In "traumatized space," psychoanalysis and the spatial sciences converge. Europe emerges as a real and simultaneously phantasmic landscape of concentration camps. Literature unsettles all representations of this landscape. In stories of entrapment and exclusion with no way out, ruptures occur. The mission of philology is to validate such moments as being authentically literary without thereby transforming them into signs of salvation.

Judith Kasper, University of Munich LMU, Germany.