The Osnabrück witch trials echo down the centuries

Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by the prize-winning novelist Annie Ernaux while she was having an affair with a married man in 1989. Ernaux has already written a novel about this relationship. Now we have a more immediate and intimate account. Meanwhile, the octogenarian feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous continues her own brand of écriture féminine in Well-Kept Ruins. For the uninitiated, Cixous’s stream of consciousness is like reading Molly Bloom with a PhD from the Sorbonne, a raft of awards and a keen eye for cognitive dissonance.

Cixous’s new book hinges on her arrival in Osnabrück, Germany, to receive the Justus Möser Medal, awarded by the city council to writers who commemorate the place. (Erich Maria Remarque was a previous recipient.) The author has written about Osnabrück before, as the birthplace of her mother Ève, an Ashkenazi Jew, born in 1910. In the 1930s, Ève fled Hitler’s Germany to find refuge in Algeria, where she met Cixous’s father, a Sephardic Jew, and a practising doctor –until the Vichy regime removed French citizenship from Jews. Hélène was born in 1937. Her father died in 1948, and in 1971 she and her mother were exiled from Algeria.

It was an expulsion that marked Cixous deeply. As the Bürgermeister bestows the city’s highest honour on her (in a ceremony that Remarque found ‘boring’), Cixous finds herself contemplating stories of Osnabrück’s 16th-century witch trials – and how the trauma those women endured was echoed in her own mother’s persecution as a midwife and a suspicious (Jewish) woman.