The memory of the genocide and its evolution
Daniela Lino de Almeida - Charlotte Peeren - Gwladys Testut
I - MEMORY, MEMORY ASSIGNMENT, HISTORY...
Memory definition, memory assignment, history...
Difference between "memory" and "history"
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 such as that of the Jews for example following the Shoah, this massive killing impossible to imagine. This memory of the Shoah was very difficult and took a long time to be recognized.
Thus, first of all, in order to clarify the subject, we will study memory by defining it, then by confronting it with history in order to highlight the differences.
In a second time, 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 of memory, duty of memory, history...
Memory is an emotional 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, question the national institutional 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 made of them, which they generally conclude with different kinds of memory. For a more correct and complete understanding of the subject, we relied on excerpts from the book by 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 in the past, it is no longer a given but a wish that is directly exposed 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 which hold the declarative dimension of memory. The danger is that, as in all speeches, those of the "declarative memory" that 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 qualifies as a summary of the recognition of the remembered events. Subsequently, recognition is armed with a blade that cuts between two absences: that of the former and that of the unreal, which splits "the memory of the imagination," as a matter of principle.
Often, we use and abuse memory by the request of the memory on the path of the recall, which leads to an impeded 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-recognitioneven culminates the reflected 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 is 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 since 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.
We advocate the idea of a "duty to remember" (carefully avoiding even to imply that of a "duty to forget"), knowing that the solution consists in directly opposing it to an "intensive work of memory," based on the "mourning work," theorized by psychoanalysis. The work of memory is the underlying meaning of history.
b) Difference between "memory" and "history"
We all more or less define history as the knowledge and account of past events/facts related to the evolution of humanity (a social group, a human activity); for this is the definition found in the dictionary. But the end of the definition is too often forgotten: "these events are worthy of memory."
Indeed, there is a logical link between history and memory; but these two terms are different in spite of themselves... Let’s say they complement each other, that often one does not go without the other, it is 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 gap between history and memory appears in the definition phase of words as such, then it widens into the explanatory phase, where all kinds of available uses of the connector are tested "because...".
It is true, however, that the coupling between explanation and understanding, which we still emphasize even as preservation in continuity with the decision-making capacity exercised by social agents in situations of indecision and, by the same means, continuity with self-understanding, dependent on memory. The Shoah illustrates in spite of itself the omnipresent indissociability between HISTORY and MEMORY, because together these two terms are stronger and illustrate the strength of the future that will not be forgotten.
In the second part, we will deal with the evolution of this memory...
II- THE EVOLUTION OF MEMORY OVER TIME
) The situation in the immediate post-war period
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 then began. In the latter part of the war, rumors circulated about the extermination of the Jews, but no one wanted to believe it. The last survivors who were able to return home at liberation very quickly realized that they would not be believed. It is this period when silence was master that we are going to address.
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 want to acknowledge its responsibilities. The government also refuses to assert the specific character of Genocide in which 75,000 French Jews lost their lives.
In 1956, a film representative of this period was created:
Moreover, the propaganda was organized in such a way that no information was disseminated about it. These were only rumors that did not seem credible. The victims therefore preferred to remain silent. In 1960, the Jewish conscience 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 that they would soon die and leave no descendants behind. They also know that the Nazis will do everything 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 somehow ensure immortality. It is a desire for everyone to know how these millions of people disappeared. The goal is to revive with 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 onwards, new generations had a different relationship with the past. Vichy became an obsession. The polemics follow one another until 1995.
Anti-German sentiment is fading. Memories then distinguish the Nazis from the Germans. In 1964, a law provided
With the return of General Charles de Gaulle in 1958, resistance monopolized the memory of the war. More than the local celebration of Liberation, the day of 8 May, declared a public 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 shown by the war has decreased significantly, there is still a diffuse memory of the war.
In 1962, the Eichmann trial and then that of Frankfurt in 1964, where about twenty-five Germans stationed at Auschwitz were tried, were indeed to mark a turning point. Eichmann’s trial freed the witnesses' voices. It creates a social demand for testimony.
This is where the memory of the genocide will stand out and eclipse others. Indeed, in order for the memory of the genocide to penetrate the social field, the political configuration must change, especially that the testimony, one of the essential vectors of memory, takes on a meaning that goes beyond individual experience, that it is carried by sectors of society.
Since the end of the 70s, attention has shifted from deportation to resistance to genocide of the Jews. This has to do with the triumph of the "ideology" of human rights and the place of the victim in our society. The focus on victims, their rights, their words, is one of the signs of our time, a global movement that goes beyond the Shoah.
In 1978, Darquier de Pellepoix, head of the Commissariat aux questions juives under Vichy, declared: "that at Auschwitz only 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, was indicted for crimes against humanity under the 1964 law. The trials follow one another: the launch of the Papon case, for example, in 1981 and the indictment of René Bousquet and Paul Touvier, which highlight both the active collaboration with 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 much talk in the mid-1980s of 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 instituted by presidential decree, and not by a law discussed and voted in parliament. The decree provides for an official commemoration on July 16 (if that day falls on a Sunday, otherwise, on the Sunday following the 16th), the erection of a monument at the site 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 24 April 1994. The inscription that appears not only on these steles, but also in each French department reads: "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 state intervention 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 posed to it by the present have continued to grow as it moved away in time.
We could observe that, although there is 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 has shown. 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 go by. 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:
The memory 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 the science of past events, of an evolution.
SHOAH:
Hebrew word meaning "catastrophe", referring more specifically to the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people.
-Manuel d'Histoire de terminales 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 camp system provided by Mrs. Mallard
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