Bibliograph

Diary of the dark years, 1940-1944, collaboration, resistance, and daily life in occupied Paris, Jean Guéhenno ; translated and annotated by David Ball

Type

Label

Diary of the dark years, 1940-1944, collaboration, resistance, and daily life in occupied Paris, Jean Guéhenno ; translated and annotated by David Ball

Language

eng

resource.biographical

autobiography

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Diary of the dark years, 1940-1944

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

870529695

Responsibility statement

Jean Guéhenno ; translated and annotated by David Ball

Sub title

collaboration, resistance, and daily life in occupied Paris

Summary

Jean Guehenno's 'Diary of the dark years 1940-1945' is the book historians love to quote to describe both ordinary daily life and literary life in Paris under Nazi occupation. While it is a sharply observed record of day-to-day life in occupied Paris, this diary is far more than that: it is "a remarkable essay on courage and cowardice." (Caroline Moorehead, Wall Street Journal.) At the time, Guehenno was a well-known political and cultural critic, left-wing but not Communist, and uncompromisingly anti-fascist. Unlike most French writers during the Occupation, he refused to pen a word for a publishing industry under Nazi control. He expressed his intellectual, moral and emotional resistance in this diary: his shame at the Vichy government's collaboration with Nazi Germany, his contempt for its falsely patriotic reactionary ideology, his outrage at its anti-Semitism and its vilification of the Republic it had abolished, his horror at its increasingly savage repression and his disgust with his fellow intellectuals who kept on blithely writing about art and culture as if the Occupation did not exist-not to mention those who praised their new masters in prose and poetry.--, Provided by publisher

Classification