Overview

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative. From 1942 to 1944, approximately 160,000 people were deported from France to concentration camps under the German occupation. Despite the horrific conditions, some political prisoners deported for Resistance activities, in addition to a small number of Jewish prisoners, managed to write poetry secretly in the camps between 1943 and 1945. Concentration camp poetry from over a hundred French prisoners survives to this day in archives, family collections, and published books. This book examines the poetry of eight French prisoners, as well as poems composed and shared within a group of friends in Ravensbrück. Through close readings, it explores prisoners’ efforts to identify transcendent meaning in their traumatic circumstances. Using poetic and rhetorical techniques and drawing on the long tradition of French verse, these poets interrogated the horrors of the camps, attempted to reconcile their experience of trauma with their spiritual and political beliefs, and, in some cases, uncovered salvific meaning in their tribulations. This book offers a new perspective on French concentration camp literature, showing that in the camps themselves, some prisoners were already confronting their trauma in literature, employing the themes, narratives, and poetic techniques that would become so widespread in post-liberation testimonies. Poetry became a means not only to represent the atrocious events prisoners were experiencing but also, on occasion, to discover meaning and purpose within extreme suffering.

Full Product Details

9781836245421

Table of Contents

Reviews

“The author is fully aware that this discovery in poetry of hope, consolation and meaning goes against the dominant trend of trauma studies, and therein lie the appeal and importance of this book.” – Professor Colin Davis, Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London “[This book] will make a unique contribution to scholarship on WWII, the Nazi camps, French cultural studies, and literary studies more broadly. It will help to revive the memory of the atrocities experienced by political deportees in particular in the camps, and of the agency that internees showed in the face of trauma. It will also, I believe, provide more nuance to our understanding of why the particularities of the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust was so difficult for French society to acknowledge.” – Professor Sharon Marquart, Gustavus Adolphus College

Author Information

Belle Joseph has a PhD in French Studies from the Australian National University, Canberra.

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