These 2 International study days will be devoted to the mechanisms of dispossession and their representation in Europe during the Second World War. The event organized jointly by the Center for Contemporary and Digital History – Luxembourg University and the National Center of Literature.
Experienced personally or recounted through fiction, due to the application of the law or to the opportunism of some, the dispossession of certain categories of the population for the benefit of others manifested itself in many ways in Europe between 1933 and 1945. The Jewish population was particularly targeted by exclusion measures that caused individuals to lose their property, their identity and even their very existence by evicting them from economic life, public space and the social body in a mechanism that often only prepared them for deportation and death.
These processes, whose central stage is often the modification of the legal framework and its application by the various components of society, have repercussions right down to the intimate, creating a feeling of exclusion which is echoed in the arts. The loss of what constitutes one’s identity, one’s home, one’s daily life, is thus expressed in painting, as in the paintings of Felix Nussbaum or Jean Fautrier, as well as in literature, with, for example, Max Jacob, Paul Palgen, Marcel Thiry.
The aim of these study days will be to explore the different facets of this dispossession, in particular but not exclusively in Luxembourg, France and Belgium, by first of all looking at the structural mechanisms and their material manifestations, then at their individual consequences and the way in which they are expressed in the arts.
Link to the website for registration:
https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/events/journees-detude-deposseder-depossede