Salzburger Mauthausenprojekt
French, italian, spanish testimonies of survivors

FWF-Projekt 2002 - 2005

Short presentation
The project deals with the analysis of a corpus that has been collected and archived in two years of preliminary research and that consists of about 200 texts of recollection (reports, memoirs, diaries, autobiographies and more) from Italian, French and Spanish survivors of the concentration camp Mauthausen (and its annexed camps). This (surprisingly) extensive textural corpus has been examined by neither international nor national Holocaust-research, let alone been systematically analysed. The applicant is a professor of Romance languages and literature (with authorisation to teach Romance philology and comparative literature).
This explains on the one hand the limitation to texts of French, Italian and Spanish survivors (in numbers this was the largest group of prisoners from Western Europe in the Mauthausen complex), on the other hand the choice of an approach focusing on textual analysis and hermeneutics, an approach which combines problems of literary studies (authobiograhy,...) and cultural studies (the memory as an object of research, ...) The accurate historical foundation is ensured by a co-operation with contemporary historians in Italy, France and Spain, as well as the department for contemporary history of the institute of history at Salzburg University. The investigation opens up a neglected field of research for German-speaking and international Romance studies. The chosen approach that focuses on textual analysis/hermeneutics methodologically puts the question of how to speak the unspeakable into the centre of interest. The authors of texts on camps are known to see themselves confronted with the difficulty of having to reconstruct their terrible experience from a relatively large distance in time. The motivation to write it down is often the need to testify in order to prevent the events from sinking into oblivion and to understand, or even to justify their own survival. When writing, the problem of how to describe these events inevitably arises, because the atrocity of what happened seems to be beyond both the capacity of language and comprehension. This gives the project its special approach: The investigation focuses not so much on what the authors say but on how (i.e. what language, images, patterns, forms and examples are used) they try to express what they assume will be too demanding on both their own expressiveness and their readers´ ability to understand.
The aim of the project is to write a comprehensive monograph which summarises the results of the investigation on "Speaking the Unspeakable" (language, narrative techniques, strategies of literarization, intertextuality and so on in relation to age, gender, level of education, origin, profession and so on of the authors) and which presents the collected corpus of texts in a well-structured way (descriptions of texts, biographies of authors).
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