War as a legacy: On the systematics of transgenerational imprinting in the work of Julia Weidmann

Not experienced, but inherited: Problem statement and research interest

Julia Weidmann, Continuum of Wars: Intergenerational Narratives of the World Wars in Contemporary French Literature, Studia Romanica 245 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2025), 397 pp.

When Anne Berest in 2021 Postcard Published, she faces a unique narrative premise: as the great-granddaughter of people murdered in Auschwitz, she writes about five generations of a family whose history is interwoven with two world wars and the Shoah – employing a literary research approach that intertwines archives, letters, photographs, and oral traditions to reconstruct what silence and death conceal. This constellation is not an isolated case. Jean Rouaud begins his novel cycle Les Champs d'honneur (1990) with the death of his grandfather, in order to approach – by way of everyday details, meteorological observations and a virtuoso shifting narrative perspective – the legacy of two world wars that permeates his childhood family life in the Loire-Inférieure without ever having been explicitly named. And Ivan Jablonka pursues in Histoire des grands-parents que je n'ai pas eus (2013) a historical micro-study about his deported grandparents Matès and Idesa, whose only material legacy consists of two postcards from Drancy and the silence of a father who survived deportation as a child. What connects this and numerous other texts in contemporary French literature is a recurring narrative pattern: descendants of the World War II generations retrospectively turn to familial and collective history, bridging communicative gaps through textual research, balancing source work and imagination, and in doing so, simultaneously constituting their own identity within the horizon of a generational imprint they did not experience themselves but inherited.

In her dissertation, written under the supervision of Michael Schwarze and Anne Kraume at the University of Konstanz and defended in 2023, Julia Weidmann systematizes precisely this phenomenon. The present, slightly revised book version—published in 2025 in the "Studia Romanica" series by Winter University Press—represents, as far as I can see, the most comprehensive comparative study to date of a decidedly intergenerational narrative of the World Wars in contemporary French literature. Weidmann proposes her own conceptualization, develops a four-step analytical method, and applies both to a corpus of thirteen authors from four phases of the continuum. The result is a methodologically sound and text-based study that fills a productive gap in Romance studies.

Remembering and Imagining: Structure, Methodology and Concepts

Weidmann's starting point is the thesis that war should not be understood as a closed event, but as a continuum – an experience that is passed down from those directly affected across several generations and continues to have an impact today on family histories, cultural influences, and individual identities. To make this continuum analytically manageable, the author replaces the numerical generational categories established in Holocaust research (1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3) with a metaphorical scale oriented towards the medical definition of trauma: injury (the generation directly experiencing the war), wound (children who experienced the war in their early years), pain (post-war children), scar (children of war orphans), and legacy (grandchildren and subsequent generations). This model is graphically represented as overlapping continua of the two world wars and allows for the understanding of the superposition of generational positions – for example, in the case of Claude Simon, who can be categorized both as a child of the First World War (wound) and as a soldier of the Second World War (injury). The decision for the metaphorical model is conceptually plausible: The body metaphor preserves the dignity of those affected better than numerical abstractions, it avoids the implicit hierarchization of half-value (1.5 as "not fully valuable") and allows for fluid transitions between the phases.

Methodologically, Weidmann employs a four-step close reading approach, which is applied to each author along four guiding perspectives: "Narrating & Questioning" (communicative starting point, multigenerationality, autobiographical influence), "Witnessing & Interpreting" (historical sources, archives, photographs, letters), "Remembering & Imagining" (moments of remembrance, their linguistic construction and tension with fiction), and "Understanding & Assuring" (the relationship between understanding others and self-constitution). This analytical framework is developed in the chapter on the generation of the wound (Chapter 2) using the texts of Claude Simon, Georges Perec, and Pierre Pachet, and subsequently serves as the guiding perspective for the following chapters. The introduction of this guiding perspective allows for comparability across the corpus while simultaneously preventing a sweeping uniformity, as the close readings highlight the specific characteristics of each text before any generalized comparisons are made.

The corpus includes thirteen French-speaking authors from the period 1975 to 2021:

• Claude Simon (The Acacia, 1989), Pierre Pachet (Autobiography of my father, 1987) and Georges Perec (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, 1975) for the generation of the wound;
• Alain Robbe-Grillet (Le Miroir qui revient, 1984), Patrick Modiano (Family record book1977; Dora Bruder1997; A pedigree, 2005) and Jean Rouaud (Les Champs d'honneur, 1990 et al.) for the generation of pain;
• Pierre Bergounioux (L'orphelin, 1992 and others), Marianne Rubinstein (Tout le monde n'a pas la chance d'être orphelin2002; C'est maintenant du passé, 2009) and Ivan Jablonka (Histoire des grands-parents que je n'ai pas eus2013; By camping-car, 2018) for the generation of the scar;
• and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (Source of history2013; Du côté des femmes, 2015), Colombe Schneck (The repair2012; Les guerres de mon père, 2018) and Anne Berest (Postcard, 2021) for the generation of the heritage.
• A final chapter (Chapter 6) applies the developed categories to three Italian-language texts – Helena Janeczek's Leszioni di tenebra, Massimo Zambonis L'eco di uno sparo and Michela Marzanos Stirpe e vergogna – to test the transferability of the model to another Romance literature.

The introduction carefully situates the work within the relevant research landscape. Weidmann discusses the central concepts from memory theory (Marianne Hirsch's "postmemory," Annette Wieviorka's "ère du témoin," Paul Ricœur's memory bridge), literary theories on generational narratives (Dominique Viart's "récit de filiation," Griet Theeten's "roman de la trace," Laurent Demanze's "enquête"), as well as German and Italian studies research on memorial family narratives. She precisely identifies the existing research gap: While individual generations or individual war conflicts have been studied separately, a contrasting overview that comparatively examines the continuum of war experience across multiple generations and for both world wars is still lacking.

Injury, wound, pain: the chapters in detail

The first chapter (“Injury”) recapitulates the literary testimony of the surviving generation and clarifies the fundamental concepts for the subsequent chapters: Willi Huntemann’s differentiation between witnessing, memory, and remembrance; Aleida Assmann’s basic typology of witnessing; Avishai Margalit’s concept of the moral witness; and the various theories of secondary and intellectual witnessing. Particularly instructive is Weidmann’s presentation of the five phases of Shoah witnessing in France (1942–2018) and their consequences for the writing of subsequent generations. The section on Aurélie Barjonet’s category of an “ère des non-témoins” (era of non-witnesses) highlights the tension in which the descendants find themselves: neither witnesses in the strict sense nor mere non-witnesses, they combine secondary, vicarious, and filial witnessing in an epistemically and ethically complex writing position.

The second chapter (“Wound”) is the methodologically central one of the work. Using the corpus of Simon, Perec, and Pachet—three authors who spent their childhoods under the influence of the First and Second World Wars, respectively—Weidmann develops the four-step guiding perspective and distills the connecting characteristics of intergenerational narrative: the retrospective bridging of broken communication through textual research, the integration of historical documents as an indirect dialogue, the explicit reflection on moments of memory and their constructive dimension, and the parallel oscillation between understanding others and self-affirmation. Based on Simon (The Acacia) Weidmann shows how the non-linear interweaving of the father's war memories (World War I) and the narrator's own war experiences (World War II) leads to an architecturally condensed experience of a continuum. Perec (W ou le souvenir d'enfance) is analyzed as a prime example of the literary construction of memory: The two narrative strands – a fictional sports utopia and autobiographical fragments of memory – structurally converge throughout the book and only reveal the allegory of the concentration camp in the later chapters through the paralleling of fragments and German exclamations. Pachet (Autobiography of my father) in turn illustrates how understanding the father figure – a Jewish migrant whose melancholy and pessimism are explained by war experiences – becomes the medium of self-affirmation for the son.

The third chapter (“Pain”) analyzes the post-war generation of Robbe-Grillet, Modiano, and Rouaud. For Robbe-Grillet, Weidmann shows that Le Miroir qui revient Contrary to popular interpretation, this should not be read as a return to the autobiographical, but rather as a consistent application of the Nouveau Roman principles to autobiography. The tripartite division of the self into an autobiographical, a fictional, and a critically reflective self corresponds to the fragmentation, incompleteness, and contradiction that Robbe-Grillet theoretically formulated as characteristics of reality. Particularly convincing is Weidmann's reading of the "états de service" of five military generations, which the narrator quotes from the attic and which trace the continuum of war literally back to the 18th century. For Modiano, Family record book, Dora Bruder and A pedigree They are read as literary family registers in which the absence of one person—the Jewish teenager Dora Bruder—becomes the structural center. Weidmann convincingly analyzes how ellipsis and seemingly casual evocation linguistically realize this absence. The discussion of Rouaud's novel cycle is the most extensive in the chapter and provides a literary-critically nuanced reading of the "cycle des deuils": the analysis of the three nous forms (familial, indeterminate, collective), the function of rain as an allegory of war, the reversal of reader expectations through the latent presence of war in seemingly civilian everyday scenes, and the metafictional commentary on writing in Sur la scène comme au ciel.

The fourth chapter (“Scar”) is dedicated to the children of war orphans. In his analysis of Bergounioux's texts, Weidmann explores how the rural topography of the Corrèze becomes a repository of memory, literally anchoring transgenerational imprints in the soil. The reference to L'abîme du temps And the idea of ​​a determined reality of life, perpetuated by the country's history, leads to a reading that anchors Bergounioux as an unusual case of a continuum experience without a Shoah context, but rather within the horizon of impoverished rural France. Rubinstein's patchwork writing style—short, associatively linked chapters that oscillate between present and past—is read as the formal equivalent of a postmemorial structure of memory, in which gaps and detours are constitutive. The most extensive section is devoted to Jablonka (Histoire des grands-parents que je n'ai pas eus), in which Weidmann demonstrates how the model of “texte-recherche”—Jablonka’s own categorization—does not resolve the tension between the subjective grandchild’s self and the methodically transparent historian’s gesture, but rather explores it productively. The distinction between the principle of “radicalement honnête” and that of objectivity is one of the work’s most conceptually astute observations: transparency regarding one’s own interpretations and hypotheses—not their erasure—constitutes the text’s epistemic claim. That Jablonka ultimately invents a scene—retrieving her grandmother from school in 1981—without marking it as an imagined scene, is identified by Weidmann as a singular departure from the self-imposed claim to transparency—a nuanced observation.

The fifth chapter (“Legacy”) deals with the generation of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Audoin-Rouzeau, himself a historian of the Great War, presents the interesting paradox of a scholar who, in exploring his family's legacy, shifts from academic discourse to personal narrative. Weidmann reads Source of history as an example of "filiation" in a double sense: The historian's methodological tools are used for private genealogy, without, however, being abandoned. Schneck (The repair and Les guerres de mon père) we analyzed their texts, in which the father's silence about his father, a survivor of deportation, creates a peculiar communication gap: The conversation fails not because of temporal distance, but because of the mediator's emotional inability. Berest (PostcardFinally, her novel is read as a formal puzzle that explicitly thematizes and structurally realizes hybridity: conversations between mother and daughter frame and interrupt an autonomous third-person narrative based on oral traditions, while simultaneously realizing internal focalizations and employing free indirect discourse that defies clear categorization. Weidmann's tabular analysis of the alternation between "récit" and "entretien" in the first book of Postcard is a methodologically useful tool for the analysis of structural hybridity.

Chapter six (“A Glimpse”) is the shortest chapter of the work and pursues the stated goal of applying the developed categories to three Italian-language texts. The selection – Janeczek’s Leszioni di tenebra (Shoah context), Zambonis L'eco di uno sparo (Legacy of Fascism across a generation) and Marzano's Stirpe e vergogna (Fascist family history, guilt, and genealogy) – is heterogeneous but illustrative. Weidmann convincingly establishes parallels to the analytical criteria developed in French literature, while simultaneously identifying language-specific differences and pointing to the particularities of the Italian context (including perpetration as a dimension that is hardly addressed in French). The chapter fulfills its exploratory character but cannot achieve the depth of the individual analyses in the main chapters.

Succession and relic: Overall assessment

Weidmann's study accomplishes several things simultaneously. On a conceptual level, it proposes a coherent and flexible model for describing transgenerational influences, one that overcomes the weaknesses of numerical categorization while remaining manageable enough to be applied to a broad corpus. On a methodological level, it develops a four-step analytical perspective that is not applied mechanically but rather varied and refined in relation to specific texts. On a textual-analytical level, it provides close readings that, in some cases—particularly with Rouaud, Jablonka, and Berest—significantly enrich the field of research. The inclusion of authorial statements, research interviews (Weidmann corresponded with Jablonka and Rubinstein), and paratextual elements lends the analyses additional depth.

Particularly productive is Weidmann's observation of succession, one of her four working hypotheses: With increasing temporal distance from the core event of war, the dependence on physically enduring sources (archives, photographs, documents) increases compared to living communication. This shift structurally alters intergenerational storytelling: Where the generation of the wound can still draw on their own memories, the generation of the inheritance operates exclusively with relics. The resulting professionalization of research—evident in Jablonka's travels to Poland, Israel, and Argentina, or in Berest's hiring of a private detective to locate the postcard author—is one of the most striking changes that Weidmann's comparison reveals.

Equally compelling is the demonstration of repetition: intergenerational storytelling is indeed a narrative pattern not tied to a specific author or literary school, but rather recurs as a structural phenomenon in various aesthetic contexts (Nouveau Roman in Robbe-Grillet, autofiction in Modiano, historical microhistory in Jablonka, genre hybride in Berest). Weidmann's decision to select three authors per generation, with one text from the context of the First World War and two from that of the Second, allows for a systematic comparison within the generational phases and highlights the superposition of continua for texts like Rouaud's, which can be positioned as both a generation of pain from the Second World War and a generation marked by the scars of the First World War.

There are also objections to the work. Chapter 6, on Italian literature, necessarily remains schematic in its treatment of the texts; a more intensive analysis of individual texts—even if the chapter had been reduced to two—would have more convincingly supported the comparative thesis of the category's transferability. Furthermore, the analytical model places a strong emphasis on the narrative voice and its declarative reflections on memory, imagination, and source work; aspects such as rhythm, prosody, figural language, or paratextuality are often considered in the analysis as supplementary elements, rarely as independent analytical dimensions. This may be due to the study's design as a systematic-comparative overview; it would have benefited in certain sections from a more pronounced emphasis on the texts' inherent aesthetic qualities.

A certain degree of redundancy arises from the repeated application of the four-step analytical framework: Similar observations—for example, regarding the function of photographs as memory aids and constructs—are frequently developed for several authors in succession, without the parallel being explicitly made during the course of the analysis. The summary sections at the end of each chapter therefore fulfill an important comparative function, which they do—however, their impact would be felt earlier if the connections between the individual case studies were more prospectively established.

The decision to exclude the discussion about the legitimacy of speaking about the suffering of others from the center of the analysis – which, according to Weidmann, is not the subject of this work – is a methodologically understandable self-limitation; nevertheless, it would have been worthwhile to address more strongly in the concluding remarks the consequences that the developed model could have for this normative debate.

Even with such minor limitations Continuum of Wars This is a substantial contribution to Romance studies and the literary studies of memory. The study fills a genuine research gap: a systematic, cross-generational investigation of intergenerational narrative in contemporary French literature, oriented towards both World Wars, has been lacking until now. Weidmann's conceptualization of the war continuum and the associated narrative typology offer researchers a robust set of tools that can be applied beyond the immediate subject matter to other national literatures and conflicts—a potential that the chapter on Italian literature at least hints at.

The concluding remarks rightly raise questions that will continue to occupy researchers: What forms will intergenerational storytelling take when no personal memories can connect with living eyewitnesses? In 2013, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau wrote a book in which he describes how, as a historian of the First World War, he discovered his own generational position within this continuum. Anne Berest's daughter Clara, who in Postcard Those who, as children, are confronted with antisemitism at school represent the fifth generation. The continuum of wars continues – and with it the question of which narrative forms are appropriate to it. Julia Weidmann's study provides a precise conceptual foundation for this question.