Guest of the ilb 2002
Robert Bober was born
a child of Polish Jews in Berlin in 1931. In 1933 his family emigrated
to France, where thanks to a warning, they survived the razzia of the
»Vélodrome d’Hiver« in July 1942. At the age of 16 he started an
apprenticeship as a tailor and worked as a tailor and cutter until
1953. Afterwards, he worked as a teacher at holiday homes and led
therapeutic projects with psychologically ill children, including
children who had lost social ties through the war.
In the
fifties, Bober got to know François Truffaut and became his assistant
on the films »Tirez sur le pianiste« (1960) and »Jules et Jim« (1962).
In 1967 he made his own first documentary film for television. Today
Bober is regarded as one of the most renown documentary film-makers in
France. In the sixties and seventies his television documentaries were
thematically concerned with the post-war period and the effects of the
Holocaust.
Films such as »La génération d’après« (1971) and
»Réfugié provenant d’Allemagne, apatride d’origine polonaise« (1976)
were made, which are concerned with the fate of German Jews of
Polish origin in France, who fled. Since the eighties, in co-operation
with Pierre Dumayet, author portraits are at the forefront of his work,
for example films abut Paul Valéry, Flaubert and Georges Perec, with
whom Bober was friends.
Together with Georges Perec, one of the
forerunners of the »Nouveau Roman« he filmed, in 1979, »Ellis Island
Tales«, a film about the former main starting point for
European immigrants in the USA.
In 1993, Bober’s debut
novel, »Quoi de neuf sur la guerre?«, for which he received the coveted
»Prix du Livre Inter« came out. Set in the first year following the end
of the war, in a Jewish Parisian tailors, Bober tells the story, in an
apparently light, almost cheerful tone, of a group of war survivors who
tell of how they were saved.
Bober’s second novel, »Berg et
Beck« appeared in 1999 and is, since 2000, also available in German.
Thematically, it is linked to the debut: the author tells the story of
surviving children of deported Jews in the early fifties, their war
traumas and their strategies of surviving the loss of the most
important people in their lives.
The novels of the
author, who lives in Paris, keeps alive the memory of the Shoah and the
war without tearing the horror into a harsh light of prefabricated
paradigm. In an unspectacular way, almost casually and in a down to
earth and simple language, the still fresh memories of the
concentration camps and the atrocity of the Holocaust are, through
Bober’s characters, confronted with the slowly returning everyday life.
»There comes a moment,« according to Bober »where writing shouldn’t
replace remembering but should continue it. [...] The more intense a
situation, the more painful it is and so all the more pathos must
be avoided.«
© international literature festival berlin | 
