Jean-François Steiner

Jean-François Steiner is a French-Jewish writer born on 17 February 1938 in Paris, France. He is the son of Kadmi Cohen (1892–1944), a French lawyer and writer who died at the concentration camp of Gleiwitz. In 1952 he was adopted, together with his sister Josée Steiner and elder brother Olivier Cohen-Steiner by his mother's second husband, a physician. He is best known for his controversial non-fiction novel Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp first published in 1966 as Treblinka: la révolte d'un camp d'extermination;[1][2] translated a year later by Helen Weaver for Simon & Schuster.[3] The book is a semi-fictional attempt to layout the logic of the Nazi concentration camp system and the experiences of the victims who eventually succeeded in revolting against their exterminators in the Treblinka camp. It is written in a third person almost-omniscient way, as the author tries to tie the behavioral conditioning used on the Jews to the narrative perspective of those who endured the violent human experiment. Following outrage among French, Jewish and foreign academics,[4] Steiner agreed to republish his book (which became a bestseller),[5] by presenting it as a fictional account of the Treblinka extermination camp operation. The book remains very popular in France.[6][7]

Jean-François Steiner
Front cover of Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp by Steiner,
ISBN 0452011248
Born17 February 1938
Paris, France
OccupationWriter, academic
NationalityFrench
GenreWorld War II history

Treblinka

When asked upon the publication of his book why death camps such as Treblinka had been 'avoided' by his own French contemporaries, Steiner replied: "In Treblinka, as in all the other extermination camps, the Germans had designed 'the machine' (as they referred to the methods of extermination) in such a way that it would almost run itself. It is the Jews who did everything."[8] Professor Samuel Moyn in his Treblinka Affair explained that Steiner claimed to direct his non-fiction novel at the "problem" of the Jews' complicity in a manner reminiscent of parts of Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews or Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.[8]

Works
  • Treblinka : la révolte d'un camp d'extermination with Preface by Gilles Perrault and Simone de Beauvoir. First published in 1966 by Fayard; 169 editions: 1968, 1970, 1974, 1985, 1994.
  • Si Paris..., Paris, Balland, 1970, photographs of Daniel Chaplain.
  • Les Métèques, Paris, Fayard, 1970.
  • Varsovie 44, l'insurrection, (testimony and documents collected and translated by Jean-François Steiner), Paris, Flammarion, 1975.
  • La sémiométrie – Essai de statistique structurale, in collaboration with Ludovic Lebart and Marie Piron, Paris, Dunod, 2003; ISBN 978-2-7021-4681-1.

References
  1. OCLC WorldCat. "Treblinka. La Révolte d'un camp d'extermination by Jean-François Steiner". OCLC 28654242. Paris, A. Fayard, 1968. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  2. OCLC WorldCat (1994). Treblinka by Jean-François Steiner. Preface by Simone de Beauvoir. Introduction by Terrence Des Pres. ISBN 0452011248. OCLC 895198850. Paperback, 415 pages, published by Meridian, 1994 (first published in 1966).
  3. OCLC WorldCat. "Treblinka by Jean-François Steiner". OCLC 394953. Mazal Holocaust Collection. Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 1967. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. Moyn, Samuel (2005). A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France. UPNE. ISBN 1584655097 – via Google Books.
  5. Romanov, Sergey (17 October 2006). "Richard Glazar on Jean-Francois Steiner". Treblinka survivor Richard Glazar's critique of Jean-Francois Steiner's book about Treblinka. Yad Vashem catalogue numbers: E/72-1-4, E/1152; Ing. Richard Glazar, Prague, 29th June 1968.
  6. Bracher, Nathan (Summer 2006). "Review". South Central Review. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern Language Association. 23 (2): 128–133. doi:10.1353/scr.2006.0019. JSTOR 40039934. S2CID 144009439.
  7. Moyn, Samuel (19 August 2014). Fellows of Harvard College. "Abstract". A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005.
  8. Moyn 2005, The Treblinka Affair, p. 4.
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