Germaine Tillion

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Germaine Tillion (born May 30, 1907 in Allègre , Haute-Loire department , † April 19, 2008 in Saint-Mandé ) was a French ethnologist and resistance fighter in the Resistance .

Life

Youth and Studies

Germaine Tillion spent her youth with her parents and her sister Françoise in Clermont-Ferrand , where her father Lucien Tillion (1867-1925) worked as a justice of the peace. Her parents were educated people, they loved art. Her father was an amateur photographer, her mother Emilie Tillion was a writer and for a time worked largely on the editorial team of Guides bleus , a prestigious collection of small reference books for tourists.

She left home to study in Paris. There she joined a group of ethnologists around Marcel Mauss and Louis Massignon . She finished her studies with degrees from the École pratique des hautes études , the École du Louvre and the Institut national des langues et civilizations orientales .

In 1934 she went on her first study trip to Algeria to research the Berber people of the Chaouis . Three more study visits followed by 1940 in that mountain region, the Aurès in eastern Algeria.

Resistance and concentration camps

During the French mobilization in 1940, she returned to France. She acknowledged the French surrender in the face of the German attack with contempt; she vomited when she heard Marshal Pétain's speech . She became the commandant of the first group of the Resistance that formed in the occupied territory, the groupe du Musée de l'Homme . This resistance group set itself the goal of gathering information and freeing prisoners. Her colleagues included the librarian Yvonne Oddon , the linguist Boris Vildé and the anthropologist Anatole Levitsky , all three of whom worked at the Musée de l'Homme , as well as the monarchist Maurice Dutheil de la Rochère and the retired colonel Paul Hauet .

In the course of 1941, the German reconnaissance was gradually able to unmask the group. Anatole Levitsky and Boris Vildé were arrested and shot in the Forteresse du Mont-Valérien in February 1942 . On August 13, 1942, Tillion was also arrested following a denunciation at a meeting in the Gare de Lyon in Paris . She was incarcerated in Fresnes Prison, where her mother Emilie was also incarcerated.

On October 21, 1943, she and her mother were deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . Germaine was given the lowest status in the camp hierarchy, that of an available , a prisoner who could be used for any work at any time. Hidden in a box, she wrote the libretto of a macabre-comic operetta in 1944: Le Available aux Enfers , the title varies Orphée aux Enfers . In March 1945 she lost her mother, who, along with many other inmates, was murdered by poison gas that month. In the same spring, she was saved from the Allied invasion by the transport of the Swedish Red Cross . Tillion's manuscript secured another prisoner. Tillion appropriated photographs taken by the Nazi doctors of the human experiments. She attributed her own survival to happy circumstances and a friendly network in the camp, but not to her will to survive: “J'ai surpassé, oui, mais sans de le faire exprès. Si j'ai survécu, je le dois d'abord et à coup sur au hasard, ensuite à la colère, à la volonté de dévoiler ses crimes et, enfin, à une coalition de l'amitié - car j'avais perdu le désir viscéral de vivre. "

After the Second World War

After the war, she devoted herself to researching the Second World War and investigating German war crimes. In 1951, together with the Trotskyist David Rousset , she founded the Commission internationale contré le régime concentrationnaire, which exposes and denounces the existence of the Gulag . From 1954 she turned again to studies on Algeria. She started an educational program for prisoners. She became director at the École pratique des hautes études and organized 20 study trips to North Africa and the Middle East. At the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and at the Center national de la recherche scientifique , she completed a number of relevant studies on Mediterranean societies and cultures .

On July 4, 1957, she secretly met Yacef Saadi in Algiers to put an end to the escalation of assassinations and executions in the course of the Algerian War, which remained unsuccessful. After the Algerian War she was involved in various political projects:

  • against the impoverishment of the Algerian population,
  • against torture in Algeria,
  • for the emancipation of women in the Mediterranean.

In 2004, she and other French intellectuals took part in an appeal against torture in Iraq .

On June 2, 2007, on the occasion of her 100th birthday, her operetta Available aux enfers was premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris .

In February 2014, French President François Hollande announced that the remains of Tillion would be transferred to the Panthéon next year, on May 27, 2015, together with those of Pierre Brossolette , Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Jean Zay . In the summer of 2013, May 27th was set by law as the Journée nationale de la Résistance , a nationwide state day of remembrance.

On May 27, 2015, Tillion's remains were transferred to the Panthéon , along with those of Jean Zay , Pierre Brossolette and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz . This is the highest posthumous honor in France, May 27th has been the Journée nationale de la Résistance since 2014 , a national day of remembrance.

honors and awards

Fonts (selection)

  • Fragments de vie. Edited by Tzvetan Todorov. 2009
  • The stolen innocence. A life between the Resistance and ethnology. Translated, edited and with an introductory essay by Mechthild Gilzmer. Selected and with an afterword by Tzvetan Todorov. AvivA, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-932338-68-7 .
  • Le available aux enfers. Une opérette à Ravensbrück. La Martinière, 2005, ISBN 2-73243281-4 . (French)
  • L'Algérie aurésienne. In collaboration with Nancy Woods . 2001.
  • Il était une fois l'ethnographie. Autobiography. 2000.
  • Le harem et les cousins. 1966
  • L'Afrique bascule vers l'avenir. 1959.
  • Les ennemis complémentaires. 1958.
  • L'Algérie en 1957. 1956
  • Ravensbrück. Neuchâtel 1946. (Reissued 1988, ISBN 2-02031007-4 .)
    • Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. From the Franz. By Barbara Glaßmann. Appendix: Anise Postel-Vinay: The mass killings by gas in Ravensbrück. Fischer, Frankfurt 2001, ISBN 3-596-14728-X .

exhibition

  • 2008: Germaine Tillion, ethnologue et résistante. Rennes , Musée des Bretagne and Paris, Musée de l'homme.

literature

  • Cathérine Simon: Le siècle de Germaine Tillion. In: Le Monde. May 30, 2007, p. 24
  • Cathérine Simon: Germaine Tillion. In: Le Monde. April 22, 2008, p. 20
  • Tzvetan Todorov: Une héroïne de la fraternité (a heroine of brotherhood). In: Le Monde. April 22, 2008
  • Martin Blumenson: Le Réseau du Musée de l'Homme. Seuil, Paris 1979.
  • Mechthild Gilzmer: Germaine Tillion (1907-2008) "In search of the truth", in: Florence Hervé (Ed.): With Must and List. European women in the resistance against fascism and war, Cologne 2020, S: 93–98, Papy Rossa, ISBN 978-3-89438-724-2 .
  • Jean Lacouture: Le Témoignage est un combat. Une biography of Germaine Tillion. Seuil, Paris 2000, ISBN 2-02-040401-X .
  • Nancy Woods: Germaine Tillion, une femme-mémoire. D'une Algérie à l'autre. Autrement, Paris 2003, ISBN 9782746703186 .
Movie
  • François Gauducheau: Les images oubliées de Germaine Tillion. Pois Chiche Films, Lorient 2001 (a film with a collection of photographs taken by the ethnologist in Algeria in the 1930s).

See also

Web links

In French:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Quand j'ai entendu le discours de Pétain, j'ai vomi. Littéralement "; Quoted from Cathérine Simon in Le Monde , April 22, 2008, p. 20.
  2. ↑ Germaine Tillion, in Ravensbrück , 1988 edition. The page number is missing here.
  3. ^ German for example: International Committee against Concentration Camps
  4. ↑ Documents - Documents. Journal for the German-French dialogue. H. 2, summer 2014, ISSN  0012-5172 p. 109.
  5. ↑ Documents - Documents. Journal for the German-French dialogue. H. 2, Sommer / Éte 2014, ISSN  0012-5172 p. 109
personal data
SURNAME Tillion, Germaine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French ethnologist and resistance fighter of the Resistance
DATE OF BIRTH May 30, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Allègre
DATE OF DEATH April 19, 2008
Place of death Saint-Mandé