Description
Book Synopsis During the fifty years since the end of hostilities, European literary memories of the war have undergone considerable change, influenced by the personal experiences of writers as well as changing political, social, and cultural factors. This volume examines changing ways of remembering the war in the literatures of France, Germany, and Italy; changes in the subject of memory, and in the relations between fiction, autobiography, and documentary, with the focus being on the extent to which shared European memories of the war have been constructed.
Trade Review "There is no question that this is a timely volume ... [that] provide[s] a basis for a genuinely interdisciplinary, transnational comparative discussion ... [and] could represent an important point of reference for all discussions of how to conceptualize historical memory." · Robert Moeller, University of California, Irvine
"... a well focused collection of articles, all of which are of a good scholarly standard and some of which are strikingly original or illuminating." · Michael Kelly, University of Southampton
Table of Contents Preface
Introduction: Studying European Literary Memories
Helmut Peitsch
PART I: THE GERMAN SOLDIER'S MEMORY
Chapter 1. Private and Public Filters: Memories of War in Heinrich Böll’s Fiction and Nonfiction
J.H. Reid
PART II: THE RESISTANCE MEMORY
The Female Resister
Chapter 2. Ordinary Heroines: Resistance and Romance in the War Fiction of Elsa Triolet
Diana Holmes
Chapter 3. ‘This Book Does Not Want to Be a Work of Art. This Book Is Truth.’ The Diaries of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich
Irmela von der Lühe
Chapter 4. A Woman’s Perspective: Autobiography and History in Giovanna Zangrandi’s Resistance Narratives
Penny Morris
The Male Resister
Chapter 5. Vercors – Writing the Unspeakable: From Le Silence de la mer (1942) to La Puissance du jour (1951)
William Kidd
Chapter 6. ‘A History Full of Holes’? France and the French Resistance in the Work of Stephan Hermlin
Dennis Tate
Chapter 7. War, Civil War and the Problem of Violence in Calvino and Pavese
Sarah Morgan
Chapter 8. Imagining Losers in Bufalino’s Diceria dell’untore
Peter Hainsworth
PART III: THE FASCIST'S MEMORY
Chapter 9. Memory and Chronicle: Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the D’un château l’autre Trilogy
Nicholas Hewitt
Chapter 10. Portrait of the Poet as a Dead Man. Ernst Jünger’s Writing in the Second World War: Strahlungen
Justus Fetscher
Chapter 11. Changing Identities Through Memory: Malaparte’s Self-figurations in Kaputt
Charles Burdett
PART IV: THE VICTIM'S MEMORY
Chapter 12. Reviewing Memory: Wiesel, Testimony and Self-reading
Colin Davis
Chapter 13. Primo Levi. The Duty of Memory
Robert Gordon
Chapter 14. La Douleur: Duras, Amnesia and Desire
Emma Wilson
Chapter 15. Myth, Memory, Testimony, Jewishness in Grete Weil’s Meine Schwester Antigone
Moray McGowan
PART V: THE MEDIA OF MEMORY: MAY 1968 AND CINEMA
Chapter 16. L’Armée des ombres and Le Chagrin et la pitié: Reconfigurations of Law, Legalities and the State in Post-1968 France
Margaret Atack
Chapter 17. Alexander Kluge: Germany – An Experience of Words and Images
Klaus R. Scherpe
Chapter 18. Fascism and Anti-fascism Reviewed: Generations, History and Film in Italy after 1968
David Forgacs
PART VI: WOMEN'S WRITING AND THE QUEST FOR THE FATHER
Chapter 19. Remembering the Collaborating Father in Marie Chaix’s Les Lauriers du lac de Constance and Evelyne Le Garrec’s La Rive allemande de ma mémoire
Claire Gorrara
Chapter 20. Seeing the Father: Memory and Identity Construction in Elisabeth Plessen’s Mitteilung an den Adel
Anne Moss
Chapter 21. Intimations of Patriarchy: Memories of Wartime Japan in Dacia Maraini’s Bagheria
Judith Bryce
PART VII: A CHILD'S MEMORY
Chapter 22. A Child in Time: Patrick Modiano and the Memory of the Occupation
Alan Morris
Chapter 23. Childhood Memory and Moral Responsibility: Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster
Chris Weedon
Chapter 24. Strategies for Remembering: Auschwitz, Mother and Writing in Edith Bruck
Adalgisa Giorgio
PART VII: AFTER THE COLD WAR: EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY
Chapter 25. Trauma and Absence
Omer Bartov
Chapter 26. Nonrational Discourse in a Work of Reason: Peter Weiss’s Anti-fascist Novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands
Robert Cohen
Chapter 27. Fifty Years On: German Children of the War Remember
Jost Hermand
Chapter 28. Memories of Resistance, Resistances of Memory
Luisa Passerini
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
