The memory of the horror: performing the concentration camps

Abstract

This paper focuses on the dramatic works about the experience on the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Among the plays addressing this theme, this study concentrates on two works: El campo (1968), by the Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro and J´attendrai (2014), by the Spanish playwright José Ramón Fernández. This corpus will be useful to analyse the characteristics and different perspectives on this common subject: the temporal distance between each of the plays and the historical events; their different context of production (the dictatorship in Argentina; the democracy in Spain); the desire to criticize the oppression in contrast to the claim on historical memory; Gambaro´s Neovanguardia style and Fernández´s poetic realism... In short, the corpus examined will enable the examination of dissimilar ways to reproduce, both aesthetically and thematically, the horror lived in concentration camps.