“Death as the impossibility of dying”: Trauma and the Self-Reflective Dimension of Writing in the Texts of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2026 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | According to the trauma theorist Alexander Kratochvil, trauma represents the opposite of memory – that is, a kind of rupture in the perception of reality, which can later be healed through the creation of “post-traumatic narratives”. But what happens if one cannot awaken from the nightmare of trauma into the waking day, during which it could be so processed? In other words, what if no period for working through the rupture follows, resulting in a narrative that comments on the traumatic horrors in their immediate proximity? This is precisely what we observe in the book Letters from the Ashes (Dopisy z popela), edited by the Russian historian Pavel Polian. This more than six-hundred-page publication collects all textual materials written by Jews directly within the confines of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. Their authors were specifically prisoners from the so-called Sonderkommando – a group of men assigned by the Nazis to erase traces of German crimes, tasked, for example, with burning the corpses of their fellow inmates. Paradoxically, however, those who were meant to destroy evidence became the authors of uniquely valuable documentary materials. In my presentation, I will therefore focus primarily on the ways in which the trauma associated with facing genocide was embodied by the Sonderkommando members in their written testimonies. I will be particularly interested in the self-reflexive dimension of their writing – these authors explicitly confront the fact that, although they are still alive, their death is inevitable, and it is their texts, rather than they themselves, that will become the surviving witnesses to the crimes. Here, the famous poststructuralist notion of the “death of the author” ceases to be merely a metaphor, and in the pages of the autothanatographic Letters from the Ashes, we therefore encounter what Maurice Blanchot describes as “death as the impossibility of dying. |
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