UMBER IN THE LAGER: a study on the Shoah Literature
Shoah literature; judaism; mysticism; phenomenology; sociology.
The following study is a proposition; as in the words of Paul Celan, to say something, only putting it in different ways. What would one dare to say? How would it be possible to think about the Shoah withouth an analysys of forms and numbers? The starting point was a quote from Primo Levi, who raised the question: what was it like for a jewish to have his or her name changed for a number in the nazi camps? As I assumed it was not an easy route to take, I opted for a kind of writing that would allow the use of images from the Lager brought from my readings of the source material. Initial readings started with Walter Benjamin and Gaston Bachelard, but after verifying that the concept of evil was deeply entwined in the jewish texts about name and soul, Hannah Arendt soon became another fundamental entry in my theoretical framework; Giorgio Agamben and Léon Poliakov also helped with the issues on judaism. The need to think about alterity became an imperative when I realized that Primo Levi was not referring to the human being only in a political level; thus the discussion about name and soul. The result is an amalgam of six different authors: Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Lévinas, Gaston Bachelard, Gershom Scholem, as well as the reports and narratives. Therefore, this work stands as a type of "constellation writing", as the result of following the trail of thought of this six-pointed star: a reading on the Shoah Literature.