Melancholia and Victimhood in Boualem Sansal’s Le Village de l’Allemand: Ou Le journal des frères Schiller

Algerian author Boualem Sansal’s 2008 novel Le Village de l’Allemand: Ou Le journal des frères Schiller (An Unfinished Business) focuses on the journal entries of two brothers—Rachel and Malrich Schiller—as they respond to the news that their father was a Nazi war criminal. In doing so, the novel engages with two major conceptual models: melancholia and victimhood. Both concepts have emerged as dominant paradigms in recent years, with melancholia in particular being reconceptualized as an ethico-political mode of resistance and agency. By focusing on the emergence of these concepts in Le Village de l’Allemand, however, the author demonstrates how melancholia can lead the grieving subject to conflate victims and perpetrators and to appropriate the victim subject-position. Sansal’s novel thus calls into question the suitability of melancholia as an ethico-political paradigm, signaling the need for new modes of working through the past that attend to the singularity of historical events.