The Holocaust and French Historical Culture, 1945–65

220 Pages·2015·1.409 MB·English

by  Johannes Heuman (auth.)

The Holocaust and its Contexts
Series Editors: Olaf Jensen, University of Leicester, UK and Claus-Christian
W. Szejnmann, Loughborough University, UK.
Series Editorial Board: Wolfgang Benz, Robert G. Moeller and Mirjam Wenzel
More than sixty years on, the Holocaust remains a subject of intense debate with
ever-widening ramifications. This series aims to demonstrate the continuing
relevance of the Holocaust and related issues in contemporary society, politics
and culture; studying the Holocaust and its history broadens our understanding
not only of the events themselves but also of their present-day significance.
The series acknowledges and responds to the continuing gaps in our knowledge
about the events that constituted the Holocaust, the various forms in which the
Holocaust has been remembered, interpreted and discussed, and the increasing
importance of the Holocaust today to many individuals and communities.
Titles include:
Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams (editors)
REPRESENTING AUSCHWITZ
At the Margins of Testimony
Johannes Heuman
THE HOLOCAUST AND FRENCH HISTORICAL CULTURE, 1945–65
Antero Holmila
REPORTING THE HOLOCAUST IN THE BRITISH, SWEDISH AND
FINNISH PRESS, 1945–50
Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (editors)
ORDINARY PEOPLE AS MASS MURDERERS
Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives
Karolin Machtans and Martin A. Ruehl (editors)
HITLER – FILMS FROM GERMANY
History, Cinema and Politics since 1945
Simo Muir and Hana Worthen (editors)
FINLAND’S HOLOCAUST
Silences of History
Henning Pieper
FEGELEIN’S HORSEMEN AND GENOCIDAL WARFARE
The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union
Diana I. Popescu and Tanja Schult (editors)
REVISITING HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION IN THE POST-WITNESSING ERA
Tanja Schult
A HERO’S MANY FACES
Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments
Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (editors)
BRITAIN AND THE HOLOCAUST
Chris Szejnmann and Maiken Umbach (editors)
HEIMAT, REGION, AND EMPIRE
Spatial Identities under National Socialism
The Holocaust and Its Contexts Series
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The Holocaust and French
Historical Culture, 1945–65
Johannes Heuman
Uppsala University, Sweden
© Johannes Heuman 2015
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission.
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-57586-2 ISBN 978-1-137-52933-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137529336
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Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction 1
2 French–Jewish Relations and Historical Culture 22
3 Nationalisation and Isolation 43
4 Europeanisation and Historicisation 70
5 Universalisation and Global Remembrance 100
6 The Holocaust Enters French Historical Culture 128
7 Concluding Discussion 156
Notes 171
Bibliography 196
Index 207
v
List of Illustrations
Photographs
Photographs 5.1a and 5.1b A model of the planned Mémorial
by the architects Georges Goldberg and Alexandre Persitz (left).
The drawing of the planned crypt (right) shows where the
ashes of the victims are to be kept, together with an eternal flame.
© L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, no. 55 (Sept. 1954): 21 and 23. 104–5
Photograph 5.2 The ceremony to lay the cornerstone in
May 1953, which marked the beginning of the construction
of the Tombeau du Martyr Juif Inconnu. © Centre de
documentation du Mémorial de la Shoah. 109
Table
Table 6.1 Private Commemorations at Mémorial, October
and November 1960 144
vi
Acknowledgements
This book is a revised version of my doctoral thesis at Stockholm
University, which would not have been possible without the gener-
ous help of friends and colleagues in Sweden and abroad. My greatest
debt of thanks is to my supervisors Pär Frohnert and Leif Runefelt. It
has been a great privilege to work both Pär and Leif, who have not
only generously commented upon my work but also helped shape me
as a researcher. The good atmosphere at the Department of History at
Stockholm University has furthermore made my research easier in many
ways. Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to all my colleagues
at the department. My special thanks, within the Nordic academic com-
munity, go to Klas-Göran Karlsson, Mattias Tydén, Orsi Husz, Claudia
Lenz, Karin Lützen, Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke, Fredrik Charpentier
Ljungqvist, Aryo Makko, Olof Bortz, and Nevra Biltekin.
As a postgraduate research student, I have been fortunate to be associ-
ated with the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (IHPT-CNRS) in Paris,
thanks to Henry Rousso and the then president Christian Ingrao. I spent
a year at the institute, with generous access to an office, the library, a
very welcoming body of colleagues, and the opportunity to present my
research at its seminars. In Paris I am also grateful to Johanna Linsler,
Newman Lao, Simon Perego, Anne Grynberg, and the staff of the Centre
de documentation du Mémorial de la Shoah (CDJC). In addition to this,
I was fortunate enough to spend five months at the Parkes Institute for
the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton.
It was a great privilege to work at this dynamic interdisciplinary and
international research centre, and I would like to thank Joachim Schlör
and in particular Tony Kushner for his friendly guidance and important
comments on my research during these months. I have also benefitted
from the generosity and helpful comments of Maria Grever, director of
the Center for Historical Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam, during
a visit to Stockholm.
My research abroad in Paris, Southampton, and elsewhere was funded by
generous grants from STINT (the Swedish Foundation for International
Cooperation in Research and Higher Education), the Knut and Alice
Wallenberg Foundation, the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation, and
vii
viii Acknowledgements
the Department of History at Stockholm University. The permission to
use material published in the journals Holocaust and Genocide Studies and
History and Memory is gratefully acknowledged. Charlotte Merton has
given me great guidance on my English writing that I will carry with me
into future projects and I am also grateful to Nathalie Tafelmacher and
Jonathan Tedenbring in this regard. Turning my research into a book
has been an exciting process and I am very pleased with the generous
support from Linda Auld, Angharad Bishop and Emily Russell at Palgrave
Macmillan, the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, as well as
the editors of the Holocaust and its Context series, Olaf Jensen and
Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann. My girlfriend Tove Rauscher, in addition
to ensuring our lives run smoothly in every possible way, has also com-
mented on my manuscript and has improved its argument. And, finally,
I would like to thank Mum, Dad, my sisters, and my friends. Karin and
Inge, my parents in Lund, have not only been the constant in my life,
but have always encouraged me in my chosen paths, whether broad or
narrow. Without them, this research would have been inconceivable.
viii
1
Introduction
National historiographies and commemorations in Europe have tradi-
tionally been employed as forceful instruments in the consolidation of
nation-states and to foster a belief in national homogeneity. This was
particularly the case during the two decades following the Second World
War, when narratives of national heroism and resistance were used to
reconstruct the disastrous experiences of the recent past. In France,
Charles de Gaulle, as the head of the provisional government after the
Liberation, developed a memory policy that sought to heal the wounds
of a divided nation by ignoring ideological conflicts, focusing on the
military aspects of the war, and adopting an expansive view of the
Resistance as a basis for a common identity. This well-known pattern
of how the legacy of the Second World War was incorporated into
national-historical culture was repeated all across Europe, mirroring
how nationalism and historical narratives had strengthened nation-
building projects in Europe long before the war.
In spite of the dominance of these national myths, however, the end
of the Second World War also saw the rise of new approaches to the past
that grew from the traumatic experience of the Holocaust. Contrary to
common belief, public discussions on this genocide did not start from
nearly nothing in the 1970s when the patriotic narratives of the war lost
their influence in Western Europe; recent scholarship on early post-war
reactions to the genocide of the Jews has shown how transnational initi-
atives in Europe, the US, and Israel paved the way for Holocaust studies,
museums, and archive collections as early as the end of the 1940s.1
These small groups collected documents and presented alternative nar-
ratives as a corrective to national historiographies. A great deal of the
literature was written in Yiddish and thus was completely disconnected
from national-historical cultures, yet some of these early Holocaust
1