Interior Freedom in the French-language Poetry Written in the Concentration Camps (1943-45)

Abstract

Interior Freedom in the French-language Poetry Written in the Concentration Camps (1943-45) Abstract: Adorno’s controversial declaration that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ kindled debates on the Holocaust and literature that persist to this day. A number of critics, including Alvin Rosenfeld and Antony Rowland, have argued that conventional poetics and aesthetics are deeply problematised, even incapacitated, by the horrific nature of the concentration camps. Holocaust poetry, these commentators suggest, seeks self-effacement and silence, constantly drawing attention to its own inability to assume the horrors of the camps. My thesis challenges this paradigm, examining the little studied corpus of French language poetry written by Resistant and Jewish camp prisoners during their captivity. I argue that this poetry consistently articulates interior freedom, a freedom rooted in the enduring intellectual, philosophical, political and religious convictions of these poets. Far from representing a self-defeating project, poetry for these prisoners, I contend, was a vital means of uncovering a saving ethos under conditions of extreme deprivation and oppression. In this thesis, I focus on the poetry of five French prisoners, André Ulmann (Mauthausen), Gustave Leroy (Dora), Maurice Honel (Auschwitz), André Verdet (Buchenwald) and Jean Cayrol (Mauthausen). I bring out from close textual readings the distinctive nature of each author’s understanding of freedom, discussing the poetic strategies, including metaphor and Surrealist imagery, that contribute to their elaboration of compelling visions of freedom and looking at the ways in which freedom becomes embodied in the aural dimension and formal structure of their poems. Notably, in my study of Jean Cayrol’s extravagantly imaginative and mystical poems, I introduce the concept of ‘imaginative translocation’ to describe the author’s unique narrative approach and particularly ambitious conception of interior freedom. Paying particular attention to the influence of key movements and belief-systems, most notably Communism, Catholicism and Personalism, I explore the nature of the beliefs that allowed these five prisoners to discover moral bearings, ethical purpose and interior freedom during their internment.