THE MEMORY OF THE GENOCIDE AND ITS EVOLUTION
Daniela Lino de Almeida - Charlotte Peeren - Gwladys Testut
I - MEMORY, MEMORY ASSIGNMENT, HISTORY...
Memory definition, duty of remembrance, history...
Difference between 'mémoire' and 'histoire'
II- THE EVOLUTION OF MEMORY OVER TIME
The situation just after the war
Representation of the past, memory is the memory that one keeps of something that remains engraved in the minds of every man, of every community like that of the Jews for example following the Holocaust, this massive killing impossible to imagine. This memory of the Shoah was very difficult and took a long time to be recognized.
Thus, in a first step we will study, in order to clarify the subject, memory by defining it, then by confronting it with history in order to highlight the differences.
In a second phase, it would be wise to focus on the evolution of the memory of the Shoah: the situation just after the war, then the memory of our days in France.
I - MEMORY, MEMORY ASSIGNMENT, HISTORY...
a) Definition memory, duty of remembrance, history...
Memory is an affective link with the past, likely to evolve or be manipulated. This frequently personalized memory can only be collective when it is representative of a community such as Jewish, resistant or other which, very often, questions the institutional national memory as we know it, conveyed by teaching (often incomplete) and official commemorations.
Today, historians "study" memory. They define this as an evolution of different social practices aimed at representing the past and maintaining its memory. For this, they must analyze the uses that are made of it, which they generally conclude by different kinds of memory. For a more correct and complete understanding of the subject, we have relied on excerpts from the work of Paul Ricoeur.
According to the latter, any phenomenology of memory is a simple idea. That of the 'happy memory' which is hidden in the definition of 'memory by fidelity'. Only when this fidelity is past, it is no longer a given but a wish that directly exposes itself to disappointment, even betrayal. We see in this vow of "memory by fidelity" a particular originality: it is not an action that is characterized but a representation of words, acts, constituent languages that hold the declarative dimension of memory. The danger being that, as in all speeches, those of 'declarative memory' which must lead to success only sometimes succeed, since unfortunately the rest of the time they are doomed to failure. This would make the vow of "memory by fidelity" a pure claim. All this results from the 'memory-making' that Ricoeur describes as a summary of the recognition of the recalled events. Subsequently, recognition is armed with a blade that slices between two absences: that of the former and that of the unreal which splits the 'memory of the imagination', in principle.
Often, we use and abuse memory by the request of memory on the path of recall, which leads to a prevented memory, a manipulated memory, a condemned memory... and as many difficult but never impossible figures.
For the Shoah, the conjunction between work of memory and work of mourning was certainly the price to pay, but sharing such suffering with others can only be beneficial; and from this follows the fact that it is in self-recognition-even culminates the reflexive moment of memory on the mode of the logical and personal wish.
According to a column by Pierre Bouretz, we can approximately "define" what the "duty of memory" is. Frequently, and especially for families who have been affected by the horror of the Shoah, memory finds itself divided between 'fidelity' and 'truth', never leaning completely into one of these two extremes. On the contrary: very often, after a swing between these poles comes forgiveness. This is a real danger for memory given that the horizon of forgiveness inevitably leads to the prospect of forgetting. But, the refusal is categorical when the possibility of erecting the memory into a bond is issued.
One advocates the idea of a 'duty to remember' (carefully avoiding even implying that of a 'duty to forget') knowing that the solution lies in directly opposing it with an 'intensive work of memory', based on the 'work of mourning' theorized by psychoanalysis. The work of memory is the underlying meaning of History.
b) Difference between 'memory' and 'story'
We all define more or less, History as the knowledge and narrative of past events/facts related to the evolution of humanity (a social group, a human activity); because it is the definition that one finds in the dictionary. But one far too often forgets the end of the definition: "these events are worthy of memory".
Indeed, there is a logical link between history and memory; but these two terms are different despite themselves... Let’s say they complement each other, that often one does not go without the other, it’s obvious. Testimony transmits to history the energy of declarative memory ".
Simply, not all the documents have the qualification of 'testimony' as do those who are 'witnesses in spite of themselves', like the deportees from Auschwitz.
The existing gap between history and memory appears in the phase of definition of words as such, then it widens in the explanatory phase, where we test all kinds of available uses of the connector "because...".
It is true, however, that the coupling between explanation and understanding, which we still emphasize even the preservation in continuity with the decision-making capacity exercised by social agents in situations of indecision and, by the same way, continuity with self-understanding, dependent on memory. The Shoah illustrates despite itself the omnipresent indissociability between HISTORY and MEMORY, because together these two terms are stronger and illustrate the strength of the future which will not be forgotten.
In the second part, we will deal with the evolution of this memory...
II- THE EVOLUTION OF MEMORY OVER TIME
a) The situation just after the war
Like every war, the Second World War caused many deaths. But after the Armistice, when the Allies emerged victorious, many deaths remained of mysterious origin. How to understand that millions of people were locked up, condemned to forced labor and industrially exterminated, only because they had a different religion, skin color or because they did not have the same ideas as the government of the 3
At the end of the summer of 1941, the final solution was established. The mass killing of the deportees began. In the last part of the war, rumors were circulating about the extermination of the Jews, but no one wanted to believe it. The last survivors who were able to return home upon release quickly realized that they would not be believed. It is this period when silence was master that we will deal with.
The memory of the Shoah took a long time to be recognized. It was almost total silence until 1985, when Claude Lanzmann directed the film
During the Second World War, the Vichy regime gradually submitted to the wishes of the Nazis by wanting to assert French sovereignty through negotiations. However, in 1945, the Vichy regime did not wish to recognize its responsibilities. The government also refuses to affirm the specific character of Genocide in which 75,000 French Jews lost their lives.
In 1956, a film representative of this period was created. It is about
Moreover, the propaganda was organized in such a way that no information was spread about it. It was only about rumors that did not seem credible. The victims therefore preferred to remain silent. In 1960, the Jewish consciousness is reborn and the specificity of the Genocide is affirmed for the first time before the whole world. But the first testimonies were those of men who did not survive. These men knew they were soon to die and left no descendants behind. They also know that the Nazis will do everything possible to make the Jewish community disappear from the whole world. The priority for these men then became to tell everything before it was too late. Writing then becomes a vital need to keep track of events that defy the imagination and to somehow ensure immortality. It is a will that everyone knows how these millions of people disappeared. The objective is to revive through words a destroyed universe. It is an urgent necessity to bear witness so that history can one day be written.
After the tears, silence and forgetting weigh on the memory of the war. However, from 1968 on, new generations maintain a different relationship with the past. Vichy becomes an obsession. The controversies follow one another until 1995.
The anti-German sentiment fades. Memories then distinguish the Nazis from the Germans. In 1964, a law provided
With the return of General Charles de Gaulle in 1958, resistancialism monopolizes the memory of the war. More than the Liberation celebrated locally, the day of May 8, declared a holiday in 1953, unifies commemorations that are geographically and politically fragmented. The memory of the war is essentially military and resistant, and is grafted on that of 1914.
Although the interest in the war is decreasing significantly, there remains a diffuse memory of the war.
In 1962, the trial of Eichmann and then that of Frankfurt in 1964, where about twenty-five Germans serving at Auschwitz were tried, will indeed mark a turning point. Eichmann’s trial has freed the witnesses' voices. It creates a social demand for testimony.
It is there that the memory of the genocide will singularize itself and eclipse others. Indeed, for the memory of genocide to penetrate the social field, it is necessary that the political configuration change, that the testimony in particular, one of the essential vectors of memory, takes on a meaning that goes beyond individual experience, that it be carried by sectors of society.
Since the end of the 70s, attention has shifted from the deportation resisting the genocide of the Jews. This has to do with the triumph of "the ideology" of human rights and with the place of the victim in our society. The emphasis on the victims, their rights, their word, is one of the signs of our time, a global movement that goes beyond the Holocaust.
In 1978, Darquier de Pellepoix, head of the commissariat for Jewish questions under Vichy, declared: " that at Auschwitz, only the lice were gassed ". The scandal is immense and the consequences significant. For the first time, in 1979, a Frenchman, Jean Leguay, a senior police officer who supervised the roundup of the Vélodrome d'Hiver, is charged with a crime against humanity under the 1964 law. The trials follow one another: launch of the Papon case, for example, in 1981 and indictment of René Bousquet and Paul Touvier which highlight both the active collaboration of Vichy and the complicities these men enjoyed after liberation. Historians take up the question of Vichy. Many buried memories then arise.
In France, there was a lot of talk in the mid-80s about the famous 'historians' quarrel, which divided the intellectual world of the Federal Republic of Germany.
For the first time in the history of the Republic, a national day is established by presidential decree, and not by a law discussed and voted in parliament. The decree provides for an official commemoration on July 16 (if this day falls on a Sunday, otherwise, on the Sunday following the 16th), the erection of a monument at the location of the Vélodrome d'Hiver as well as two steles, one on one of the places of internment in France, the other at the house of Izieu, whose Memorial Museum, largely financed by the State, was inaugurated on April 24, 1994. The inscription which appears not only on these stelae, but also in each French department indicates: " The French Republic in tribute to the victims of racist and anti-Semitic persecution and crimes against humanity committed under the de facto authority known as " government of the French State ", 1940-1944. Never forget. ". This is a unique case in France of direct intervention by the State in the establishment of monuments and steles.
As we enter the third millennium, the genocide of the Jews is both inscribed in history and strongly present in the collective imagination. It has a unique character, that of a European event whose effects on the present and the questions that the present poses to it have continued to grow as it moved away in time.
We were able to observe that, although there was a logical link between 'memory' and 'history', these two terms were completely opposed.
However, one cannot go without the other as the horror of the Holocaust may have emphasized. In the early days, just after the war, silence was almost total, mentalities refusing to believe in the unimaginable. However, a change is noticeable as the years pass. Nowadays, the genocide of the Jews is a reality, rooted in the collective imagination in France.
Although in our country this disaster represents an unforgettable horror, it is not the same in other countries where the Shoah is unknown, perhaps due to the fact that they were not directly concerned, such as Portugal or Spain.
CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY:
Violation of the rules of fundamental law penalized by state governments.
GENOCIDE:
Systematic extermination of a human, national, ethnic or religious group.
MEMORY:
Memory that one keeps of someone or something; what remains or will remain in the minds of Men.
COLLECTIVE MEMORY:
Set of specific memories of a community, a nation.
HISTORY:
Part of the past known through written documents/studies and science of past events, of an evolution.
SHOAH:
Hebrew word meaning 'catastrophe', referring more particularly to the undertaking of the extermination of the Jewish people by the Nazis.
-Manual of History of terminal ES,L
-Manuel d'Histoire de terminales ES,L,S collection Laurent Bourquin
- Manuel d'Histoire de terminales
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- The mimeographed concentration system provided by Mrs. Mallard
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