Jorge Luis Borges: un requiem per la Germania

Abstract

J.L. Borges can be considered one of the first writers to have told the destiny of National Socialism in fiction. A few years after Hitler’s defeat, in February 1946, one year after the start of the Nuremberg trial, he published the short story Deutsches Requiem in Sur (later gathered in The Aleph): it is the propaganda and immoral delirium of a criminal looking for an existential justification. The monologue of the Nazi torturer hypothesizes an “individual teleology” able to justifies his destiny together with that of Germany, which explains the controversial opinions expressed by critics and intellectuals on the tale. My essay aims to focus on the most problematic issues of the text, taking into account the six theoretical essays on Nazism that precede it (the articles and essays published in Sur between 1937 and 1946), and also the reviews published in El Hogar in the thirties, which integrate the corpus of texts on which the most important studies are based.

Keywords

• j.l. borges
• deutsches requiem
• hispano-american literature
• germany
• national socialism