Testimonies from survivors of Mauthausen

The project deals with the analysis of a corpus that has been collected and archived in two years of preliminary research and that consists of about 200 texts of recollection (reports, memoirs, diaries, autobiographies and more) from Italian, French and Spanish survivors of the concentration camp Mauthausen (and its annexed camps). This extensive textural corpus has been examined by neither international nor national Holocaust-research, let alone been systematically analysed. The applicant is a professor of Romance languages and literature (with authorisation to teach Romance philology and comparative literature). This explains the limitation to texts of French, Italian and Spanish survivors (in numbers this was the largest group of prisoners from Western Europe in the Mauthausen complex) as well as the choice of an approach focusing on textual analysis and hermeneutics, an approach which combines problems of literary studies (autobiography,...) and cultural studies (collective memory, ...) The accurate historical foundation is ensured by a cooperation with contemporary historians in Italy, France and Spain, as well as the institute of history at Salzburg University. The investigation opens up a neglected field of research for German-speaking and international Romance studies. The chosen approach that focuses on textual analysis/hermeneutics methodologically puts the question of how to speak the unspeakable into the centre of interest. The authors of texts on camps are known to see themselves confronted with the difficulty of having to reconstruct their terrible experience from a relatively large distance in time. The motivation to write it down is often the need to testify in order to pre-vent the events from sinking into oblivion and to understand their own survival. When writing, the problem of how to describe these events inevitably arises, because the atrocity of what happened seems to be beyond both the capacity of language and comprehension. This gives the project its special approach: The investigation focuses not so much on what the authors say but on how (i.e. what language, images, patterns and forms are used) they try to express what they assume will be too demanding on both their own expressiveness and their readers` ability to understand. The aim of the project is to write a comprehensive monograph which summarises the results of the investigation on "Speaking the Unspeakable" (language, narrative techniques, strategies of literarization, intertextuality etc. in relation to age, gender, origin, profession etc. of the authors) and which presents the collected corpus of texts in a well-structured way (description of texts, biographies of authors).

The duty to remember the crimes committed during National Socialism belongs to the rhetoric of every commemoration service. At the same time, the incidents and occurrences in the camps recede further into the distance with the deaths of the last contemporary witnesses. The increasing experiential void can only be incompletely filled by memorials, exhibitions, documentaries and films. Should we not seek out the camp experiences where the survivors of the concentration and extermination camps themselves keep them? Scattered all across Europe there are thousands of memoirs in every language. With the exception of the canonical works of Primo Levi and a few other authors, they have never been systematically catalogued. Using two hundred French, Italian, and Spanish memoirs of the concentration camp Mauthausen, the FWF-Project "Speaking the Unspeakable" ["Sagbarkeit des Unsagbaren"] demonstrates a new approach to this immense repository of memories. Our research refutes the impression of what Hannah Arendt has referred to as a "conspicuous monotony" within these testimonies. In fact, the language of every one of these accounts displays a high degree of individuality. The desire to put into words an experience that seems to defy both expression and comprehension requires a wealth of rhetorical decisions (`How do I speak the unspeakable?`). The fact that the texts refer to a single concentration camp, makes it possible to assemble different accounts of the same event. Thus, the survivors experience, remember, and describe the brutal initiation ritual or the liberating rescue in completely different ways. These differences are related to individual as well as collective consciousnesses: a communist writes differently about his survival than a priest, a man differently than a woman, etc. It is all the more interesting when an author writes against the grain of the group to which he belongs: when a Frenchman denies the heroic story of his comrades in the Resistance, an Italian priest casts doubts about the human soul, or a communist re- relates his experience in Mauthausen after his expulsion from the party. The approach developed within the framework of this FWF-Project allows us to discover anew the wrongly forgotten memoirs of the camp and the Shoah, regardless of their literary qualities, and to observe the dialogue taking place between them. Some texts were forgotten only because they appeared to give a different account of the camp than the public expected to hear. Successive projects to systematically catalogue Central and Eastern European memoirs of Mauthausen, comparative studies of other camps, and an analysis of the theme of intercultural conflicts in `camp texts` are planned. Potential practical applications are translations of selected texts from the Mauthausen corpus as well as a more widespread use of memoirs in schools and museums.