« Nobody wanted to help me. I had to do it myself, walking days after days with a heavy backpack as only luggage. I had to do it. My sisters had risked their lives during the Tsar Nicholas time. I had to do what I had to do. It was my turn. In four years, I have been in every shtetls of East Europe and I have taken sixteen thousand pictures between Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, basically in all countries that were not behind "the Iron Curtain"... with the constant obsession to build a monument for the Jew people´s torment... The major requirement to become a human being is to do what others do not want to do. »
Simone Veil has spoken on very different stages and subjects, and before extremely diverse audiences. The speeches collected here represent only a fraction of her public dialogues: those given over the last six years in her capacity as president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.Having written those last words, I must immediately correct myself: when our president discusses the Shoah, she is firstly and always Madame Veil, the Auschwitz survivor, matured and enriched by her French and international political experience, who speaks from the heart about her own memory and her own thoughts.Alone, the typed pages of these speeches doubtless lack her gaze, her gravitas, and the singular tone of her stories, which always pierce her listeners.
Essay on the Perceptions and Values of the Chinese This book is the result of a study carried out in Guangzhou (Canton), financed by the European Union and focusing on the perceptions that the Chinese have of Europe and Europeans.
The perceptions tell us nothing or little about the social reality and the real behaviour of others.. They are above all an implicit confrontation with the values of those who pronounce them. They act as a projection. Here, they express the framework of thought and implicit values of the Chinese, at the same time as they give a true idea of what the Chinese think of Europeans.
It is the role of the social sciences to deconstruct these perceptions in order to objectivize them, that is to say put into perspective their link with the reality described. This done, it is possible to create a certain distance in relation to what is expressed, a certain relativism, the existence of which is necessary in an intercultural perspective.
Cet ouvrage est dédié à la mémoire de cet homme qui incarnait la conscience de la Shoah. Y sont rassemblés des hommages personnels consacrés à Simon Wiesenthal et des essais provenant d'un large panel d'auteurs, traitant de l'antisémitisme et d'autres formes d'intolérance, de racisme et de xénophobie. Partant de l'idée que l'antisémitisme est en soi le paradigme des haines collectives et individuelles, sont examinées à travers ces lignes certaines des raisons qui lui ont permis de prospérer à travers les âges pour être toujours présent à notre époque, malgré la condamnation presque universelle de la Shoah. Certains des auteurs ayant participé à ce projet le voient tel un virus, toujours prêt à prendre son essor, à se répandre partout où l'on refuse la différence du judaïsme. D'autres mettent en avant le fait que les mythes antisémites ne prennent pas vie dans la réalité mais dans la calomnie, dans la création d'un être imaginaire à qui l'on peut attribuer tous les vices et toutes les perversions. S'il faut les accuser des pires abominations, les Juifs ou les Tziganes, les Kurdes, les Arméniens ou encore les Tutsis, tous ont le profil idéal.
Ce volume de Transversales constitue le septième volet des travaux de spécialistes des études sur le dix-huitième siècle français et britannique. Ces chercheurs tentent de redéfinir les modes opératoires de la sociabilité pour chacune des deux nations, à partir de sources célèbres ou méconnues, et s'interrogent sur la réalité de la supériorité du modèle français de sociabilité. Le présent volume s'intéresse plus particulièrement à la représentation et à la réinvention des espaces de sociabilité à partir de sources diverses, correspondance, oeuvres littéraires, archives de sociétés, essais philosophiques, films. Il met en évidence les dimensions urbanistiques et transgressives de l'espace, sa dualité, en étant à la fois imaginaire et physique et s'interroge sur le rôle de l'être humain, acteur et spectateur. La représentation des espaces de sociabilité, telle qu'elle est abordée dans cet ouvrage, pose la question de l'autorité et de la négociation opérée par l'individu entre liberté et appartenance à un groupe socio-culturel lui-même indissociable d' une nation en devenir.
This volume is the seventh in the Transversales series published by a group of researchers of different nationalities on the topic of sociability in France and Britain during the Enlightenment. The research focuses on the extent to which a new model of sociability emerged in these nations during this period, and the similarities and differences between the ways this model developed on each side of the Channel. The present volume examines the representation and reinvention of sociable spaces through an excavation of various sources, letters, literary works, archives of societies, philosophical essays, films. It highlights the urbanistic and transgressive aspects of space, its duality, as it is at once physical and imaginary, and it questions the role of human beings, both as actors and spectators. The representation of sociable spaces, as it is dealt with in this work, raises the issue of authority and of the negotiation enacted by the individual between freedom and the membership of a socio-cultural group that is inseparable from a nation in the making.
