A perspective from the margins: Franco-German mediators, victims and sites of remembrance in the 19th and 20th centuries

A volume that turns the page of the family album

Andrea Micke-Serin / Brigitte Rigaux-Pirastru (eds.): The Forgotten and the Invisible in the Franco-German Context of the 19th and 20th Centuries: Backgrounds, Intentions, and Strategies / Les oublié(e)s et les invisibles dans le contexte franco-allemand aux 19e et 20e siècles. Causes, objectifs et stratégies, Media and Cultural Memory 13 (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2026), 258 pp., 11 illustrations.

The edited volume, which emerged from a Franco-German conference held in Angers in 2022, begins with a productive shift in perspective. The editors contrast what they, following Mechthild Gilzmer, call the "family album" of Franco-German reconciliation—that carefully staged, linear narrative of hereditary enmity transformed into friendship, whose founding myth is enshrined in the Élysée Treaty of 1963—with a different visual program: that of the margins, the spaces in between, the obscured actors. This precisely defines the volume's focus. It is not about another celebration of the Franco-German relationship, but rather about its flip side, about those figures, events, and works that—although formative in their time—have fallen out of active collective memory.

For scholars of Romance languages, the appeal of this approach is obvious. It shifts the focus away from the Heine-de Staël axis, that canonical pair of intermediaries, to a far more densely populated field: to the more than 60.000 Germans who lived in Paris in the 19th century and made the capital "de facto" the third-largest German city (according to Mareike König, on whose work the introduction is based), to cultural mediators, booksellers, stained-glass artists, football officials, and female concentration camp inmates. The volume consistently understands the Franco-German constellation not as binary, but as France's relationship to "German-speaking regions"—a term the editors prefer to the narrowly nationalized "Germany" in order to make border regions and border crossers visible in the first place.

Introduction: The theory of forgetting as a methodological framework

The bilingual introduction (the volume offers each contribution in one language with a summary in the other) achieves more than typical conference proceedings introductions often do: it provides a coherent theoretical framework upon which the subsequent individual contributions engage. Andrea Micke-Serin and Brigitte Rigaux-Pirastru draw upon a well-organized arsenal of memory and remembrance research. From Tzvetan Todorov, they adopt the basic premise that forgetting stands in opposition to preservation, and that memory is the interaction of the two. Yosef Yerushalmi presents the idea of ​​forgetting as a rupture in intergenerational transmission—a people can never "forget" what it has not previously received. Nicole Loraux's Phrynichos example introduces intentional forgetting, Aleida Assmann's Forms of forgetting (2016) the “constructive” and “therapeutic” forgetting that eliminates the ambiguity between victim and perpetrator of remembering.

The most fruitful approach for the literary and art historical contributions is to draw on Jean-Noël Tardy, who—via Lucien Febvre's history of the senses—links invisibility to seeing: something can be named but never shown, which congeals into a visual taboo in painting, photography, and film. Enzo Traverso's concept of "memory wars" (mémoires fortes/faibles) further underscores the political dimension. The editors clearly distinguish between forgetting and invisibility as dependent, sometimes complementary, concepts—invisibility as a possible precursor to forgetting, brought about by censorship, concealment, and erosion—while simultaneously maintaining an openness to the ambivalence: invisibility can be a form of protection, self-chosen, even welcomed. This analytical restraint, this reluctance to reflexively judge forgetting as loss or guilt, is one of the volume's strengths.

The sheer number of authorities cited (Chris Lorenz's "hot" history, Ernst Nolte's "past that refuses to pass," and Henri Rousso's "haunting" history are crammed into a small space) might seem a bit scholarly and affected. However, the introduction disciplines this material by transforming it into concrete guiding questions: Who is considered invisible or forgotten? What are the causes and strategies? Is the process spontaneous or controlled, perhaps even driven by those affected themselves? The value of each individual contribution can be measured against these questions.

The individual contributions

Literature/Culture section

Federica D'Ascenzo - as Associate professor A renowned expert on the avant-garde in French literature at the University of Chieti-Pescara and editor of critical editions of forgotten fin-de-siècle authors, including Dujardins Les Hantises – opens with a lucid case study on Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949). The inventor of the interior monologue (Les lauriers sont coupésDujardin (born 1887), a Wagnerian and Germanophile, was initially marginalized by aesthetic elitism, then fell into complete obscurity when his pacifist stance during the First World War became intertwined with adherence to Chamberlain's racial theory and an alignment with Vichy and Hitler's Germany. D'Ascenzo's crucial point is methodological: she separates the political reasons for Dujardin's obscurity from his literary-critical rejection and demonstrates that the latter is no longer valid today, as criticism is now turning to other collaborationist authors. She interprets Dujardin's obscurity using the psychoanalytically grounded concept of... repression (Repression) – a programmatic beginning for the volume, because it shows that forgetting is not a coincidence, but a cultural operation.

Philippe Wellnitz, a qualified Germanist at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier with works on Dürrenmatt and Botho Strauß, as well as many years of experience as a mediator (he headed the series “Helvetica” in Strasbourg), dedicates himself to Françoise Frenkel (1898–1975), the Polish-Jewish founder of the first French bookstore in Berlin (1921–1939). Her memoirs were published in Geneva in 1945. Rien où poser sa tête They remained unnoticed, were rediscovered at a flea market, and only republished in 2015. Wellnitz's analytical achievement lies in uncovering a double silence: that of posterity and that of the author herself, who barely addresses her Jewishness and her survival. At the same time, he criticizes the media's rediscovery, which placed Frenkel within a history of Vichy reception and obscured her actual role as a cultural mediator. The essay is a prime example of the insight that rediscovery itself can be a selective, distorting process of remembrance.

Moritz Schertl, a DAAD lecturer in Rouen and doctoral candidate in Münster with interests ranging from the Enlightenment to Holocaust remembrance and hip-hop, delivers what is probably the most theoretically dense literary studies text: an analysis of Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997). With Pierre Noras places of memory Drawing on Michel Foucault's concepts of counter-history and counter-memory, Schertl reads the text as the creation of "sites of counter-memory" that counteract official memory. Modiano succeeds in securing a place for the missing girl Dora in history; Schertl simultaneously emphasizes the necessary incompleteness of this re-individualization of the Shoah victims. The essay combines genre-poetic precision with reflection on the theory of memory and is likely to be the most rewarding for literary scholars.

Götz J. Pfeiffer, art historian at the Kassel State Church Office specializing in stained glass north of the Alps, conducts with the stained glass family Ely (Heinrich Ely, 1820–1886) presents an art-historical rediscovery project. Founded in Nantes in 1855 and relocated to Kassel in 1883, the studio left behind stained-glass windows in at least 54 locations in France, Germany, and the USA, yet it remains almost forgotten. Pfeiffer's strength lies in his meticulous, archive-based research—even extending to collaboration with a West French association for the preservation of religious cultural heritage in Beaupréau. Using Assmann's concept of forms of forgetting, he identifies the "dark spots" in the historical record. This contribution is important to the volume because it extends the concept of forgetting into the material and artisanal realms, demonstrating that cultural transfer was not solely the domain of writers.

Andrea Micke-Serin, Lecturer in German Studies at the Université catholique de l'Ouest in Angers, who received her doctorate in 2021 with a study on Prince Pückler's largely unpublished French-language correspondence, reconstructs the Prussian's dual existence Carl Jäger alias Caïd Osman (1811–1863). After achieving some notoriety as Pückler-Muskau's private secretary, Jäger, driven by financial hardship, joined the French Foreign Legion and the Spanish Foreign Army (Spahis), serving French colonial interests in Algeria, Crimea, Italy, China, and Mexico. Based primarily on unpublished letters, Micke-Serin suggests that French colonial policy is the central reason for Jäger's obscurity: a biography that intersects German and French, European and colonial loyalties, fails to fit into any national narrative of memory. The essay is rich in sources and exemplifies the volume's central thesis that biographies of individuals who straddled national borders systematically fall through the cracks of national historical narratives.

Céline Largier Vié, agrégée d'allemand and Lecturer for linguistics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle with a focus on discourse analysis, examines the Parisian memorial plaques from 1939 to 1945. Her observation is seemingly paradoxical: a medium specifically created to combat forgetting becomes invisible itself as soon as it no longer captures the gaze of passersby and the "virtual graves" are no longer interpreted as such. Largier Vié attributes this invisibility to the rupture of a "collectively experienced temporal continuity," which inevitably occurs when eyewitnesses die and historical processing replaces lived memory. This is a methodologically stimulating contribution because it concretely explores the relationship between material medium and perception—Tardy's question about seeing.

Philipp Didion, historian (studied in Metz and Saarbrücken, cotutelle dissertation on a comparative stadium culture history from a French-West German perspective), explores with Willy Scheuer (1912–2002) explores a field that has received little academic attention to date: football as a site of Franco-German relations. The binational president of Racing Club Strasbourg and Germany expert for the French Football Federation organized international matches, but remained a behind-the-scenes figure. Didion considers several reasons for this neglect – anti-German sentiment, Scheuer's own desire for invisibility, the disinterest of the elites of the time in football, and its belated academic recognition. The essay expands the volume's scope to include the history of sports and popular culture, convincingly demonstrating that "forgetting" is also a matter of disciplinary attention.

History/Politics Section

Moritz Bauerfeind, trained in history and Slavic studies (Bamberg, Olomouc), former research trainee at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt and assistant for Jewish history at the University of Basel, inquires about the forgetting of the Alsatian reform rabbi Moïse/Moses Nordmann (1809–1884), who tirelessly campaigned for Jewish emancipation in France, Switzerland, and the German states. Bauerfeind considers his personal account of antisemitic attacks in the spring of 1848 a rare testament. His thesis is precise and generalizable to the entire volume: 20th-century nation-state historiography has distorted the narrative of German-Jewish history; a particularly mobile, transnational Jewish population does not fit into territorially fixed national borders—hence the “paradoxical” forgetting. The essay makes a strong case for a transnational perspective.

Thomas Nicklas, Professor of Civilisation of German-speaking countries at the University of Reims and lecturer in Strasbourg, co-responsible for the series Studia Habsburgica, harbors the Car accident in Grisolles (1913): The German military attaché Detlof von Winterfeldt (1867–1940) is injured in an accident during French maneuvers and is cared for in the village; the president and ambassador visit his bedside, and Wilhelm II bestows gifts upon the village. Nicklas demonstrates, using the regional press, that the "good German officer" embodied a possible reconciliation after the crises of 1913—a chapter that was never written. The metamorphosis of collective memory he traces is striking: the admired Winterfeldts were, in retrospect, branded as traitors and spies. The essay illustrates how counterfactual possibilities of history are rendered invisible precisely by subsequent events.

Jens Späth, holder of the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Passau with a proven focus on transfer and interconnected history (Southern and Western Europe, Mediterranean region), commemorates the Alsatian Jewish journalist and politician Salomon Grumbach (1884–1952), a key mediator for half a century, first a member of the SPD, then of the SFIO. Späth structures his search for the causes around three key events: his change of citizenship in 1919, his commitment to German-speaking refugees after 1933, and his efforts to foster Franco-German dialogue within a pan-European framework after 1945. This double marginalization—forgotten in both France and Germany—is particularly instructive from an analytical perspective because it demonstrates that mediating figures can be rejected by both national memories simultaneously.

Mechthild Gilzmer, adjunct professor of Romance cultural studies at Saarland University specializing in exile, internment and resistance of women and curator of a Ravensbrück traveling exhibition, highlights two overlooked categories of female deportees in Ravensbrueck (1942–1944) brings to light: women classified as “prostitutes” or “criminals,” as well as French civilian workers interned for offenses such as “loafing.” Her argument regarding the politics of memory is sharp: after 1945, these women were excluded from the collective memory and denied victim status because postwar French society, in its efforts to restore national identity, relied on traditional family and gender roles—some even concealed their imprisonment to avoid the shame. This contribution connects gender and memory history and marks one of the most politically astute sections of the volume.

Layla Kiefel, PhD student in German Studies and History in Cotutelle (Bordeaux Montaigne / Konstanz, associated at the Centre Marc Bloch) with a thesis on female resistance in the context of the International Socialist Combat League, analyzes the diary of the Jewish resistance fighter Eva LewinskiInterned in 1940 in Gurs, southern France, Kiefel interweaves historical, literary, and gender analysis, focusing on the dialectic of revealing and concealing: the mitigating and omitting stylistic devices Lewinski uses to engage in introspection, sublimation, and self-assertion, expressing strategies for survival and resistance. This contribution demonstrates how a literary-critical reading of ego-documents methodologically sharpens our historical understanding of the “Gursiennes.”

Franck Schmidt, PhD student in history at the EHESS and the University of Heidelberg (German-French doctoral program), history teacher in an Abibac section in Brest, deals with the friendship association with the GDR founded in 1958, which Franco-German exchangesAfter intensive archival research, he reconstructs the strategy of "making visible" with which the GDR sought French recognition during the Cold War, and the subsequent erasure after 1989 – for both political and pragmatic reasons related to reunification. His findings correct a deeply ingrained misconception: Franco-German relations are almost universally perceived in cultural memory as westFranco-German. This article concludes the volume from a contemporary historical perspective and simultaneously opens it up to the German-German dimension.

Evaluation: Results, strengths, weaknesses, desiderata

The greatest strength of this volume, in my opinion, lies in its use of the conceptual pair of forgetting/invisibility not merely as a metaphor, but as an operationalizable analytical framework – each contribution consistently inquires into causes, intentions, and strategies, and the introduction ensures that these questions remain interconnected. This discipline results in an otherwise rare internal coherence for a conference volume.

Strengths to highlight include: firstly, the consistent use of primary sources – from Micke-Serin's unpublished letters to Bauerfeind's ego-document and Schmidt's club archives, the contributions work with materials that are themselves partly being explored for the first time; secondly, the genuine interdisciplinarity, which not only juxtaposes literary, art, sports, gender, and political history but also links them together through a common theoretical framework; thirdly, the redefinition of "Franco-German" as a relationship to "German-speaking spaces," which includes border crossers, Alsatians, Swiss, and the GDR, thus overcoming the binary model; fourthly, the analytical maturity of not morally condemning forgetting but also considering its constructive and self-chosen forms. Of particular value to Romance studies is that several contributions (D'Ascenzo, Wellnitz, Schertl, Kiefel) show how literary methods – genre poetics, reception history, narrative theory, style analysis – refine historical knowledge about mediators and victims.

Weaknesses are also identifiable. The principle of the case study creates a somewhat additive structure: a synthesizing concluding chapter that typologically grouped the thirteen cases—for example, according to Assmann's forms of forgetting or the guiding questions of the introduction—is missing and would only fully realize its theoretical ambition. The section headings "Literature/Culture" and "History/Politics" seem rather pragmatic in light of the methodological boundaries crossed (Largier Vié and Kiefel belong to both). And the theoretical foundation, however stimulating, remains almost entirely within the canon laid out in the introduction (Assmann, Todorov, Nora, Traverso); an engagement with more recent debates is lacking. memory studies – for example, Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory, which would have been relevant for the competing victim groups in Gilzmer's work – would have sharpened the framework.

Reading this volume reveals several desiderata. The Franco-German constellation calls for a greater consideration of visual and film media, which Tardy's theorem of invisibility actually addresses – Rigaux-Pirastrus's own expertise on East and West German cinema suggests what would be possible, but this is not addressed in the volume. Secondly, the opposite direction should be explored: The volume is primarily interested in Germans in France and figures at the border; the forgotten French people in German-speaking regions (such as Camille Fauroux's). French (to suggest) remain, with exceptions, an open field. Thirdly, the question, which runs through several contributions, of the Rediscovery to develop it into an independent object as a separate, selective memory operation.

These objections do not diminish the value of the volume; they indicate the research program it opens up. The Forgotten and the Invisible This is a meticulously researched, theoretically grounded, and source-rich contribution to transnational cultural and memory history, enriching the history of Franco-German relations by highlighting its under-explored margins. It is recommended to Romance studies not only for its individual gems of textual analysis, but also as a model for how philological and historical methods can be productively intertwined on the shared subject of forgetting.