Layers of Memory and the Discourse of Human Rights: Artistic and Testimonial Practices in Latin America and Iberia Hispanic Issues On Line (2014) 6 Memory, Postmemory, Prosthetic Memory: Reflections on the Holocaust and the Dirty War in Argentine Narrative (original) (raw)

For many of Argentina's Jews, especially those who were directly affected by the state terror associated with the military junta of 1976-83, or who look back on that era now in the light of subsequent revelations, the Nazi Holocaust resonates deeply with their own nation's Dirty War. Poet and essayist Liliana Lukin, for example, tells how hours of reading novels, autobiographies, memoirs, documents, diaries, and letters about and from the Holocaust has shaped her body, the body of the reader, as has reading the literature, testimonios, and documents written during and after the dictatorship in Argentina. Perhaps most startling, even shocking, is her assertion that the state terror practiced in Argentina during the dictatorship represents the perfecting of the Nazis' Final Solution (Lukin 31-32). Similiarly, when José Pablo Feinmann's narrator, Pablo, argues in La crítica de las armas that geriatric facilities are a kind of concentration camp, he uses as points of comparison both the Nazi and the Argentine camps, making explicit the connection and similarity between the two. All three are places where a certain kind of people are held in one space, a space in which the majority of those people will die. Insofar as the overt brutality of the German and Argentine camps is absent in nursing homes, the former are even more closely aligned: Un geriátrico tiene algo-mucho o poco no sé-de campo de concentración.. .. No hay, en un geriátrico, sádicos SS que disfrutan con el sufrimiento de sus sometidos. No hay oficiales o suboficiales del Ejército Argentino, o de su Marina, o su Aeronáutica. Los viejitos de los