As the narrative shifted to recognize Jewish death, the martyr-hero increasingly became the isolated and abandoned deportee. From the beginning, he shows, Jewish memory was integrated into accounts of deportation: it was on display in memorials and ceremonies, which combined images of Christian martyrdom with the minimal style that was later associated with representations of Holocaust memory Gaullist monumentalism harmonized with a sober, austere aesthetic of spiritual longing. He eschews an either-or approach by tracing the emergence of a continuous narrative of deportation that incorporated multiple voices and gave increasing weight to the Jewish fate over time. Nord builds on such scholarship but moves beyond its tendency to counter silence with speech. Among them is Laura Jockusch’s account of surviving Jews’ efforts to document their experiences, and François Azouvi’s The Myth of Silence, which recovers several public discussions touching on Jewish suffering, including coverage of the Eichmann trial and debate about Rolf Hochhuth’s play about Pius XII, The Deputy. In his response, Nord mentions other works that have questioned the silence-to-voice narrative.
8 February 2021 | Įditor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor and Chair: Carolyn J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France. Although he does not question the turning points of this narrative, including the Gaullist myth of the Resistance, the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he treats them as important but insufficient explanations for the ‘repression’ or emergence of Holocaust memory in France. The student rebels of 1968 unearthed long-repressed memories about Jewish persecution and the Vichy regime that had been buried by both Gaullist and Communist accounts of French heroic martyrdom, and the earlier celebration of Resistance gave way to an emphasis on Jewish suffering. As the story goes, the French imagined deportees as anti-fascist, patriotic victims of the Nazi regime until the 1960s and 70s, when a younger generation questioned French complicity in the Holocaust along with French racism and colonialism. It revises the dominant silence-to-voice story that historians have nuanced and contested, but never fully dislodged. Philip Nord’s After the Deportation is a compelling and ambitious account of ‘deportation memory’ in France.
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