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ABSTRACT
This article analyses how the topography of various kinds of wartime camp are represented in British narratives. It does so in order to explore whether a specifically British experience or viewpoint is evident in these texts.
The camps under discussion include the internment camps, established from 1940 onwards on British soil for the incarceration of ‘enemy aliens’, and their representation in wartime memoirs and novels as well as in more recent fiction. The second category of camp to be analysed is that of the necessarily fictional deportation camp, imagined in recent novels to have been established in a Britain which has either been invaded or surrendered in 1940. Lastly, the terrain of the forced-labour and extermination camp at Auschwitz has appeared in recent British fiction in a way that draws on documentary sources by means of an anglophone perspective.
The article concludes by observing that, in each case, what might have seemed to be a comparison, drawing likenesses between the real or imagined British camp and those of occupied Europe, turns out rather to be a stark literary and moral contrast.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her most recent publications include the BFI Modern Film Classics volume on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (2011), the co-edited volume Representing Holocaust Perpetrators in Literature and Film (2013) and Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era (2014).
Notes
1. Bhabha, quoted in the introduction to the present volume, 141.
2. Cesarani and Kushner, “Introduction,” 1.
3. Bhabha, quoted in the introduction, 147. See Charmian Brinson, on the extreme psychological toll of internment in relation to such writers as Livia Laurent and Ruth Michaelis-Jena, in her “Autobiography in Exile,” 14.
4. Cohn, A Lucid Interval.
5. Burt, Animals in Film, 11.
6. Cesarani and Kushner, “Introduction,” 10.
7. Brinson, “‘In the Exile of Internment’,” 74; Kühn, Gertrud Kolmar, 274.
8. Kushner, “Loose Connections?” 53.
9. Cesarani and Kushner, “Introduction,” 8. See also Pistol, “Enemy Alien and Refugee,” 42.
10. Cesarani and Kushner, “Introduction,” 4.
11. Lynton, Accidental Journey, 80.
12. Brinson, “‘In the Exile of Internment’,” 79; Uhlman, The Making of an Englishman, 227.
13. Uhlman, quoted in Brinson, “‘In the Exile of Internment’,” 83.
14. Uhlman, The Making of an Englishman, 224.
15. Cesarani and Kushner, “Introduction,” 4–5.
16. Nelki, quoted in Brinson, “‘In the Exile of Internment’,” 82; Igersheimer, Blatant Injustice, xxix.
17. On the literary adoption of the “Helpful Information” leaflet, see Vice, “British-Jewish Holocaust Fiction.”
18. Solomons, Mr Rosenblum's List, 7.
19. Ibid., 10.
20. Mark Lynton notes that had any of his non-Jewish fellow internees confessed to Nazi sympathies, it would have been “tantamount to a death-wish.” Accidental Journey, 83.
21. Borchard, We Are Strangers Here, 19.
22. Ibid., 30.
23. Ibid., 35.
24. MacLeod, Unexploded, 20.
25. MacLeod, interview with Sussex Life.
26. MacLeod, Unexploded, 178.
27. Ibid., 81.
28. Cummins, “Review.”
29. See the BBC's “Who Do You Think You Are?” episode devoted to Baddiel, 23 November 2004.
30. Baddiel, The Secret Purposes, 405.
31. Figes, “Behind Barbed Wire.”
32. Baddiel, The Secret Purposes, 29.
33. Ibid., 98.
34. Ibid., 103.
35. Ibid., 368.
36. Ibid., 294.
37. Amis, Time's Arrow, 132.
38. Baddiel, The Secret Purposes, 324.
39. Ibid., 334.
40. Sansom, Dominion, 16.
41. Ibid., 245.
42. Ibid., 444.
43. Ibid., 580
44. Ibid., 357.
45. Amis, The Zone of Interest, 270.
46. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 98. However, by contrast with the baby-faced Franz, the fictional Paul Doll's visage is said to resemble a “huge and unwashed strawberry” (Amis, The Zone of Interest, 154).
47. See Guest, “Review.”
48. Arendt, The Life of Mind, 4.
49. Amis, The Zone of Interest, 111.
50. Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, 129.
51. Amis, The Zone of Interest, 88.
52. Ibid., 67.
53. Levi, Introduction to Hoess, 24.
54. Abrams, “Review.”
55. Amis, The Zone of Interest, 51.
56. Felstiner, Paul Celan, 36.
57. Amis, The Zone of Interest, 125.
58. Ibid., 228.
59. Felstiner, Paul Celan, 36.
60. Amis, The Zone of Interest, 204.
61. Ibid., 179.
62. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 359.
63. Solomons, Interview.
64. Jacobson, Kalooki Nights, 472.
65. On Cyprus, see David Hughes’ novel My Son the Enemy; Caroline and Kevin Sturdy-Colls cite some first-person accounts of the Alderney camp in their “Reconstructing a Painful Past.”
66. Borchard, We Are Strangers Here, 117.