Traumatized Space. Topography, Dissemination, and Transference of the Holocaust

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Judith Kasper
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2009 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 159010444

Trauma and space are the main concepts of the research project. They evoke a series of heterogeneous problems and methods in literature and cultural studies which here are brought together for the first time and, in this constellation, are newly reflected: on the one hand the results of the trauma research in psychoanalysis, literature and cultural studies; on the other hand the theories of space developed in the last ten years under the sign of the spatial turn. Analyzing representative literary works of the 20th Century (namely Blanchot, Celan, Kertész, Levi, Perec, Semprun etc) which are in favour of a writing after Auschwitz, the research project develops the concept of the traumatized space. This concept will contribute to a problematization of the topological representations of the Holocaust which dominate in cultural memory as well as in cultural studies. Particular attention is dedicated to the role of literature as a space in which on the one hand take place narrative irritations of topological representations of the camp, for instance by an outrageous rapprochement between the home and the camp (Levi, Celan, Kertész), the idyll and the camp (Blanchot, Kofman, Lanzmann). On the other hand the research project elaborates a strong concept of literature as a space of tension and continuous switching between word and spirit, provoking a oscillation between a literal and a realistic reading. Inside the tension and the difference between these two poles are observed and analyzed surprising and new linguistic twists which open a space beyond a traumatic fixation without however falling in the idea of a possible overcoming (especially in Freud, Perec, Goldschmidt, Semprun). Due to the surprising insisting of Dante s Commedia (namely of the Inferno) as an intertextual reflex in numerous texts testifying survive in the concentration camps, the research project concludes with a return from the contemporary literature to the very beginning of modern literature as such. The Commedia on the whole will be conceived as a dispositif providing poetical elements which are able to form a narrative structure in front of an irreparable loss or an insurmountable trauma.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants