Book Reviews 367 volume of poems from the Library of Congress and various Jerusalem libraries on the grounds that he had ‘witnessed the burning of his pre-war world’ (p. 16): as his nom de plume suggested, he wished after his arrival in Israel to be defined by his Holocaust experience; nothing before then mattered. Annette Timm examines Ka-Tzetnik’s writing as Holocaust testimony and considers it in relation to the role of memoir literature and oral testimony generally in the years after 1945. Iris Milner and Or Rogovin each tackle aspects of Ka-Tzetnik’s literary style. Some critics have found it uneven and disjointed but Milner and Rogovin conclude that the use of metaphors, allegories and recurrent leitmotifs in his narratives is all part of his attempt to contain the Holocaust in his writing and to coordinate the multiple narratives of survi- vor testimony that he draws upon. Pascale Bos and Guido Vitiello focus on the ethical dilemmas posed by Ka-Tzetnik’s depiction of sexual violence. Bos suggests that House of Dolls was a contribution to the post-1945 discussion of Nazi sexual violence that was in fact more prevalent than later scholars have appreciated. Vitiello’s discussion of the pulp fiction inspired by Ka-Tzetnik’s writing links it to Binjamin Wilkomorski’s pseudo- memoirs, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones and Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter. Uri Cohen compares Ka-Tzetnik’s Salamandra with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, contrasting the self-doubting Levi teaching that survival was itself a sort of collaboration with Ka-Tzetnik seeing the experience of the Nazis’ victims as but the latest chapter in an ancient story of persecution. Iris Roebling-Grau examines Ka-Tzetnik’s last work Shivitti: A Vision (1987), in which he reported on the visions he experienced under LSD- enhanced psychotherapy following a breakdown, a narrative that Roebling-Grau sug- gests was suffused with Cold War themes employed to strengthen Ka-Tzenik’s habitual metaphorical style. Dirk Rupnow rounds off the volume with a wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between historical scholarship and literature in transmitting knowl- edge of the Holocaust. While scholarship remains fundamental, he suggests, public knowledge conveyed by films and novels is also crucial for telling stories about the Holocaust and is an important way of coping with the past and of ensuring that the per- petrators fail in their ambition to transform human existence. In addition to her excellent introduction, Timm rounds off the volume with a thought- ful conclusion. In fact any reader unfamiliar with Ka-Tzetnik and his work would be well advised to read that immediately after the introduction. It is definitely one of the best things in the book: critical, moving and yet ultimately fair to a man who ‘insisted on his right to present truth through fiction’ (p. 214). Joachim Whaley Günter Grass. By Julian Preece. London: Reaktion, 2018. Pp. 223. £11.99. This highly readable little book is a must for any student or lay reader who wishes to gain an overview of Günter Grass’s life and work, but it also contains gems for those more familiar with his texts and times. Julian Preece has dedicated much of his own working life to opening up the Grass corpus to diverse readers, from other Grass specialists in Anglophone countries to interested members of the public in multiple languages around