Author Biography

Astrid Dehe is a journalist, translator, and teacher. Achim Engstler is a university and adult education lecturer and writer. Dehe and Engstler have worked as a writing duo since 2008 and are the authors of two books in German. They live in Varel, Germany. This is their first book to be translated into English. Helen MacCormac has been a freelance translator since 1998 and lives in Kassel, Germany. Alyson Coombes translates contemporary German fiction and she lives in London.

Review

Praise for Eichmann's Executioner
"An admirably translated work, highly recommended for students of that tragedy and readers of historical and literary fiction in general."
—Library Journal (starred)

Praise for the German edition:
"Both curiously transparent and full of secrets, a simultaneously dense yet airy fabric of cryptic threads and references…Nothing is gratuitous in this book, nothing coincidental; all is intricately interlaced."
—Frankfurter Rundschau

"A fascinating book that doesn't let you go…It intentionally and repeatedly unsettles the reader. It poses important questions about humanity and consciousness, about what you are capable of doing."
—Neues Deutschland

"Disturbing."
—Perlentaucher

Long Description

A gripping and beautifully imagined work of literary fiction that explores history, memory, and the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust, in the English-language debut of a highly acclaimed German writing duo In May 1962, twenty-two men gathered in Jerusalem to decide by lot who would be Eichmann's executioner. These men had guarded the former Nazi SS lieutenant colonel during his imprisonment and trial, and in the absence of trained executioners in Israel it would fall to one of them to end Eichmann's life. Shalom Nagar, the only one among them who had asked not to participate, drew the short straw. In a novel that picks up decades later, Nagar is living on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, haunted by his memory of Eichmann. He remembers watching him day and night, the way he eats, the way he lies in bed, the sound of the cord tensing around Eichmann's neck. But as he tells and re-tells his story to anyone who will listen, he begins to doubt himself, and when one of his friends, Moshe, reveals his own link to Eichmann, Nagar is forced to reconsider everything he has ever believed about his past. In the postwar tradition of trauma literature including Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Bernhard Schlink's The Reader , the highly acclaimed writing team Astrid Dehe and Achim Engstler raise provocative and universal questions of how we represent the past, whether we should, and how these representations impinge upon the present.

Review Quote

Praise for the German edition: "Both curiously transparent and full of secrets, a simultaneously dense yet airy fabric of cryptic threads and references...Nothing is gratuitous in this book, nothing coincidental; all is intricately interlaced." -- Frankfurter Rundschau "A fascinating book that doesn't let you go...It intentionally and repeatedly unsettles the reader. It poses important questions about humanity and consciousness, about what you are capable of doing." -- Neues Deutschland "Disturbing." -- Perlentaucher

Description for Sales People

Publication will be supported by the Goethe Institut, which will also promote the book. Has already received excellent reviews in Germany, including from Neues Deutschland. will be of interest to anyone concerned with the story of Adolf Eichmann and his trial. Told with an Israeli perspective on Eichmann and his victims.

Details