Exile between estrangement and second homeland: affective atmospheres and imaginary geographies in the exile literature of Robert Schopflocher

Abstract

This article analyzes the work of the exiled writer Roberto Schopflocher, who emigrated from Nazi Germany to Argentina with his family as a teenager. Schopflocher dedicated himself to writing literary texts in the last third of his life, an activity that he intensified after his retirement. He wrote his first texts in Spanish, then changed to his mother tongue. The experience of emigration, the arrival in the “new homeland” and the “integration” in it are very resent motifs in his literary work. This article analyzes these facets, focusing both on the Jewish experience of migration and on the imaginary significance of the geographies of the “new homeland”.