Abstract
The Holocaust as an unprecedented fact in the history of mankind has become a widely literary subject initiated by the survivors who felt the need to share their experience and then captivate the interest of other authors. This body of works gave origin to a literary subgenre: the Holocaust literature. However, in Portugal, writers did not show interest in that subject, except for Ilse Losa (1913-2006), a Portuguese/German author born to a Jewish family who was forced to leave Germany due to Nazi persecution. The Holocaust is a recurring subject in the work of this writer and it is the subject of this dissertation The Representation of Holocaust in Ilse Losa. This study focuses on the analyses of the novels O mundo em que vivi (1949), Rio sem ponte (1952), Sob cÊus estranhos (1962) and some short stories in the volume Caminhos sem destino (1991). In addition to a chapter dedicated to the contextualization of the work of Ilse Losa’s Holocaust Literature and Portuguese Literature, this authors’ novels are perceived as a guide to explore what is concentrated in the analysis of the following aspects: the time periods of the historical fact (the years before, during and after the Holocaust) and the values that prevailed; the elements involved in that event (the victims, the perpetrators, the bystanders and the opponents of the regime); the literary devices that sustained this representation (the type of narrator, the flashbacks and the flashforwards, the use of the letter as a narrative technique, the act of remembering and the physical description); and the words in which one can conceive a pedagogical dimension in these novels.
Key-words Holocaust, Ilse Losa, Holocaust literature, Memory, Representation