Les publications

Choix sous contraintes Survivre et décider dans l'univers concentrationnaire

Emmanuel Delille , Sonia Combe

Dans une Europe sous la domination du régime national-socialiste, en particulier dans les ghettos, dans les camps de concentration et dans les camps d'extermination, des hommes et des femmes furent confrontés à la nécessité de faire des choix dans des conditions extrêmes. Plusieurs récits sont parvenus jusqu'à nous : une mère a dû sacrifier un de ses enfants pour permettre à un autre de vivre ; un détenu devenu « Kapo » a été contraint de choisir quels prisonniers protéger au détriment des autres ; un médecin ou soignant a dû choisir quels malades à l'infirmerie avaient le plus de chance de survivre pour leur éviter la sélection… Dans ces conditions extrêmes, l'ensemble des valeurs qui présidaient au choix entraient en conflit – qu’elles soient liées à la morale individuelle, à l’éthique professionnelle ou à la logique d’une résistance collective. En cela, le choix était à la fois impossible et en même temps inévitable et nécessaire. Le spécialiste de la littérature sur le génocide juif, Lawrence L. Langer, l’a désigné en 1980 par l’expression de choiceless choice : un non-choix, c’est-à-dire un choix qui n’en est pas un.
En mobilisant des contributions de chercheuses et chercheurs issus de différents pays et spécialistes de l’histoire des camps et de la littérature de témoignages, cet ouvrage livre une réflexion interdisciplinaire sur la question du choix et des stratégies de survie.

https://catalogue-editions.ens-lyon.fr/fr/livre/?GCOI=29021100968800

Chiffres et réforme sociale : la Société fabienne et les savoirs comme stratégie du socialisme réformiste (1884-1889)

Laure Piguet

Piguet, Laure, “Chiffres et réforme sociale : la Société fabienne et les savoirs comme stratégie du socialisme réformiste (1884-1889)”, Histoire@politique, 55/1 (2025): 1-19.

https://journals.openedition.org/histoirepolitique/20410

Beyond Borders and Binaries: Young Ottoman Women’s Experiments with Gender, Body, and Sexuality in Germany During World War I.

Nazan Maksudyan

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19475020.2025.2488284 

In contrast to their male counterparts in apprenticeships, secondary education and technical training, there is a gap in scholarship on the education of (Muslim, unmarried) Ottoman women in Germany during the First World War as part of an educational collaboration between two empires. This article presents a wealth of new insights into the lives of this group of young women, based on research into official documentation from the Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives, the Political Archive of the Foreign Office, the Federal Archives in Berlin and the Secret State Archives, supplemented by personal documents and biographical sources. In particular, I focus on the Heidelberg diary of Şaziye Hayri (1899–1994), held from 20 February 1918 to 26 January 1919. The diary offers insights into the experiences of young women in German cities and educational institutions during wartime, thereby enriching our understanding of the interplay of gender dynamics in such exceptional conditions. Furthermore, the diary provides valuable insights into women’s experiences and explorations into gender, body, and sexuality. I argue that these women arrived in Germany with high hopes of achieving emancipation, independence, self-sufficiency, and individualisation. Their emancipated lifestyles during and after the war led them to seek a similar space of freedom in their later lives and helped them develop a more grounded sense of agency and self-respect. Nevertheless, in the context of the rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s, the anti-intellectual, anti-liberal, and anti-feminist attitudes of these regimes marginalised the contributions and experiences of these women in historical scholarship.

Das Gefängnis schreiben. Zeugnisliteratur und Fiktionen afrikanischer Autorinnen

Isabel Schröder

https://www.wvttrier.de/p/das-gefaengnis-schreiben

Ausgehend von einem transgenerischen und transregionalen Ansatz widmet sich die Monographie von Isabel Schröder der afrikanischen Gefängnisliteratur. In der Untersuchung werden die in der Rezeption des Genres oftmals vernachlässigten weiblichen Stimmen sichtbar gemacht und in ihrer Vielfalt aufgezeigt. Die Arbeit bringt erstmals zahlreiche englisch- und französisch-sprachige Werke aus verschiedenen Regionen Afrikas zusammen und analysiert im Detail sechs zwischen 1970 und 2015 erschienene Texte afrikanischer Autorinnen aus Eritrea, Kamerun, Marokko, Nigeria, Senegal und Simbabwe. Betrachtet werden sowohl persönliche Zeugnisse Gefangener als auch fiktionale Romane, die das Leben im Gefängnis schildern. Dieser Forschungsansatz ist von besonderem Interesse, da beide Textsorten testimoniale Funktionen erfüllen und gleichzeitig Strategien des fiktionalen Erzählens aufweisen. Trotz der sehr unterschiedlichen historisch-politischen sowie kulturellen Kontexte der Gefängnistexte, ist ihnen oftmals gemeinsam, dass sie auf inhaltlicher Ebene Kritik an politischen und gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen äußern sowie an eine moralische Gemeinschaft appellieren. Diese Kritik ist häufig genderspezifisch, sie kann allerdings nur in Wechselbeziehung mit anderen Differenzkategorien gedacht und verstanden werden, weshalb die Analyse konsequent einem intersektionalen Ansatz folgt. Der Gefängnisraum selbst wird als „Heterotopie“ im Sinne Michel Foucaults verstanden – ein Raum, der es den Gefangenen unter anderem ermöglicht, gesellschaftliche Strukturen anders zu erfassen, zu hinterfragen und teilweise auch zu unterlaufen. So entsteht ein kritischer Blick auf die Undurchdringbarkeit und Abgeschlossenheit des Gefängnisses, der literarische und machtpolitische Grenzen auslotet.

"Crime and Non-punishment: Legacies of Genocide and Denial in Turkey"

Nazan Maksudyan

N. Maksudyan, (2025). "Crime and Non-punishment: Legacies of Genocide and Denial in Turkey". In: Dinç, P., Hünler, O.S. (eds) The Republic of Turkey and its Unresolved Issues. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-1583-4_3

"Rural Child Welfare, Gendered Community Work, and Intersectionality: Erna Eckstein-Schlossmann’s Migration from Nazi Germany to Turkey"

Nazan Maksudyan

Maksudyan, N. (2025). "Rural Child Welfare, Gendered Community Work, and Intersectionality: Erna Eckstein-Schlossmann’s Migration from Nazi Germany to Turkey". In: Women, Migration and the Exchange of Knowledge from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century. (Palgrave Macmillan)

A Dormant Giant: Renewable Energy in the Soviet Union and Russia (1970s–Present)

Benjamin Beuerle

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/russ.70012

In spring 1981 the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party officially sanctioned the start of an “alternative” renewable energy development program in the Soviet Union. Throughout the follow- ing decade, some two hundred organizations in the USSR were involved in research and development activities and installing test facilities for solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass as well as tidal wave energy. This article explores the motivations behind this endeavor, earlier Soviet precursors, the main directions and regions within the program, its concrete results, and its fate after the demise of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, these decade-long research activities speak to the high potential of the post-Soviet region for various sorts of renewable energy. Under Putin, this potential and the heritage of the development program have remained mostly unused, mainly due to the priorities of political decision makers who lack any vision for Russia’s development in a decarbonizing world. Only in the very last years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have renewables appeared to reacquire some momentum in Russia, with prospects of new, “green” energy partnerships between Russia and its Western partners on the horizon. To unearth this long-ignored treasure will be vital for a post-Putin Russia, its partners, and the world climate.

Knowledge as a Weapon. Parisian Workers Quantitative Surveys and Epistemic Theory (1840-1848)”

Laure Piguet

Piguet, Laure, “Knowledge as a Weapon. Parisian Workers Quantitative Surveys and Epistemic Theory (1840-1848)”, Labor History, (online first) (2025): 1-16. 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0023656X.2025.2479714

Benjamin, Deleuze and the Baroque The Early Modern Origins of Media Theory

Noa Levin

For Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, who both authored seminal theoretical works on early cinema and photography, the history of modern media begins much earlier, in Baroque culture and science. Benjamin, Deleuze and the Baroque argues that their media theories were informed by their respective readings of the philosophy and mathematics of G.W. Leibniz, and the Baroque can thus be seen as the locus of modern media.
By critically comparing Benjamin and Deleuze's interpretations of the Baroque, Levin demonstrates the extent to which their theories of visual culture are intertwined with critiques of Enlightenment historiography and politics. Using a hermeneutic comparative approach, this book argues that the juxtaposition of Benjamin's reception of Leibniz with Deleuze's highlights the extent to which both authors' theories of image and media were informed by Leibniz's concepts of expression and perspectivism, themselves inspired by ground-breaking evolutions in optics and perspective. Providing close readings of Deleuze's The Fold and Benjamin's Origin of the German Trauerspiel, which remain understudied in the English language, it explores how, in their dual roles of philosopher and cultural critic, the pair may illuminate our own age of multiple crises through the Baroque.

Table of Contents

Introduction
I. A Strange Encounter
II. Redefining the Baroque
III. Leibniz, Paradigmatic Baroque Philosopher

Chapter 1: Of Monads and Mirrors: Leibniz's Monad in Deleuze and Benjamin
1.1 The Structure of Expression
1.2 Leibniz's Two Labyrinths
1.3 A Forbidden Tradition
1.4 Continuity of Knowledge and Experience

Chapter 2: Infinite Tasks of Learning: The Baroque-Inspired Critical Epistemologies of Benjamin and Deleuze
2.1 Infinite Analysis
2.2 Refiguring the Idea
2.3 The Concept of Origin
2.4 Minute Perceptions
2.5 Learning as Recollection

Chapter 3: Forces of History and Spectres of Return: The Baroque as Origin of Enlightenment Politics and Historicisms
3.1 Leibniz's Concepts of Force and Historical Progress
3.2 Virtual Histories and Infinite Totalities
3.3 Force and Violence in Origin of the German Trauerspiel
3.4 Apokatastasis and Eternal Return
3.5 Benjamin and Mallarmé on Chance and Probability

Chapter 4: It's All about Perspective: The Body Politics of the Baroque Image
4.1 Benjamin's Monadic Montage
4.2 Leibniz's Conceptions of Image and Perspective
4.3 Perspectivism and Mannerism
4.4 Allegory and Symbol
4.4 Perception and Body

Chapter 5: From the Crystal Palace to Cinematic Crystals: The Baroque Optic as Pre-cinematic Form
5.1 Between the Dialectical Image and the Crystal-Image
5.2 Deleuze and Benjamin on Montage and Montrage
5.3 The Crystal Pyramid, Leibniz's Theodicy

Conclusion