This final chapter engages with the difficulty of thinking about imaginative mechanisms as ‘I’-saving in the wake of the Holocaust, arguably the century’s most devasting act of mass murder. It offers a close reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and locates its conflicted defence of the imagination within the complex legacy of Theresienstadt: a Nazi concentration camp where inmates were encouraged to participate in cultural activities and carry on their pre-war professions in the hope that their example might trick the outside world into thinking that Europe’s Jews were not in danger. The chapter not only argues for Ishiguro’s indebtedness to two major accounts of that infamous site: H. G. Adler’s historical study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community and W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz. It also contends that Never Let Me Go registers, with arresting power, how knowledge of the combination of suffering, deception, and creativity that took place inside Theresienstadt’s walls has challenged ideas about the value of art and the ethics of attempting to console or distract persecuted populations

This chapter engages with Bowen’s writings of the Second World War. It explores how these texts responded to the narratives, myths, and lies fed to Britons to maintain wartime morale and to aid the transformation, in the immediate post-war period, of traumatic and discontinuous experiences into palatable histories. The chapter begins with Bowen’s wartime autobiographical works, Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters (1942), both of which register anxieties about how personal experiences and recollections may be disputed by the assertions of historical accounts. These works are then discussed in relation to comparable concerns which emerged in the final months of the Second World War, once news of the Holocaust began to challenge both narratives which had stressed the terrible conditions endured in Britain and the scepticism many civilians had professed about reports of Nazi atrocities. Central to this argument is a reading of Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949): a post-war novel that links the painful forms of retrospective censure suffered by its heroine to questions circulating in this period about personal responsibility and the limits of judgement.

Let us start with Sartre, whose creative appropriation of Being and Time’s phenomenology of death came to prominence first – in 1946’s Being and Nothingness – and probably remains the most widely known in its own right. If Sartre’s vision of existential death is rarely recognized as his alternative to Heidegger’s account, that is both because what Being and Time means by death is not widely understood and because Sartre’s alternative represents the furthest departure from Heidegger’s own view. In general, Sartre’s adoption of a subject/object dualism leads him to pervasively re-Cartesianize Being and Time, as if he were completely oblivious to Heidegger’s overarching efforts to undermine Cartesian dualism. (This obliviousness is already clear from Sartre’s oft-quoted but nonetheless false claim that the “existentialism” he shares with Heidegger can be defined by their shared insistence “that subjectivity must be the starting point.”) Sartre’s phenomenology of the objectifying “look of the other” transforms Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death so dramatically that Sartre can easily appear to be describing a different phenomenon altogether. Read carefully, however, it becomes clear that Sartre’s account of the “the look” allows him to articulate his own version of an existential phenomenon in which I experience “the death of my possibilities” – even though “I am my possibilities” – and yet I live through that experience to tell the tale phenomenologically.

What are the basic coordinates of the dispute between Heidegger and Levinas over the phenomenology of “death” and its larger ontological or ethical significance? Or, put in the “perfectionist” terms developed in Chapter 4, in what ways do Heidegger and Levinas disagree about how we human beings become genuinely or fully ourselves? Examining the convergences and divergences of Heidegger’s and Levinas’s phenomenologies of death, this chapter suggests that Heidegger and Levinas both understood themselves as struggling to articulate the requisite ethical response to the great traumas of the twentieth century. By comparing their thinking at this level, I contend, we can better understand the ways in which Levinas genuinely diverges from Heidegger even while building critically on his thinking.

Chapter 4 highlights the way in which vegetarianism may be understood as an alternative (to) religion. The first part of the chapter suggests that after 1962 vegetarianism is central to the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and that no proper understanding of that fiction can be obtained without first understanding Singer’s vegetarian epistemology. This stands in contrast to the traditional view which is that Singer’s vegetarianism was only a kind of sublimation of Jewish dietary laws. The second part of the chapter focuses on Graham Greene’s The Comedians, arguing that the vegetarianism of Mr and Mrs Smith, which appears at first to be only comic relief, comes to take on much greater significance since it emerges as a powerful kind of surrogate faith – the kind of faith that Brown, the narrator, has lost.

The final chapter draws together the themes of the book. It uses the work of Derrida, Levi, Camus, and Judith Butler to delineate the way in which carnivorism operates as an ideology of violence; it argues that much harm against the human results from the way in which we misunderstand and misconceptualise the animal. It also suggests the limitations of metaphorical thinking with regards the human–animal relationship, and suggests that a metonymical conception, based on association and contiguity, may serve both human and animal better.

While the last chapter examines primarily the interplay between the ICRC and the RC Movement, this chapter examines ICRC links with the Swiss federal authorities in Bern. The chapter shows that historically relations have been very close, with early ICRC leaders failing to recognize that their humanitarian neutrality was different, or should be different, from Swiss political neutrality as directed by Bern. This failure accounts for a big reason, but not the only reason, why the ICRC compiled a defective record in responding to the Holocaust in the Nazi era. But the problem of too much Swiss nationalism, and lack of independence, in ICRC policymaking was evident before then, as in dealing with Mussolini.

The first part of the chapter discusses Serbia during the Great War. Following initial military successes, Serbias army was forced to retreat, together with the government and the royal family, to the Greek island of Corfu in late 1915. By late 1918, a recuperated Serbian army, together with its allies, liberated Serbia and occupied much of what would soon become Yugoslavia. Serbia suffered enormously in the war, but its domination of interwar Yugoslavia alienated non-Serbs and many formerly Habsburg Serbs. In response to the political crisis, King Aleksandar Karadjordjević introduced dictatorship in 1929. His project to create a unified Yugoslav nation had largely failed even before his assassination in 1934. The late 1930s saw a partial return to democracy, in contrast to developments elsewhere in East-Central Europe, a Serb-Croat compromise, and a move closer to Berlin and Rome. Serb officers and most political leaders rejected a pact with the Axis in 1941, leading to the invasion and partition of Yugoslavia by the Axis. The final part discusses resistance, civil war and collaboration and the German policy of reprisals against Serbs, Jews and Roma in occupied Serbia.