L’hora blanca

Joaquim Amat-Piniella is one of the greatest European writers of the Nazi concentration camps literature. His great novel on the human condition, ‘K.L. Reich’ (1946), is a well-measured and deep reflection on the extent of the tragedy that the Holocaust meant, also for the Spanish republicans. The book is an important contribution as it is prior to works by such writers as Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún, Hannah Arendt or Ellie Wiesel. Moreover, from a secular perspective, it becomes a precursor of the humanist existentialism, represented by Albert Camus.

In exile and with words as his only weapon, he is confronted with “understanding” and “making understand”, in the words of Jean Améry and Giorgio Agamben, the horror a human being can be submitted to. Word becomes the medium through which art leads to “catharsis” – as Imre Kertész admits, a catharsis of the “white hour” (“L’hora blanca”), which is to give birth to a new person.