Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1 . Pierre Nora, “Gedächtniskonjunktur,” Transit 22 (Winter 2001–2002): 18–31; and Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” Radical Philosophy 11 (1975): 24–29. The interview with Foucault originally appeared in Cahiers du cinema, nos. 251–252 (July/August 1974). An English translation of a part of Nora’s essay may be found in Pierre Nora, from “Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory,” in Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levey, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 437–441. 2 . Philosopher Paul Ricoeur remarks that the successive waves of memory in France were occasioned by historical events: the Jewish deportations moved to the foreground in the context of the Six-Day War in Israel (1967) and later the 1984 trial of former Hauptsturmführer and Gestapo member Klaus Barbie (who was known as the “butcher of Lyon”). See Paul Ricoeur, “Zwischen Gedächtnis und Geschichte,” Transit 22 (Winter 2001–2002): 12. 3 . Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire ,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 8. 4 . Ibid., 13–14. 5 . Ibid., 15. 6 . Nora, “Gedächtniskonjunktur,” 31. 7 . Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 36. 8 . Maurice Halbwachs, La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte: étude de mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941), 105–112. “Via dolorosa” is literally “The Way of the Cross.” “Stations” is a 13th -century Roman Catholic imaginary construct – one that came later than the original meaning. 9 . Ibid., 205. 10 . Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting , trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), 124. 11 . Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” 28. 12 . Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie, Gesamtausgabe , vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 304; and Das Prinzip Hoffnung , Gesamtausgabe , vol. 5 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959). 13 . Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 110. 14 . Aleida Assman, “Memory, Individual and Collective,” in Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 210–211. 15 . For a good summary of the memory debates in philosophy, see Frigga Haug, Vorlesungen zur Einfürhung in die Erinnerungsarbeit (Berlin: Argument, 1999). 160 Notes 161 16 . Christian Metz, Le Signifiant imaginaire: psychanalyse et cinéma (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1977); The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema , trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982). 17 . See Yves Bédard, “Images technologiques: ce qu’il advient de la mémoire,” Cinémas 1, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 96. 18 . Huyssen, “Present Pasts,” 36. 19 . Stephen Heath, “Screen Images, Film Memory,” Ciné-Tracts 1, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 35. 20 . Aleida Assmann, “Memory, Individual and Collective,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, 216. 21 . Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998), 225. 22 . David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 23 . Dudley Andrew, “A Film Aesthetic to Discover,” Cinémas: Revue d’Études Cinématographiques = Journal of Film Studies 17, no. 2/3 (Spring 2007): 47–69. 24 . Ibid., 63. 25 . Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” 25. 26 . Huyssen, “Present Pasts,” 29. 27 . Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 236–237. 28 . Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), 5–10. See also Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), 17. 29 . Caruth, Unclaimed Experience , 11. 30 . Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting , 393–397; and Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997). 31 . Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy, de 1944 à nos jours , 2nd ed (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 32 . Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting , 80–82. 33 . Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 225. 34 . Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” Selected Writings , vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 215. 35 . Jo-Marie Burt, “Historic Verdict in Guatemala’s Genocide Case Overturned by Forces of Impunity,” NACLA Report on the Americas 46, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 3. 36 . Pierre Nora, “Espanã vive una Guerra civil de memoria,” interview with Salvador Martínez Mas, Pasajes 31 (Winter 2009–2010), 72. 37 . Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press 2006), 8. 1 Living Memory: Representations of Drancy 1 . Némirovsky was the daughter of Jewish-Russian émigrés who had moved to France after the revolution. At the time of France’s defeat by Germany, Némirovsky had already made a name for herself in French literary circles. 162 Notes However, she was unable to obtain French citizenship and was deported to Auschwitz, where she perished. See the review by Alice Kaplan, “Love in the Ruins,” The Nation , May 29 (2006): 16–20. 2 . There is, however, one short exchange between the protagonist and his mother about the deportations. To her son’s claim that Jews are being sent to the East to work, the skeptical mother responds: “Are you sending children to construct roads as well? Because you’re also taking children, aren’t you?” The protagonist responds that it is the French police who have carried out the roundups. See Jonathan Littel, Suite française (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 484. 3 . Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past , trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 1998), 39. 4 . Pierre Nora, “Le Syndrome, son passé, son avenir,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1995): 488. 5 . Ibid., 489. 6 . Ibid., 492. 7 . Serge Klarsfeld has established the chronological table of deportations in Vichy- Auschwitz: la solution “finale” de la question juive en France (1983; Paris: Fayard, 2001). In addition to those deported from Drancy, additional deportations from Lyon and other locations brings the total to 75,721. Of the more than 73,000 deportees from Drancy (which included 11,400 children), there were fewer than 3,000 survivors. Approximately one-third of those deported were French citizens. The total number of Jews in France was 270,000 at the time of the deportations; one-half of these were foreign. In other words, one-fifth of the total Jewish population was deported. The French government officially admits to 120,000 racial deportees, which includes Roma and other groups. In addition, over 2,000 Jews died while interned on French soil. See Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991); Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford: Stanford Univ., Press, 1995). 8 . The exhibit went to the train stations of Paris Saint-Lazare, Lyon Part-Dieu, Limoges, Clermont-Ferrand, Marseille Saint-Charles, Rennes, Lille-Flandre, Strasbourg, Nice, Nancy, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Metz, and Paris Nord. See Les 11,400 enfants juifs déportés de France, juin 1942 –août 1944 (Paris: Mairie de Paris, 2007). 9 . Serge Klarsfeld, Le Camp de Drancy et ses gares de déportation: Bourget-Drancy et Bobigny, 20 août 1941–20 août 1944. 60e anniversaire de la déportation des juifs de France (Paris: FFDJF, 2004). 10 . The Klarsfeld interview is online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= U2FqdJE7U9I. 11 . See Elaine Sciolino, “By Making Holocaust Personal to Pupils, Sarkozy Stirs Anger,” The New York Times , February 16, 2008, http://www.nytimes. com/2008/02/16/world/europe/16france.html. 12 . Antoine Sabbagh, Lettres de Drancy (Paris: Tallandier, 2002). 13 . Donald Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 31. 14 . Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998), 22. Notes 163 15 . In an interview on June 16, 2007, Marcel Bluwal told me that in fact Robert Hughes Lambert was not interned at Drancy but at another camp, so the film has taken a few liberties with the facts. 16 . Interview with the author, June 16, 2007. Marcel Bluwal’s grandmother was deported from Drancy. Bluwal hid for 26 months with his mother in a small room in Paris. His compelling story, in which he also relates his involvement in the birth of the French television industry after the war, is told in Un aller (Paris: Stock, 1975). 17 . Alain Finkielkraut, “From the Novelistic to Memory,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Auschwitz and After (New York: Routledge, 1995), 95. 18 . LaCapra, History and Memory , 8; see pp. 95–138 for a discussion of Lanzmann’s Shoah . 19 . Claude Lanzmann, “Seminar with Claude Lanzmann,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 82–99. 20 . Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 2003), 172. 21 . Clairval’s video has been shown on the French television network France II as well as on the channel of the French Parliament and the cable channel Odysée. It is often broadcast on the last Sunday in April, which was desig- nated in 1954 by the French government as “Journée nationale du souvenir de la déportation,” a day memorializing the deportations. Copies have also been deposited with French schools and with municipal councils. The video received a special mention by the jury at the International Festival of Historical Films in Pessac, France, in 2002. 22 . La Shoah à l’écran: crimes contre l’humanité et représentation (Strasbourg: Conseil d’Europe, 2004), 37–38. The showing at Lincoln Center was sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, French Cultural Services, and the Cahiers du cinéma . 23 .