What exactly is the 'naked truth' spelled out here? The narrator's gesture of brutal frankness identifies culprits just to insist that they could not help their wrongdoing, thus undermining the idea of culpability. The sense of guilt, Müller's text suggests, is unavoidably brought up by the death while, at the same time, the concept of guilt is inadequate to approach this kind of action and causality. The notion of implication is better suited to address them, especially an expanded notion of implication that comprises the ambivalent and highly charged terms of guilt and, by extension morality.The theory of implication responds to what Rothberg is right to call an 'underdeveloped vocabulary' for thinking what it means to be a participant in social dynamics and historical structures of wrongdoing beyond the victim-perpetrator-divide. 3 Rothberg sees this polarity not only as too simple to grasp complex realities but, moreover, as often used to denote human essences and identity. 4 The 'figure' of the implicated subject, in contrast, is 'an analytical category' 5 that seeks to emphasize actions and changing, multifold, or contradictory implications to grant insight into the varying roles individuals play in different contexts. This, Rothberg proposes, permits a better understanding of ambiguities such as 'the grey zone' described by Primo Levi, a result of the Nazi policy that 'camps were set up to make victims complicit in their own victimization', which 'troubles not only conventional morality but also legal judgment and historical understanding'. 6 Rothberg's notion of implication seeks to 'twist the temporal axis' 7 in order to translate the complication of a 'simplified, moralistic' 8 victim-perpetrator-differentiation attained in Holocaust studies onto other issues of complex individual involvement and collective responsibility such as trauma in historical perspective 9 and in the context of the Anthropocene. 10 Far from evoking moral relativism or inappropriate comparison, Rothberg's project of carving out a term to describe problematic involvement in

Background: In the twenty-first century, literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying complicity Nazi perpetration, Soviet terror, or other instances of 20th century mass violence and totalitarianism. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the boom prompts the question: Why the interest in past complicities now? My hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between involvements in past acts of mass violence and current forms of participation in wrongdoings in neoliberalism. While these issues differ profoundly, they are related: structurally, both present the challenge of forming a nuanced notion of participation. Historically, they are related since justifications of past involvements have established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which terror, repression, and mass violence are subsequently discussed, thus forming the frame for negotiating current problematic involvements. Method: Critical discourse analysis is used to scrutinize the legal concept of complicity and combined it with close readings of passages from four literary texts to outline how attention to reciprocity in language can enhance our understanding of problematic involvement. Results: Literary portrayals of historical complicity are ambivalent; they can help to find models for comprehending issues of the present in cultural memory, but they can also serve to establish distance between present and past to appease the sense that all is not quite well, even after the demise of Nazi and Soviet terror. The article outlines two modes of distancing: a) spacio-temporal distancing of the commemorating point of view in ‘the West’ from the portrayed violence in ‘the East’, and b) moral distancing that casts the audience as superior to complicit characters. Conclusion: By pressing for analytic or consoling distance, both strategies of distancing amount to a complicity with the transmission of discourses that justify, excuse, or deny mass violence and totalitarian terror.

Mass violence—killings and other forms of violence that aim at exterminating large groups of people—is often called a tragedy. The trope can be found in testimonies of victimization, justifications of perpetration, journalistic, political, and academic language as well as in popular parlance. The article examines the divergent usages of the travelling trope of tragedy with particular emphasis on its role in forming justificatory discourse. The issue at stake is that the trope of tragedy does not remain confined to outright justifications such as juridical legitimization, moral vindication, political propaganda etc., but permeates condemnation and critique as well. The rationale of the analysis is that justifications of acts of mass violence that are negotiated in key areas of the cultural canon give a culturally specific, often identificatory, meaning to acts that are, from a critical perspective, mostly either considered senseless or comprehended in economic and sociopolitical terms. Yet it is largely owing to justificatory discourses that acts of mass violence do not remain single, exorbitant events, but have a lasting impact by shaping the linguistic and heuristic framework of their subsequent evaluation. When condemnation and critique adopt these terminologies and frameworks—such as the notion of purity underlying the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, or the ethnopolitical paradigm informing the concept of genocide—this effects an uneasy mimetic participation in transmitting justifications of mass violence. The trope of tragedy makes it possible to address the issue of mimetic participation by drawing attention to the audience as an indispensable element of the discourse.

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In EnglIshThe outset of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents a stage of life and language that is commonly evoked and, at the same time, systematically avoided in autobiographies as well as theoretical approaches to language: infancy. This textual strategy refers back to Augustine's Confessiones, one of the most canonical autobiographies, reading it as a mainstay for an unconventional hypothesis: Rather that understanding infancy as an early stage of, or even before, language, Joyce expounds that the condition called infancy -the openness for receiving language while being unable to master it -accompanies all speech, be it childlike or eloquent. The article analyses Joyce's text as one instance of a general paradox of autobiographical writing: initial aphasia. Setting out with birth or infancy, autobiographical texts precede articulate discourse. In Joyce, this paradox appears as starting point for a poetical -rather than theoretical -thinking about language, and language acquisition. AbsTrAcT In gErmAnDer Beginn von Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stellt eine Stufe des Lebens und der Sprache dar, die in autobiographischen wie sprachtheoretischen Texten ebenso gewöhnlich evoziert wie systematisch gemieden wird: das Infantile. Diese Textstrategie greift zurück auf Augustinus' Confessiones, eine der kanonischsten Lebensbeschreibungen, versteht diese jedoch als Ausgangspunkt für eine alles andere als kanonische Hypothese: Statt das Infantile als Frühzustand der (oder gar vor der) Sprache aufzufassen, stellt Joyce Infantilität -die Offenheit für die Sprache bei gleichzeitiger Unfähigkeit, sie Finding a Tongue. Autobiography and Infancy 21