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Hitler, from France to the Rest of the World (and Back): Concluding Remarks

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Hitler’s French Literary Afterlives, 1945-2017

Abstract

This chapter refers to and contextualises other French fictional texts—realist or not—in which Hitler is either mentioned, alluded to or even appears briefly. It also broadens the perspectives of Hitler’s French Literary Afterlives by discussing other scholarly studies written by Alvin Rosenfeld, Gavriel Rosenfeld and Michael Butter on Hitler in North American and British fiction, which are the main predecessors to this book. Finally, this chapter concludes with a reflection on the future of ‘Hitler fictions’ in France, asking whether a ‘normalisation’ of Hitler should be a cause for concern.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/contemporary-european-history.

  2. 2.

    On perpetrators in WWII French fiction, see Rasson (2013); see also Petitt (2017) for interesting comparative perspectives on the same topic.

  3. 3.

    Although it only came out in 1963 in German language, Weiss’s novel (1977 in English) was actually written in 1938. This obviously explains why it doesn’t deal with the Second World War.

  4. 4.

    It is hardly mentioned online, and it is also unknown to all WWII French literary scholars with whom I discussed it.

  5. 5.

    Martin Bormann died in 1945 but his body was only found in the 1970s (McKale 1981; Karacs 1998).

  6. 6.

    In fact, several books published recently (e.g. Dunstan and Williams 2013) argue that Hitler did not die in his bunker in 1945 but escaped to, and consequently lived in South America for many years after the end of the Second World War (cf. Evans 2014, 119–121).

  7. 7.

    Even in Pompes funèbres (1947) by Jean Genet, an axiologically ambiguous text, the narrator creates Hitler in his image, depicting him as a homosexual and a poet.

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  1. University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland

    Manuel Bragança

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Bragança, M. (2019). Hitler, from France to the Rest of the World (and Back): Concluding Remarks. In: Hitler’s French Literary Afterlives, 1945-2017. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21617-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21617-7_6

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