Representações do Holocausto: o mito de Antígona revisitado por Grete Weil

Abstract

In general terms, the concept of myth can be defined as a story or a report with exemplar value that did not crystallize in the time it was created and that, at least in its origin, demonstrates the eruption of the sacred or supernatural in the world (Brunel et al. 1983, 125). As time elapses, different reinterpretations of myths are elaborated, which in reality seek to point out problems and concerns that mark a specific period. On the other hand, Victor Jabouille draws our attention to the fact that “a myth, an anonymous and collectively accepted product, has, at a certain point, a literary materialization. That text though is part of the history of the myth but it is not the myth. It is simply a form it adopts at a certain moment” (Jabouille 1993, 24). The myth of Antigone, in the context of Second World War Germany, was object of several updates. 1948 drama Die Antigone des Sophokles, by Bertold Brecht, Rolf Hochhuth’s novel Die Berline Antigone, published in 1963, and Meine Schwester Antigone, an autobiographical novel published in 1980 by Grete Weil, a Jewish author and survivor, – are some examples of materializations of this particular myth. The present essay aims at presenting Grete Weil’s first autobiographical novel, which would be received with high acclaim both by the public and the literary critic. In Weil’s text, Antigone, the great mythical figure and symbol of resistance that preferred death to abiding by the orders of the king of Tebas, is the model that the narrator regrets not to have followed. Departing from the present, Weil sets out a journey through her memories, examining a past that is filled with violence and bemoaning the Jewish incapacity to upraise and contradict the objectives of the national-socialist project.