"'Do you remember that night soon after the Second War, we were boys, freshly out of the Maquis...'"
-"Marius," p. 15.
Thus, both of these future history series are firmly grounded in common memories of the twentieth century.
Tuesday 31 March 2020
In The Twentieth Century
"'Do you remember that night soon after the Second War, we were boys, freshly out of the Maquis...'"
-"Marius," p. 15.
Thus, both of these future history series are firmly grounded in common memories of the twentieth century.
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4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And that leads me to think Anderson speculatively set the WW III of his Psychotechnic series in the early to mid 1960's.
Ad astra! Sean
Although Poul was writing too close to WWII to write about the actual war.
The people who lived through it saw bits and pieces, their personal parts, with a vividness and reality nobody else could.
But they saw the thing as a whole largely in terms of the myths of the war and postwar periods, the communal beliefs worked out partly by official propaganda, and partly by what people collectively needed to believe.
The Maquis was one of them. Charles de Gaulle once sardonically noted that the Resistance started small and then grew -- but unfortunately its membership reached its peak in about 1960. The Maquis those characters are referring to is the mythic one.
(Albert Speer in an interview talked about the trouble the partisan movements in the Balkans and Eastern Europe caused for the German war effort, and how it turned out that France contributed much more than the Ukraine. The interviewer then said: "But what about the French Resistance>?" Speer said sardonically: "What resistance?"
Everyone was constructing myths. My father, who spent a lot of time in Germany just after the war (he was stationed in Metz, close to the frontier), remarked that you could go into any German town and find that there had been only two actual Nazis: Franz, who was killed in the bombing, and Erich, who didn't come back from the Russian Front. (My father actually rather liked the Germans.)
Sean,
Sandra Miesel says 1958.
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Yes, I have read in honest histories of how the French "resistance" was not all that big or much of a problem for the Germans thru out practically speaking, all of their occupation of France. And the French disgraced themselves by voluntarily cooperating with the Nazis in deporting Jews to the death camps.
Paul: I did have 1958 in the back of my mind, from Miesel's chronology. But the text you quoted made me think Anderson was thinking WW III might come four or five years later.
Ad astra! Sean
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