| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction to the Handbook on Prejudice |
|
|
which allows the audience to step into his shoes, if only for a moment, and to experience the situation from his point of view:
In this part of his speech, which was regularly cut when the play was performed in Nazi Germany, a situation of empathy is created on the basis of one overarching in-group, the membership of common humanity. Through the medium of narrative, plot, and characters, literature presents human beings not only as representatives of groups but also as individuals. In literary representation, there is a constant crossover between group membership and the individual human being. This incongruence between type and token opens a creative space for empathy, imagination, and the possibility for new cognitive and emotional experience. The Turkish writer and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has praised the novel as the greatest invention of the Western world that is linked to mobility, curiosity, and change in the process of transcending and changing boundaries. The novel produces an alienation of the self and a familiarisation of the other by creating the possibility “to tell our story as that of someone else and to present it as a gift to the whole world” (Pamuk 2005, 8). Literature, as Martha Nussbaum has so well shown, is an effective medium for empathy that invites border-crossings in the imagination that are seldom possible or available in reality (1995; 1990). It is the effect of such imaginative border-crossings that in-group and out-group relations can be renegotiated. A clear example is the American television series Holocaust, which presented the history of the Holocaust in the format of two exemplary families, one Jewish and one German. Irrespective of the artistic quality of the series, this show made an enormous impact on the German audience and overcame an emotional barrier and