Second Generation, Third Generation, and State Political Postmemory: The Holocaust and Its Literary Effects in Contemporary France

This article aims to offer a reflection on the interaction between literature, the postmemory of the Holocaust as Marianne Hirsch describes it and the political sphere in contemporary France.¹ In the fields of literature and film, many works have dealt with the Holocaust. France is perhaps the European country where the idea of a “duty of memory” regarding the genocide of the Jews and the country’s own past under Nazi occupation has been most discussed. One may observe the same interest in direct testimonies by survivors of the genocide in France as in the United States. However, the last fifteen years have been characterized by two simultaneous phenomena: first, the coming of age of a “third generation” with its own specific questions, which is willing to take over from the second generation and which has been extensively studied by psychoanalysts, and second, a complete renewal of the political context: the Holocaust, and the active role the French state played in it, are now considered inescapable parts of national political memory. Through a discussion of a number of particularly striking French-language contemporary works, this article will explore the effect on literary writing of the interaction between a generational phenomenon and highly interventionist memory politics. I ask, first, what is happening to literature regarding the family memory of the Holocaust in this third-generation context? Second, beyond family and community legacy, are we moving toward a national postmemory highlighting passivity in front of the genocide?

To begin with, two books published in the 2010s have presented themselves as grounded in this third-generation experience. Both are characterized by a highly structured critical metadiscourse on their own approach. In Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai jamais eus (A history of the grandparents I never had), the historian Ivan Jablonka uses the methods specific to his disciplinary field—through which he usually explores subjects unconnected to his Jewishness—to investigate the story of his grandparents who died in Auschwitz.² The author follows their trail through archives to piece their lives back together, from their youth in Poland, to their involvement in the Communist Party, their activism in France, their going underground, and finally their arrest and death. This is a work of what is now called in academic circles microhistory, but what makes it strikingly different from the usual pattern of such works among French historians is its undisguised claim to subjectivity. The author, who is of Jewish descent and was born in France in the 1970s, writes in the first person, questions his own quest and motivations, and asserts his identity as a writer as well as a historian. But he explicitly forbids himself from resorting to literature to fictionalize episodes insufficiently documented by history. Cultivating attention to the singularity of individual lives in the midst of anonymous crowds, the book may remind us of The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn, which became popular among French readers when it was released in 2007. However, Mendelsohn’s book is not Jablonka’s only model: micro-histories, biographies, literary investigations, first-person narratives, family stories—his book is based on a form of reasoned hybridity, extremely aware of its own status, sources, commitments and limits.

Another third-generation work is La vie après (Life after), by Virginie Linhart, an essay written in parallel to a documentary film that she directed for the French public television network.³ Linhart, a filmmaker and writer, is the granddaughter of Jews who escaped the Holocaust by hiding in Switzerland during the war. Linhart explains that she embarked her project to answer her own questions about identity and to shed light on the darker episodes of her family’s history. Her approach is original, since she does not interrogate, at least not at length, what her grandparents’ friends went through during the war in the death camps or in their secret hiding places. Instead, she focuses on the aftermath of that traumatic experience: how they pieced themselves back together, how they managed to return to...