engleski

The Concentration Camp on the River Sava. What Remains Afterwards?

Giorgio Agamben in his Remnants of Auschwitz proposes that whereas an adequate historical account of the Final Solution is available, we have yet to grasp its ethical and political significance. There is, in his vew, an unbridgeable gap between the traumatic experience of the victims/survivors and our own understanding of its larger implications. Agamben studies Holocaust testimony in an attempt to close this gap but comes to similar conclusion as Shoshana Felman few years earlier: the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. Following Primo Levi's testimony, Agamben realizes that the only true witness (Muselmann) didn't survive. But while in Felman's discussion on Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah history returns in the song of a survivor, for Agamben only a rupture in representation itself can bear witness to the extreme reality of the camps. The Muselmann is important in Agamben's thinking on Auschwitz not only as the extreme figure of the impossibility of witnessing but as the image of an historical trauma or the figure of an unthinkable reality, an incomprehensible historical transformation of the human subject into a bare (and unwitnessable) life. Croatian writer Ilija Jakovljević, who was interned at the Stara Gradiška concentration camp (Stara Gradiška was a part of a system of camps, its center being at Jasenovac, the largest concentration camp in the so-called Independent State of Croatia, founded in 1941 under the auspices of Nazi Germany) in his novel Concentration camp on the river Sava (Konclogor na Savi, 1999.), by focusing on the figure of perpetrator, opens a different perspective. The purpose of this paper is to examine his testimony with respect to the problems addressed by contemporary trauma theory (LaCapra, Leys, Caruth, Felman), as well as authors concerned with ethical and political significance of the Holocaust (Agamben, Eisenstein, Arendt, Levinas, Badiou).

Jakovljević, testimony, literature, concentration camp

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