Today, Victory in Europe Day, marks the anniversary of the end of World War II on the Eastern European Front on 8 May 1945. We are delighted to share the video-recording (hosted on Cambridge University Library’s YouTube channel) of the talk on the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation collection (1944-1946) we gave on 19 March, as part of the 2024 Cambridge Festival, in partnership with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics.
This year will mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings and the Liberation of France from German occupation, at the end of the Second World War. As part of the ongoing promotion of and research into Cambridge University’s Library Liberation collection (1944-1946), we have been delighted to shed light on Sophie Dubillot’s AHRC-funded collaborative (Cambridge UL and Open University) PhD project: ‘Ce n’est pas une blague: Purposes and Limits of Visual Humour in Early Post-War France (1944-46)’ and on the Liberation Collection (1944-46) Visiting Scholarship at Cambridge UL, whose first recipient will be announced in the next few weeks. We would be very happy to welcome you on Tuesday 19th March, 5-6pm at the Faculty of Divinity on the Sidgwick site, for Sophie Dubillot and Irène Fabry-Tehranchi’s talk on the Liberation collection: Illustrated books and humour in Cambridge University Library’s Liberation collection (1944-46), as part of the Cambridge Festival (you can register here).
This talk will examine a selection of the Liberation collection’s illustrated works (ranging from deluxe fundraising anthologies to commemorative works, clandestine printing and poetry), as well as humorous drawings representing struggles (such as restrictions, housing issues, and missing family members), in an ideologically divided country in dire need of reconstruction.
Irène Fabry-Tehranchi
Cambridge University Library is delighted to announce the launch of the Liberation Collection Visiting Scholar Programme. Generously supported by the Penchant Foundation, this new initiative will enable a Visiting Scholar to spend between two and four months undertaking research focused on the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection held at Cambridge University Library.
This programme is a collaboration between the University Library Research Institute and Clare Hall, a graduate college located at the heart of the University of Cambridge, renowned for its informal approach to college life and its international diversity. The maximum value of the scholarship is £6000 for UK-based applicants and £7000 for international applicants.
Ville de Toulouse, Octobre 1944. Liberation.a.235
Special issue of the city bulletin of Toulouse published after the liberation of the city in August 1944.
We are delighted to share the new webpage designed by the University Library Research Institute (ULRI), for the AHRC-funded doctoral award on France and the Second World War, a collaborative project of the Open University and Cambridge University Library.
The PhD candidate, Sophie Dubillot, previously contributed to this blog pieces on the French résistante Madeleine Riffaud and the collaborationist Auguste Liquois; the résistant priest Père Jacques de Jésus (who inspired Louis Malle’s 1987 film Au revoir les enfants) and Julien Unger’s Le sang et l’or : souvenirs de camps allemands (1946).
Sophie is using material from the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection and the abundant press of the Liberation period to examine humorous drawings in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in France (1944-46). Her project aims to examine visual humour’s forms, functions, and limits at a time when the French had to negotiate the delicate post-war transition back to peace. Sophie’s research focuses on how humour served to redefine the French nation in the early post-war period and how different influences on the drawings encouraged or stifled particular voices.
Irène Fabry-Tehranchi
We recently wrote a blog post about a recently catalogued collection of Nazi propaganda. Among these items were some specifically anti-British and anti-American publications which are well worth examining. For instance, the humorous graphic concertina leaflet (leporello) L’Olympiade 1941 (CCC.26:4.620) by Apis (pseudonym for Jean Chaperon, 1887-1969) makes fun of the Allied defeat in Greece, presented in the guise of a failed competition of the British team at the aptly named ‘Olympic games’, under the gaze of Jupiter. In the first two vignettes, a group of Tommies landing in Greece are welcomed with enthusiasm by a young man in traditional Greek costume. But very quickly, the challenge turns sour: the British run away from the German enemy and their best performances consist in their speed at taking flight (running, marathon, jumping, rowing and swimming). The grim outcome is death: “Morts à l’arrivée”.
Continue reading “Anti-Allied propaganda in Cambridge University Library’s Nazi Collection”
I recently catalogued two dozen of Nazi booklets and pamphlets circulating in France in the 1940s. They are an addition to existing special collections of National Socialist literature at Cambridge University Library; and a good complement and forerunner to the more recently donated Chadwyck-Healey Liberation collection (which focuses on French language works mainly published between 1944 and 1946). A first Nazi literature collection in the University Library (CCA-CCC.25) contains a selection of books representing National Socialist Germany and is based on a collection of 750 items, including school textbooks and songbooks, which were acquired in August 1947 through His Majesty’s Stationary Office.
In the first part of my blog-post on working with the Liberation donation, I explored the fragmented and sometimes contradictory vision of history that the books in the collection offer, each point of view representing only a tiny portion of the actual events. In this second part, I want to expand on the odd feeling I sometimes had that the entire collection itself, despite offering quite a complete view of the period’s publishing landscape in France, was only a fraction of the whole story. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of the collection; indeed, what it doesn’t say is just as interesting from a historical point of view as what it does say.
Everybody knows about Ruth Klüger or Primo Levi; Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2002, and Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. These authors are famous for their autobiographical texts about the Shoah, which they wrote after having survived the Nazi extermination camps. Their books are well known, they became part of the literary canon and have led to a lot of scholarly research.
The Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection in Cambridge University Library offers a promising addition to that field of research, because the collection keeps very similar, though much lesser known books. As the Liberation Collection focuses on books published between the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 and the end of 1946, the collection’s accounts of the Holocaust rank among the earliest testimonies of Nazi crimes, deportation and mass murder during the Second World War. These testimonies range from written accounts to documents and even paintings and illustrations. Even for research focused on books about the extermination camp of Auschwitz, the Liberation Collection offers a diversity of genre, tone, biographical background and emphasis.
Continue reading ““Holocaust Literature” in the Liberation Collection”
Originally posted on the Special Collections blog:
On Thursday 22nd February Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey will give a talk to the Cambridge Bibliographical Society on ‘The power of the image in liberated France, 1944-46’.
His talk is inspired by imagery from the collection he has put together (recently presented to the University Library) on the German occupation of France during the war and its liberation by the allied forces. Beautiful books began to be published immediately after the liberation of Paris in August 1944 even though the war was still being fought in France. Once Paris was free and the Vichy government had collapsed, censorship came to an end, and it is the immediacy of this response and the quality of the books themselves that makes this period so interesting for the history of the book.
Talk starts at 17.00. Tea from 16.30 before the talk.
Free event, no booking required. Members and non-members of Cambridge Bibliographical Society welcome.
All welcome; booking not required
The powerful role of radio propaganda during World War II cannot be overestimated. Information was transmitted quickly to vast populations across borders, overpassing enemy lines. In the UK, the BBC would broadcast in several languages, including French of course, and would even send secret messages to the French Resistance in the form of apparently senseless phrases. The Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection has several publications related to this topic, some of them particularly fascinating.
Maurice Van Moppès was an illustrator, Free France member and broadcaster who worked for “Les Français parlent aux français”, one of the BBC radio programmes that transmitted news from the Front (for more on this check the 5 volumes of Ici Londres, 1940-1944: les voix de la liberté, 539:1.b.820.2-6). The programme was also supposed to boost the French people’s morale and send code messages to the Résistance. Continue reading “Radio broadcasting and the war”
Languages across Borders 