Romans croisés

The "Romans croisés" section features texts that not only thematically touch upon the Franco-German sphere but poetically intersect, sometimes even transcend, it. The selection includes novels and short stories in which linguistic spaces, memories, and social experiences overlap—be it through multilingual writing styles, characters situated between Germany and France, or narrative perspectives that deliberately disrupt national borders and historical narratives. Key criteria include formal interweaving (shifts in voices, registers, and cultural codes), spatial and historical depth (border regions, migration, shared memories), and a discernible reflection on the in-between as a literary principle. The guiding questions explore how literature does not dissolve difference but rather makes it productive: How do meanings emerge in the transition between languages? What images of neighborliness, conflict, or intimacy are created? And in what way does identity become visible as something fluid, translatable, and perhaps even inexhaustible?

Between times and countries: Resistance as a time-travel novel by Martin Winckler

Based on Martin Winckler's own biography as a Jewish doctor born in Algeria, caught between colonial history, French memory culture and later emigration, the review reads his novel "L'Amour à temps" (POL, 2026) as a literary condensation of precisely that experience of uprooting and historical overlay. The text intertwines the popular time-travel narrative with the historical depths of the German occupation, the resistance of marginalized groups, and the emancipatory impulses of 1968: The prologue begins with the striking image of the library of Tours in flames, and the young doctor Maurice D'Alget pulling a wounded soldier from the fire amidst smoke and collapsing shelves – a scene that paradigmatically combines the destruction of knowledge with the impulse to rescue. The story then centers on the 83-year-old narrator Rachel, who in 2026 reconstructs her own past, intervening in 1942 via a time portal; this is particularly condensed in the scene of her visit to her grandparents in occupied Paris, where, trembling all over, she tries in vain to warn them of the impending wave of arrests – a moment in which historical knowledge becomes an existential, but limited, agency. This dual movement – ​​retrospective narration and physically experienced past – transforms time travel from a speculative motive into an ethical procedure of bringing history to life, which ultimately culminates in the drastic act of Rachel killing a collaborator, thereby changing an individual fate but not negating the logic of persecution. The essay highlights that Winckler hybridizes the genre – as a “roman choral”, which organizes collective memory against silencing through a multitude of unattributed voices, and as an autopoetological project in which the narrator herself appears as an instance of archiving, commenting and legitimizing. The temporal structure becomes an ethical aporia: knowledge of historical catastrophes creates responsibility without necessarily guaranteeing agency; time travel only allows "interventions on the surface" that shift individual fates but do not revise history as a whole. From this perspective, the novel appears as a decidedly contemporary narrative of remembrance, which – as the review pointedly highlights – transfers the language of the resistance of 1942 into the political present, thus making visible the continuity of violence, ideology and resistance. Overall, the interpretation reads the text as a combination of bodily memory, multilingualism, and polyphonic witnessing, whose common vanishing point is a poetics of storytelling as resistance: writing here becomes a practice not of preserving the past, but of constantly updating it anew in the act of passing it on.

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Dismantling German-French historical myths in Eric Vuillard's récits

Éric Vuillard's "La bataille d'Occident" (2012) and "L'ordre du jour" (2017) are two narratives about war that tell the First and Second World Wars not as national histories, but as products of mutually intertwined Franco-German mythologies: The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 forms the structural horizon of both texts, from which the complementary self-images of both nations – the German mythology of rationality and the unstoppable military apparatus, and the French "élan" myth of the glorious offensive – emerge as traumatic reflections of each other. The essay argues that Vuillard's literary method essentially consists of a twofold deconstruction: firstly, he demonstrates that the supposed German efficiency is a bluff—the Wehrmacht's tanks are stuck in traffic on the road to Linz, Schlieffen moves paper figures across a yellowed map—and secondly, that French revanchism collapses in Joffre's culinary Alsatian fantasies, while soldiers in red uniform trousers march into machine-gun fire. The unifying explanatory model is neither national character nor political irrationalism, but rather capitalist interest and class logic: the twenty-four industrialists who financed Hitler in 1933 appear in Vuillard's work as the civilian continuation of the same accounting rationality that led Schlieffen to devise his plan of annihilation as a profit gamble. As a genre of Récit – a hybrid form between essay, historiography and novel – Vuillard practices an autopoetologically reflected poetics of the counter-archive, which sets the repressed names of the victims, the collapsed myths of the perpetrators and the continuing amnesia of corporations against the domestication of history into the folkloristic “déesse raisonnable” of a stagnant historical politics.

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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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Building bridges, deepening ditches: Pauline Dreyfus

Pauline Dreyfus's "Un pont sur la Seine" (2025), beginning with the catastrophe of a ferry accident in 1828, unfolds the story, spanning generations, of two village communities separated by the Seine, whose fates are intertwined in the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of a bridge. Through the Vernet family and its genealogical branches, the novel traces the transformation from an agrarian milieu to an industrial society and onward into a post-industrial culture of memory, with historical turning points—wars, the Popular Front, occupation, deindustrialization—inscribed as structuring forces in the lives of its characters. At the same time, the narrative insists on its own artificiality: characters appear less as psychologically singular individuals than as typified bearers of social positions, whose conflicts—for example, between a vintner and a factory worker, a Resistance heiress and a politician of memory—make the persistence of societal divisions visible. The essay explores how the central poetic principle of the novel lies in the multidimensional construction of the bridge: as a historical object, a topographical axis, a social diagnostic tool, and a philosophical metaphor that, in the sense of a self-reflexive poetics of history, does not foster reconciliation but rather produces and makes visible difference. In this dialectic of documentation and fiction, of historical accuracy and ironic distance, Dreyfus's text proves to be both a conscious continuation and a critical break with the tradition of the historical social novel: he demonstrates that the grand narratives of progress and connection fail in the face of micro-social realities and that every form of historical narrative—in the novel as well as in the museum project he conceived—must necessarily reflect on its own logic of construction.

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Bridging the gap and self-correction: Ernst Robert Curtius

Ernst Robert Curtius's "The Literary Pioneers of the New France," a product of the immediate postwar period and born out of the experience of political defeat, opens up a deliberately counter-movement, a European-oriented interpretive space. By presenting key French authors (Gide, Rolland, Claudel, Suarès, Péguy) as bearers of an intellectual renewal in 1918/20, Curtius engages less in neutral literary mediation than in a cultural-political intervention against national resentments and stereotypical images of France. This review highlights that Curtius's argument rests on a twofold movement: on the one hand, the deconstruction of the German cliché of rationalist, "Latin" France through the demonstration of transnational, and especially "Germanic," influences; on the other hand, the construction of a "true France" that can serve as a pedagogical projection screen for a renewed, European-oriented Germany. The tension between documented enmity (for example, in the case of Suarès) and its programmatic overlay through the idea of ​​Europe is not leveled, but rather read as a productive contradiction. The review critically highlights the book's selective approach and its philosophical hierarchy of values, which excludes certain currents of thought while normatively elevating others. Overall, Curtius's study thus appears as a project that is both bound to its time and methodologically groundbreaking: a rhetorically driven self-correction of national perceptions that places literary studies in the service of intellectual understanding.

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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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Belonging as exclusion: the foreign language and the father as Yekkes at Manor Dory

The novel reveals how Jewish identity functions simultaneously as a historical protection and as a normative inscription on the body, placing the individual in an irresolvable tension between diaspora and Israeli belonging. A son writes to his dead father in a foreign language, demonstrating how history, origin, and power are indelibly inscribed on bodies, names, and desires—and how one can only escape them by retelling them. Manor Dory's "Le Gorille" (Grasset, 2026) explores how identity is produced through historical, bodily, and linguistic inscriptions—and how these inscriptions cannot be overcome, but only transformed. The starting point is the constellation of an autobiographically grounded epistolary novel in which a son writes to his dead father in order to escape his grasp and simultaneously recreate him in literary form. From this starting point, the essay reconstructs the central lines of movement in the text: the childhood experience of a physically and symbolically different father (non-circumcision, name change from Reinhard to Ezer), the author's own adolescence as a phase of violent approach to this very body and simultaneous resistance (culminating in a psychiatric episode and homoerotic impulses), and adult life, in which genealogical, political, and erotic conflicts converge in a transnational existence between Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris. The interpretation reads the novel along the lines of the thesis that different power structures—family, religion, state, masculinity—function homologously insofar as they mark, discipline, and make legible the body; circumcision acts as a paradigmatic figure, but is expanded through names, languages, and institutional practices. Particular attention is paid to the poetics employed: the choice of French as the “private” language of writing, the mosaic structure as a reflection of a non-linear memory, and the figure of deadnaming as an intersection of Zionist naming politics and queer-theoretical thought. At the same time, the review highlights the central paradox of Jewish existence, which the novel encapsulates in a concise image: what ensured survival in Europe (the uncircumcised body) signifies exclusion in Israel—a historical reversal realized in the father's body and made explicit in the son's writing. From this perspective, writing itself appears as an ambivalent practice: not as liberation from violence, but as its displacement into a self-determined form, as a “translation” that makes loyalty possible only through betrayal. The ending—the announcement of an uncircumcised, multilingual child—is interpreted as a deliberate interruption of a context of inscription, the continued influence of which the novel simultaneously reflects upon and does not negate.

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Where the trauma begins: Camille de Toledo

Camille de Toledo's "Thésée, sa vie nouvelle" (Verdier, 2020) develops a multifaceted literary investigation from a shocking moment—the discovery of her brother's hanged body in Paris in 2005—intertwining mourning, family chronicle, essay, and poetic evocation. The novel follows its narrator, Thésée, over the course of years in a dual movement: into the present of a traumatized body and simultaneously backward into the genealogical depths of a family marked by loss, silence, and concealed Jewish heritage. Starting with three boxes containing photographs, letters, and the manuscript of her great-great-grandfather, a "poem-inquiry" unfolds, revealing how historical violence, suicides, and repressed memory are inscribed not only narratively but also physically in the bodies of descendants. The review interprets this formally hybrid work as a performative poetics of the transgenerational: the non-linear temporal structure, the synchronicities of the dates, the shifting pronouns, and the incorporation of documentary voices realize precisely the entanglement of past and present that the text asserts. At its core lies the reinterpretation of the Theseus myth: the labyrinth is no longer an external place, but rather the interior of the family history, the "Ariadne's thread" a fragile web of archival material that only emerges in the act of writing. By returning at the end—in a radical inversion of chronology—to the great-great-grandfather's suicide in 1939, the novel marks the origin of the wound and reveals that knowledge is only possible through return: through arriving at the place from which everything originated. The essay emphasizes that Toledo thus provides neither a psychological nor a sociological explanation of suicide, but rather establishes a literary form of knowledge that gives voice to the memory sedimented in matter. Literature appears here as a place of “revival” – not as a resolution of trauma, but as a reconnection with the dead, as a careful mending of a broken thread that makes a “vie nouvelle” conceivable in the first place.

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Oedipus in Évreux: A German-French post-war tragedy by Denis Dercourt

Denis Dercourt's debut novel, "Évreux" (Denoël, 2023), tells a consequential family saga spanning seven decades, beginning amidst the bombing raids of 1944. Léon, born to an abused French woman and a German collaborator, grows up in an atmosphere of shame, silence, and moral coldness. The child of the ruins becomes a ruthless power broker who systematically exploits the guilt of his fellow citizens for blackmail, building an empire in the process. In parallel, the novel follows the fates of his estranged children and the historian Antoine, who attempts to uncover the hidden crimes of the past—and in doing so, becomes entangled in a deadly spiral of revenge and vigilante justice. The city of Évreux emerges as a morally contaminated space where the history of the Franco-German occupation is not overcome but rather perpetuated through personal narratives. The review consistently interprets the novel as a modern tragedy in the vein of Oedipus Rex, arguing that Dercourt is less concerned with presenting a historical chronicle than with developing a deterministic model of guilt. Central to this is the thesis of an "economy of guilt": transgressions are not atoned for, but rather instrumentalized and transferred into new power relations. Stylistically, the review supports this interpretation by pointing to the paratactic, protocol-like narrative style, which de-emotionalizes violence and presents it as a logical consequence of historical entanglements. Furthermore, it highlights that the figure of the historian embodies the ambivalence of enlightenment: knowledge does not lead to catharsis, but rather to renewed action. The review's argument is clearly structured—from the primal scene in 1944 through intergenerational repetition to the final act of vigilante justice—and aims to diagnose a postwar society whose official narratives of reconciliation are radically undermined by private histories of violence.

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Hitler's visit to empty Paris: Michel Guénaire

Michel Guénaire's "La visite" (Grasset, 2025) reconstructs Hitler's two-hour visit to Paris on June 23, 1940, not as a historical episode, but as a highly concentrated aesthetic act. The text depicts a deserted city, which Hitler traverses at dawn like a museum without an audience: Paris appears as a "dead star," as pure architecture, detached from social life. Guénaire replaces action with perception, making the walk, the gaze, and the silence the very substance of the narrative. The city becomes both the benchmark and the rival against which Hitler's aesthetic ambitions are ignited: Paris is admired, assessed, and simultaneously interpreted as a challenge to the never-realized "Germania" project. In the encounter with monuments such as the Opéra, the Trocadéro, and the Invalides, the narrative unfolds as a political-aesthetic study of power, form, and appropriation, in which architecture becomes the language of totalitarian imagination. The review reads "La visite" as a model case of authoritarian rule and analyzes Guénaire's argument beyond its historical context. It shows how the text does not explain power psychologically, but rather exposes it as a form of perception and staging: Hitler appears not as a thinking subject, but as a seeing entity, surrounded by an archetypal entourage of technicians, artists, and functionaries who aesthetically secure power. The deserted city, however, refuses the expected response, thus revealing the emptiness of totalitarian gestures. The review particularly emphasizes the metaphor of the "silent film," with which Guénaire describes the visit as an unreal, almost surreal moment—a peaceful staging at the heart of a war of annihilation. From this perspective, "La visite" becomes a universal reflection on authoritarian systems: The focus is not on the individual dictator, but on the recurring structures, roles, and images through which power produces itself—and ultimately fails in a world that cannot be fully appropriated.

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A novel of Franco-Romanian friendship: Cătălin Mihuleac

Against the backdrop of Franco-Romanian relations from the First World War to the early communist postwar period, Cătălin Mihuleac's "Les Demoiselles de Fontaine" unfolds the story of a cultural fraternization forged through education, language, and personal loyalties, ultimately shattered by political means. At its heart are the French officer and later university professor Marcel Fontaine, his Romanian companions, and especially those young women whose Francophilia is condemned as guilt under the communist regime. This review interprets the novel less as a historical narrative than as a European reflection on the fragility of cultural ties: France appears not primarily as a state, but as a projection screen for humanism, education, and universalist values, while Romania is portrayed as a space of appropriation, hope, and eventual disillusionment. Mihuleac demonstrates, the review argues, that while cultural transfer shapes identities and connects generations, it remains extremely vulnerable without institutional protection. What was considered moral capital in the interwar period was criminalized after 1947. The review further highlights the character Petru Negru, whose joyful engagement with folklore and ethnography appears not as regressive superstition, but as an alternative form of knowledge in which historical experience, collective memory, and a resistant understanding beyond official ideologies converge. By intertwining fairy tales, folklore, and historical chronicle, the novel paints a picture of a European promise that shatters not through individual failure, but through systemic change. The review therefore emphasizes the text as a literary monument to a failed, yet blameless, project: it is not the people who fail, but the political orders that cannot sustain cultural loyalties.

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Nuremberg Trials Without a Conclusion: Alfred de Montesquiou

This article interprets Alfred de Montesquiou's novel "Le crépuscule des hommes" (2025, Prix Renaudot Essai) as a counterpoint to popularized portrayals of the Nuremberg Trials, such as James Vanderbilt's film "Nuremberg" (2025). While the film narrows the narrative to a psychological duel between Hermann Göring and his American psychiatrist, thus adhering to a personalized "cinema of great men," Alfred de Montesquiou unfolds a multifaceted panorama. His novel is not interested in verdicts or the psychology of the perpetrators, but rather in the periphery of the tribunal: journalists, photographers, translators, and observers who experience Nuremberg as a space of transition. The city appears as a semantically overloaded place caught between National Socialist self-presentation, legal rupture, and moral uncertainty. Language, translation, and media representation are revealed as fragile instruments that necessarily fail in their task of making the monstrous narrative possible. Argumentatively, the review situates the novel within the intellectual framework of Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt. As with Jaspers, the focus shifts away from purely legal guilt towards a moral self-examination by observers who become aware of their own complicity. Arendt's skepticism towards definitive explanations is reflected in the consistent refusal of a narrative or moral conclusion. The roman vrai thus emerges as an epistemic form that begins where files and judgments reach their limits. Nuremberg is not narrated as the endpoint of history, but as a state of limbo: a "twilight of humanity" in which the perpetrators' demise does not guarantee moral clarity. The reading makes it clear that de Montesquiou does not conclude Nuremberg, but keeps it open—as a space of transition in which law, memory, and narration themselves are put to the test.

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Global Places, Shared Meanings: Olivier Wieviorka and Michel Winock

This review focuses on the edited volume "Les lieux mondiaux de l'Histoire de France" (Perrin, 2025), which explores how certain places become global points of reference and what cultural, literary, historical, and political meanings are concentrated in them. The volume brings together interdisciplinary contributions that analyze "places in the world" not only as geographical fixed points but also as dynamic spaces of memory, power, migration, and imagination. The review elucidates the volume's central theoretical premises, particularly the tension between local rootedness and the global circulation of meanings. It also discusses the methodological diversity of the contributions and their relevance to current debates in spatial theory and cultural studies. Special attention is paid to the extent to which "Les lieux mondiaux" opens up new perspectives on the symbolic construction of cosmopolitanism and what impulses the volume provides for literary studies' engagement with space, globalization, and cultural translation.

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On courage as well as cowardice: Jérôme Garcin on literature during the Occupation

In "Des mots et des actes: les belles-lettres sous l'Occupation" (Gallimard, 2024), Jérôme Garcin presents a morally incisive analysis of the French literary scene during the German occupation, demonstrating how words could become tools of subjugation or resistance. Through pointed portraits of collaborators such as Brasillach, Céline, Morand, and Chardonne, as well as resistance figures like Prévost, Decour, and Lusseyran, he shows that literary genius does not relativize moral guilt but rather exacerbates it. His guiding principle is the "échelle de Prévost," a scale he developed to assess the connection between ethical stance and literary practice. Garcin reveals how a cultural elite maintained a vibrant Parisian cultural life despite mass murder and repression, and how an aesthetic cult surrounding collaborationist authors persists to this day, while resistance writers are marginalized. The book is simultaneously a historical reckoning, a moral appeal, and an intellectual self-portrait of a reader who abandons "innocent reading." The review highlights the work's dual nature: the historical reconstruction of the literary field under occupation and Garcin's self-critical revision of his own approach to reading. It emphasizes that Garcin challenges the traditional separation of work and author, revealing the persistence of a French "aesthetic amnesia" that shows admiration for collaborators and only dutiful respect for resistance fighters. The review elaborates how Garcin connects literary portraits with structural arguments (the CNE, generational conflicts, social milieus), thereby initiating a moral re-canonization that rehabilitates responsibility as an indispensable category of literary criticism. Overall, the review reads the book as an urgent contribution against the trivialization of cultural betrayal – and as a manifesto against the continuing mythical aura surrounding the “geniuses” of hatred.

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New phase of French memoir literature: Matthieu Niango and Benny Malapa

“Le Fardeau” by Matthieu Niango and “Un nègre qui parle yiddish” by Benny Malapa (both 2025) portray two family histories in which the 20th century is revealed as a genealogical upheaval. Niango’s novel follows a son’s archival research, uncovering his mother’s Lebensborn origins and the paradoxical legacy of Jewish victimhood and Nazi persecution. Malapa’s sweeping family epic tells the love story and survival tale of a Cameroonian-German man and a Polish-Jewish woman, refuting any myth of ethnic purity. Both books demonstrate how colonialism, racism, and antisemitism intertwine and how hybridity becomes the antithesis of totalitarian ideologies. With their differing aesthetics—documentary-analytical in Niango's work, oral-epic in Malapa's—they demonstrate that identity is an open process of memory: a web of ruptures, transmission, and responsibility. The review argues that both novels mark a new phase in French memory literature, in which national history is no longer explored through grand collective narratives, but rather through intimate family archives, minority biographies, and transgenerational traumas. It reads the two works as counter-narratives to identity-based, ethnonational interpretations of "French" origin. Niango and Malapa uncover genealogical assemblages that conceive of Europe's history of violence relationally. The novel forms model two ethics of remembering: responsibility through analysis (Niango) and responsibility through transmission (Malapa).

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The Spirit of Locarno: Europe One Hundred Years After the Peace Conference: Christine de Maizières

With "Locarno" (2025), Christine de Mazières has written a novel that is both historical and contemporary—a European drama about diplomacy, memory, and the power of language. The starting point is the 1925 Locarno Peace Conference in Switzerland, where, in the aftermath of the First World War, Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann, and Austen Chamberlain attempted a moral renewal of Europe. De Mazières recounts the events as a polyphonic tableau: politicians, journalists, and artists act on a stage where political gesture, rhetorical form, and symbolic action are inextricably intertwined. A journalist, Louise Lenfant, witnesses this "comédie humaine de la paix," whose fragile hope she carries both personally and politically. The novel's emblematic image—an eagle swooping down on doves of peace—encapsulates the paradox of this era in a single metaphor. The essay “The Spirit of Locarno” reads de Maizières’ novel not as a mere historical reconstruction, but as a literary reflection on the relationship between intellect and politics. At its core lies the question of whether peace is conceivable as long as Europe remains intellectually divided. The text demonstrates how the novel continues Valéry’s diagnosis from “La Crise de l’esprit” (1919): the attempt, after the catastrophe, to create a “fédération de l’esprit”—a federation of the mind. The review interprets Locarno as a narrative response to Valéry’s question “Et qu’est-ce que la paix?” (And what is peace?) and as an echo of Heinrich Mann’s call for an “intellectual Locarno.” De Mazières combines Briand's moral vision with Valéry's skeptical intelligence, transforming the political stage of 1925 into a literary laboratory for the present: a century later, in 2025, Locarno remains an open question for Europe itself – whether it is capable of renewing its intellectual powers before the eagle once again dives on the doves.

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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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The forgotten drama from 1940: Aurélien d'Avout

Aurélien d'Avout, La France en éclats: écrire la débâcle de 1940, d'Aragon à Claude Simon (Brussels: Les Impressions nouvelles, 2023), 390 pp. A turning point and a rupture in the French self-image: Aurélien d'Avout's study, La France en éclats, illuminates why the year 1940, and June in particular, is often shrouded in a "veil of silence" in France. Although the…

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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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The Architect and His Guide, a contre-fiction novel by Jean-Noël Orengo

In his novel "Vous êtes l'amour malheureux du Führer" (You Are the Führer's Unhappy Love), Jean-Noël Orengo fictionally explores the figure of Albert Speer. He critically examines Speer's complex relationship with Adolf Hitler, his strategic self-presentation after the war, and the power of narrative in dealing with historical truth. The novel deconstructs Speer's own narrative—as an attempt to deny his own responsibility—and reveals the mechanisms of his apologia. For example, Speer's ministry employed millions of slave laborers, including many Jews, and was complicit in the expansion of Auschwitz into the world's largest death factory. Orengo's novel, however, is more than a mere historical retelling: it is an investigation into the construction of truth and fiction in historiography—particularly in the context of crime and memory. Orengo exposes Speer's "memoirs" as a masterfully constructed narrative that manipulates the truth and establishes Speer as a "star of German guilt" by portraying himself as "responsible, but not guilty." This “autofiction” is so powerful that it can even overshadow historical facts. The novel portrays historiography as a battle of narratives, in which Speer, through his narrative skill, often prevails, even against contradictory documents. Orengo demonstrates how difficult it is to find the “truth” about such a dark period when the main characters masterfully fictionalize their own history.

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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