The project investigates the relationship between cooperation, possibilities for coping, corporeality, and creativity in theatre, cabaret, and variety shows in First World War camps. It seeks to help systematically understand the reparative capacity of collectively organised cultural practice, as offered by various forms of cultural activity for German, Austrian, and French prisoners and internees, as well as for North African prisoners and internees integrated into the French army. The project also considers aesthetic dimensions: invention, improvisation, sensuality, voice, and body. It examines the processes leading from intention to performance and critique, arguing that the interplay of communally shared experience and creativity could become a decisive factor in helping prisoners respond constructively to the pressures they faced. These activities took place against the backdrop of wartime violence on an unimaginable scale, which many had experienced firsthand, altering their relationship to injury and vulnerability, illness and death. Medical authorities of the day generally accused destabilised individuals of being weak and proved hardly able to respond to their psychological suffering. But cultural cooperation made it possible to gain self-confidence and creative potential. The project also examines the extent to which collective cultural practice fostered solidarity while also reinforcing norms and forms of exclusion, including colonial and other forms of discrimination against particular groups.
PROF. DR. ISABELLA VON TRESKOW
CURRICULUM VITAE
Isabella von Treskow has been a professor of French and Italian literary and cultural studies at the University of Regensburg since 2009. In 2017, she was a visiting professor at Université Clermont Auvergne, and in 2022 at Université de Toulouse II. From 2024 to 2026, she was also a visiting fellow at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the relationship between cultural action and political violence. Central to her work are forms of action in situations of captivity, with reference to resistance and the persecution of Jews in Europe and North Africa, as well as cultural-historical reflections on traumatisation. A second area of her research is the history of knowledge and ideas, from the seventeenth century onwards. Her project on Flossenbürg concentration camp, Französische Stimmen zu Gehör gebracht / Faire écouter des voix françaises/ Making French voices heard, has received several awards.