Journeys of Remembrance: Memories of the Second World War in French and German Literature, 1960–1980 (review)

In the introduction to this stimulating monograph, Kathryn N. Jones explains her interest in experiential and vicarious accounts of the war years published prior to the ‘boom’ in memory studies that occurred in the 1980s, narratives potentially untrammelled by or at least innocent of, the later discourses on memory. Which is not to say that, in this study, contemporary debates over national and personal memories are glossed; rather, the work of theorists and historians such as Pierre Nora, Dan Diner and Henri Rousso serves to illuminate paths trodden by the preceding generation. In contrast to the stillness of monuments, museums and iconic photographs, the texts explored by the author convey movement. Borrowing from theories of travel writing, Jones argues that the notion of the journey in space as well as in time, whether of deportation to the death camp in Charlotte Delbo’s memoirs Auschwitz et après (1965, 1970, 1971) or sea voyage to a mysterious island in Perec’s novel W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975), widens the compass of memory. In Delbo’s case, the narrator draws in the perspectives of those not personally affected by the Holocaust, whereas Perec’s reader is distanced by textual form, obliged continually to criss-cross the no-man’s land between fictional allegory and historical referent. From the opening page, where the author marks a striking contrast in the French and German monuments unveiled in 2005 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, comparisons between the cultural discourses of memory in each country animate the analysis. One advantage of the comparative approach is that it allows specialists and students working in the one field access to the other, thus providing for a richer understanding of related but also very different topoi. In Chapter 1 the author chronicles the varying ways in which the war years were remembered in France, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic during the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequent chapters offer rigorous analyses of specific narratives in the context of these national memories. The Nazi death camps are the fulcrum of each one, but the writers selected by Jones offer multi-facetted perspectives on the Holocaust. Thus, French narratives of deportation are juxtaposed with a ‘memorial site literature’, represented by four German-language writers who all wrote accounts of post-war visits to the camps. It transpires that many retrospective German narratives of the war, such as Bernward Vesper’s Die Reise (1977), Evelyne Le Garrec’s La Rive allemande de ma mémoire (1980) and Marian Sell’s Mourir d’absence (1978), are coloured by generational conflict, at the level both of the personal and of the collective. Jones departs unequivocally from Adorno’s dictat on the incompatibility of art and atrocity and, through her deft presentation of a succession of more or less metaphorical journeys, she makes a good case. This valuable book for all scholars of post-war French and German culture will enhance the reader’s understanding of what Paul Ricoeur once termed ‘l’événement fondateur négatif ’ of the last century.