Cultural Trauma in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night

Abstract

This research on Primo Levi's If This is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night tries to explore cultural trauma as the narrating witness in these two autobiographies recount their traumas of the Holocaust.Themajorobjective is to understand therelationship betweencultural trauma and collective identity: how the threat to Jewish cultural identityleads to the forging of cultural trauma in the two memoirs. The studyargues thattrauma of Levi and Wiesel grounded in the events of the Holocaust, becomes a way of stressing the ethical character of the cultural trauma process.Even though trauma is fundamentally a matter of psychology, it is equally a matter of social construction as the survivors have to live in harmony with socio-cultural and religious surroundings. Even if Levi and Wiesel try to psychologically release themselves of the traumatic experience of the Holocaust, they cannot help making it a cultural trauma.