David Rousset

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David Rousset (born January 18, 1912 in Roanne , † December 13, 1997 in Paris ) was a French writer and political activist.

Life

The son of a metalworker studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne and toured Germany and Czechoslovakia from 1931 to 1936. From 1931 he was a member of the Socialist Students of the SFIO . As a teacher, he approached Trotskyism , the leader of which he met during his stay in France, which in 1935 led to his expulsion from the SFIO. In 1936 Rousset was one of the founders of the Trotskyist Parti ouvrier internationaliste (POI). He now devoted himself primarily to the anti-colonialist struggle in Algeria and Morocco. In 1938 he became a correspondent for the American magazines Fortune and Time . In 1939 he married Susie Elisabeth Elliot.

During the German occupation , Rousset worked on the secret POI. On October 16, 1943, Rousset was arrested for his political work, tortured, held in the notorious Fresnes prison , then deported to Buchenwald concentration camp . After a death march from Neuengamme to Wöbbelin concentration camp , Rousset was liberated by advancing Allied troops.

After the war, Rousset published the book L'Univers concentrationnaire in 1946 , a fundamental work on the concentration camps of the Nazi regime that influenced Hannah Arendt and has been available in German translation since 2020. In 1947 he published the documentary novel Les Jours de notre mort . In addition to continuing his anti-colonialist struggle, Rousset and Jean-Paul Sartre founded the short-lived Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR), an anti-totalitarian left party, in 1948 . But Sartre soon approached the PCF .

After the sensational success of the French version of the Soviet-critical book J'ai choisi la liberté (1947) by a Soviet defector and the won trial of the author by Krawtschenko against Les Lettres françaises , the literary magazine of the PCF, Rousset founded the Commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire in October 1950 (CICRC), which carried out investigations into the concentration camps in Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. For the first time in France, Rousset used the term gulag for the camp system of the Soviet Union. He was then called by the Lettres françaises "trotskyste falsificateur" ( Trotskyist forger). Rousset sued and won the libel case in 1951, not least thanks to the testimony of Alexander Weißberg-Cybulski and Julius Margolin .

From 1952 to 1956, Rousset researched the situation of convicts in China and wrote a corresponding white paper. In May 1957, the CICRC condemned the repression in Algeria.

In the early 1960s, Rousset worked for Le Figaro and Le Monde, among others, and interviewed third world personalities: Nasser , Ben Bella , Che Guevara . In 1965 he supported Charles de Gaulle as a "left-wing Gaullist" and in 1968 was elected as a deputy of his UDR party for the Isère constituency. After the withdrawal and death of de Gaulle, whom he had admired for his policy of decolonization in Algeria, Rousset ended his mandate as an independent.

Rousset ended his journalistic career as a reporter for Figaro littéraire , also worked for the radio station France-Culture and published several books, including Fragments d'autobiographie .

Works

  • L'Univers concentrationnaire . Edition du Pavois 1946
    • German edition: The concentration camp universe , from the French by Olga Radetzkaja and Volker Weichsel. With an afterword by Jeremy Adler and explanations by Nicolas Bertrand, Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-633-54302-1 .
  • Les Jours de notre mort . Novel. Edition du Pavois 1947
  • Jean-Paul Sartre, David Rousset, Gerard Rosenthal: Entretiens sur la politique . Gallimard, Paris 1949
  • Vers une seconde révolution en Chine . Saturne 1959 No. 19th
  • Sur la guerre. Sommes-nous en danger de guerre nucléaire? Ramsay, Paris 1987

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ David Rousset, a liberated prisoner who is acting as a guide for an American soldier , Rousset after the liberation of the Wöbbelin concentration camp. Image on the pages of the USHMM
  2. ↑ Ahlrich Meyer: The threshold of the testimony exceeded. David Rousset's L'univers concentrationaire is finally available in German. In: SGO Sozialgrschichte online. DuEPublico, Duisburg-Essen Publications Online, University of Duisburg-Essen, 2020, accessed on August 21, 2020 (German).
  3. ↑ Ahlrich Meyer: The threshold of the testimony exceeded. David Rousset's L'univers concentationaire is finally available in German . In: SGO Sozial.Geschichte Offline . No. 27 . Janus Projects, Cologne 2020, p. 207-216 .
  4. ↑ Olga Radetzkaja: The lonely witness, Julius Margolin and his report from the underworld; in: Julius Margolin, Journey to the Land of the Camps . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-42406-3 , pp. 626 .
  5. ↑ René Schlott: In staccato through a universe of horror. In: FAZ. FAZ, January 26, 2020, accessed on August 21, 2020 (German).

literature

  • Björn Kooger: David Rousset and the world of the concentration camp . In: Memorial Foundation Saxony-Anhalt (ed.): Remember! Task, opportunity, challenge . No. 2014/2 , pp. 7-24 . [1]

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Rousset, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French journalist and political activist, member of the National Assembly
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Roanne
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 1997
Place of death Paris