The confessional impulse in French autobiographical works of the second world war

There are many valuable works written by non-Jews who spent time in concentration camps. All the autobiographies that form the basis of this study have long been ignored by critics. New insight can be gained by exploring these works from a fresh perspective.

To understand the changes in confession literature brought about by the concentration camp experience, I examine in the first chapter the evolution of autobiography as well as the related secondary literature. I end this chapter by focusing on the various forms that confession autobiography has assumed since St. Augustine and Rousseau. In the second chapter I study a new approach to confession literature. In his meditation Lazare parmi nous, Jean Cayrol stresses the necessity to describe faithfully and accurately the inconceivable atrocities that prisoners had to face in the camps. Using Cayrol's concepts, I investigate in the third chapter the methods that writers/prisoners use to make concentration camp reality accessible to readers. I probe the stages of the systematic devaluation of human life that occurred in the camps and the complexity of responses to it.

The notion of search is an integral part of confession literature. In the fourth chapter I study the nature and form of the search made by writers/prisoners. Using Bruno Bettelheim's work The Informed Heart, I describe a search for autonomy that characterizes most concentration camp experiences. And in the fifth chapter I return to Lazare parmi nous to examine the complex issue of solitude. I point out the ways in which solitude envelops a prisoner and how it gradually becomes a means of self defense as well as a medium for communication with others.

In the last chapter I focus specifically on confession. In the traditional form, guilt, transgression and reconciliation are important elements. For confessions emerging from the camp experience, the focal point changes. Writers/prisoners capture in plain, precise terms the depth of man's inhumanity to man. It is in this way that confession becomes a medium for expressing any thought or action that one would ordinarily not share with another human being.