Dr Hannah Scheithauer wins Holocaust Studies journal prize

Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History publishes research on the Nazi genocides from a historical and social perspective and studies their origins and consequences. The journal's publisher, Routledge, awards an annual prize of £500 to the author of the best research article published in the preceding year.

Dr Hannah Scheithauer won the 2025 prize for her article 'Spectral time and the ethics of ‘multidirectional memory’: Anouar Benmalek’s Fils du Shéol (2015)'.

The article offers the first ever scholarly account of Fils du Shéol [Son of Sheol], a novel by the Algerian author Anouar Benmalek which was published in 2015. ‘Sheol’ is a term from the Hebrew Bible denoting an afterlife where the dead dwell and congregate. In the novel, Benmalek adopts this concept as the basis of an extraordinary ghost story. The narrative follows a young German-Jewish boy called Karl, who dies in the Holocaust at the very beginning of the text. Upon entering the afterlife, Karl’s ghost starts falling backwards through time and retracing his family history in reverse: from his childhood in wartime Berlin to his parents’ meeting in interwar Algeria and finally, to his grandfather’s involvement in the Herero and Nama genocide, which was perpetrated in the German colony of South-West Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century.

By engaging with the novel’s unusual temporal structure, Dr Scheithauer asks what happens when multiple, highly fraught histories are brought to coexist within the space of a single literary text. Specifically, she considers the novel in light of recent controversies regarding the comparability of the Holocaust and the significance of German colonialism as a potential pre-history of Nazism. Dr Scheithauer argues that the text draws nuanced and empathetic connections between these different contexts. At the same time, she show that the novel’s ever-spiralling descent to the past and apparent foreclosure of the future raise challenging questions for the ethics of remembrance today.