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In 1999, historian Tim Cole wrote, "at the end of the twentieth century, the 'Holocaust' is central to modern consciousness...[it] has emerged as nothing less than a ruling symbol in our culture...a dominant icon."1 Certainly, few events have colored the history of the twentieth century to the same extent as the Nazis' mass extermination of the European Jews and other "undesirable" social and ethnic groups between 1936 and 1945. Today the Holocaust is one of the most heavily represented historical events of the modern age, depicted in novels, feature films, documentaries, memoirs, exhibits, and memorials throughout Europe, Israel, and North America. This saturation, touching every facet of representational media within western culture, leads Cole to claim that "the Holocaust is being bought and sold."2 Cole argues that this version of the Holocaust, readily available for consumption in easily digestible media bites, constitutes a "myth" developed as a culture-wide "response to the sheer horror of the mass murders, to meet contemporary needs, and as an attempt to find meaning in the murder of six million Jews."3 Cole is concerned primarily with understanding the Holocaust as a historical event, and his conception of the term "myth" is primarily historiographical. Within this article, however, I will interpret the "myth" of the Holocaust in narrative terms, for as narrative "myth" has the power to make us "tremble by taking us to the edge of the abyss, after having forced us to face evil and all the darkness which also resides within us."4 It is my contention that the multitudinous narrative accounts of the Holocaust have developed a meta-narrative that is now intrinsically present throughout contemporary cultural responses to the event. This narrative is ultimately reproduced in mythic form as a generic Holocaust "story," a cultural construction that perpetually seeks to return us to the edge of the abyss in search of understanding, possibly even redemption. Although it manifests in a variety of forms in a diverse range of narrative representations, one of the most striking generic features of this Holocaust "story" is its use of fairy-tale symbols, motifs, and narrative structures that permeate contemporary fictional texts. This tendency suggests that, within cultural memory of the twentieth century, the Holocaust itself may have become a form of dark fairy-tale.
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