grotesqueness

Belsen's notoriety soon stood out, not just because of the chillingly vivid accounts of journalists, soldiers and photographers, whose testimonies were sent around the world, but because it was found with all its grotesqueness intact.

With its use of caricature, distortion and exaggeration, art can look “grotesque” without conveying grotesqueness; indeed, it can convey something quite the opposite.

The grotesqueness of the sacrifice seems compounded for the Africans dragooned into fighting somebody else’s war.

To make room for that grotesqueness, that depraved thinking, to believe in any murder’s necessity, you must abandon reality.

As his legendary status grew, his human side – so flawed, so painfully angry and confrontational, so complicated – appeared to morph into an ever increasing grotesqueness.