Elaboration of the past and temporality in Kertész, Pahor and Frankl

This book leads us to question why members of the testimonial literary category consciously use their writings to think about, among many other issues, why a Europe that, even if reunified, is marked by the dread of remembrance caused by monuments to the Holocaust and how testimony carries at its core an ambiguous topos, a lacunar truth that constitutes it. This is the impotence of the language we know to narrate what happened, a representative force that is necessary and impossible at the same time, a power that takes strength in its own impotence to tell of an unheard-of violence... To testify on behalf of those who died would be, in addition to an ambiguous ethical requirement, a reconciliation with one’s own guilt for having survived, and therefore this is the need for specific writing strategies.