1. Introduction: Historical crime fiction and German Fascism: Different ways of representing Nazism and the Holocaust.- 2. Teaching readers about forgotten aspects of the Holocaust: Didacticism in Christian von Ditfurth’s A Paragon of Virtue.- 3. Deconstructing the People’s War: British and German Nazis in Foyle’s War.- 4. Teaming up the French policeman and the good (or at least not so bad) Nazi: Fighting crime in occupied France.- 5. Telling the story of the rise of German fascism: Intradiegetic narration in Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath-novels.- 6. The hard-boiled hero and the Holocaust: Reflecting on crime fiction as a representation of history in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther-series.- 7. Negotiating the idea of historical truth: Questioning the reliability of account of the past in Uta-Maria Heim’s Feierabend.- 8. Conclusion: On different ways of telling the story of Nazism and the Holocaust in historical crime fiction.

This book takes a close look at crime fiction set in the interwar period and during the reign of terror of the Nazi regime. Kniesche analyzes historical crime fiction depicting Weimar and Nazi Germany with specific questions in mind: what does the text try to accomplish in regard to transmitting historical knowledge? What history is told? How is historical knowledge represented and conveyed in crime fiction? Does the historical background provide an indispensable setting for the crime story? With consideration to the degree of self-reflexivity in the texts, Kniesche probes how open the text is to an active participation of the reader in evaluating the historical knowledge that the text itself attempts to provide.

Thomas W. Kniesche is Associate Professor of German Studies at Brown University, USA. His publications include Spuren lesen und Zeichen deuten. 11 Versuche zum Kriminalroman (2023) and A Companion to Contemporary German Crime Fiction (2019).