Archiválható-e a trauma? Holokausztáldozatok azonosítása kortárs „archív” dokumentumfilmekben
Can Trauma Be Archived? Identifying Holocaust Victims in Contemporary “Archival” Documentaries

Summary/Abstract: Drawing on Ernst van Alphen’s Pierre Janet-inspired distinction between narrative and traumatic memory, this essay asks how contemporary archival Holocaust documentaries relate to trauma – not by illustrating it, but by working through it in different registers. The films Nelly and Nadine (2022), Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021) and The Exit of the Trains (2020) each build their own investigative process into their visible structures, treating fragmentary source material as monument rather than mere document, in Foucault’s and Blümlinger’s sense. Reading this practice against the administrative, ideological and ultimately absolute registers of Nazi dehumanisation theorised by Hilberg, Bauman, Sofsky and Agamben, the essay argues that the act of naming and facing the victims constitutes a partial, symbolic reversal of that erasure – one that reaches a precise limit at the figure of the Muselmann. Taken together, the three films trace trauma not as a single shared form but as a spectrum between narrative mastery and unresolved recurrence.

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