Sue Vice

Bio:

Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, where her interests include contemporary literature, film and Holocaust studies. Her most recent book is a revised version of her BFI Modern Film Classics volume on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (2026) and she is currently writing a study of Holocaust imagery in popular fiction.

Keynote lecture title:

Intimate Silence in Holocaust Fiction

Keynote lecture abstract:

The paper explores the role of romantic fiction in representing the high cost of disavowing or suppressing Holocaust atrocity. The central examples are two novels published nearly a century apart, each focusing on a hidden sexual relationship: Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (1934) and Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep (2024).

These novels have divergent historical vantage-points - Carson’s set in Bavaria in 1933 to 1934, van der Wouden’s in the Netherlands in 1961 - yet share a focus on an intimate relationship between a Jewish and a non-Jewish individual. The affairs in these novels are not only conducted with increasing secrecy in the narrative but embody silence symbolically. In Crooked Cross, Lexa must hide her relationship with her fiancé Moritz from the ‘important Nazis’ in her family; in The Safekeep Isabel’s love for Eva must be concealed, not least because she is the girlfriend of Isabel’s brother.

The relationship in both novels is a ‘prism’ through which to show historical events, revealing individual interactions as a ‘metaphor for group relations’ (Pshevorska 2023, Garloff 2016). The affair’s portrayal in each case oscillates between realism and allegory. It hints at the possibility of betrayal as well as reconciliation, heartbreak or the embrace of difference. In Carson’s cautionary novel, the relationship’s difficulties foreshadow the genocidal endpoint of Nazi biopolitics; while the full significance of that in van der Wouden’s, figuring the possible reclamation by non-Jews of their Jewish neighbours, is only gradually revealed.