Exile between estrangement and second homeland: affective atmospheres and imaginary geographies in the literary texts by exiled Roberto Schopflocher

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the work of the exiled writer Roberto Schopflocher, who emigrated from Nazi Germany to Argentina with his family as a teenager. Schopflocher dedicated himself to writing literary texts in the last third of his life, an activity that he intensified after his retirement. He wrote his first texts in Spanish, then changed to his mother tongue. The experience of emigration, the arrival in the “new homeland” and the “integration” in it are very present motifs in his literary work. This article analyzes these facets, focusing both on the Jewish experience of migration and on the imaginary significance of the geographies of the “new homeland”.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• Jewish-Argentine identities
• imaginary geographies
• homeland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Grinberg and Grinberg, Psicoanálisis, 13-36.

2 Sosnowski, Senkman and Goldberg, Fluchtpunkt, 35-56.

3 see Eser, Affektraum.

4 “(M)igration is not an isolated traumatic experience, which manifests itself at the moment of departure-separation from the place of origin, or at the moment of arrival in the new place … On the contrary, it includes a constellation of determining factors of anxiety and grief”. Grinberg and Grinberg, Psicoanálisis, 23.

5 Gross, Heimat, 105.

6 Grinberg and Grinberg, Psicoanálisis, 37.

7 The reflections of the Romanist Leo Spitzer on affections in spatial terms and on the semantic field of concepts such as “milieu”, “ambience”, “Stimmung” and belonging, realized in its own precarious situation of exile, are an interesting example of existentially motivated reflections on “exile” and belonging in academic history; see Spitzer, Milieu.

8 see Eser, Affektraum, 31–34.

9 Grinberg and Grinberg, Psicoanálisis, 98.

10 Ibid.

11 see Gross, Heimat, 109.

12 Schopflocher, Weit, 112-119.

13 Schopflocher, quoted in Lubich, Strahlen, 495.

14 Schopflocher, Weit, 1.

15 Alfredo Bauer published books on topics related to his professional practice – doctor and gynecologist – and also linked to political and social issues regarding the place of women in contemporary society. In his literary and essayistic writings, Bauer has explored his own situation and positioning as an exile as well as his location in political-ideological terrains, in the religious field (his dialogue with Judaism), and at the level of national-cultural ideologies. Bauer is mentioned in the Metzler Lexikon der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur; Bolbecher, Bauer, 26-27.

16 Between 1933 and 1940, 40,000 people fled to Argentina.

17 see Lubich, Strahlen.

18 Centro DIHA, Homenajea.

19 see Eser, Affektraum.

20 Falcke, Leben.

21 Schopflocher, Fluch, 273–326.

22 Schopflocher, Verfremdung, 58.

23 Schopflocher, Über dieses Buch, 178f.

24 Schopflocher, Verfremdung, 59.

25 Schopflocher, Skizze; Lubich, Strahlen, 504.

26 Schopflocher, Uhrmacher, 89-101.

27 Schopflocher, Erinnyen, 145-174.

28 Schopflocher, Über dieses Buch, 179.

29 Sneh, Gerchunoff, 17f.

30 Senkman, Gauchos, 144.

31 Aizenberg, Others, 22.

32 Senkman (Gauchos, 144) stresses that Gerchunoff’s rendering of shtetl draws on both Gospel motifs and the poetic tellurism of Argentine regionalist writers who coined a poetry of the land, integrating labor, nature, and the criollo spirit in a rural ontological vision of the land; see also Aizenberg, Others, and Sneh, Gerchunoff.

33 Schopflocher, Wie Reb Froike, 43-88.

34 The story of Froike’s saving intervention is part of a complex narrative constellation that intertwines different temporalities and levels of action, which cannot be reproduced here.

35 Schopflocher, Seltsam vertraut, 42-68.

36 For an interpretation of the spatial logic of the cemetery, see Lehman (Jewish Colonia, 313), who thematizes this account in detail.

37 Flusser, Brasilianische, 77.

38 Flusser, Wohnung, 253 f.

 

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Notes on contributors

Patrick Eser

Dr. Patrick Eser holds a Ph. D. from Philipps University, Marburg. He teaches at Facultad Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, holding there the Walter Benjamin Chair and being a representative of the DAAD (German Service of Academic Exchange). This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.