Language:
English
Year of publication:
1999
Titel der Quelle:
French Cultural Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
10,2 (1999) 161-172
Keywords:
Perec, Georges,
;
Antelme, Robert.
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
;
Nazi concentration camps
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
Abstract:
Discusses Georges Perec's article "Robert Antelme ou la vérité de la littérature" (published in "Partisans" 8, 1963), on Robert Antelme's memoir "L'espèce humaine" (1947). Antelme had been a political prisoner in a subcamp of Buchenwald. Perec praised the book, including its sensitivity to the issue of expressing the inexpressible, and the book's emphasis on the triumph, via solidarity, of humanity over Nazism. Perec's father died in June 1940 while fighting in the French army; his mother perished in Auschwitz. Points out that Antelme does not speak about the Holocaust, nor does Perec in his discussion of Antelme. Suggests a political reason for this - that leftists in postwar Europe avoided singling out Jewish suffering in the war, as well as a personal explanation - Perec's discomfort with his Jewish identity. Concludes that, for Perec, Antelme represented an indirect approach to his own pain, by which he could speak about the camps without relating to the Jewish tragedy or to the problems of those orphaned by the Holocaust. Antelme was a model for dealing with the camps by way of writing about them, but he also encouraged Perec to embark on the path of self-concealment, which Perec pursued in "W ou le souvenir d'enfance".
Note:
Appeared also in his "History, Memory and Mass Atrocity" (2006) 93-106.
URL:
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