Preface 1. Understanding and Representing the Occupation

Notes Preface 1. Nancy Wood observes that Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial book Hitler’s Willing Executioners was especially criticised by historians for the fundamen- tal flaw of resorting ‘to acts of psychological projection that have no place in historiographical discourse’ (Wood, 1999: 93). Such traits more characteristic of fiction are in fact found in many popular history books, such as Martin Blumenson’s The Vilde´ Affair (Robert Hale, 1978). 2. Innumerable examples of less well-known figures caught between heroic and treasonable sacrifice could be cited. The future novelist Pierre Boulle, for instance, joined the Free French in Singapore in July 1941; captured by the Vichy authorities in Indochina, he was given a life sentence for treason and stripped of French nationality by a court martial in Hanoi in October 1942. After his escape from detention in late 1944, he was awarded the Le´gion d’honneur, Croix de Guerre and medal of the resistance. Many of the novels he subsequently wrote explore the shifting boundary between heroism and betrayal (the most famous being the source of the film The Bridge on the River Kwai). 3. Of the 75,500 Jews deported from France, 42,000 were deported in 1942 and 17,000 in 1943, while 80 per cent of those deported were originally arrested by the French police (see Froment, 1994, for further details on Bousquet). 4. The Vichy minister Pierre Pucheu was less successful in his attempt to trans- fer his allegiance from collaboration to resistance halfway through the occupation, since he was one of only four senior government figures to be executed for treason (in his case in March 1944; the others were Laval, de Brinon and Darnand, condemned after the liberation). 5. A chapter originally planned on songs has been omitted for space reasons. The material has been published elsewhere (Lloyd, 2001, 2003 – in press). 1. Understanding and representing the occupation 1. Pierre Daninos in La Composition d’Histoire has produced an amusing analysis of the caricatural, jingoistic simplifications of historical subjects to be found in most school textbooks across the world, and he enumerates at length the howlers produced by pupils who have been instructed by such material (thus Hitler for one German teenager was ‘the first man to land on the moon’, 1979: 134). He concludes rather bleakly that ‘it is better to be ignorant than to be wrong’ (p. 92). However, Sellar and Yeatman, despite their amusing reduction of historical study to good things, top nations and waves, do offer a more persuasive and optimistic defence of the business: ‘The object of this History is to console the reader. History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.’ And half a century 238 Notes 239 before Francis Fukuyama, they note: ‘History is now at an end’ (1930: vii–viii). 2. Thus Robert A. Rosenstone argues that ‘The notion of postmodern history seems like a contradiction in terms. The heart of postmodernism, all theor- ists agree, is a struggle against History. With a capital H. A denial of its narratives, findings, and truth claims’ (1995: 200). 3. Unlike historians, novelists are generally not obliged to draw on archival and documentary sources, though in practice many historical novelists do refer explicitly or implicitly to sources which lend authority and credibility to their fictions. A fascinating and at times acrimonious debate has been pur- sued in France about the accessibility, or rather the inaccessibility, of state archives concerning the occupation and what may, or may not, be concealed from public view. The most substantial discussion is found in Sonia Combes’s book, Archives interdites (1994). While professional historians claim that she sometimes overstates her case (see, for example, Conan and Rousso, 1994; or Baruch, 1997), she confirms by a whole range of persuasive examples the virtual impossibility of writing properly documented history about certain shameful episodes, such as French collaboration with the Gestapo, apart from reminding us that the amnesty laws of the early 1950s make it legally difficult even to name collaborators in print. Fiction attempts to fill such gaps by imaginative insight and speculation. 4. Popular genres however often contain a strong didactic element; in other words, they offer more than simple entertainment, however confused or misleading their message may be in some cases. If, for instance, one looks at a sample of French comic books dealing with World War Two, one finds pedagogic propaganda is often a prime concern. Thus Philippe Chapelle’s Armeé secre`te (1997) is a somewhat pious, but informative, pseudo-documentary, offering ‘a moving lesson in courage and fraternity’, as Lucie Aubrac puts it in her preface. Similarly, Marie-Laureche Boucheron’s Lo [sic] Grand Guingouin (1984) suffers from information overload, turning its protagonist into an heroic cipher. Alain Bouton et al. in Vercors: le combat des re´sistants (1994) omit all reference to the strategic failings behind the disaster or to the role of French auxiliaries on the German side, but at least offer a more readable, visually appealing narrative by centring their account on a fictional maquisard, uncontaminated by controversy and platitudes. 5. For a debunking account, see Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (Picador, 1996). Guitry and Jamet were briefly imprisoned for collaborationist activities after the liberation, though never formally charged and con- victed, and wrote indignant memoirs protesting their good intentions. Heller was an SS officer responsible for censoring book publications in occupied Paris who was on close terms with many collaborationist intellec- tuals; he casts himself in the role of liberal-minded francophile in his memoirs, published after many of those who might have contradicted him had died. 6. The novelist G.M. Fraser amusingly contrasts his own recollections of the campaign in Burma with the austere and ordered account given in the official history of his unit in his book Quartered Safe Out Here (Harvill, 1992). 240 Notes 7. As far as Great Britain is concerned, Calder suggests that ‘The greatest single fact suppressed by the Myth of the Blitz is this: in 1940, because Churchill refused to give in, world power passed decisively away from Britain to the USA’ (1991: 52). 8. See Tudor (1972). 9. In fact, the French National Assembly officially recognised in January 2001 the genocide of over one million Armenians perpetrated by the Turks in 1915 (unlike the US Congress which remains reluctant to offend Turkey). 10. Cf. François Be´darida’s contrast of history and memory: ‘Whereas history is situated outside events and generates a critical approach from without, memory is placed within events, working back as it were in them, inside the subject. Memory makes itself contemporaneous with what it seeks to transmit, whereas history maintains a distance’ (1993: 7). Prefacing the English translation of Pierre Nora’s celebrated multi-volume collective study, Les Lieux de me´moire, L.D. Kritzmann similarly glosses memory as the ‘variety of forms through which cultural communities imagine themselves in diverse representational modes’, as opposed to history ‘regarded as an intellectual practice more deeply rooted in the evidence derived from the study of empirical reality’ (in Nora, 1996: ix). He further notes that memory can be contradictory and divisive rather than universalist. Given that anyone studying the occupation of France and its consequences is effectively obliged to account for the changing history of memories of the period, it seems to me more appropriate to include memory and myth within the process of historical enquiry, along with all the imaginary cultural productions which are their vehicles. 11. Davies praises the attempts of Major Denis Hills to save Ukrainians from the Waffen SS Galicia Division from repatriation to the USSR. Most were allowed to settle in the UK in 1947, although it is now clearly established that the division had engaged in systematic atrocities against civilians in Poland and the Ukraine (a point reiterated most recently by a documentary film broadcast on ITV in January 2001). Regarding the British officers and officials who did not oppose repatriation, Professor Davies concludes sen- tentiously: ‘the moral principle is unequivocal. If ‘‘obeying orders’’ could be no defence for Adolf Eichmann, it can be no defence for Allied officers’ (1996: 1047). For further discussion of such moral issues, see later in this chapter. 12. See Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 a` nos jours. Rousso defines the syndrome as the multitude of symptoms in French political, social and cultural life which reveal the deep-seated national trauma caused by the occupation, a trauma whose damaging effects continued to appear long after the initial divisions and disruption caused by defeat in 1940 (1990: 18–19). 13. Gise`le Sapiro’s monumental La Guerre des ećrivains 1940–1953 (1999) does not conform to this generalisation about the narrowness of material sampled, since it is a quantitative study of 185 French writers who were active in 1940. Her interest lies however not in their writing and texts, whether perceived as historically informative or aesthetically innovative, but rather in the sociological status of the writer and related professional groups and associations, following Bourdieu’s exploration of the ideo- Notes 241 logical and economic factors which determine power and influence within the ‘literary field’. 14. This figure is a rough estimate, deriving mainly from published biblio- graphies and the selective card index established by the BDIC (Biblio- the`que de documentation internationale contemporaine) of several hundred works of fiction and autobiography about the occupation published in the post-war period. Henri Michel’s Bibliographie critique de la Re´sistance (1964) lists 500 books categorised as memoirs.

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