Didier Daeninckx worked as a printer, cultural presenter and local journalist. He places the social theme and the historical investigation into a disguised or hidden past at the heart of his fiction. His commitment takes its Source in his family environment shared between the anarchist, antimilitarist and communist currents. In 1984, he published “Murders for Memory” in the ” Black sequence “ by Gallimard. He has since published around thirty titles which confirm a desire to anchor the intrigues of the noir novel in social and political reality. He is also the author of numerous short stories which describe everyday life in a sometimes tragic, sometimes ironic aspect, and whose link could be black humor.
You have often been called a maverick. In your autobiographical work “La Mémoire longue” (Le Cherche Midi, 2008), you write that you are in “the dark room of history”. Can you explain to us what you mean by that?
I have a family history full of silences. When I became a novelist, I was keen to question through the means of fiction all those unsaid things which were intimately linked to history with a capital H. My paternal grandfather had been declared a deserter during the Great War. When I was 12, he joked that he was captain of a wash boat, simply because his wife was a washerwoman on the banks of the Seine. It was his way of dismissing the question. I wrote in an article that he was a deserter, and my family was very angry with me.
Later, I was able to have access to his file, and I discovered that he had spent a year in the Aubervilliers maquis, before being caught by the police with false papers and being sentenced to three years of forced labor. I had already tried to approach this blind spot in history in 1984 in The Last of the Lastlong before having had access to these archives.
This article is taken from the “Special Issue Le Monde: 1944 – From the landings to the liberation of France”, May 2024, on sale in newsstands or on our store website.
Subsequently, I wrote texts about my other grandfather, whose history is closely linked to that of the communist movement. He was mayor of Stains from 1935 to 1939 and general councilor of the Seine. One day, in the 1970s, I saw him cry when he saw an interview on television with Charles Tillon, who had just been kicked out of the party.
And there, it’s the same. Impossible to have the information, until the day a former mayor confided to me what my grandfather had never told his children: he had refused the German-Soviet pact and left the CP. Then he joined the army and was taken prisoner for four and a half years. In August 1945, thanks to Charles Tillon, elected soldiers from the party that had refused the German-Soviet pact were able to run again under the communist label.
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