Otto Maria Carpeaux: O que Não Pôde Ser Dito

Abstract

To reconstitute lives in written form is also to navigate the silences of the protagonists. In this essay, which is part of a larger universe of study focused on Jewish intellectuals who were persecuted by Nazism and took refuge in Brazil, we turn to the silence of one of those characters, Otto Maria Carpeaux (Viena, 1908 – Rio de Janeiro, 1978), and to the discoveries that resulted from the analysis of documents obtained from archives in Austria and Israel, which reveal aspects not recorded by the historiography with regard both to the author’s origins and to his past of persecutions in Europe. In addition to the interest to Carpeaux’s own trajectory, such findings confirm that, in his case, the exile did not mean the end of violence.