Tuitéame cómo pasó: narrating Mauthausen, transmitting trauma, and witnessing in @Deportado4443

Abstract

ABSTRACT In January 2015, the Twitter account @Deportado4443 began sharing the harrowing story of Antonio Hernández Marín (1907–1992), whose exile from Spain following the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Nazi capture and eventual deportation to the Mauthausen camp in Austria was communicated through 140-character posts and images to the account’s 40,000 followers. This essay theorizes the use of Twitter as a groundbreaking format for the purposes of twenty-first-century witnessing of concentration camp atrocities. Three dimensions of the Twitter account @Deportado4443 are essential to its reconfiguration of narratives about the Spanish Civil War, the Republican exile and the Nazi camp: its virtual platform as a way to transmit a familial-personal history; its use of the fragment to relate the trauma of the camp in its brute simplicity to readers; and its significance for the theorization of witnessing. These three characteristics of @Deportado4443 are all inextricably linked to its social media format as a Twitter account. @Deportado4443 reaches a mass audience as it shares repressed memories of Republican Spain, thus crafting a unique text that implicates its 2010s readers as potential witnesses to events occurring during the 1940s. The essay ultimately examines the possibilities and limitations of this Twitter project not only as a way to access the history of the Spanish Civil War and of Republicans in the Nazi concentration camps, but also to alter our understanding of the notion of the witness.