Robert Antelme - Böcker

Arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Dachau, Robert Antelme recovered his freedom a year later when François Mitterand, visiting the camp in an official capacity, recognized the dying Antelme and had him spirited to Paris. Antelme's story of his experiences in Germany--his only book--indelibly marked an entire generation, "a work written without hatred, a work of boundless compassion such as that is to be found only in the great Russians.

Rescued in 1945 from Dachau - where he lay dying when Francois Mitterand, his onetime comrade in the resistance, recognized him among the thousands of quarantined prisoners - Robert Antelme set out to do what seemed ""unimaginable,"" to describe not only his experience but the humanity of his captors. The result, The Human Race, was called by George Perec ""the finest example in contemporary French writing of what literature can be."" In this volume, the extraordinary nature and extent of Robert Antelme's accomplishment, and of the reverberations he set in motion in French life and literature, finds eloquent expression. The pieces Antelme wrote for journals - including essays on ""principles put to the test,"" man as the ""basis of right,"" the question of revenge - appear here alongside appreciations of The Human Race by authors from George. Perec to Maurice Blanchot to Sarah Kofman; personal recollections of Antelme; and interviews with, among others, Dionys Mascolo (who brought Antelme back from Dachau), Marguerite Duras (Antelme's wife, who tells of his return from Germany), Francois Mitterand, Edgar Morin, Maurice Nadeau, and Claude Roy. Throughout, these reflections, reminiscences, and testimonials pose once more, in subtle and suggestive variations, the question lifted to an unprecedented level of sobriety, simplicity, and openness by Robert Antelme: Who is ""the Other""?