ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with an analysis of Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH (Hitler’s Brain is Named Heydrich), which tells two simultaneous stories. One is the drama of “Operation Android,” the planning and execution of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Protector of Czechoslovakia and Architect of the Final solution. The other follows the writer, Binet’s decisions about how to write the story. The analysis of the text is followed – with the exception of an analysis of W. G. Sebald’s novel; Austerlitz – by readings of Czech novels, which have been grouped under the rubric of “Holocaust laughter.” Their turn to humor is treated as a way of challenging dominant assumptions about the Holocaust and its representational limits. The presumption is that laughter-inducing Czech Holocaust fiction both restores a humanity to those who had been deprived of it and moves the past into the future anterior by altering its will-have-been.
