“How can one still write? I can sense the deep connection that links writer to his era as I had never sensed it before. I suddenly feel eighty years old. All the frameworks of thought in which I thought and lived have, perhaps, been destroyed. I feel completely insecure when I write. My thoughts seem to me those of a madman. It is the world which is mad around me. But the effect is the same. The connection between it and me has been destroyed. It was not only pressure from the outside, perhaps, but the ruin inside, too, that reduced German and Italian writers to silence so quickly. It is all abominable.” (Jean Guehenno, Diary of Dark Years, 1940–1944)