‘Germanen sprechen französisch, Romanen fühlen flandrisch’? German translations of Marie Gevers under National-Socialism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article will study the issue of the German translations of Belgian/Flemish author Marie Gevers, which were published under National-Socialism. These translations were part of a long-term program meant to promote positive images of Flanders in German-speaking countries. Paradoxically the Nazis tolerated the presence of a French-language writer, while they were encouraging the social emancipation of the Flemish Movement to liberate itself from the socio-cultural dominance of French in Belgium. Close-readings of Gevers’s texts will shed light on this specific contradiction and the way the regional literature embodied by her novels may have suited the propagandistic model of the ‘völkisch’ literature promoted by the Nazis. Another aspect of my interpretations concerns the images of Flanders in Gevers’s German translations and how they favor a kind of aporia through some topoi and hetero-representations of Belgium, which had been common in Germany and in Europe since the nineteenth century.