Some Thoughts on Perpetrator Metafiction: David Albahari’s Götz and Meyer and Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream

This article aims to explore the significance of metafiction as an appropriate mode for representation in Holocaust perpetrator fiction. Looking at two pertinent examples—David Albahari’s Götz and Meyer (1998) and Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972)—it argues that the movement between the diegetic and extradiegetic narrative spaces allows for an encoding of imaginative processes that promote postmemorial discourses. This process is important at this juncture, when the Holocaust is sliding out of living memory, because it emphasizes the need to continually re-engage with the past, thereby retaining its significance in the present.