Jewish Sources of the Twentieth Century: Auschwitz and its Remnants

Though Auschwitz became the emblematic topos of the XX century catastrophe, it is still not clear what it stands for, especially in historical representation. Its reconstruction tries to get closed to what Primo Levi has called the black hole of its intelligibility. Whether we are considering the realm of purely theoretical and historical discourse or its broader public use, Shoah memory flows through texts as a social, political and cultural unifying and catalyzing device that describes a crucial and peculiar illusion of our era. This memory praxis increasingly involves a great number of texts many of which necessitate some form of intellectual intervention. Texts bear the mark of an epoch, they change public discourse and in doing so they may very well detach themselves from the intentions of their authors. The need that the present paper is motivated by is twofold. If from one side it is part of the on-going debate about the limits of representation after Auschwitz, on the other side it has another purpose, maybe even more important than the first one that is to define the use and the goal, as an historian, in the aftermath of the event, of the Jewish Books known as Shoah texts.