Eichmann's Executioner

(Hardback)

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A gripping and beautifully imagined work of literary fiction that explores history, memory, and the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust, in the English-language debut of a highly acclaimed German writing duo

In May 1962, twenty-two men gathered in Jerusalem to decide by lot who would be Eichmanns executioner. These men had guarded the former Nazi SS lieutenant colonel during his imprisonment and trial, and in the absence of trained executioners in Israel it would fall to one of them to end Eichmanns life. Shalom Nagar, the only one among them who had asked not to participate, drew the short straw.

In a novel that picks up decades later, Nagar is living on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, haunted by his memory of Eichmann. He remembers watching him day and night, the way he eats, the way he lies in bed, the sound of the cord tensing around Eichmanns neck. But as he tells and re-tells his story to anyone who will listen, he begins to doubt himself, and when one of his friends, Moshe, reveals his own link to Eichmann, Nagar is forced to reconsider everything he has ever believed about his past.

In the postwar tradition of trauma literature including Gunter Grasss The Tin Drum and Bernhard Schlinks The Reader, the highly acclaimed writing team Astrid Dehe and Achim Engstler raise provocative and universal questions of how we represent the past, whether we should, and how these representations impinge upon the present.

Reviews

Praise for Eichmanns Executioner
"An admirably translated work, highly recommended for students of that tragedy and readers of historical and literary fiction in general."
Library Journal (starred)

Praise for the German edition:
"Both curiously transparent and full of secrets, a simultaneously dense yet airy fabric of cryptic threads and referencesNothing is gratuitous in this book, nothing coincidental; all is intricately interlaced."
Frankfurter Rundschau

"A fascinating book that doesnt let you goIt intentionally and repeatedly unsettles the reader. It poses important questions about humanity and consciousness, about what you are capable of doing."
Neues Deutschland

"Disturbing."
Perlentaucher

Author Bio

Astrid Dehe is a journalist, translator, and teacher. Achim Engstler is a university and adult education lecturer and writer. Dehe and Engstler have worked as a writing duo since 2008 and are the authors of two books in German. They live in Varel, Germany. This is their first book to be translated into English. Helen MacCormac has been a freelance translator since 1998 and lives in Kassel, Germany. Alyson Coombes translates contemporary German fiction and she lives in London.