Jean-François Steiner

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Jean-François Steiner (born Jean-François Cohen February 17, 1938 in Paris ) is a French writer.

Life

Jean-François Cohen's father Isaac Kadmi Cohen (1892–1944) was a lawyer, Zionist activist and writer. He was deported by the Germans in 1944 and murdered in the Gleiwitz subcamp of the Auschwitz concentration camp . After the war, his mother married a Jewish doctor. Dr. Ozias Steiner, who adopted Jean-François and his siblings Josée (* 1939) and Olivier (1936–2019) in 1952. Steiner attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and spent a year and a half on a kibbutz in Israel after graduating from high school . He then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne with a licentiate degree. In 1964, Steiner read a lecture by Abba Kovner from 1946 on the subject of Jewish passivity in the face of the Holocaust . He did a self-study in the Center de documentation juive contemporaine and found out about the second Treblinka trial that was carried out in 1964/65 against members of the security guards in Düsseldorf . He had conversations with some of the survivors of the Treblinka concentration camp in Israel.

In 1966, Steiner published the factual novel Treblinka: la révolte d'un camp d'extermination (Treblinka: the revolt of an extermination camp), which received a great response and, in addition to translations into many foreign languages, achieved 160 editions in France. Steiner received the Prix ​​littéraire de la Résistance in the year of publication . The novel is controversial because Steiner describes the function of the Jewish Sonderkommando in the Treblinka extermination camp , which played an important role in the killing machinery planned and violently enforced by the Germans. Steiner was sharply criticized for his portrayal, among others, in 1968 by Treblinka survivor Richard Glazar .

In 1967 Steiner married Grit von Brauchitsch, daughter of the Wehrmacht officer Bernd von Brauchitsch . After he had been quiet for a while, he reappeared in the press in the 1990s when he came out (to no avail) against prosecution of French collaborator Maurice Papon .

Fonts (selection)

  • Treblinka: la révolte d'un camp d'extermination . Preface by Gilles Perrault and Simone de Beauvoir . Paris: Fayard, 1966. Translations and over 160 editions.
  • Si ... Paris . Paris: Balland, 1970, photographs of Daniel Chaplain.
  • Les Métèques . Paris: Fayard, 1970.
  • (Editor and translator): Varsovie 44, l'insurrection . Documents. Paris: Flammarion, 1975
  • La sémiométrie - Essai de statistique structurale . In collaboration with Ludovic Lebart and Marie Piron. Paris: Dunod, 2003 ISBN 978-2-7021-4681-1

literature

  • Richard Glazar: Several months ago a French version of Mr. Steiner's book on Treblinka got into my hands , letter to Yad Vashem , June 29, 1968 (en) with a text attachment Treblinka as seen and as described in writing , which was sent to Jean-François Steiner is directed.
  • Didier Daeninckx: De Treblinka à Bordeaux…. In: Revue d'Histoire de la Shoah, no 166, 1999, pp. 89-99
  • Samuel Moyn : From l'Univers Concentrationnaire to the Jewish Genocide: Pierre Vidal-Naquet and the Treblinka Controversy. In: Julian Bourg: After The Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France . Lexington Books, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7391-0792-8
  • Samuel Moyn : A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France . Brandeis University Press, 2005
  • Nathan Bracher: A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France by Samuel Moyn . Review in: South Central Review. 23, No. 2, 2006, pp. 128-133
  • François Azouvi : Le Mythe du grand silence: Auschwitz, les Français, la mémoire . Fayard, 2012, ISBN 978-2-213-67099-7
  • Sebastian Voigt : Treblinka. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 159-164.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The article Treblinka by Sebastian Voigt (2015) describes the history of the impact of Steiner's book from 1966 in France. There also information on biography.
  2. ^ Jean-François Steiner: Afterword, in: Hubert de Beaufort, Michel Bergès: Affaire Papon: la contre-enquête . Guibert, 1999, ISBN 978-2-86839-564-1 , pp. 333-334
personal data
SURNAME Steiner, Jean-François
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cohen, Jean-François (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris