In L'Écriture ou la vie (1994) Jorge Semprún reflects on the difficulties of writing about his internment in the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War. He also thinks about the need to opt for life when the memories of the camp, as revitalized in his writing, strive for its impedance. The author struggles for a standpoint in this difficult transaction, between permitting the urgency to write devour his life or living a present grounded on the erasure of the past. In the novel studied here, Semprún places his having lived through horror in a framework that does not banalize this experience, one that allows him to portray his past, find a voice, speak, and write the truth of the camp without having to give up life. To do this he will need to open the Derridean archive to include experiences like his in need of a language and meaning. This also sets Semprún on the search for an interlocutor, one who will be able to recognize the author's right to personal memory. In the post-national state as defined by Jürgen Habermas, Semprún will be able to articulate a memoir of the horror of Buchenwald, one that will allow him to define the kind of political action needed to impede the emergence of concentration camps in the future.Spanish writer Jorge Semprún's critical project is dedicated to revealing the difficulties he faces in writing about his internment in the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War. In L'Écriture ou la vie (1994), the tensions reside between the need for a closure that is conducive to survival and a written memory of that experience which seems to impede, in fact, the very process leading to resolution and closure. Semprún, much like other Holocaust survivors, is tempted at first to erase this horrific and annihilating past as a strategy of overcoming the camp. He strives for a position that will allow him to find a middle ground between permitting the urgency to write to devour his life or living a present grounded upon the erasure of the past. The novel studied here avoids conceptualizing the concentration camp experience as an exception. His is an attempt to inform a type of response that will make the camp a relevant part of the present so as not to relegate it to total erasure. To a certain extent, one could argue that Semprún's critical project entails articulating a system of meaning that will accept the senselessness of the camps, one that can incorporate having lived through that horror without banalizing or eliminating the experience as too overpowering. It also entails finding the language to speak and to write the truth of the experience of death without having to renounce life.

In The Son of the Accordion Player, novelist Bernardo Atxaga proposes a new model of Basque identity for the 21st century, a model that distances itself from Romantic notions of identification linked to language, land, and ethnicity. David, the protagonist of the novel, is immersed in a long process of self and collective discovery, one that puts him at first on the road to political violence in the name of Basque identity if only to ''survive'' this terror and discover through the power of writing a more subdued and tranquil cultural identity that he then learns to pass on. This new model he discovers wrestles with the violences of the Spanish Civil War and of the Franco dictatorship in order to put them to rest. Writing, the writing of The Son of the Accordion Player, becomes a site for a version of memory free from melancholia and of impossible redemption.Me propongo estudiar cómo en El hijo del acordeonista (2004) de Bernardo Atxaga emerge una identidad que quiero llamar local, ceñida a un espacio y tiempo concretos. Lo local en el autor no es exclusivamente nacional, pues no se agota en un deseo de estado-nación; no se relaciona con una sola lengua, pues lo vertebran varias; ni es, finalmente, puramente étnico, pues no se encierra en sí mismo, sino

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