Reserve

A text, a work, an author that is revisited and revisited. Cf.: "Reserve (French réserve from Latin reservare 'to keep', 'to withhold') refers to a stockpile or reserve for emergencies or needs. This stockpiling can help to weather crisis situations more easily." (Wikipedia)

Exchange and misunderstanding: Jacques Decour, Philisterburg

Jacques Decour's "Philisterburg" (1932, Éds. Allia, 2023) is paradigmatic as a text of a poetics of the "in-between": a hybrid work between diary, essay, travelogue, and political diagnosis, which, from the perspective of a young French student of German studies, explores Germany in the late Weimar Republic while simultaneously reflecting on the epistemic conditions of this observation. At its core is not a one-sided portrayal of the foreign, but rather the productive tension between proximity and distance, between participation and critical self-examination, which manifests itself both formally—in the interweaving of narrative and essayistic passages—and in terms of content. Decour's text unfolds a dense panorama of social, political, and cultural forces in which characters appear less as individuals than as bearers of structural positions within the Franco-German relationship. Particular attention is paid to the role of language and translation as sites of both misunderstanding and insight, the analysis of stereotypes and enemy images, and the comparison of different educational systems as expressions of divergent worldviews. Against the backdrop of the escalating political situation around 1930, the portrayal gains a prophetic sharpness without ever lapsing into deterministic certainty. The review highlights how Decour understands the "in-between" not as a harmonious synthesis, but as a conflict-ridden, knowledge-generating space in which cultural difference becomes visible and conceivable – and how precisely this literary stance lends the text its enduring relevance and intellectual urgency.

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Between myth and mass murder: German-French novels under the shadow of the Third Reich

Michel Tournier's "Le Roi des Aulnes" (1970) and Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes" (2006), despite the 36-year gap and two fundamentally different literary temperaments, are both Franco-German novels in the most precise sense: Tournier sends his Parisian garage owner Abel Tiffauges as a prisoner of war to East Prussia, where he experiences Germany as a mythological mirror land – herds of deer like heraldic animals, Göring's hunting lodge as a "palais sur rails", the Napola castle Kaltenborn as the fulfillment of an Erlking obsession – until the Jewish child Ephraïm inverts all his symbols at the end and transforms himself into the Star of David in the last sentence; Littell equips his first-person narrator, Max Aue, an SS officer and mass murderer, with Alsatian origins, a French mother, a Sciences Po education, and Parisian collaborators, so that Franco-German hybridity appears not as a humanizing bridge, but as a prerequisite for complicity—whoever knows Racine and Hölderlin equally well simply writes mass murder in better French. The present contrasting interpretation argues that both novels share precisely this commonality: They reject the comforting narrative that National Socialism was something culturally alien, imposed on the Franco-German heritage from the outside, and instead force their protagonists—the fascinated Frenchman as well as the hybrid perpetrator—to recognize their own education, fascination, and language skills as a gateway to the Nazi regime. The review sharply distinguishes between Tournier's mythological alienation – the crime is sublimated into archaic patterns (Erlkönig, Christopher, inversion of signs) in order to become visible – and Littell's hyperrealistic immanence, which denies any mythological shield and draws the reader into a complicity through Aue's cultivated narrative tone, from which he cannot escape; the review suggests that this difference is not only aesthetically but also historically explainable: in 1970 Auschwitz was still indescribable, it was sublimated – in 2006 it was academicized and museumified, and Littell insisted on its unprocessability. As Franco-German texts, both novels are also examined in terms of their language policy: the German, which Tournier leaves in the novel as reverently untranslated foreign material (Napola, Reichsjägermeister, Jungmann), and the French, which Littell chooses as the written language for the German mass murder – a literary sacrilege that turns the “clarté française” against itself and thus illustrates the thesis of the review that the Franco-German cultural community cannot close the black hole in its history, but can only circle around it.

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Reconciliation is in the midst of conflict: Christine de Maizières

Christine de Maizières' "Trois jours à Berlin" (Wespieser, 2019; I was somewhat incredulous to find no German translation) transforms November 9, 1989, into a poetic mosaic of voices, memories, and perspectives. A French woman, Anna, travels to the divided city to find the man she once met—Micha, the son of an East German official. Interwoven with Stasi files, inner monologues, and the otherworldly perspective of the angel Cassiel, the novel unfolds a polyphonic narrative of history as a 'folding': Berlin becomes a vibrant metaphor for Europe, a "plain immense" filled with ruins, languages, and longings. The fall of the Wall appears not as a heroic moment, but as a delicate instant of permeability, in which silence, misunderstanding, and poetry subvert the power of ideologies. “Trois jours à Berlin” can be interpreted as a poetic reflection on a French perspective of Germany—as a work that makes the division not only political but also existentially tangible. De Maizières’s shifting narrative forms, her interplay between lyrical introspection and bureaucratic coldness, allow the event itself to speak: reconciliation as an aesthetic movement, not as a historical conclusion. In the tension between Anna and Micha, between the angel Cassiel and the people, we find the image of a Europe searching for its “missing part”—a lost tenderness that rediscovers itself in the moment of opening.

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Naked Reality: On the new edition of early Claude Simon

Claude Simon's novel "La corde raide" (1947) is a mosaic of scenes, memories, and reflections, ranging from swimming in the sea with the young Véra to childhood recollections and wartime experiences, culminating in considerations of art theory. The "taut rope" in the title represents a delicate balance between vitality and awareness of death, between chaotic life experience and its artistic shaping. These early works by the author, reissued in 2025 by Éditions de Minuit in a volume together with "Le tricheur" (1945) and presented by Mireille Calle-Gruber, had long been out of print, as Simon had not desired their republication during his lifetime. Calle-Gruber interprets the texts as a poetics laboratory in which montage, fragmentation, the simultaneity of time, and the primacy of sensory perception over action are already discernible—techniques that would characterize his later work. The new edition fills a gap in the work's history by making this moment in its literary development accessible again (both texts are missing from the Pléiade edition). – The article interprets "La corde raide" as a non-linear narrative, an associative network of scenes and leitmotifs linked by semantic fields such as water, light, vegetation, body, and movement. War experiences are not depicted heroically, but as a chaotic, bodily-sensory reality; childhood scenes serve as a base layer of perception and a foil for contrast to the existential present. The tension between appearance and reality is central: Simon criticizes "falsification" in art and society and seeks a naked, unvarnished truth, with Cézanne serving as a positive counter-model to academic painting. Architecture, color, and lighting are employed, as in painting, to structure memory and perception. Overall, “La corde raide” is understood as an early, but already consistent, exploration of a poetics that balances perception, memory and form on a “tightrope” between chaos and structure.

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Choreography of memory: Patrick Modiano on his 80th birthday.

Since his debut novel, "La Place de l'Étoile" (1968), Patrick Modiano, who this year turns as old "as the post-war era" (Andreas Platthaus), has created a poetic world permeated by shadows of memory, shifting identities, and mysterious absences. His novels—melancholic, elliptical, interwoven with forgetting and return—revolve around a paradoxical movement: remembering through loss, experiencing through disappearance. In this aesthetic tension, dance takes on a special role: as a motif, as an image, as a narrative form. Particularly in his most recent novel, "La danseuse" (2023, English translation 2025), this motif becomes a poetic metaphor: the dancer becomes the figure of remembering, the projection screen for a groping first-person narrator, and the allegory of an almost incomprehensible life. Here, dance is not at the center of a plot, but is staged as a floating trace, as a rhythmic principle of storytelling, as a fleeting figure that choreographs the storytelling itself.

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Waltz of the Ruins: Jean-Jacques Schuhl

Jean-Jacques Schuhl's novel "Ingrid Caven" (Gallimard, L'Infini, 2000), winner of the Prix Goncourt, is more than a mere biographical exploration of the artist and the author's partner. It can be read as a cultural-historical diagnosis of an era, its defining themes, and the fascination with a specific German mythology from a French perspective. This encompasses key historical markers such as the war and the "zero hour," figures of a "German mythology" like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the Red Army Faction, as well as the omnipresent motif of "longing." At the same time, the novel's aesthetics express a distinct understanding of literature on the part of Jean-Jacques Schuhl himself, reflecting on his own role and that of the publisher Philippe Sollers in literary production and reception.

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Poetics of Childhood: Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux's poetics of childhood is an evolving, central dimension of her work, inextricably linking personal memory with collective, social, and historical dimensions. Her childhood in her parents' café-grocery store in Yvetot instilled in her a profound sense of in-betweenness and fragmentation—born of a lack of privacy, early exposure to poverty and social disparities that intensified during her private school years and resulted in a break with her family background. Rather than presenting a linear, traditional narrative of childhood, Ernaux dissects her memories, analyzing the formative influences of language, social origin, gender roles, and cultural norms, and illuminating how these factors shaped her identity as a child and young woman. She seeks to unravel the "unspeakable scene" of her childhood and embed it within the generality of laws and language, often presenting herself as an "ethnologist of herself." Her depictions of childhood are therefore not idealized or nostalgic reminiscences, but sharp, often painful investigations that reveal the ambivalence and social tensions of her origins.

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In memory of Pierre Nora (1931–2025)

On June 2, 2025, the eminent French historian Pierre Nora died in Paris at the age of 93. As editor of the monumental seven-volume series "Les Lieux de mémoire" (1984–1993), he decisively shaped the understanding of national memory culture and made a significant contribution to the reflection on French identity. Born in Paris in 1931, Pierre Nora escaped Gestapo persecution as a child. This early experience profoundly influenced his thinking about history, memory, and nation. In two books published in recent years, Nora presented his memoirs, "Jeunesse" (2022) and "Une étrange obstination" (2023), in which he freely recounted his life as a publisher and historian, and in particular traced his career.

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Uchrony and salvation: Emmanuel Carrère

Decades after the publication of his book "Le Détroit de Behring" (1986, English translation "Kleopatras Nase: kleine Geschichte der Uchronie," 1993), Emmanuel Carrère, in his 2025 reissue of "Uchronie," with his own preface, describes his movement as one from imagination to acceptance, from play to responsibility, from the uchronic excess of possibility to lived reality. For Carrère, uchronie is not merely a genre designation, but also a poetics-based commentary: the text itself is an uchronie, yet simultaneously reflects what an uchronie can achieve—and where its limits lie, for example in his books "La Moustache" or "Le Royaume."

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Ship from the open sea: Philippe Sollers

Philippe Sollers died in Paris on May 6, 2023, at the age of 86. The initial obituaries in Germany largely referred only to "Femmes," a book with which the author and literary theorist had found a more accessible form of writing in 1983. Books of the 21st century remain to be discovered: “Passion fixe” (2000), “Un amour américain” (Mille et une nuits, 2001), “L'Étoile des amants” (2002), “Une vie divine” (2005), “Un vrai roman : mémoires” (Plon, 2007), “Les Voyageurs du temps” (2009), “Trésor d'amour” (2011), “L'Éclaircie” (2012), “Médium” (2013), “L'École du mystère” (2015), “Mouvement” (2016), “Beauté” (2017), “Centre” (2018), “Le Nouveau” (2019), “Desir” (2020), “Légende” (2021), “Graal” (2022).

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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