Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T22:57:40.278Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - The Concentrationary Universe

from Part I - Heroes and Martyrs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Philip Nord
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Get access

Summary

The deepening of Cold War tensions led to a splintering of the deportee community. FNDIRP took the Soviet Union’s side in the conflict, opposing German rearmament and casting the fledgling German Federal Republic and its American sponsors as fascism’s postwar heirs. Ex-deportees of more centrist political views broke away and founded a counter-organization. The move was led by David Rousset, author of a classic analysis of camp life, L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946). For Rousset, it was not just the Nazis who were culpable of maintaining a camp system but the Soviets too (he was in fact the first to introduce the word Gulag into French common usage). Rousset crusaded under the banner of anti-totalitarianism, and the better to identify and to fight totalitarianism in whatever guise, he wanted the world to know what a genuine concentration camp looked like. To that end, he and the organization he helped to found, the Union nationale des associations de déportés, internés et familles de disparus, français, campaigned in the 1950s to create a national monument to the Deportation, located at Struthof in the Alsace, territory that had been annexed by the Reich during the war. The Struthof memorial complex (1960), located on the site of an actual concentration camp, turned the vestiges of the camp into an outdoor museum that both memorialized the résistants who had died there and stood in warning against any recrudescence of such totalitarian designs in the future.

Type
Chapter
Information
After the Deportation
Memory Battles in Postwar France
, pp. 53 - 87
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×