Abstract
With the end of the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War the following September, the nation that many antifascist Germans identified as their ideological utopia — France — turned against them. After France's declaration of war on Germany in September 1939, all Germans living in France became `enemies of the French state' and were forced to report to internment camps. Drawing on a variety of archival and published documents — poems, plays, novels, personal memoirs, posters and camp reports — produced by German antifascists who were interned in French internment camps in 1939—40, this study examines how imprisonment in France affected the German antifascist concept of France and the political ideals it represented.
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