Crime fiction provides entertainment by focusing on the darkest sides of reality, such as violence, murder, and injustice, and the genre is often seen as the escapist genre par excellence. In the eyes of some of its theoreticians, crime fiction’s appeal exists precisely in its capacity both to expose evil and to present the triumph of its counterpole: innocence and justice. W. H. Auden, a great “addict” of crime fiction himself, once stated: “The interest in the detective story is the dialectic of innocence and guilt.” “The magic formula,” notes Auden, “is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from which the guilty other has been expelled … by the detective who discovers the truth.” Crime fiction, in other words, has the cathartic function of confronting us with injustice and guilt and delivering what Auden termed a “magical satisfaction” by presenting us with a vision of the society that “re-establishe[s] its innocence anew.” What happens, however, when crime fiction takes evil of the greatest possible dimensions—genocide— as its theme? This essay examines the theme of the Holocaust in contemporary German-language crime fiction and the ways the genre forces the responsible society to confront its own historic wrong-doing.

The particular appeal of crime fiction is that it supplies readers with narratives of crime and punishment, presenting a utopia of social order that eventually triumphs over the disorder of crime. This formal characteristic has important implications when a crime novel features the ultimate Nazi crime, because the very incorporation of the Holocaust into the plot of a crime novel might imply that it is a crime that can be adequately punished or avenged. Furthermore, such crime fiction needs to reconcile the necessity to address the German complicity in the crime of the Holocaust with the genre’s prerogative to offer a cathartic experience of relief from guilt. This essay analyzes five contemporary German crime novels that deal with the Holocaust and the National Socialist period, examining the ways in which this popular genre frames the Holocaust according to the paradigm of crime and punishment.