The trans-memory of images, feel time and look after: the sonderkommando case

Abstract

If the memory was, since its inception, as a privileged terrain of history, it is no less important for other areas of thought, such as the arts. If history has used it and integrated it as one of its fundamental concepts, transforming it into an operative concept of thought, the arts allow us to describe the "posthumous life" of the forms of culture and a rtistic manifestations. Recall, Walter Benjamin and his concept of "Remembrance", like the very concept of Aby Warburg, namely the "Surviving Image", and here appears another component, which unfolds from that: the relation of the image to the story itself and also to the memory that survives in the images. This article intends to analyze the four photographs that were taken by prisoners of AuschwitzBirkenau camp at risk of life, the Sonderkommandos, showing that the images are the hypothesis of reconstruction of the testimony.