Crises of Memory and the Second World War (review)

In this book Susan Rubin Suleiman gathers and expands texts that she rehearsed in article form between 2000 and 2004, adding a theoretical introduction as well as two completely new essays. By “crisis of memory,” Suleiman means a “moment of choice, and sometimes of predicament or conflict, about remembrance of the past, whether by individuals or by groups” (1). The crises that Suleiman analyzes in this study are mostly related to the memory of World War II in France and Central Europe, a memory that Suleiman regards as transcending national boundaries because of the “global nature” of the war and the “global presence” of the Holocaust (2). Chapter 1 is devoted to Sartre’s writings about the period of the German Occupation in France; chapter 2, to the case of Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, a French couple who were involved in the Resistance and later published memoirs; chapter 3, to the ceremony that marked the transfer of Resistance leader Jean Moulin’s remains to the Pantheon, as well as to the narrative of that ceremony in Malraux’s Antimémoires; chapter 4, to Hotel Terminus, Ophuls’s documentary film about the Gestapo head in Lyons, Klaus Barbie; chapter 5, to Sunshine, Szabo’s epic movie following the destiny of a Jewish family in Hungary; chapter 6, to the different texts in which Semprun evokes his stay in the concentration camp at Buchenwald; chapter 7, to Wilkomirski’s hoax, Fragments, and to some variants among the successive editions of Wiesel’s Holocaust memoirs; chapter 8, to the experimental writings of Perec and Federman; and chapter 9, to the topics of forgiving and forgetting, as they obviously are related to memory.

Suleiman’s book touches on several issues that directly concern the subject of “witnessing.” With most contemporary theorists, Suleiman first underscores the necessarily constructed nature of any testimony. Witnesses, however sincere they might be, must always select among the events they have observed or experienced and then organize those events along the lines of a coherent narrative. Construction as selection, Suleiman shows, is particularly obvious in the case of the articles that Sartre published in 1944–45 about the Occupation and the liberation of France. Endorsing the myth that de Gaulle was seeking to accredit at the time, Sartre maintains that all French did in fact resist (though perhaps only in their hearts) and that the collaborators constituted little more than a social and psychological margin. In doing so, Suleiman explains, Sartre picks out some facts while excluding others: an avowed fascist such as Brasillach was not a marginal, as he had attended the same prestigious schools as Sartre himself and had become a well-known writer; collaborators such as Papon and Bousquet were able to reconcile their socioprofessional status “with a routinized collaboration that would later qualify as crimes against humanity” (29); and several collaborators acted not out of neurosis or social exclusion but for specific “ideological” motives, such as rejection of democracy and anti-Semitism (29). Similarly, Suleiman surmises that Lucie Aubrac might have “arranged” (54) some details in the narrative of her husband’s imprisonment and escape because of “narrative desire,” that is, to abide by the requirements of “coherence” (61). In other words, according to Suleiman, Lucie Aubrac probably assumed that recounting the events “as they actually occurred” could pose problems of credibility for the readers. She thus (consciously? unconsciously?) altered her narrative, at the risk of being taken to task by historians—as she and her husband were in scholarly studies and at a roundtable whose transcripts Suleiman analyzes at length.

While Suleiman emphasizes the constructed nature of all testimonies, she is careful to distinguish “construction” from “forgery.” The accuracy of some details in Lucie Aubrac’s narrative might be questioned. Aubrac, however, undoubtedly “was there,” her memoirs meeting in this respect the most fundamental condition of a genuine, “authentic” testimony. Wilkomirski, by contrast, never witnessed the events that he claims he went through as a child and reports in Fragments. As journalists...