Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
- Part I: Writing After Nuremberg
- Part II: Territorial Rights
- 4 ‘We Refugees’: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights
- 5 ‘Creatures of an Impossible Time’: Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen
- 6 The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - ‘Creatures of an Impossible Time’: Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen
from Part II: Territorial Rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
- Part I: Writing After Nuremberg
- Part II: Territorial Rights
- 4 ‘We Refugees’: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights
- 5 ‘Creatures of an Impossible Time’: Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen
- 6 The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What caused the girl to express herself like a displaced person? The explanation – that from infancy onward Eva had had as attendants displaced persons, those at a price being the most obtainable, to whose society she'd be largely consigned – for some reason never appeared: too simple perhaps?
Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout or Changing ScenesAt almost the exact same time as Rebecca West attended the Nuremberg trial, Elizabeth Bowen travelled from Ireland to France to report on the Paris Peace Conference for the Cork Examiner. The conference took place amid the tired splendour of the Luxembourg Palace between 29 July and 15 October 1946, and like Nuremberg, was intended to restore some kind of lawfulness to postwar Europe. Borders between Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and France were redefined; Italy, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland resumed sovereign state status; reparations were agreed and, after a late amendment, the signatories of the five treaties committed themselves to the ‘enjoyment of human rights and the fundamental freedoms’ for all people under their jurisdiction. The conference, however, lacked the historical and moral intensity of Nuremberg, and was a tense, weary event. Any sense that the world's diplomats were coming together to script the final chapter of an atrocious history was quickly tempered by the realisation that they were, in fact, in an early episode in the Cold War. Even as the delegates declared fundamental freedoms for all, Europe was in the grip of a mass population transfer.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Judicial ImaginationWriting after Nuremberg, pp. 118 - 140Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011