Suchergebnisse

Alongside the well-known narratives of the mode rétro, which returned in the 1970s to the years of war and Occupation in France, there were texts that challenged simplistic notions of guilt and innocence through a virtuoso deployment of sarcasm and derision. Romain Gary's La Danse de Gengis Cohn (1967), Albert Cohen's Ô vous frères humains (1972) and Serge Gainsbourg's album Rock Around the Bunker (1975) are all confronting the cruelty and abjection of a murderous anti-Semitism in intimate and disturbing ways. These are very different texts – a novel, an autofictional essay and an LP – but each one gives a powerful voice to the victim in these complex stories of hatred and fear. Derision enacts an aggressive dismantling of the stereotypes and tropes of the abject Other, exposing the vacuity of established pieties, the contradictions and hypocrisies at the heart of a rhetoric of superiority. Briefly situated in relation to earlier (Camus, Céline, Sartre) and later (Littell) narratives of derision relating to war and occupation centred on the perpetrator, a detailed critical and narrative analysis draws on Julia Kristeva's analysis of abjection in order to identify what is at stake in these elaborate, stylised and unsettling texts where it is the abjected victim who is the subject of their own story.

Didier Daeninckx has devoted many novels to the history and memory of the Occupation. This article explores the relationship between his fiction and historiographical frameworks with reference to Meurtres pour mémoire, contrasted with Missak published 25 years later. After discussion of 1980s historiography of the Occupation and the Algerian War, it looks particularly at narrative structure and the thematics of order (both obedience and orderly documentation), seeking to establish the differences in the ways these two novels historicise the past, and the historiographical differences in their approach to guilt, knowledge and interpretation.

The aim of this article is to address a number of texts where the 'otherness' of the German is in part constructed through sexuality. The mobilisation of sexuality in narratives about Fascism and the Holocaust such as in the film The Night Porter, to underline and intensify oppressive, perverse power relations at the frontiers of life and death, has long been noted, and often deplored. This article will focus rather on representations within French literature. Various studies have identified features in traditional representations of the German which construct this figure as different from and opposed to France and the French: barbarism, militarism and stress on group rather than individual identity describe both a Prussian heritage and its Fascist renewal; a ponderous, organised and bureaucratic psychology is contrasted to French wit, energy and resourcefulness; one could extend the list. However, the importance of intense, often 'deviant', sexualities and sexual relationships in representations of Germans has received less attention. Sequestration, incest, homosexuality and ambiguous sexual doubles of various kinds are to be found in texts from the 1940s to the twenty-first century − sexual encounters which are frequently locked into psychosexual dramas with strange or monstrous parental relationships.