The irruption of some historical events of the twentieth century, like the holocaust in World War II, the gulags, the genocides of Cambodia, Rwanda and the wars in Yugoslavia, as well as those that have accumulated in the twenty-first century, have caused the testimony is re-evaluated. In particular, the holocaust made it possible to reflect again on the testimony as the only way to be able to reconstruct this event. The historian Annette Wieviorka even considers that after Auschwitz installed the 'witness era', since the survivors represented the only possibility of remembering him because there was no material evidence found that could give account of what happened there. From that moment on, was given aturn to the notion of testimony, considered this as the only possibility to have direct access to the past.The age of t
...he testimony, as Annette Wieviorka writes, had its great outcome from the process to Eichmann in 1961 (Cfr. Wieviorka, L'ére du témoin), even though by then a hundred testimonial texts had been published.
Until then, with the exception of certain cases, the experience of Auschwitz had been experienced as an experience of shame and embarrassment. Neither victims nor perpetrators wished to remember what had turned them into a kind of sub-men, wild and murderous beasts, on the one hand, or, on the other, sheep taken to the slaughterhouse without even being able to raise their voices, in hungry beasts ready to kill for a crust of bread. We can better understand the shame of the perpetrators, but what happened to the victims who decided to remain silent to continue living, who took refuge in a silence full of guilt to stay
alive? Because the guilt and the shame of taking the place of the other, of that other one who was wished death to have a bigger space in the barrack or to steal that little piece of extra bread to survive and that finally ended up disappearing the chimneys of the crematoria, populated the memory and the life of the great majority of the survivors.
In this sense, we should not forget that when the writer Primo Levi wanted to publish, in 1947, If this is a man, a masterpiece of testimonial literature that gave an account of the Nazi hell, nobody wanted to publish it. In the end, a small publisher supported the publication of this book, which went almost unnoticed. It seemed that the nightmares of the inhabitants of the camps had come true: the world did not want to know, did not dare to imagine, or, in other words, wished to forget the most degrading and shameful episode of the century.Now, if we continue thinking and imagining the genocide that marked a rupture in Western thought, which questioned the ability of man to self-destruct, it is precisely because both massacres and genocides have continued to occur in the eyes of the world without Man, he who, as Levi writes, disappeared in Auschwitz, reappears again. 'We live in an era where events similar to the Holocaust are possible' (Bauer, Repenser l'Holocauste, 29); for this reason it is necessary to continue thinking and imagining Auschwitz, not as something that belonged to the past but as a space that may belong to the future: the Holocaust as premonition and not as antecedent.If there is a space
of resistance where the need to live becomes emphatically patent, that is the space of writing. Since the 1960s, an infinity of texts written about the Holocaust have come to light, especially in Europe.
The writers are innumerable: Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim, Etty Hillesum, Victor Klemperer, Jorge Semprun, Jean Améry, Charlotte Delbo, Robert Antelme, Anne Frank and Albert Camus who, without having lived the experience of the fields, wrote in his novel The plague a terrible allegory of genocide and its possible repetition, etc. I would not finish listing the number of books published on the experiences of survivors in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Can we speak not only of a novel or testimonial literature in general terms or can we really speak of a 'literature of the fields'? Could Auschwitz be the unifying motif of a whole series of testimonies, although this field is not the only one that marked the derailment of man towards barbarism? Certainly it is testimonial literature, but we could go further and pose that it is a particular literature that revolves around the barracks, the gas chambers, the crematoria, the hunger, the self-destruction of man at the hands of man; of that which made Paul Celan write: 'scream darker the sound of the violins so you will go up like smoke in the air / so you will have a pit in the clouds does not lie there [...] / your hair of gold Margarete / your shulamit ash hair. '(Paul Celan, Escape from Death, in Complete Works, 64) Could it be that we are facing a new testimonial genre: the genre of Nazi concentration literature?The notion of
a vehicle arises here not so much in its logic of transmission or reproduction, but rather as a generator gear, as a driving device.
Thinkers like Jan Assmann and John Czaplika, especially in his book Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity (1995), or Aleida Assmann, in his book Espacios del recuerdo (1999), have insisted a lot on this approach to memory. Collecting this accumulated and other more classic, Professor Astrid Erll, in his text collective memories and cultures of memory (2012), condenses well what could be the main attributes or cultural elements of memory. Thus, she mentions that memory allows to forge an identity to social groups or enable identification practices. In addition, he argues that memory serves to reconstruct the past in the present, something that was already detected by classics such as Halbwachs. Similarly, memory depends on the continuity of meaning, which is achieved through different forms and channels of expression. It also achieves some level of institutionalization and organization, through specialized carriers, with which it can reach a degree of axiological relevance for the group or a binding nature. To this is added that the memory reflects the vital world of the group: the image that it has of itself helps in the process of reflexivity, connects yesterday with today. In a kind of diachrony, it makes a selective, that is, strategic, relative use of memories and allows the positioning of the subjectivity or the agency of the collective subjects acting.
