Writing Occupation

Author(s):  
Julia Elsky

Why did some of the most brilliant—but often forgotten—Jewish émigré writers of the first half of the twentieth century choose to write in French as a second language, even as they faced a double exclusion as foreigners and as Jews under Vichy? Jewish writers of Eastern European origin who immigrated to France before the Second World War (including Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, Irène Némirovsky, and Elsa Triolet) switched from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, even when their Frenchness was being violently denied by the state. In this manuscript, Julia Elsky argues that these Jewish émigré writers harnessed the potential multilingualism of French to express hybrid and shifting cultural, religious, and linguistic identities before and during the Occupation. When the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied them their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws, Jewish émigré authors from Eastern Europe began to re-examine, and in some cases, reassert their role in the French nation by exploring the possibilities of writing with a “Jewish voice” in the French language. In depicting key aspects of the war experience—the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the Resistance in France and in London—their work contests the boundaries between foreignness and belonging.

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Kennedy

Abstract This paper argues that André Siegfried’s writings on Canada played a critical role in shaping his vision of French national identity. Siegfried’s studies of Canada have long been praised for their insight, but recent scholarship has emphasized his role in promoting both anti-Americanism and an exclusionary vision of what it meant to be French during the first half of the twentieth century. For Siegfried, Canada represented a site of managed contestation between British and French culture but also an early example of the deleterious effects of Americanization. His problematic view of French Canada as essentially conservative and unchanging in the face of such challenges reinforced his conviction that France itself should remain true to “traditional” values. The exclusionary implications of his ideas were most evident when Siegfried appeared to accommodate himself to the Vichy regime, but they also persisted after the Second World War.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-246
Author(s):  
Tadd Graham Fernée

This article comparatively examines French and English literature based on two novels published in 1947, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Jean-Louis Curtis’ The Forests of Night. Both novels employ the mythic device to construct narratives on the twilight of the British Empire and the German occupied French Vichy regime, respectively, depicting experiences of resistance and collaboration on the eve of and during the Second World War. Both invent a system of symbolic imagery modelled on the Surrealist template in Jean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, that turns the classical mythic device still prevalent in the early 20th century (i.e. in Joyce or Eliot) upside down. The revolution in Mythic Imagination follows the Structuralist Revolution initiated by Durkheim, Saussure and Bachelard, evacuating fixed ontological architecture to portray relational interdependency without essence. These novels pursue overlapping ethical investigations, on “non-interventionism” in Lowry and “fraternity” in Curtis. The novels raise questions about the relation between colonialism and fascism and the impact of non-Western mythic universes (i.e. Hinduism) upon the Mythic Imagination. They have implications for our understanding of gender relations, as well as the value of political activism and progress.


Author(s):  
Rowena Ward

The pre-1941 Japanese population of New Caledonia was decimated by the French administration’s decision to transfer most of the Japanese residents to Australia for internment at the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific theatre of the Second World War. Among the men transferred to Australia were ten men who had been formerly French nationals but had lost their French nationality by decree. The French Administration’s ability to denationalise and intern and then subsequently repatriate the former-Japanese French-nationals was possible due to changes to the French nationality laws and regulations introduced by the Vichy regime. This paper considers the case of the Japanese who had taken French nationality and were denationalised in the context of the changes to the French nationality laws that, in turn, negatively affected the post-1945 sustainability of the Japanese community in New Caledonia.


2004 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacklyn Young

In recent years museums and galleries have come under scrutiny following claims that artworks confiscated or looted during the Second World War, and still unaccounted for, have made their way into public collections. In response, many such institutions worldwide have been endeavouring to reaffirm the integrity of their collections. The Queensland Art Gallery has established a Provenance Research Team to complete its records for artworks of European origin which have missing provenance details during the period 1933-1945. This paper highlights the role the Gallery Library is taking in supporting the project.


Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 110
Author(s):  
Axel Stähler

Looking at short stories by writers as diverse as Brian Glanville, Ruth Fainlight, Clive Sinclair, Jonathan Wilson, James Lasdun, Gabriel Josipovici, Tamar Yellin, Michelene Wandor, and Naomi Alderman, and extending from the center of Jewish British writing to its margins, this article seeks to locate the defining feature of their ‘Jewish substratum’ in conditions particular to the Jewish post-war experience, and to trace its impact across their thematic plurality which, for the most part, transcends any specifically British concerns that may also emerge, opening up an Anglophone sphere of Jewish writing. More specifically, it is argued that the unease pervading so many Jewish British short stories since the 1970s is a product of, and response to, what may very broadly be described as the Jewish experience and the precarious circumstances of Jewish existence even after the Second World War and its cataclysmic impact. It is suggested that it is prompted in particular by the persistence of the Holocaust and the anxieties the historical event continues to produce; by the confrontation with competing patterns of identification, with antisemitism, and with Israel; and by anxieties of non-belonging, of fragmentation, of dislocation, and of dissolution. Turned into literary tropes, these experiences provide the basis of a Jewish substratum whose articulation is facilitated by the expansion of Jewish British writers into the space of Anglophone Jewish writing. As a result, the Jewish British short story emerges as a multifaceted and hybrid project in continuous progress.


Tekstualia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (51) ◽  
pp. 127-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Więckiewicz

The point of departure in the present article is a discussion of the concept of multidirectional memory, the category proposed by Michael Rothberg in his book ANGIELSKI TYTUŁ. The article then analyzes the memoirs by Jewish-Austrian Ruth Klüger and Afro-German Hans-Jürgen Massaquoia, as examples of transnational narratives. It thus highlights the problem of the war experience of black Germans, concomitantly tracing the process of identity formation resulting from an ethnic person’s dialogue with the representatives of other marginalized and oppressed groups within the Nazi system


Author(s):  
Theodor Michael

This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is the last surviving member of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent. His life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora.


2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Chieh Huang

AbstractThe General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the Word Trade Organization (WTO), have been the main forum of international trade since the end of the Second World War. The regime is unquestionably based on free-market rules and principles. Yet in the last two decades, formerly planned economies — including Eastern European countries, former Soviet countries and China — have attempted to join the GATT/WTO. To encourage their transition under the influence of free-market principles, and to be a truly global trade organization, the GATT/WTO has accepted applicants with a reforming planned economy. This article studies the evolution of the GATT/WTO's approaches to integrate non-market economies and shows that the approach to integrate non-market economies during the WTO era is significantly different than during the GATT. While special mechanisms were provided in GATT accession protocols to bridge different market structures, WTO accessions require non-market economies to convert their own market structures. This article holds that this intolerance of different market structures in the WTO reflects the collapse of embedded liberalism and the rise of coercive trade diplomacy. Multilateral trade diplomacy has therefore become a means of imposing a domestic restructuring of economic structures rather than providing a negotiation forum for trade liberalization.


2002 ◽  
Vol 147 (3) ◽  
pp. 92-94
Author(s):  
George C Kieffer ◽  
Claire Harder

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
NILS ARNE SØRENSEN

After the liberation in 1945, two conflicting narratives of the war experience were formulated. A consensus narrative presented the Danish nation as being united in resistance while a competing narrative, which also stressed the resistance of most Danes, depicted the collaborating Danish establishment as an enemy alongside the Germans. This latter narrative, formulated by members of the resistance movement, was marginalised after the war and the consensus narrative became dominant. The resistance narrative survived, however, and, from the 1960s, it was successfully retold by the left, both to criticise the Danish alliance with the ‘imperialist’ United States, and as an argument against Danish membership of the EC. From the 1980s, the right also used the framework of the resistance narrative in its criticism of Danish asylum legislation. Finally, liberal Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen started using it as his basic narrative of the war years (partly in order to legitimise his government's decision to join the war against Iraq in 2003). The war years have thus played a central role in Danish political culture since 1945, and in this process the role of historians has been utterly marginal.


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