Poeticile memoriei la Paul Celan și George Steiner: literatura și culpa supraviețuitorului

Both Paul Celan’s and George Steiner’s writings deal with the relationship between culture and barbarism; both originate in a terrible guilt of the survivor. In Paul Celan’s case, it is the guilt of surviving his own parents, exterminated in an internment camp in the Transnistria Governorate in 1942. In Steiner’s case, when he was 11 years old and on a vacation with his family in New York, his father decided that they would not return to Paris, but remain in the United States; in a few weeks, the Nazi army would occupy Paris; of Steiner’s Jewish colleagues at his elite high school in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, only one would survive (besides Steiner himself). In an autobiographical essay published in 1965 in Commentary, “A Kind of Survivor,” Steiner states directly: “I am a survivor, and not intact.” The Holocaust’s traumatic memory imbues every line in Celan’s poetry and every sentence in Steiner’s scholarly books – long before Holocaust studies became an academic discipline (he has done enormously himself in this respect). The present article documents traces of this fundamental trauma both in Celan’s poetry and in Steiner’s academic and autobiographic writing.

Spatial Contestation of Indo Europeesch Verbond and Japanese Internment Camp in Kesilir Plantation Village 1920s

Kesilir Village, in the southern tip of Banyuwangi, opened as a plantation area in 1920s by Indo Europeesch Verbond (Indo-European Community). Ironically, in the early period of Japanese occupation (1942-1943), the village was converted into an internment camp for Europeans in Java, including the Indo-Dutch community. Interrupted by two ruling regimes and local plantation workers in the colonial era, Kesilir has become a node of the social dynamics of people from various backgrounds. Specters of histories, memories, and the traumas of during colonial era haunted the physical and mental space of the residents, blending with the social spaces up to this day. This study investigates the village’s spatial structure and architectural intervention of two colonial regimes, extending from the opening of the IEV plantation in 1920s until when it was used for internment camp under Japanese occupation in 1943. The main objective of this study is to reconstruct the architectural history of the Kesilir Village by understanding the relationship between environment, built structure, and social dynamics that occurred in the past, through analyzing archival records, spatial structures, and memories. The study of regional morphology is used in this study to dissect maps, notes, sketches, and physical traces that can still be found. Field documentation and archive elicitation were also carried out to capture collective memories that still remain.

Who Was He? Internment, Exile and Ambiguity in Norbert Gstrein’s Novel Die englischen Jahre (The English Years) (1999)

Winner of the Alfred Döblin Preis in 1999, the novel Die englischen Jahre by the Austrian novelist Norbert Gstrein deals with internment and exile in Britain dur- ing and after the Second World War. It centres on the (fictitious) character of Gabriel Hirschfelder, a writer and refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who is detained, with oth- er ‘enemy aliens,’ in a camp on the Isle of Man. There, Nazi sympathisers are interned together with Jewish and political refugees, and the central chapters in the novel depict the conditions and resulting conflicts in the internment camp. Hirschfelder dies in exile at Southend-on-Sea, having confessed shortly before his death that he killed a fellow inmate. This confession as well as reports of a transport of internees sunk off the coast of Scotland in 1940 incite a young Austrian woman to try to solve the mystery surrounding Hirschfelder and his allegedly lost autobiography The English Years. The paper discusses how Gstrein combines different genres like the historical novel/historiographic metafic- tion and the whodunit as well as using multiple narrative perspectives and refractions to pinpoint questions of shifting identities and allegiances, and of belonging and alienation in the wake of internment and exile.

Hiroshima/Vietnam/Tule Lake

The origin of Asian American political identity was not in cultural nationalism but in diasporic consciousness, most notably in the concept of solidarity with Third World peoples struggling against imperialism around the globe. The poetry of Janice Mirikitani juxtaposes locations from Vietnam to Zimbabwe to the Tule Lake internment camp, making transnational political solidarity prior to, not dependent upon, racial identification. In contrast, the anthology Aiiieeeee!, often cited as the origin of Asian American literary politics, emphasizes the integrity of the individual writer over communal identification. Restoring Mirikitani’s place in the history of Asian American literature also restores a coalitional, transnational vision of Asian American politics that lays the groundwork for a contemporary poetics of the Asian diaspora.

Alien Internment in John Galsworthy’s ‘The Bright Side’ and ‘The Dog It was that Died’

This article illuminates two short stories by John Galsworthy through examining them with the help of his diaries and letters, a handful of unpublished letters by his nephew from an internment camp and secondary historical sources. It argues that the stories, when read in conjunction with these sources, are highly revealing about human nature during Second World War and also about Galsworthy’s prescient fears concerning a second twentieth-century world war, which he did not live to see.

Separated Families and Epistolary Assistance

This article focuses on clandestine letters between Jews in French internment camps and their loved ones. It offers an examination of these letters, which were hidden in packages or thrown from cattle cars on their way to Auschwitz. These letters are astonishingly abundant today largely thanks to three types of aid: creative self-help, mutual aid among internees, and aid from non-Jewish helpers. At the intersection of three areas of scholarship—the material letter, internment camps, and aid to Jews during the Holocaust—this article explores how internees could write with limited resources, send letters without using the official postal service, and participate in mutual aid inside the camps. The article argues that the internment-camp letter was at once the result of aid and itself an avenue of aid, parallel to the more organized humanitarian organizations. Cet article porte sur la correspondance clandestine entre les Juifs dans les camps d'internement en France et leurs proches. Il présente une analyse de ces lettres que l'on a cachées dans des colis ou que l'on a jetées des wagons à bestiaux destinés à Auschwitz. Une correspondance d'une abondance étonnante existe aujourd'hui en grande partie grâce à trois types d'aide : la débrouillardise individuelle, l'entraide parmi les internés et l'aide des non-Juifs. A la croisée de trois champs de recherche (la matérialité de la lettre, les camps d'internement et l'aide aux Juifs pendant la Shoah), cet article explore comment les internés ont pu écrire avec un matériau limité, envoyer des lettres sans la poste, et s'entraider à l'intérieur des camps. L'article suggère que la lettre du camp d'internement soit à la fois le résultat et l'agent de cette aide, œuvrant en parallèle des organisations humanitaires plus officielles.

Camps after Camps

Chapter 2 examines what happened to the Nazi camps in the immediate aftermath of the war. It narrates the transition from KZ to internment camp at each location in the context of cleansing responses to Nazism and transitional justice. It demonstrates how local populations responded to the renewed camp presence and the new inmates in their midst, and outlines the extent of official municipal involvement. It addresses the earliest forms of KZ memorialization, in particular the ways and means by which local communities were involved in enacting and debating commemoration, both of their own accord and in conjunction with other actors (namely survivors and the state). It details the swift consummation of Vught’s Fusilladeplaats as an official KZ monument and highlights local fraternity with prisoners as a key aspect of early post-war KZ commemoration (in formerly occupied nations). The chapter finally examines the significance of the actual KZ sites in terms of heritage and tourism.

Establishing the Ramgarh Training Center: The Burma Campaign, the Colonial Internment Camp, and the Wartime Sino-British Relations

This article investigates how the Chinese Expeditionary Force joined the Burma Campaign and retreated to India in 1942, and how the Chinese, American, and British authorities negotiated to determine the destiny of Chinese forces in India. This article argues that the choice of Ramgarh, a small town in northeast India, as the site of a training centre for the Chinese Expeditionary Force sheds light on a decades-long programme of colonial internment-camp building in British India, and illuminates the difficult relationship between Chinese and British authorities during World War II. In doing so, it also argues that the historiography of China's War of Resistance requires Southeast and South Asian perspectives.