Clarissa's Blog

One of Rafael Chirbes’s greatest intellectual concerns was the suffering of Germans at the hands of the Allies in the closing years of World War II. I learned from him about the vast amount of literature, including memoirs and fiction, on this subject. I’m not entirely sure why this was of so much interest to him. Did he identify with the Germans because his own side, the Republicans, were the losers in the Spanish Civil War that they brought about?

I am not aware of any other non-German, Western intellectual who would be as profoundly devastated by the suffering of the Germans in World War II. Even if the issue is mentioned in passing, it never is articulated as the foundation of anybody’s worldview. Curiosly, Chirbes, whose French was at the near-native level, but whose German was rudimentary, read and thought very little about the suffering of the French during World War II. He loved French literature, of course, and read an enormous amount in the language, staying current on all of the recent award winners and bestsellers in France. But the writer’s interest in the devastation of World War II was mostly concentrated on Germany.