The concentration prisoner

Confined aesthetics

Abstract

Through the works of the authors that we have gathered here under the name of concentration prisoners, or also prisoners of lager, such as the Spaniard Jorge Semprún (1923-2011), the Romanian-Israeli Aarón Appelfeld (1932-2018), the Austrian nationalized Belgian Jean Amery (1912-1978) or the Hungarian Imre Kerstérz (1929-2016), we propose a reflection on the linguistic dehumanization that runs parallel to the withdrawal of the human condition of prisoners. Each of the authors cited will try to find a way out of the confinement that can not left behind, because they still live the lager as their most daily reality. If Appelfeld decides to look at soah from the innocence of a child, assuming a worldview in which creativity is at a stage prior to rationalization and conceptualization, thus avoiding skepticism, to explain the non-biographical realism of his novels, Kerstérz must to mark distances and justify itself in the face of the new French realism that spreads under Robe-Grillet’s objectivism; while Semprún defends the “artifice “ as a way of communicate not only about the unimaginable, but about the unlivable, Amery, in turn, narrates, first from perplexity and then from desolation and anger, the existential emptiness of seeing his language native invaded by totalitarianism. Through them, we observe the different literary and existential solutions, not always successful, to get out of a confinement that keeps them in its midst.