An intellectual at Mauthausen: Aldo Bizzarri between essay, fiction (and cinema)

Abstract

This article offers an overview and analysis of the concentration camp writings of Aldo Bizzarri, an Italian political deportee at Mauthausen concentration camp during 1944-1945. Bizzarri had a varied career as a writer, essayist and cultural diplomat before deportation and as a journalist and writer after the war. He wrote two important books about his experiences at Mauthausen and also worked on a film with a concentration camp setting. His experimentation in these different forms, it is argued, is symptomatic of the variety and complexity of early attempts to find an appropriate idiom to represent the Lager phenomenon and the Nazis’ genocidal violence.

Keywords

• concentration camp literature
• Bizzarri (Aldo)
• Holocaust
• early representations
• testimony and non-testimony
• Levi (Primo)