The Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous, whose mother was German, has, since the mid-1990s, repeatedly addressed the fate of her German-Jewish family in Nazi Germany. In recent years, she has created in several of her works a harrowing memorial to the German-Jewish world. Olivier Morel's remarkable book is now the first study of this important subject. In a reading of great intensity, he succeeds in deciphering the dense web of motifs that structures the cycle and at the same time links it closely to the author's overall œuvre. Convincingly, he argues that the cycle culminates in the concept of the 'German illusion,' which Cixous uses to describe the Jewish population's mistaken belief that they had found a home in Germany.

Andrea Grewe, Professor of Romance Literatures, University of Osnabrück, Germany

What Olivier Morel's fascinating book reveals is not just a missing piece of Hélène Cixous's biography but a nuanced reconstruction, at once historical and poetic, of the 'German malady' (that will never be fully worked through), and an intersectional postcolonial story that fits no readily available historical category. A story of exile within exile, this book offers a searing investigation of 'GermanAlgeria' (or 'Osnabrück-Oran') in the crucible of irrecuperable origins. It describes a singular Franco-Algerian, German-Jewish case of diaspora, self-dispossession, and untranslatability but its audience is anyone and everyone who can identify with the experience of surviving within outsider lifeworlds.

Emily Apter, Julius Silver Professor and Chair, French Literature, Thought and Culture, New York University, USA