Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (review)

The passing of François Mitterrand in 1996 marked the end of a definitive phase in the memory of the Holocaust, and of late twentieth-century France in general. Wolf's Harnessing the Holocaust explores the postwar era ably, looking at the discursive uses to which the memory of Jewish genocide during World War II has been put in France from the 1960s to the 1990s. In exploring this history, Wolf advances a complex and intriguing thesis. Starting with the Six Day war of June 1967, she argues that French Jews formulated a reading of the Holocaust as trauma, making it key to an emergent sense of Jewish identity in contemporary France. She also explores how non-Jews increasingly came to use the Holocaust as a template upon which to inscribe their own feelings of suffering and victimization. Although this universalization of the Holocaust plays an important role in the book, Wolf is not primarily concerned with representations of Jews as the "Other." Rather, she foregrounds the interplay between Jewish views of both the Holocaust and its appropriation by other sectors of French society. For Wolf, the key aspect of this interplay is its articulation of a larger phenomenon, the conflict between Jewish and French identity, that she sees as rooted in the history of Jewish assimilation in France and tragically underscored by the Holocaust itself.

Wolf traces this history from the assertion of French-Jewish identity and Holocaust trauma in 1967 through the various debates about antisemitism and the memory of the Occupation ending with the trial of Maurice Papon. The story of France's struggle to come to grips with the legacy of World War II, in particular the trials of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, and Papon, has been covered in depth by a number of scholars and popular writers over the last few years. The originality of Wolf's contribution lies in her focus on the reaction of France's Jews to these events, and to their implications for both Jewish life there and for French identity as a whole. In considering this perspective, she intelligently criticizes the recent controversial thesis of Henry Rousso, according to which public discourse about Vichy has overemphasized Jewish suffering and the Holocaust. Though not disagreeing with the idea that the Shoah has occupied a central role in public reevaluations of the war years, Wolf argues that this emphasis spoke to the dissonance between the Jewish experience of the Holocaust as trauma and the universalist model of French citizenship. Differences between Jews and non-Jews about how to interpret the relationship between Holocaust and Resistance, for example, illustrate the contradictions of assimilation for both sides. In a particularly intriguing section, Wolf argues that the rise of a more assertive young Jewish generation in France has tended to heal the trauma by rendering the assimilationist paradigm less relevant, paradoxically promoting a different kind of integration into the nation.

Harnessing the Holocaust does an excellent job of analyzing Jewish perceptions of the legacy of the Holocaust in France. It is less successful in making the broader case that many other groups in French society embraced the Holocaust as a metaphor for their own victimization. The fact that such comparisons have at times occurred in particularly inflammatory circumstances, such as the conflict between Israel and Palestine or in Jacques Vergès' defense of Klaus Barbie, does not necessarily make them ubiquitous. For example, many have written about the massacre of October 17, 1961, ever since the declassification of the official state documents about it in 1999. Yet few have compared it with the Holocaust, preferring to consider it in the context of France's colonial past and its troubled relations with its Muslim minority today. This plurality of perspectives, in fact, supports Wolf's...