Born an Enemy: The children of Franco-German couples born during the Second World War
Publisher
:
Payot
Parution date
:
EAN
:
9782228903998
Number of pages
:
376
Description
What happened to the tens of thousands of children born between 1941 and 1949 to French mothers and German fathers? They were the sons and daughters of men who were first soldiers and then prisoners of war. What happened to the children born in Germany whose mothers were German and whose fathers were first prisoners of war and later soldiers of the French-occupied zone?
French and German states are now recognizing the pain caused by their discrimination against the children born during World War II of Franco-German parentage, even offering them dual citizenship in recompense. But it wasn’t always that way. Born an Enemy explores how these children were conceived, perceived, and assimilated . . . and how they were rejected or discriminated against by their respective communities.
The shame and unease provoked by these births has, until now, stopped them from becoming the subject of a thorough examination. Fabrice Virgili brings us the disturbing story, developed from 10 years of scrupulous research both in Germany and in France, of these unaccepted relationships and the children that they produced. He lets us see the circumstances of the pregnancies—of how they occurred, given the extremely close regulation of sexual relations by the Germans in France and, until late in the war and its aftermath, the limited contact that French men had with German women. What could women of either side do when they found themselves pregnant? And after the war, what could a woman do when her child’s father was a defeated enemy or a new occupier of her country? And most important, what were the children’s lives like? Virgili answers these questions and more in this fascinating examination of the children born of forbidden or coerced sexuality.
Author
Fabrice Virgili : Fabrice Virgili is a historian and is head of research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. He is the author of La France “virile”: Des femmes tondues à la Libération (Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2000), published in English as Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (Berg Publishers, 2002; paperback by New York University Press, 2003).
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