Robert Antelme

Robert Antelme (Sartène 1917 - 1990) is a Poète and Résistant French which knew the Déportation. It is the the author of one of largest the books on the concentration camps: the Mankind .

In 1939 it Marie with Marguerite Duras which works then for a publisher. Their first child, a boy, dies in the birth in 1942. The same Marguerite Duras year becomes acquainted with Dionys Mascolo which becomes his/her lover. Marguerite Duras and Robert Antelme are members of the Résistance under the Occupation. Their group falls into an ambush, Marguerite Duras succeeds in escaping helped by Jacques Morland , name of war of François Mitterrand but Robert Antelme is stopped and sent in a camp, on June 1st 1944. After a passage to Buchenwald, it is led to Gandersheim, small a kommando dependant on Buchenwald, where it is placed in an old closed down church, near a factory.

After the end of the war, François Mitterrand finds Robert Antelme in the camp of Dachau, exhausted and mined by months of detention under unnamable conditions (it had typhus), and organizes his return to Paris. Marguerite Duras drew an account from the return of Antelme of the camps: the Pain .

Robert Antelme published on the camps a book of great range, the Mankind , in 1947. The book was read and almost forgotten little. It is dedicated to Marie Louise her sister died in deportation. Robert Antelme shows there deportees who preserve their conscience, vis-a-vis worst human cruelties. The men whom it describes, reduced to the state of " eaters of épluchures" , live in the obsessing need but also in the conscience of living.

Robert Antelme founded, in 1945, with Marguerite Duras, a publisher, “the universal city”. The couple divorced in 1946, but they worked still together, as in 1959 when, at the request of Raymond Rouleau, it adapted, with Marguerite Duras, “papers of Aspern”, part of Michael Redgrave, according to a news of Henry James. After the war, it thus continues a discrete work in the literary circles, collaborates in the Modern times and militates with the French Communist party, from which it is excluded in 1956, after repression by the troops of the Warsaw Pact of the Insurrection of Budapest. During the War of Algeria, Robert Antelme is signatory of the Manifeste of the 121.

Robert Antelme died in the night from October 25th to 26th 1990.

Quotation

Opposite this coalition the Almighty (of the S.S. and the kapos), our objective became humblest. It was only to survive. Our combat, the best among us could carry out it only in an individual way. Solidarity even had become individual business.

I bring back here what I lived. The horror is not gigantic there. There was in Gandersheim neither gas chamber, nor crematory. The horror is there darkness, lack absolute of reference mark, loneliness, ceaseless oppression, slow destruction. The spring of our fight will have been only the exaggerated claim, and almost always itself solitary, to remain, until the end, of the men.

Works

the Mankind , Gallimard, 1947,1957,1999
To think death, Gallimard
Revenge , Mixed corn

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