Introduction: The Holocaust in French
and Francophone Literature (–)1
In , during the commemorative ceremony marking the fifty-third
anniversary of the rafle du Vél’hiv’, the newly elected French president,
Jacques Chirac, implicated the broadly understood French state in the
deportation of some , Jews to the Nazi concentration and death
camps. Prior to that, French authorities blamed the Jewish tragedy largely
on the Germans and in any case abstained from singularizing it, instead
preferring to subsume it within the broader phenomenon of la déportation. In contrast to subsequent postwar administrations, including that of
his immediate predecessor, François Mitterrand, Chirac broke with the
Gaullist myth of the French as uniquely heroic resisters. Then, with Lionel
Jospin’s speech, the Left itself took distance from Mitterrand’s position. Finally, the leading politicians’ iconoclastic pronouncements were
followed by other acknowledgements of institutional responsibility: in
the Catholic church asked for forgiveness for its wartime silence, and a
police officers’ union offered an apology for the actions of their predecessors (Clifford –).
The recent intensification of French and Francophone writers’ interest
in the Jewish tragedy, which is the subject of the present special issue, can
certainly be attributed to the encroaching absence of survivors, the influence of thriving Anglophone Holocaust fiction, or the growing threat of
negationist tendencies as well as, more broadly, of racism and populism.
However, the afore-described breakthrough in French memory politics
must be regarded as an important factor in—if not as the trigger of—the
recent surge of French-language Holocaust literature. Customarily connected with Jonathan Littell’s hugely successful albeit controversial novel,
Les Bienveillantes (),2 this surge can be traced back to Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder published nine years earlier. It can hardly be a coinci-
. , .
dence that Modiano, who had been chiefly interested in the ambiguities of
the Occupation (Morris ), wrote his only Holocaust-themed novel so far
in the immediate aftermath of Chirac’s momentous speech. Moreover, as
the narrator’s search for information about the eponymous Paris-born
Jewish teenager develops, his tone becomes increasingly critical of the
French state that he overtly blames for the arrest, internment, and deportation to Auschwitz of Dora and her parents. Since the publication of Modiano’s Dora Bruder many other French-language writers have taken up the
subject of World War II and the massacre of Europe’s Jews; apart from
Littell’s already-mentioned monumental novel, recent French-language
narratives about the Holocaust include Pierre Assouline’s La Cliente (),
Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara (), Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de
Brodeck (), Fabrice Humbert’s L’Origine de la violence (), Yannick
Haenel’s Jan Karski (), Laurent Binet’s HHhH (), Arnaud Rykner’s Le Wagon (), or David Foenkinos’s Charlotte ().
The present issue of French Forum takes stock of some of the developments in French and Francophone Holocaust literature published over the
last twenty years. Without being able to deal with all the texts that appeared
between and , the articles gathered here manage nevertheless to
explore writings by all three generations of Holocaust authors. The twelve
articles also address a variety of genres, including the graphic novel and
poetry, and, looking beyond the borders of the Hexagon, focus on texts
produced by European and non-European Francophone writers. The analyses undertaken in this special issue have been contextualized by a wide
range of theoretical and methodological approaches, such as Marianne
Hirsch’s elaboration of postmemory as transgenerational transmission of
trauma through objects, stories and photographic images in the context of
Holocaust survival. While Hirsch’s theory has proven useful in the examination of the work of second- and third-generation novelists, Michael
Rothberg’s study of multidirectional memory as a space where traumatic
memories of violence can enter into dialogue with each other, has been
helpful in reading Haitian and Mauritian literature. Raul Hilberg’s problematization of the bipolar opposition between victim and perpetrator with
the category of bystander has in turn been deployed to interrogate our own
position in relation to both Holocaust memory and the crises in the midst
of which we live, while Primo Levi’s conceptualization of the “grey zone,”
which complicates the same opposition by foregrounding the figure of the
prisoner-functionary, serves to critique characteristically postmodern
Duffy: Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone Literature
moral relativism that dangerously blurs the border between victims and
their oppressors.
In line with the afore-stated hypothesis identifying the shift in France’s
memory politics as a catalyst for French-language Holocaust literature, it
is only appropriate for this special issue to open with a discussion of Modiano’s Dora Bruder. In “Shadow Play: Patrick Modiano and the Legacy of
the Holocaust,” Alan Morris reiterates that prior to the novel’s publication
Modiano was “less interested in Auschwitz than in the Occupation and the
moral complexity that he attaches to it.” In other words, even if in the
novelist’s pre- œuvre we find references to the roundups, the Police des
Questions juives, Drancy, and the convoys heading east, it is only in Dora
Bruder that Modiano deals head-on with the responsibility of the French
state apparatus for the deaths of Jews, be they French-born or foreign.
While Dora Bruder herself serves as a synecdoche for the former, her parents, Ernest and Cécile, represent those who sought a better life in France,
worked hard to deserve this life, and had faith in France’s unshakable
adherence to the republican ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood.
Structured by the work of Erin McGlothlin, Morris’s discussion situates
Modiano within the critic’s paradigm of second-generation Holocaust
writers, yet nuances McGlothin’s position by invoking the dubious wartime status of the writer’s father. A son of a Jew who ensured his survival by
collaborating with the French gestapistes, Modiano, as Morris convincingly
argues, straddles the categories of second-generation survivor and secondgeneration perpetrator, a status reflected in the ambiguity haunting his
entire œuvre.
Published barely a year after Dora Bruder, Pierre Assouline’s untranslated and little commented upon novel, La Cliente (), can be deciphered as a response to the accusatory tone of Modiano’s text. In “ ‘Les
Années noires avaient été grises’: A Meta-Ethical Examination of Pierre
Assouline’s Appropriation of Primo Levi’s Concept of the ‘Grey Zone’,” I
discuss the prominent Franco-Jewish journalist’s and biographer’s
attempts to undermine the black-and-white understanding of the years of
–. This understanding has resulted from the mutually opposing
narratives—le mythe résistancialiste and le syndrome de Vichy—that have
dominated the public debate about France’s wartime past. To achieve this,
Assouline’s narrator tracks down a wartime informer who is responsible
for the deportation and death of several relatives of his own wife, and who,
on France’s liberation, falls prey to misguided épuration. While crediting
Assouline with tackling the much-neglected questions of denunciation and
. , .
punishment collaboration féminine, in my article I ponder the epistemological and ethical implications of the novelist’s appropriation of Levi’s notion
of the “grey zone.” This is because, for many commentators of the Italian
writer-survivor’s work, Levi’s concept is inextricably bound up with the
“choicless choices” (Langer ) Jews faced in ghettos and concentration
camps, and should therefore not be extended beyond the gates of Auschwitz. Siding with these interpreters, I contend that, by de-contextualizing
Levi’s term, Assouline manipulates his readers to empathize or at least to
adopt the stance of impotentia judicandi, which Levi implied should be
assumed in relation to the Sonderkommandos, to a Frenchwoman responsible for Jewish deaths and, by extension, to wartime France as a whole.
Unlike Modiano and Assouline, the majority of French-language
authors writing about the Holocaust in the last twenty years belong to the
third generation, whether, speaking in Hirsch’s terms, their relationship to
the Shoah, is “familial” or “affiliative” (Hirsch , ). Among these
authors are Jonathan Littell, Yannick Haenel, Fabrice Humbert, Laurent
Binet, David Foenkinos and Arnaud Rykner, whose interview features in
the present issue. In the conversation that took place in October ,
Rykner discusses his novel Le Wagon () and conjectures about the
future of fiction about the Shoah. Adopting a collective approach to the
phenomenon of third-generation Holocaust literature, in her article “Une
troisième génération réparatrice?,” Aurélie Barjonet concentrates on the
idea of redress that drives the three texts she examines. In Nuit ouverte
() by Clémence Boulouque, Jan Karski () by Yannick Haenel, and
La Réparation () by Colombe Schneck the efforts to undo the wrongs
of the past take the form of a tribute to Holocaust victims and witnesses.
If Boulouque narrates the story of Regina Jonas, the first woman rabbi
deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt and then murdered in Auschwitz,
Haenel revives the memory of Polish resistance fighter and diplomat, Jan
Karski, who tirelessly rallied the Western Allies to the Jewish cause. Finally,
Schneck commemorates her relative, Salomé, who perished in the Kovno
ghetto in and who is symbolically given a new life through the author’s
own daughter, called after the murdered girl. The good intentions behind
the three novels, which, according to Barjonet, are by no means typical of
the third generation, are perhaps the way to repair the bad reputation of
today’s Holocaust writers, who have been accused of fascination with evil
(Littell) or historical anachronism (Haenel). However, following Henry
Rousso, Barjonet provocatively asks whether, instead of the proliferation
Duffy: Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone Literature
of narratives on the Jewish tragedy, silence and forgetting would not be
the best way of healing the wounds and traumas caused by the Holocaust.
Like Assouline in La Cliente, third-generation novelist, Gilles Rozier,
tackles the prickly subject of French people’s collaboration with the occupying German forces, while additionally taking on another potentially difficult topic: homosexuality. Rozier, whose third and highly successful novel
is the subject of Anna Maziarczyk’s article “La Shoah dans la narration
ambiguë: Un amour sans résistance de Gilles Rozier,” is a grandson of a
Holocaust victim (his grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz) and a great
champion of Yiddish culture who represents the recently emerged movement of Jewish Renewal. Although more conventional in style than Assouline’s metafictional novel, this self-defined ‘récit de soi à valeur de
témoignage’ shares with La Cliente its preoccupation with ambiguity, as
manifest in its systematic blurring of the borders between supposedly rigid
categories. Rozier’s novel does so, for example, by staging a relationship
between a Polish Jew and a Germanofile French collaborator who, sexually
attracted to the young Jewish man, spontaneously decides to save him from
deportation. Additionally, the novel foregrounds similarities between German and Yiddish, and questions the responsibility of passive bystanders.
A rather different focus has Susan Bainbrigge’s article “Prosthetic and
Palimpsestic Play in Agnès Desarthe’s Le Remplaçant (): Revisiting the
Holocaust,” which tests the applicability of theories arisen from secondgeneration literature to a novel by a Franco-Jewish third-generation writer.
Contextualizing her discussion with concepts such as Hirsch’s “postmemory,” Alison Landsberg’s “prosthetic memory,” or Max Silverman’s
“palimpsestic memory,” Bainbrigge concentrates on the trope of replacement, as embodied by the protagonist-narrator’s attachment to her adoptive “papi” (her actual grandfather died in Auschwitz). The foster
grandfather is, in turn, symbolically “replaced” by the eminent Polish educator, physician and writer, Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit), who
cared for orphaned children in the Warsaw ghetto before accompanying
his young protégés to the extermination camp of Treblinka. Yet, Bainbrigge
navigates the complex dynamics of Desarthe’s novel not only to reconstruct, via prosthesis and palimpsest, the story in which symbolic figures
replace absent ones, and where one story line substitutes for another, but
also to show how Desarthe herself finds her own voice as a writer through
fictionalizations of self within these various narratives.
As Gary D. Mole demonstrates in his article, “Les ‘Gardiens de la mémoire’: la Shoah dans la poésie francophone contemporaine,” like the novel,
. , .
twenty-first-century French and Francophone poetry has seen a revival of
interest in the Jewish catastrophe. And, just as among novelists, among
contemporary poets there are survivors, their descendants, and the socalled third-generation “témoins par procuration” with no personal connection to the events they describe. Proceeding in chronological order,
Mole begins his survey with Tristan Janco’s collection, Mémoires de la
Shoah (). Born in , the Franco-Romanian poet casts himself in the
role of a guardian of “mémoire volcanique,” setting out to save from oblivion not only the shtelt but also Romanian-Jewish poets such as Benjamin
Fondane, Paul Celan, and Ilarie Voronca. More formally traditional are
the eighty-three poems gathered in the collection Le Vent des ténèbres
(). In a grief-stricken and at times unforgiving tone, Polish-born
Karola Fliegner-Giroud, who lost all her relatives but her mother in the
Holocaust, mourns her family and brethren, and accuses the “Satan à l’œil
bleu” of having deprived her of her childhood and rendered her insane. At
the same time, however, Fliegner-Giroud acknowledges the salutary potential of poetry. In the second part of his essay, Mole turns his attention
to Robert Tirvaudey, whose collection of poems, Terre de douleur (),
celebrates the transformative power of a visit to a former concentration
camp. Despite the writer’s conception of poetry as “le dire possible d’Événements impossibles,” the poet’s tour of the camp is shown capable of offering insights that are impossible to gain from textual or visual material.
Here Mole frames his reading with Dominick LaCapra’s concept of
“empathic unsettlement,” which the metahistorian favors over “overidentification” with the victims. For LaCapra, “empathic unsettlement”
means to sidestep full appropriation of the victims’ traumatic experience
without, however, losing sight of their pain (LaCapra ). Mole’s article
closes with a commentary upon the work of a Quebecois poet, Louise
Dupré, born in . Free from the identificatory or didactic drive characterizing Tirvaudey’s writing, the texts collected in Plus haut que les flammes
() evidence the author’s efforts to work through trauma (Durcharbeitung), as conceptualized by Saul Friedländer. The intertextual references to
Francis Bacon’s paintings serve Dupré to thematize the tragedy of the children murdered in Auschwitz, which, as in Tirvaudey, the poet visits and
finds profoundly inspirational and traumatizing. Yet, Dupré uses her experience, argues Mole, in a strikingly different way, “[en faisant] résonner, sans
pour autant céder au désespoir, les ondes de choc qui révérbèrent encore.”
Louise Dupré is not the only Francophone author discussed by the present issue that also includes articles dedicated to Belgian, Mauritian and
Duffy: Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone Literature
Haitian writers. A very special case is that of Michel Kichka, an Israeli
cartoonist of Belgian origin whose autobiographical graphic novel is
addressed by Cynthia Laborde’s article “Re/trouver sa place dans l’H/histoire: perspectives postmémorielles dans Deuxième génération: Ce que je
n’ai pas dit à mon père de Michel Kichka.” A son of a Holocaust writer and
educator, the author of Deuxième génération () follows in the footsteps
of Art Spiegelman, but shifts emphasis from the father’s experience of Nazi
violence to the question of how to live as a survivor’s child. Framed with,
among others, Hirsch’s seminal work on postmemory, Laborde’s analysis
also derives its theoretical thrust from Albert Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe.
The critic compares Kichka’s father, who, in educating the young generation about the Holocaust, tirelessly relives his camp experience, to the King
of Corinth eternally performing the arduous task of pushing a boulder up
a hill. What also preoccupies Laborde is the “dialectique de rupture et de
prolongation de l’h/Histoire” that structures Kichka’s book. In other
words, the cartoonist grapples with mutually conflicting desires to cut himself off from a past that is not his own and to anchor himself in his cultural
and religious community. Standing in for the Camusian act of revolt
accompanied by the acceptance of the Absurd as inevitable, artistic work,
concludes Laborde, ultimately resolves this tension. In this way, paradoxically, the conclusion of Kichka’s narrative actualizes Lorenz Diefenbach’s
dictum “work sets you free” that the Nazis infamously abused by placing
it over the entrance to Auschwitz and their other camps.
Another Belgian, though this time non-Jewish, author whose writing
features in the present issue is Amélie Nothomb. Her controversial dystopian novel, Acide sulfurique (), which tells the story of a reality show
reproducing the dynamics of a Nazi concentration camp, is the subject of
Avril Tynan’s contribution “Please Watch Responsibly: The Ethical
Responsibility of the Viewer in Amélie Nothomb’s Acide sulfurique.” Drawing on the work of Guy Debord, Raul Hilberg, and David Cesarani and
Paul Levine, Tynan elects to read Acide sulfurique as critique of contemporary bystander behavior and of the commodification of totalitarianism. By
reframing the Holocaust as reality television, Nothomb’s novel, contends
Tynan, invites us to consider the socio-political responsibilities of the
intra-textual spectator as a reflection of the genuine ethical demands
placed upon viewers of genocide, displacement and mass racism across
the world. In Tynan’s view, Acide sulfurique also suggests that the ethical
encounter with the other is thwarted by the mediatization of evil by
screens, as well as by the temporal or spatial distance that dilutes ethical
. , .
relations between self and other. In Tynan’s sympathetic reading of
Nothomb’s novel, Acide sulfurique is therefore a constructive attempt at
foregrounding our moral responsibilities as co-participants in both the
memory of the Holocaust and ongoing suffering of others.
Moving from European to non-European Francophonie, John Patrick
Walsh’s and Nanar Khamo’s essays deal with novels that, by refuting the
Eurocentric perspective on the Jewish tragedy, can be seen as representative
of the “comparative turn” in Holocaust Studies. In “The Holocaust, Memory, and Race in Natacha Appanah’s Le Dernier Frère” Khamo asserts that
the Mauritian writer destabilizes the concept of competing, not to say
antagonistic, memories of the Holocaust and colonial violence by creating
a dialogue between them. Appanah does so with a story of a friendship
between an Indian boy, Raj, and a Jewish boy who, having fallen victim of
the anti-Semitic policies implemented by the Third Reich, was detained in
Mauritius. Khamo argues that Raj’s profound sense of loss and accompanying survivor’s guilt provoked by the death of David Stein and his own
two brothers draw attention not only to the loss experienced by slave and
servant populations separated from their homelands, families and cultures,
but also to the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. In addition to discussing
Appanah’s novel as a multidirectional space where victims acquire historical agency and where traumatic memories meet, coexist, and enter a transcultural dialogue, Khamo’s article considers the tension between the historian’s structured endeavors and the anxiety related to the shortcomings of
personal memory, which is thematised by Le Dernier Frère.
While Appanah examines the repercussions of the Holocaust along with
other forms of violence in Mauritius, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, whose
novel is the focus of Walsh’s essay “From Buchenwald to Port-auPrince: Becoming Haitian in the Holocaust: Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s
Avant que les ombres s’effacent,” considers the legacy of the Jewish tragedy
alongside forced migrations in the Caribbean. Such “interdiasporic reflection,” to use Sarah Phillips Casteel’s term (Casteel ), abounds in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature, as exemplified by the work
of Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant, Caryl Phillips, or Maryse Condé.
While continuing to chart the Holocaust as a turning point in twentiethcentury European history, by adopting the perspective of a Jewish survivor
who finds refuge in Haiti, Dalembert’s novel, as Walsh posits, displaces the
Holocaust’s fixed position. Inspired by Michael Rothberg’s hermeneutic
model of “multidirectional memory,” Walsh’s analysis interrogates the
ways in which, by tracing Reuben’s circuitous journey from Central Europe
Duffy: Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone Literature
to Haiti, Dalembert links the plight of Jewish refugees and Haitian history.
Moreover, the novelist brings to the fore little known aspects of the Holocaust and rehabilitates Haiti, a country widely connected in Western imaginary to poverty and disaster, as a place of refuge. Finally, the novel, as
Walsh demonstrates, invites the reader to rethink not only Haiti’s place in
the Caribbean, but also the history of the Holocaust beyond its European
context.
Reversing the intinerary traced by the title of Walsh’s essay, with this
issue’s closing article, we return from Port-au-Prince to Buchenwald,
where Jorge Semprun situates the action of his autobiographical
novel. In “La mort qu’il faut: Semprun and Writing after Death,” Liran
Razinsky explores the survivor-writer’s complex view of witnessing, as
articulated with the story of the protagonist-narrator’s survival in Buchenwald through a swap of identity with a dying Muselmann named François.
Razinsky begins his close reading of Le Mort qu’il faut by questioning the
literariness of this explicitly autobiographical text, as exemplified by Semprun’s use of the figure of the double, which inscribes his novel into a
rich literary tradition cultivated by E. A. Poe, Guy Maupassant, or Fyodor
Dostoyevsky. Yet, far from doing this gratuitously, Semprun, argues Razinsky, mobilizes the trope of the double to polemicize with Primo Levi’s
provocative proposition (maintained by Giorgio Agamben) that all testimony is vicarious, the real witnesses having perished. As Le Mort qu’il faut
dramatizes, complicates and renews the widely held view that even the
survivors of the Nazi camps died during their incarceration, Semprun
grants both the “drowned” and the “saved,” to borrow Levi’s metaphor,
the status of a witness. Also, by fleshing out the Muselmann with the character of François and thus endowing him with an identity, Semprun saves
prisoners resigned to their death from the anonymity to which they have
been confined by Agamben’s reading of Levi’s work. For Razinsky, the
double therefore encompasses the two facets of witnessing: those who saw
the Gorgon but cannot testify, and those who have survived to tell the
tale. The motif of the double also enables the foregrounding of the shared
character of the experience of death, where death is reality for some and
possibility for others. Ultimately, the plausibility of death paves the way for
fiction, which can serve to render better the camp experience, facts themselves being sometimes wanting.
This final point inspires Razinsky to conclude his essay by invoking
Semprun’s positive, not to say enthusiastic, view of fictionalizations of the
Holocaust, which he believes to be a potent way of preserving the memory
. , .
of the six million Jewish victims. Semprun’s remarks—made implicitly in
Le Mort qu’il faut and explicitly in his major text, L’Écriture ou la vie, or in
his affirmative reviews of Holocaust novels—can also serve as a conclusion
to the present introduction. For, despite the reservations that some contributors, such as Avril Tynan or myself, raise in relation to contemporary
narrative approaches to the Jewish tragedy, it is beyond all doubt that
Holocaust-themed literature provides a unique space for voicing vital
questions that neither historiography nor philosophy have the means to
raise. As the twelve essays included in this special issue of French Forum
clearly demonstrate, the novels about the Holocaust complicate the clearcut categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander, grapple with the issues
surrounding postmemory, and interrogate the nature of witnessing and
the witness’s identity. They also confront the capacity of Holocaust literature for redress of past wrongs and successfully integrate Hitler’s assault
on European Jewry into the complex web of mutually fertilizing memories
of violence where, without losing its watershed status, the Nazi genocide
enables novelists to articulate other histories of victimizations. Last but not
least, the questions contemplated by many contemporary writers pertain
to the future of Holocaust memory and to its crucial role in mobilizing
our responses to today’s injustistices and violence.
Notes
. This special issue has been collated with the assistance of funding from the Marie
Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) of the European Union’s research and innovation
program Horizon , under grant agreement number .
. In July , in an article published in the Nouvel Observateur Grégoire Leménager spoke of the “Littell Generation.”
Works cited
Casteel, Sarah Phillips. Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination.
New York: Columbia UP, .
Clifford, Rebecca. Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in
France and Italy. Oxford: Oxford UP, .
Friedländer, Saul. “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah.” History and Memory (): –.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photograph, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, .
———. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today : (): –.
Duffy: Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone Literature
———. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust.New York: Columbia UP, .
Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe –. London: Lime Tree, .
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
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Langer, Lawrence. “The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps,” Centerpoint
(Autumn ): –.
Leménager, Grégoire. “Génération Littell,” Le Nouvel Observateur, ...
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. London: Michael
Joseph, : –.
McGlothlin, Erin. Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Rochester, NY: Camden House, .
Morris, Alan. Patrick Modiano. Oxford: Berg, .
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, .
Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further
reproduction prohibited without permission.
Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone
Literature (1997–2017)
Helena Duffy
French Forum, Volume 44, Number 1, Spring 2019, pp. 1-11 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.2019.0000
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/733407
Access provided at 6 Mar 2020 09:39 GMT from Reading University (+1 other institution account)
Introduction: The Holocaust in French
and Francophone Literature (1997–2017)1
helena duffy
In 1995, during the commemorative ceremony marking the fifty-third
anniversary of the rafle du Vél’hiv’, the newly elected French president,
Jacques Chirac, implicated the broadly understood French state in the
deportation of some 76,000 Jews to the Nazi concentration and death
camps. Prior to that, French authorities blamed the Jewish tragedy largely
on the Germans and in any case abstained from singularizing it, instead
preferring to subsume it within the broader phenomenon of la déportation. In contrast to subsequent postwar administrations, including that of
his immediate predecessor, François Mitterrand, Chirac broke with the
Gaullist myth of the French as uniquely heroic resisters. Then, with Lionel
Jospin’s 1997 speech, the Left itself took distance from Mitterrand’s position. Finally, the leading politicians’ iconoclastic pronouncements were
followed by other acknowledgements of institutional responsibility: in 1997
the Catholic church asked for forgiveness for its wartime silence, and a
police officers’ union offered an apology for the actions of their predecessors (Clifford 206–07).
The recent intensification of French and Francophone writers’ interest
in the Jewish tragedy, which is the subject of the present special issue, can
certainly be attributed to the encroaching absence of survivors, the influence of thriving Anglophone Holocaust fiction, or the growing threat of
negationist tendencies as well as, more broadly, of racism and populism.
However, the afore-described breakthrough in French memory politics
must be regarded as an important factor in—if not as the trigger of—the
recent surge of French-language Holocaust literature. Customarily connected with Jonathan Littell’s hugely successful albeit controversial novel,
Les Bienveillantes (2006),2 this surge can be traced back to Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder published nine years earlier. It can hardly be a coinci-
................. 19338$
INTR
08-27-19 15:07:50
PS
PAGE 1
2
french forum spring 2019 vol. 44, no. 1
dence that Modiano, who had been chiefly interested in the ambiguities of
the Occupation (Morris 22), wrote his only Holocaust-themed novel so far
in the immediate aftermath of Chirac’s momentous speech. Moreover, as
the narrator’s search for information about the eponymous Paris-born
Jewish teenager develops, his tone becomes increasingly critical of the
French state that he overtly blames for the arrest, internment, and deportation to Auschwitz of Dora and her parents. Since the publication of Modiano’s Dora Bruder many other French-language writers have taken up the
subject of World War II and the massacre of Europe’s Jews; apart from
Littell’s already-mentioned monumental novel, recent French-language
narratives about the Holocaust include Pierre Assouline’s La Cliente (1998),
Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara (2002), Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de
Brodeck (2007), Fabrice Humbert’s L’Origine de la violence (2009), Yannick
Haenel’s Jan Karski (2009), Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010), Arnaud Rykner’s Le Wagon (2010), or David Foenkinos’s Charlotte (2014).
The present issue of French Forum takes stock of some of the developments in French and Francophone Holocaust literature published over the
last twenty years. Without being able to deal with all the texts that appeared
between 1997 and 2017, the articles gathered here manage nevertheless to
explore writings by all three generations of Holocaust authors. The twelve
articles also address a variety of genres, including the graphic novel and
poetry, and, looking beyond the borders of the Hexagon, focus on texts
produced by European and non-European Francophone writers. The analyses undertaken in this special issue have been contextualized by a wide
range of theoretical and methodological approaches, such as Marianne
Hirsch’s elaboration of postmemory as transgenerational transmission of
trauma through objects, stories and photographic images in the context of
Holocaust survival. While Hirsch’s theory has proven useful in the examination of the work of second- and third-generation novelists, Michael
Rothberg’s study of multidirectional memory as a space where traumatic
memories of violence can enter into dialogue with each other, has been
helpful in reading Haitian and Mauritian literature. Raul Hilberg’s problematization of the bipolar opposition between victim and perpetrator with
the category of bystander has in turn been deployed to interrogate our own
position in relation to both Holocaust memory and the crises in the midst
of which we live, while Primo Levi’s conceptualization of the “grey zone,”
which complicates the same opposition by foregrounding the figure of the
prisoner-functionary, serves to critique characteristically postmodern
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moral relativism that dangerously blurs the border between victims and
their oppressors.
In line with the afore-stated hypothesis identifying the shift in France’s
memory politics as a catalyst for French-language Holocaust literature, it
is only appropriate for this special issue to open with a discussion of Modiano’s Dora Bruder. In “Shadow Play: Patrick Modiano and the Legacy of
the Holocaust,” Alan Morris reiterates that prior to the novel’s publication
Modiano was “less interested in Auschwitz than in the Occupation and the
moral complexity that he attaches to it.” In other words, even if in the
novelist’s pre-1997 œuvre we find references to the roundups, the Police des
Questions juives, Drancy, and the convoys heading east, it is only in Dora
Bruder that Modiano deals head-on with the responsibility of the French
state apparatus for the deaths of Jews, be they French-born or foreign.
While Dora Bruder herself serves as a synecdoche for the former, her parents, Ernest and Cécile, represent those who sought a better life in France,
worked hard to deserve this life, and had faith in France’s unshakable
adherence to the republican ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood.
Structured by the work of Erin McGlothlin, Morris’s discussion situates
Modiano within the critic’s paradigm of second-generation Holocaust
writers, yet nuances McGlothin’s position by invoking the dubious wartime status of the writer’s father. A son of a Jew who ensured his survival by
collaborating with the French gestapistes, Modiano, as Morris convincingly
argues, straddles the categories of second-generation survivor and secondgeneration perpetrator, a status reflected in the ambiguity haunting his
entire œuvre.
Published barely a year after Dora Bruder, Pierre Assouline’s untranslated and little commented upon novel, La Cliente (1998), can be deciphered as a response to the accusatory tone of Modiano’s text. In “ ‘Les
Années noires avaient été grises’: A Meta-Ethical Examination of Pierre
Assouline’s Appropriation of Primo Levi’s Concept of the ‘Grey Zone’,” I
discuss the prominent Franco-Jewish journalist’s and biographer’s
attempts to undermine the black-and-white understanding of the years of
1940–1944. This understanding has resulted from the mutually opposing
narratives—le mythe résistancialiste and le syndrome de Vichy—that have
dominated the public debate about France’s wartime past. To achieve this,
Assouline’s narrator tracks down a wartime informer who is responsible
for the deportation and death of several relatives of his own wife, and who,
on France’s liberation, falls prey to misguided épuration. While crediting
Assouline with tackling the much-neglected questions of denunciation and
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punishment collaboration féminine, in my article I ponder the epistemological and ethical implications of the novelist’s appropriation of Levi’s notion
of the “grey zone.” This is because, for many commentators of the Italian
writer-survivor’s work, Levi’s concept is inextricably bound up with the
“choicless choices” (Langer 26) Jews faced in ghettos and concentration
camps, and should therefore not be extended beyond the gates of Auschwitz. Siding with these interpreters, I contend that, by de-contextualizing
Levi’s term, Assouline manipulates his readers to empathize or at least to
adopt the stance of impotentia judicandi, which Levi implied should be
assumed in relation to the Sonderkommandos, to a Frenchwoman responsible for Jewish deaths and, by extension, to wartime France as a whole.
Unlike Modiano and Assouline, the majority of French-language
authors writing about the Holocaust in the last twenty years belong to the
third generation, whether, speaking in Hirsch’s terms, their relationship to
the Shoah, is “familial” or “affiliative” (Hirsch 2008, 115). Among these
authors are Jonathan Littell, Yannick Haenel, Fabrice Humbert, Laurent
Binet, David Foenkinos and Arnaud Rykner, whose interview features in
the present issue. In the conversation that took place in October 2017,
Rykner discusses his novel Le Wagon (2010) and conjectures about the
future of fiction about the Shoah. Adopting a collective approach to the
phenomenon of third-generation Holocaust literature, in her article “Une
troisième génération réparatrice?,” Aurélie Barjonet concentrates on the
idea of redress that drives the three texts she examines. In Nuit ouverte
(2007) by Clémence Boulouque, Jan Karski (2009) by Yannick Haenel, and
La Réparation (2012) by Colombe Schneck the efforts to undo the wrongs
of the past take the form of a tribute to Holocaust victims and witnesses.
If Boulouque narrates the story of Regina Jonas, the first woman rabbi
deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt and then murdered in Auschwitz,
Haenel revives the memory of Polish resistance fighter and diplomat, Jan
Karski, who tirelessly rallied the Western Allies to the Jewish cause. Finally,
Schneck commemorates her relative, Salomé, who perished in the Kovno
ghetto in 1943 and who is symbolically given a new life through the author’s
own daughter, called after the murdered girl. The good intentions behind
the three novels, which, according to Barjonet, are by no means typical of
the third generation, are perhaps the way to repair the bad reputation of
today’s Holocaust writers, who have been accused of fascination with evil
(Littell) or historical anachronism (Haenel). However, following Henry
Rousso, Barjonet provocatively asks whether, instead of the proliferation
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of narratives on the Jewish tragedy, silence and forgetting would not be
the best way of healing the wounds and traumas caused by the Holocaust.
Like Assouline in La Cliente, third-generation novelist, Gilles Rozier,
tackles the prickly subject of French people’s collaboration with the occupying German forces, while additionally taking on another potentially difficult topic: homosexuality. Rozier, whose third and highly successful novel
is the subject of Anna Maziarczyk’s article “La Shoah dans la narration
ambiguë: Un amour sans résistance de Gilles Rozier,” is a grandson of a
Holocaust victim (his grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz) and a great
champion of Yiddish culture who represents the recently emerged movement of Jewish Renewal. Although more conventional in style than Assouline’s metafictional novel, this self-defined ‘récit de soi à valeur de
témoignage’ shares with La Cliente its preoccupation with ambiguity, as
manifest in its systematic blurring of the borders between supposedly rigid
categories. Rozier’s novel does so, for example, by staging a relationship
between a Polish Jew and a Germanofile French collaborator who, sexually
attracted to the young Jewish man, spontaneously decides to save him from
deportation. Additionally, the novel foregrounds similarities between German and Yiddish, and questions the responsibility of passive bystanders.
A rather different focus has Susan Bainbrigge’s article “Prosthetic and
Palimpsestic Play in Agnès Desarthe’s Le Remplaçant (2009): Revisiting the
Holocaust,” which tests the applicability of theories arisen from secondgeneration literature to a novel by a Franco-Jewish third-generation writer.
Contextualizing her discussion with concepts such as Hirsch’s “postmemory,” Alison Landsberg’s “prosthetic memory,” or Max Silverman’s
“palimpsestic memory,” Bainbrigge concentrates on the trope of replacement, as embodied by the protagonist-narrator’s attachment to her adoptive “papi” (her actual grandfather died in Auschwitz). The foster
grandfather is, in turn, symbolically “replaced” by the eminent Polish educator, physician and writer, Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit), who
cared for orphaned children in the Warsaw ghetto before accompanying
his young protégés to the extermination camp of Treblinka. Yet, Bainbrigge
navigates the complex dynamics of Desarthe’s novel not only to reconstruct, via prosthesis and palimpsest, the story in which symbolic figures
replace absent ones, and where one story line substitutes for another, but
also to show how Desarthe herself finds her own voice as a writer through
fictionalizations of self within these various narratives.
As Gary D. Mole demonstrates in his article, “Les ‘Gardiens de la mémoire’: la Shoah dans la poésie francophone contemporaine,” like the novel,
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twenty-first-century French and Francophone poetry has seen a revival of
interest in the Jewish catastrophe. And, just as among novelists, among
contemporary poets there are survivors, their descendants, and the socalled third-generation “témoins par procuration” with no personal connection to the events they describe. Proceeding in chronological order,
Mole begins his survey with Tristan Janco’s collection, Mémoires de la
Shoah (2001). Born in 1946, the Franco-Romanian poet casts himself in the
role of a guardian of “mémoire volcanique,” setting out to save from oblivion not only the shtelt but also Romanian-Jewish poets such as Benjamin
Fondane, Paul Celan, and Ilarie Voronca. More formally traditional are
the eighty-three poems gathered in the collection Le Vent des ténèbres
(2008). In a grief-stricken and at times unforgiving tone, Polish-born
Karola Fliegner-Giroud, who lost all her relatives but her mother in the
Holocaust, mourns her family and brethren, and accuses the “Satan à l’œil
bleu” of having deprived her of her childhood and rendered her insane. At
the same time, however, Fliegner-Giroud acknowledges the salutary potential of poetry. In the second part of his essay, Mole turns his attention
to Robert Tirvaudey, whose collection of poems, Terre de douleur (2011),
celebrates the transformative power of a visit to a former concentration
camp. Despite the writer’s conception of poetry as “le dire possible d’Événements impossibles,” the poet’s tour of the camp is shown capable of offering insights that are impossible to gain from textual or visual material.
Here Mole frames his reading with Dominick LaCapra’s concept of
“empathic unsettlement,” which the metahistorian favors over “overidentification” with the victims. For LaCapra, “empathic unsettlement”
means to sidestep full appropriation of the victims’ traumatic experience
without, however, losing sight of their pain (LaCapra 78). Mole’s article
closes with a commentary upon the work of a Quebecois poet, Louise
Dupré, born in 1949. Free from the identificatory or didactic drive characterizing Tirvaudey’s writing, the texts collected in Plus haut que les flammes
(2010) evidence the author’s efforts to work through trauma (Durcharbeitung), as conceptualized by Saul Friedländer. The intertextual references to
Francis Bacon’s paintings serve Dupré to thematize the tragedy of the children murdered in Auschwitz, which, as in Tirvaudey, the poet visits and
finds profoundly inspirational and traumatizing. Yet, Dupré uses her experience, argues Mole, in a strikingly different way, “[en faisant] résonner, sans
pour autant céder au désespoir, les ondes de choc qui révérbèrent encore.”
Louise Dupré is not the only Francophone author discussed by the present issue that also includes articles dedicated to Belgian, Mauritian and
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Haitian writers. A very special case is that of Michel Kichka, an Israeli
cartoonist of Belgian origin whose autobiographical graphic novel is
addressed by Cynthia Laborde’s article “Re/trouver sa place dans l’H/histoire: perspectives postmémorielles dans Deuxième génération: Ce que je
n’ai pas dit à mon père de Michel Kichka.” A son of a Holocaust writer and
educator, the author of Deuxième génération (2012) follows in the footsteps
of Art Spiegelman, but shifts emphasis from the father’s experience of Nazi
violence to the question of how to live as a survivor’s child. Framed with,
among others, Hirsch’s seminal work on postmemory, Laborde’s analysis
also derives its theoretical thrust from Albert Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe.
The critic compares Kichka’s father, who, in educating the young generation about the Holocaust, tirelessly relives his camp experience, to the King
of Corinth eternally performing the arduous task of pushing a boulder up
a hill. What also preoccupies Laborde is the “dialectique de rupture et de
prolongation de l’h/Histoire” that structures Kichka’s book. In other
words, the cartoonist grapples with mutually conflicting desires to cut himself off from a past that is not his own and to anchor himself in his cultural
and religious community. Standing in for the Camusian act of revolt
accompanied by the acceptance of the Absurd as inevitable, artistic work,
concludes Laborde, ultimately resolves this tension. In this way, paradoxically, the conclusion of Kichka’s narrative actualizes Lorenz Diefenbach’s
dictum “work sets you free” that the Nazis infamously abused by placing
it over the entrance to Auschwitz and their other camps.
Another Belgian, though this time non-Jewish, author whose writing
features in the present issue is Amélie Nothomb. Her controversial dystopian novel, Acide sulfurique (2005), which tells the story of a reality show
reproducing the dynamics of a Nazi concentration camp, is the subject of
Avril Tynan’s contribution “Please Watch Responsibly: The Ethical
Responsibility of the Viewer in Amélie Nothomb’s Acide sulfurique.” Drawing on the work of Guy Debord, Raul Hilberg, and David Cesarani and
Paul Levine, Tynan elects to read Acide sulfurique as critique of contemporary bystander behavior and of the commodification of totalitarianism. By
reframing the Holocaust as reality television, Nothomb’s novel, contends
Tynan, invites us to consider the socio-political responsibilities of the
intra-textual spectator as a reflection of the genuine ethical demands
placed upon viewers of genocide, displacement and mass racism across
the world. In Tynan’s view, Acide sulfurique also suggests that the ethical
encounter with the other is thwarted by the mediatization of evil by
screens, as well as by the temporal or spatial distance that dilutes ethical
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relations between self and other. In Tynan’s sympathetic reading of
Nothomb’s novel, Acide sulfurique is therefore a constructive attempt at
foregrounding our moral responsibilities as co-participants in both the
memory of the Holocaust and ongoing suffering of others.
Moving from European to non-European Francophonie, John Patrick
Walsh’s and Nanar Khamo’s essays deal with novels that, by refuting the
Eurocentric perspective on the Jewish tragedy, can be seen as representative
of the “comparative turn” in Holocaust Studies. In “The Holocaust, Memory, and Race in Natacha Appanah’s Le Dernier Frère” Khamo asserts that
the Mauritian writer destabilizes the concept of competing, not to say
antagonistic, memories of the Holocaust and colonial violence by creating
a dialogue between them. Appanah does so with a story of a friendship
between an Indian boy, Raj, and a Jewish boy who, having fallen victim of
the anti-Semitic policies implemented by the Third Reich, was detained in
Mauritius. Khamo argues that Raj’s profound sense of loss and accompanying survivor’s guilt provoked by the death of David Stein and his own
two brothers draw attention not only to the loss experienced by slave and
servant populations separated from their homelands, families and cultures,
but also to the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. In addition to discussing
Appanah’s novel as a multidirectional space where victims acquire historical agency and where traumatic memories meet, coexist, and enter a transcultural dialogue, Khamo’s article considers the tension between the historian’s structured endeavors and the anxiety related to the shortcomings of
personal memory, which is thematised by Le Dernier Frère.
While Appanah examines the repercussions of the Holocaust along with
other forms of violence in Mauritius, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, whose
2017 novel is the focus of Walsh’s essay “From Buchenwald to Port-auPrince: Becoming Haitian in the Holocaust: Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s
Avant que les ombres s’effacent,” considers the legacy of the Jewish tragedy
alongside forced migrations in the Caribbean. Such “interdiasporic reflection,” to use Sarah Phillips Casteel’s term (Casteel 13), abounds in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature, as exemplified by the work
of Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant, Caryl Phillips, or Maryse Condé.
While continuing to chart the Holocaust as a turning point in twentiethcentury European history, by adopting the perspective of a Jewish survivor
who finds refuge in Haiti, Dalembert’s novel, as Walsh posits, displaces the
Holocaust’s fixed position. Inspired by Michael Rothberg’s hermeneutic
model of “multidirectional memory,” Walsh’s analysis interrogates the
ways in which, by tracing Reuben’s circuitous journey from Central Europe
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to Haiti, Dalembert links the plight of Jewish refugees and Haitian history.
Moreover, the novelist brings to the fore little known aspects of the Holocaust and rehabilitates Haiti, a country widely connected in Western imaginary to poverty and disaster, as a place of refuge. Finally, the novel, as
Walsh demonstrates, invites the reader to rethink not only Haiti’s place in
the Caribbean, but also the history of the Holocaust beyond its European
context.
Reversing the intinerary traced by the title of Walsh’s essay, with this
issue’s closing article, we return from Port-au-Prince to Buchenwald,
where Jorge Semprun situates the action of his 2001 autobiographical
novel. In “La mort qu’il faut: Semprun and Writing after Death,” Liran
Razinsky explores the survivor-writer’s complex view of witnessing, as
articulated with the story of the protagonist-narrator’s survival in Buchenwald through a swap of identity with a dying Muselmann named François.
Razinsky begins his close reading of Le Mort qu’il faut by questioning the
literariness of this explicitly autobiographical text, as exemplified by Semprun’s use of the figure of the double, which inscribes his novel into a
rich literary tradition cultivated by E. A. Poe, Guy Maupassant, or Fyodor
Dostoyevsky. Yet, far from doing this gratuitously, Semprun, argues Razinsky, mobilizes the trope of the double to polemicize with Primo Levi’s
provocative proposition (maintained by Giorgio Agamben) that all testimony is vicarious, the real witnesses having perished. As Le Mort qu’il faut
dramatizes, complicates and renews the widely held view that even the
survivors of the Nazi camps died during their incarceration, Semprun
grants both the “drowned” and the “saved,” to borrow Levi’s metaphor,
the status of a witness. Also, by fleshing out the Muselmann with the character of François and thus endowing him with an identity, Semprun saves
prisoners resigned to their death from the anonymity to which they have
been confined by Agamben’s reading of Levi’s work. For Razinsky, the
double therefore encompasses the two facets of witnessing: those who saw
the Gorgon but cannot testify, and those who have survived to tell the
tale. The motif of the double also enables the foregrounding of the shared
character of the experience of death, where death is reality for some and
possibility for others. Ultimately, the plausibility of death paves the way for
fiction, which can serve to render better the camp experience, facts themselves being sometimes wanting.
This final point inspires Razinsky to conclude his essay by invoking
Semprun’s positive, not to say enthusiastic, view of fictionalizations of the
Holocaust, which he believes to be a potent way of preserving the memory
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of the six million Jewish victims. Semprun’s remarks—made implicitly in
Le Mort qu’il faut and explicitly in his major text, L’Écriture ou la vie, or in
his affirmative reviews of Holocaust novels—can also serve as a conclusion
to the present introduction. For, despite the reservations that some contributors, such as Avril Tynan or myself, raise in relation to contemporary
narrative approaches to the Jewish tragedy, it is beyond all doubt that
Holocaust-themed literature provides a unique space for voicing vital
questions that neither historiography nor philosophy have the means to
raise. As the twelve essays included in this special issue of French Forum
clearly demonstrate, the novels about the Holocaust complicate the clearcut categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander, grapple with the issues
surrounding postmemory, and interrogate the nature of witnessing and
the witness’s identity. They also confront the capacity of Holocaust literature for redress of past wrongs and successfully integrate Hitler’s assault
on European Jewry into the complex web of mutually fertilizing memories
of violence where, without losing its watershed status, the Nazi genocide
enables novelists to articulate other histories of victimizations. Last but not
least, the questions contemplated by many contemporary writers pertain
to the future of Holocaust memory and to its crucial role in mobilizing
our responses to today’s injustistices and violence.
Notes
1. This special issue has been collated with the assistance of funding from the Marie
Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) of the European Union’s research and innovation
program Horizon 2020, under grant agreement number 654786.
2. In July 2010, in an article published in the Nouvel Observateur Grégoire Leménager spoke of the “Littell Generation.”
Works cited
Casteel, Sarah Phillips. Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination.
New York: Columbia UP, 2016.
Clifford, Rebecca. Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in
France and Italy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.
Friedländer, Saul. “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah.” History and Memory 4 (1992): 39–59.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photograph, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1997.
———. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29: 1 (2008): 103–28.
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———. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust.New York: Columbia UP, 2012.
Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945. London: Lime Tree, 1993.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
2001.
Langer, Lawrence. “The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps,” Centerpoint 4
(Autumn 1980): 222–31.
Leménager, Grégoire. “Génération Littell,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 5.07.2010.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. London: Michael
Joseph, 1988: 22–51.
McGlothlin, Erin. Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006.
Morris, Alan. Patrick Modiano. Oxford: Berg, 1996.
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.
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