Please join us for the next Centre for Transnational Studies (TNS) seminar.

When: Wednesday 10th February 2016, 5-6.30pm

Where: Room 1177, Avenue Campus

Who: Dr Scott Soo

‘A place of utter desolation and abandonment…’: Administrative noise, neglect and the commemoration of the camp de Gurs.

The camp de Gurs was an internment centre that was initially built in 1939 for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. It continued to be used throughout WWII and became implicated in the Final Solution when German Jewish internees were deported to Auschwitz. While much is known about the internees’ experiences of Gurs and the operation of the camp, we know very little about what happened at the site once the camp was closed down. This paper sets out to explain how the camp was dismantled and then transformed into a place of commemorative activity through a focus on the camp cemetery. The analysis of local and national state archives will point towards a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics surrounding the construction and development of remembrance narratives in post-war France that necessarily accounts for both international factors and transnational processes.

All welcome.