In Bernardo Kucinski's novel "K" a Polish-Jewish father living in Brazil confronts the disappearance of his daughter by the military dictatorship by relating and converging the current situation with the trauma of the Holocaust and political persecution in 1930's Europe, facing an unprecedented and incomprehensible pain he elaborates the trauma and the political situation of the present with the vocabulary of traumas past.
Though Philip Roth claimed his novel The Plot Against America was not written in response to the Bush administration it was received and read as such: the tale of a possible Holocaust as metaphor for the present authoritarianism of American politics. The reappearance of the novel in best-seller lists and its adaptation as a TV series in the Trump administration points to a recurrence of this device: as politics turn traumatic, the language and framework of the Holocaust provides an archetype for understanding and confronting the present.
This paper aims to analyze the way in which both novels evoque the Holocaust to address the present as well as the contradictions and consequences of the uses of past trauma as archetype and how convergence of this sort can either clarify or obscure one or both of the events.
