"After Dachau" Daniela Quinna. Odpominanie Holokaustu: afekt, pobudzenie, transkrypta

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of Daniel Quinn’s After Dachau novel, still not translated into Polish, in the context of Holocaust studies, historical and cultural memory, as well as psychoanalytic concepts of Bracha L. Ettinger and the category of the affective impact of works of art. Quinn presents a world in which the crime of the Holocaust has been oblitereted and culturally repulsed, because in this world the Third Reich has won World War II. After Dachau is an alternate history novel and, as such, it provides a significant contribution to the discussions about the obligation to remember historical traumas—including the Shoah and wider, the history of genocide. Quinn problematizes the issues of a painful individual process of disremembering and impelling the society to recall the rejected memory of crimes. And since in the novel the process of recollection of cultural memory is induced by works of art, this analysis utilises Ettinger’s concepts of affect and matrix.

Keywords

• allohistory
• alternate history
• counterfactuality
• after dachau
• daniel quinn
• bracha ettinger
• psychoanalysis
• transcriptum