Crises of Memory and the Second World War
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How we view ourselves and how we wish to be seen by others cannot be separated from the stories we tell about our past. In this sense all memory is in crisis, torn between conflicting motives of historical reflection, political expediency, and personal or collective imagination. In Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Susan Suleiman conducts a profound exploration of contested terrain, where individual memories converge with public remembrance of traumatic events.Suleiman is one of a handful of scholars who have shaped the interdisciplinary study of memory, with its related concepts of trauma, testimony, forgetting, and forgiveness. In this book she argues that memories of World War II, while nationally specific, transcend national boundaries, due not only to the global nature of the war but also to the increasingly global presence of the Holocaust as a site of collective memory. Among the works she discusses are Jean-Paul Sartre’s essays on the occupation and Resistance in France; Marcel Ophuls’ innovative documentary on Klaus Barbie, tried for crimes against humanity; István Szabó’s film Sunshine, a chronicle of Jewish identity in central Europe; literary memoirs by Jorge Semprun and Elie Wiesel; and experimental writing by child survivors of the Holocaust. John Neubauer - Shofar Suleiman's book offers us no sure way of overcoming "crises of memory," but it admirably succeeds in guiding us through a memory landscape that is still (or again) littered with explosive underground mines.
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Crises of Memory 1"Choosing Our Past": Jean-Paul Sartre as Memoirist of Occupied France 13Narrative Desire: The "Aubrac Affair" and National Memory of the French Resistance 36Commemorating the Illustrious Dead: Jean Moulin and Andre Malraux 62History, Memory, and Moral Judgment after the Holocaust: Marcel Ophuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie 77Anamnesis: Remembering Jewish Identity in Central Europe after Communism: Istvan Szabo's Sunshine 106Revision: Historical Trauma and Literary Testimony: The Buchenwald Memoirs of Jorge Semprun 132Do Facts Matter in Holocaust Memoirs?: Wilkomirski/Wiesel 159The Edge of Memory: Experimental Writing and the 1.5 Generation: Perec/Federman 178Amnesia and Amnesty: Reflections on Forgetting and Forgiving 215Notes 235Works Cited 261Index 279
