Return of mémoire
It’s satisfying to see that the on-line news journal Rue 89 has taken up an idea I launched five days ago, that “devoir de mémoire” should be focussed not on the deported children but rather on the adults who rounded them up. They knew where the children were going and what horrible death awaited them. When I suggested that each adult should be given the name of a member of the milice (and be encouraged to wonder whether he/she knew anyone like that today) I was being perfectly serious, although no one has commented on it so maybe you all thought I was yet again being facetious - but it is actually where the mémoire in question should be. The contributor to Rue 89 is particularly well placed to make the same suggestion since he himself was rounded up, on the 16th July 1942, by the French police.
He says: “Such reminders of History are extremely useful at a time when police officers and gendarmes are working non-stop tracking down the sans papiers and, sometimes, separating them from their children.” Then, having added that of course the periods are different he writes a beautiful phrase which doesn’t work in English: “Pourtant les mauvaises manières n’en perdurent pas moins, et les fonctionnaires d’autorité de la République ne se risquent jamais à transgresser les ordres qui ne sont en rien compatibles avec les traditions humanitaires du pays des droits de l’homme.” In simple terms, people still dare not disobey orders which are in flagrant contradiction to French humane traditions. He is absolutely right and that is the root of the problem.
“Devoir de mémoire” in any country and any language usually refers to the victims, who are no longer with us: it’s too easy to remember them. It should refer to the oppressors, who are still amongst us and whose continued existence and well-being we are aiding and abetting - by not remembering that.
As perhaps the last word on mémoire, the Holocaust and how both interact with new generations, I strongly recommend Tony Judt’s excellent piece (in fact the transcript of a lecture given weeks before the French President’s decree for 10 year old children, but broadly on the same subject of how we tackle and teach this very difficult subject) in the New York Review of Books (and for anyone unfamiliar with Tony Judt and interested in why Europe is the way it is, please read his monumental and more than excellent “Postwar: a History of Europe since 1945″ which has just been published in French as “Après Guerre”).
February 20th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
I must say, I thought it was a very sensible suggestion, much better than the grotesque idea of burdening a child with a sense of guilt for something for which s/he has no responsibility and no means of redeeming (hmm, is it prejudiced to suggest there was something particularly Catholic in such thought as went into the original idea?).
February 21st, 2008 at 10:47 am
Nothing grotesque about telling a child of ten what happened to children his own age during WWII. The problem is with teenagers who misbehave when they are taken to Auschwitz. Thank you Tim for referring us to Tony Judt’s piece in the NYReview of Books. The difficulty is that in France “the Holocaust” is hardly taught or even mentioned at school for fear of “hurting”…our little muslims among others. I have been trying to get in touch with a psychoanalyst friend of mine to have her last word on guilt but with no success. I have no sense of guilt , I loved going to “catéchisme” because I was brought up with straight agnostics. But this is so individual as to being of no interest. What may be more relevant is that when I was 10 I read about little Louis XVII dying in prison after horrid treatment at the hands of his gaolers. I had no nightmares but acquired for life a horror of French revolutionaries. I really mean “French” because we were taught the French Revolution and I knew something about the context. It would be so sound to grasp what was “diabolical” in Hannah Arendt’s sense about the commonplace evil of the French Revolution . Fat chance, alas! To my mind Emmanuelle Mignon is probably among the most intelligent people of her generation. With NS, she may be tring to heal the hang-ups of this country which is mine but which is , too often, uncongenial.