Crisis of Memory and the Second World War (review)

Suleiman defines crisis of memory as ‘the interpretation and public understanding of an event firmly situated in the past, but whose aftereffects are still deeply felt.’ Given that her academic discipline is French culture and literature it is not surprising that one of her two subject areas is France, the other being the Holocaust, although there is intermingling of the two. Set against the backdrop of de Gaulle’s determination to reunite France in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, and hence bring only the most prominent of active collaborators to book, Suleiman examines Jean Paul Sartre’s writings and his thesis that the vast majority of the French people were heroic in their ability to ‘accommodate’ the German occupation; though the author fails to point out that without passive collaboration by the majority the Resistance would have had no water to swim in (to borrow from Mao Zedong). In the context of her discussion on André Malraux’s homage to the Resistance leader Jean Moulin the author highlights two pieces of legislation passed in France in 1964. On the one hand was that which stated that the statute of limitations did not apply to crimes against humanity, which inferred Nazi crimes against the French people, while on the other an amnesty was granted to Frenchmen who had committed crimes against the Algerian independence movement. Suleiman sees the latter as a reflection of French unwillingness to recognise the guilt of some of their countrymen over the treatment of French Jews during the war. The pursuit of Nazis for crimes against humanity in France also shows up selective memory in the guilty Germans themselves, as personified in Marcel Ophuls’ 1988 film documentary on Klaus Barbie. Yet, the investigation of their crimes also revealed uncomfortable truths about French involvement in them.

Suleiman now switches to the Holocaust and first looks at the plight of the Hungarian Jews. Here postwar Communist governments were, as in France, unwilling to recognise that Hungarians played a part in rounding them up during the war. Indeed, the surviving Jews tended to hide their Jewishness and it was not until the 1970s that they slowly broke their silence, although only after 1989 was the Holocaust widely addressed. Suleiman uses the 1999 film Sunshine, which charts the 150 year history of a Hungarian Jewish family, to pose several questions on memory and identity. This leads her on to examine individual accounts of those who suffered under the Holocaust, showing how easy it is for fact to become blurred with fiction in the effort to recreate their feelings at the time. This is especially so of what she calls the ‘1.5 generation’, those who were young children during the war.

While not military history per se, Professor Suleiman has written a book which deserves study by historians of all hues. It provides much food for thought, especially in the nature of first hand accounts as sources.