinct, and the unconscious, however, it seems to reflect on the prehistory of fascism by critiquing the need to display one's own sophistication (which was particularly prevalent during the interwar period), attacking the fascist logic of distinguishing between friends and enemies, and demonstrating the absurdity of distinguishing between good and bad violence.