On the Edge of the Holocaust: The Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture by Edna Aizenberg (review)

Focusing mostly on “Deutsches Requiem,” a story that appeared in Borges’s collection of stories El Aleph in 1949 and that has only recently received critical attention, Aizenberg claims that Borges “recognized early on that the reality of Auschwitz demanded a poetics of saying and unsaying –on the one hand, mimetic approximation, documentary accumulation; on the other, escape, fantasy, fragmentation, fractured discourse.” (16) He therefore created a main speaker who was a Nazi about to be executed for his participation in the Holocaust but juxtaposed that narrative with the comments of an editor presented in the footnotes. [...]through these two voices, he exposed his desire to understand “from within” what had brought the Germany he so admired to the brink of its demise, while also hinting at his other deeply felt desire that Nazi Germany be defeated for its atrocious crimes. Working through the symbolism within the novel (a women’s organization that pursues an ideal that has to be followed blindly; Greek statues; airplanes constantly flying; the threat of food shortages; trains that spell death and pain), and contextualizing them within Lispector’s experiences in a war-ridden Europe, Aizenberg illuminates the author’s attempt at understanding the fall of the West.