Detachment and Angst in Auschwitz: An Existential Reading of the Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

Abstract

The Tattooist of Auschwitz, written by the New Zealand novelist and screenwriter Heather Morris, is a 2018 Holocaust novel. The novel, loosely based on a true story, reports the inhumane atrocities perpetrated on the innocent prisoners, especially Lale Sokolov, in the concentration camps located in Auschwitz. Despite the profound thematic and artistic significance with which each chapter of the novel is pregnant, it has received scant academic attention. One of the salient yet unnoticed aspects of the novel, which casts itself as an inalienable factor, and which in dealing with each prisoner individually, determines the whole fate of the concentration camps, is hope and despair. The greatest school of philosophy dealing with such fundamental concepts as the illusory meaning of life, the elusive concept of hope, and the construction of truth(s) is existentialism. This philosophical concept or school, though had its original seeds sown by Socrates and later nourished by Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, was publicised and given voice by Jean-Paul Sartre in the aftermath of the Second World War. To put its process in order, it dissects the looming and inescapable absurdity, anxiety, and responsibility and the consequences they hold in store for those who have a mind to realize and a mouth to breathe. Elaborating on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and mediations of Holocaust existentialist psychiatrist Victor E. Frankl, endeavouring to unveil the pungent consequences of Nazi atrocities, and analysing characters’ mentality in the novel, the present article shows how the prisoners, especially the protagonist, managed to escape meaninglessness by dints of existential dicta.