The Memoires of the Second World War And the Transformation of French Historical Memories in the 1960’s-Taking Le Soldat Oubli? as An Example
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Cheng, Hao-Wen
Abstract
The publication of Guy Sajer’s Le Soldat oublié in 1967 indicating a transitional point of post-war French memory of the Second World War. Since then, the Resister’s myth (or Gaullist myth), the dominating policy of memory from 1944 to 1967, has been undermined, therefore leading the nation into a period of memory boom of the collaboration. This work of memory, however, has been ignored or underestimated by most scholars in the past four decades. While scholars examined with sedulous carefulness especially on its veracity and authenticity or on the controversial issue of this very kind of memory, barely did they pay an effort on the work and author himself. This thesis will, consequently, focusing on the policy of memory, on the social context, and on the life of Guy Sajer in the post-war France. After inspecting the changes of the legal system and the author’s mental condition by the theory of trauma and self-identification, this thesis reveals that Le Soldat oublié was written with a motivation composed of social and personal reasons. Moreover, as the first work published by a former collaborator in the late 1960s, it forecasted the following period of memory boom, a time that the long-repressed memory of collaboration would eventually destroy the myth of de Gaulle.
Subjects
Guy Sajer
Le Soldat oubli?French historical memory
collaboration
trauma
identity
memoires of the Second World War
Type
thesis
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