Entangled Memories and their Dynamics: "h/Holocaust" in Colombian Literature from 1985 until 2022

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Verena Dolle
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543780449

The Holocaust against the European Jews has entered deep into the collective consciousness, in particular since the end of the 1970s and become a cosmopolitan memory not only in the USA and Europe but also in the countries of Latin America. This is certainly related partly, as in Europe, to the impact of the US TV series "Holocaust" from 1978 and the feature films of the 1990s, but also to the first literary articulation of second and third generation Jewish-Latin American authors to a wider public, especially in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. As descendants of Eastern European Jews, they are reflecting in Spanish on their family roots in a culture destroyed by the Nazis and on their own location in countries that, although not directly affected by the Holocaust, were often marked by brutal military dictatorships and decades of internal conflict. Colombia is not only the Latin American country with the longest internal conflict lasting more than 60 years, which according to the final report of the Truth Commission of June 2022 has claimed some nine million victims; compared with other (Latin American) countries, Colombia is also characterized by ist very specific use of the term "holocaust" in public discourse to refer to a national event. Since November 1985, the Spanish term "holocausto", written in lower case and more in the sense of "burnt sacrifice" - in strong distinction from the "Holocausto" of the 20th century, written in capital letters in Spanish, has been used to refer to an event that took place around the Palace of Justice in Bogotá in November 1985 and is still traumatic in the collective memory today, with approximately 100 dead or disappeared persons. It can be assumed that this unusual and irritating use of the term from a German point of view has to do with the increased media presence of the term Holocaust with a capital H in the American-European area since 1978, although the dimensions of the two contexts - the Colombian and the systematic mass murder of more than six million European Jews - are clearly not comparable. Starting from this massacre around the Palace of Justice, ist name and the connotations that ultimately resonate with it, diverse strands of memory and narration of experiences of violence have unfolded in literary texts and are entangled with the European Holocaust and the atrocities of the National Socialists. These strands clearly show that even in countries of the Global South that were not directly involved in the events of World War II and the Holocaust, such as Colombia, a somehow self-contained tradition of remembrance in processing these is evident. The project is dedicated to the entanglements and dynamics of these memories in a corpus of ten works, most of them published since 2004.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants