The Nazi Concentrationary Machine. The Human Body between Tearing and Annihilation in La Part du fils by Jean-Luc Coatelem

This article aims to explore the representation of the human body and its metamorphoses during the Second World War. The material on which the present analysis relies is provided by Jean-Luc Coatalem’s novel La part du fils (2019), a narrative approaching and insisting on the idea of the human being as a convict trapped between destruction, body decomposition, and alienation. Committed to his sense of moral and familial duty, the narrator starts his investigation to reconstruct his grandfather’s identity, annihilated in a German concentration camp. His fruitful research delivers material rich in details about the practices of the Nazi system and particularly about the concentration machine. Unjustified arrests, the detention of those considered dangerous to the system, deportation, forced labour, violence, starvation, and sleep deprivation become agents of metamorphosis in the carceral space where most of the captives have been annihilated. Accordingly, our analysis aims, on the one hand, to expose war in its most detailed form and the whole process referring to arrest, imprisonment, and forced labour. On the other hand, the analysis focuses on the functional Nazi mechanism to reveal the human being in the complete process of extinction, specifically through physical destruction, alienation or, more frequently, a fusion of both.