The use of Literary Narratives as Historical Resources in the Study of Military Occupation
Maria Tudosescu, University of Tübingen, Germany and Aix-Marseille University, France
The interdependence between literary narrative forms and historical research has been highlighted by many scholars, most notably Hayden White, who demonstrated the extent to which historical writing follows literary narrative plots. In his Metahistory, White argued that history needs literary plots to structure its data – events unfold, but the ways they are depicted vary significantly.
What is, however, the other side of that coin and how can literary narratives serve as valuable resources for studying historical phenomena? As English historian Cicely Veronica Wedgwood remarked, ‘Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.’ Are creative literature and history then forever intertwined? If so, what strengths and limitations arise from this interdisciplinary approach? How could specifically the study of occupation profit from taking into consideration occupation literature? What about other creative media, such as films or series? Might these successfully contribute to a broader understanding of the occupation phenomenon?
With the recent surge of academic interest in various aspects of military occupation, a parallel development can be traced in literary studies. Notably, the 2024 book European Literatures of Military edited by Matthias Buschmeier and Jeanne E. Glesener has formally defined the genre of ‘occupation literature’, analysing it within its historical, political and social context. Focusing on the 20th century, Buschmeier and Glesener make a critical distinction between ‘war literature’, concerned primarily with the universe of the battlefield and the immediacy of violence, and ‘occupation literature’, which instead focuses on the experience of both civilians and soldiers coexisting in an occupied society.
Occupation literature thus focuses on the complex moral landscapes inhabited by those under an occupation regime, offering a nuanced exploration of concepts such as collaboration and resistance, perpetrator and oppressor or identity and otherness, often highlighting the gap between official accounts and lived personal experience.
A quick survey of recent publications reveals that this scholarly interest is echoed in popular culture too: the 2014 published novel All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, as well as its mini-series adaptation, which centre on the Nazi occupation of France garnered widespread acclaim, as did the Netflix mini-series Transatlantic (2023), based on Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio (2019), dealing with the same era. But why are such works important for the historian studying occupation?
For one, fiction can retrieve emotions or individual and collective beliefs that often remain obscured in archival documents. Cross-referencing documented facts with their artistic rendition can provide vivid details about everyday life under occupation which sometimes remain overlooked, or even deliberately omitted from official accounts. The voices of marginalised witnesses of an occupation often come to light in the fictionalised narratives, as the writer’s imagination weaves fiction and truth together, allowing for stories that have been left out of the official chronicles (as was the case, for example, with the gendered abuse suffered by women during the German occupation of Northern France during the First World War) to come to light and prompt new investigation of previously neglected aspects of an occupation.
When Maxence van der Meersch published his novel Invasion 14 in 1935, the French writer depicted an image of the German occupation of the northern departments that had been rejected from the official accounts, which aimed to bolster national unity and reintegrate the formerly occupied territories into non-occupied France. His characters’ struggles – based on his own childhood under occupation, as well as on interviews with other witnesses – had remained largely hidden from public view. Furthemore, the nuanced depiction of the German occupier was another point of divergence between his story and the official one, calling the myths and legends of the barbaric German practices into question and showing the complexity and diversity of human experience under occupation.
Nevertheless, such works – often highly fictionalised – require careful reflection, especially when they are contemporary to the period they portray. While their immediacy can lend authenticity and credibility, the tense political environment influenced not only the selection of scenes, but their form, too. Therefore, it is not absolute factual accuracy that should be looked for in occupation literature, but cultural dispositions, mentalities and the process of history construction itself – what does history remember, what does it forget?
Aware of a narrative’s potent influence, whether in the form of literature, film, music or art, most regimes throughout history have harnessed them to promote their own ideologies. A notable example is the Gazette d’Ardennes, a journal published by the German occupying authorities in Northern France during the First World War. Aiming to demoralise the French population, the Gazette published propagandistic occupation literature, such as A Lille Novel by occupying officer Paul Oskar Höcker, which told the story of a German-French couple torn apart by war and occupation, subtly inducing a sympathetic image of the German presence.
This pattern continues post-occupation, with former soldiers often trying to justify their presence in the occupied territories or portray themselves as peaceful intermediaries rather than oppressors (Ernst Jünger and his Parisian diaries from the Second World War immediately come to mind), while the occupied seek to restore their sovereignty through heroic tales of resistance and vilifying the former occupiers.
Although not always historically accurate in the strictest sense, occupation literature can thus still be of great importance to the historian, as it captures the atmosphere and the prevailing mentalities, as well as the plurality of interpretation when it comes to the study of occupation. It is a source of context, an artifact of identity and relationships in times of conflict, a window into daily life within occupied society. Literature allows the historian to reflect on how individuals might have responded and felt during a certain occupation. Whether one reads about Joseph Breitbach’s characters during the occupation of the Rhineland after 1918, Goethe’s account of the siege of Mainz in the late 18th century, or Camus’ La Peste, one dives back into those times, experiencing, alongside the characters, the constant anxiety and ambiguities that permeate societies under occupation, leading to a better understanding of its lasting legacy on individuals and communities.
References
Breitbach, Joseph, Die Wandlung der Susanne Dasseldorf (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006).
Breitbach, Joseph, ‘Education sentimentale‘, in Die Rabenschlacht und andere Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1973).
Buschmeier, Matthias and Glesener, Jeanne E., (eds), European Literatures of Military Occupation: Shared Experience, Shifting Boundaries, and Aesthetic Affections (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2024).
Camus, Albert, La Peste (Paris: Gallimard, 2012).
Doerr, Anthony, All the Light We Cannot See (New York: Scribner, 2014).
Gazette d’Ardennes: journal des pays occupés (Charleville, 1914-1918), http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/gazette_des_ardennes2.
Höcker, Paul Oskar, Ein Liller Roman (Berlin: Ullstein, 1918).
Jünger, Ernst, Strahlungen: Die Tagebücher des Zweiten Weltkriegs und der Nachkriegszeit (1939-1948)(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2022).
Knight, Steven, creator, All the Light We Cannot See (21 Laps Entertainment, 2023).
Meersch, Maxence van der, Invasion 14: roman (Paris: A. Michel, 2014).
Orringer, Julie, The Flight Portfolio (New York: Knopf, 2019).
White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1975).
Winger, Anna and Hendler, Daniel, creators, Transatlantic (Studio Airlift, 2023).
Photo credits:
Cover picture: A US Army driver reading a book found by him in St Nazaire, France, 1919.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
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