Esperanto and the Second World War: a post-memory approach to transnational narratives ; Esperanto kaj la Dua Mondmilito: postmemora aliro al transnaciaj rakontoj

International audience ; The Second World War hit the Esperanto movement abruptly: in Europe and Asia persecution of its members was introduced by the totalitarian regimes which appeared or established themselves in the course of the 1930s.But the war also broke out at a time of poor organisation of the movement: in 1936 the neutral movement split into UEA and IEL. Likewise in the workers' movement Stalinists had provoked a schism within SAT and in 1932 had founded IPE. Activities during the war were greatly reduced and documentary traces are rare.The post-war rebirth was thus strongly marked by the recent experience of the war. In the second half of the 20th century a significant part of Esperanto writing either deals directly with the war or is strongly influenced by its consequences. The corpus is extensive and contains novels, short stories, poems, autobiography and other forms of writing such as one opera libretto.Few of these texts are known outside the Esperanto community, except Maskerado ĉirkaŭ la morto, the life story of Tivadar Soros (which appeared in 1965). Because it has been translated into several languages it is now part of the source material for researchers into the Shoah. But the corpus is extremely rich and deals with very diverse topics concerning almost every part of the world: the evacuation of children in London in 1939 in the novel Londonanidoj written by an adolescent Donald Munns (1946), the Japanese prisoners in US camps in Naskitaj sur la ruino by Miyamoto Masao (1976), the destiny of Scottish families between the First and Second World Wars in La granda kaldrono (1978) by John Francis, the experience of the Shoah in the poems by Julius Balbin. Even the epic masterpiece by William Auld, La infana raso (1955), can be read as a post-Hiroshima poem. The growth of totalitarian politics and the following war still interest today's writers, as is shown by the novels of Mikael Bronŝtejn and Trevor Steele. From these fictional accounts, based on historical facts, one can understand how the ...