Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane Book

"Four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town of Oradour in the rolling farm country of the Limousin and rounded up its inhabitants. In the marketplace they divided the men from the women and children. The men were marched off to barns nearby and shot. The soldiers locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building (and the rest of the town) on fire. Those residents of Oradour who had been away for the day, or had managed to escape the roundup, returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation." University of Iowa history professor Sarah Farmer's Martyred Village is not, however, a book about that massacre, but about how the French people have chosen to remember it in the years since. How did the massacre at Oradour become a symbol for the French experience at the hands of the occupying German forces? What went into the decision to create no monument to the dead but to allow the ruined husk of a village to remain as permanent testimony to what happened? And what do visitors to those ruins experience when they go there today? How have the residents of the "new town," adjacent to the scene, dealt with their position? These are some of the questions that Farmer addresses in her precise examination of the relationship between individual remembrances and the collective commemorations of history.Read More

from£32.50 | RRP: £32.50
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £6.09
  • Product Description

    Among German crimes of the Second World War, the Nazi massacre of 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, is one of the most notorious. On that Saturday afternoon, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town in the rolling farm country of the Limousin. Soldiers marched the men to nearby barns, lined them up, and shot them. They then locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building and the rest of the town on fire. Residents who had been away for the day returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation. In 1946 the French State expropriated and preserved the entire ruins of Oradour. The forty acres of crumbling houses, farms and shops became France's village martyr, set up as a monument to French suffering under the German occupation. Today, the village is a tourist destination, complete with maps and guidebooks. In this first full-scale study of the destruction of Oradour and its remembrance over the half century since the war, Sarah Farmer investigates the prominence of the massacre in French understanding of the national experience under German domination. Through interviews with survivors and village officials, as well as extensive archival research, she pieces together a fascinating history of both a shattering event and its memorial afterlife. Complemented by haunting photographs of the site, Farmer's eloquent dissection of France's national memory addresses the personal and private ways in which, through remembrance, people try to come to terms with enormous loss. Martyred Village will have implications for the study of the history and sociology of memory, testimonies about remembrances of war and the Holocaust, and postmodern concerns with the presentation of the past.

  • 0520211863
  • 9780520211865
  • Sarah Farmer
  • 1 December 2000
  • University of California Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 317
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.