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Teaching in Tragedy by Teaching the History of Its Remembrance: Oradour-sur-Glane and American Students in September 2001
Donald M. Reid
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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STUDENTS' INTENSE ENGAGEMENT in a time of national tragedy poses challenges to history teachers, but can also provide opportunities for insightful discussions of the interpretation of historical evidence. For me, this was the case following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as that event led my students to ponder the points at which historical events and memory intersect. Memory is a concept at once personal and collective; these imbricated forms of memory can serve different sets of purposes and interests, and, as often competing windows to the past, provide difficult interpretive choices. Communities of memory and historians in turn contest each others' legitimacy and dominions. Pierre Nora, guiding force behind study of the history of collective memory in France, lays out ideal types of memory and history: |
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Memory is always a phenomenon of the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, being a phenomenon of emotion and magic, accommodates only those facts that suit it.... History, being an intellectual, nonreligious activity, calls for analysis and critical discourse. Memory situates remembrance in a sacred context. History ferrets it out; it turns whatever it touches into prose. Memory wells up from groups that it welds together.... By contrast, history belongs to everyone and to no one and therefore has a universal vocation.1
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During the Fall term, 2001, I taught a new course intended to develop a diversity of close reading skills among students. An integral component of the course involved the exploration of memory and history. As the fate of the syllabus would have it, right after the September attacks I taught Sarah Farmer's Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.2 Farmer's excellent study begins with an account of the murder of 642 men, women and children in the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane (Haute-Vienne) in the Limousin by the SS Das Reich division on June 10, 1944. Soldiers shot males and incinerated their bodies, rounded up women and children and burned them to death in the church, and looted and burnt the town. The radical differences between this massacre and the events of September 11, 2001 encouraged students to situate the event they had just witnessed and experienced in a particular historical context rather than simply grouping the murder of civilians in an ahistorical congeries. But Farmer's text also revealed to students how vital it is to engage with the history of memory in a society like ours where the dismissive "it's history" has made memory all the more important. And whether or not students have experienced a tragedy which they recognize has affected their sense of self and their collective identities, I have found in other courses that study of memory in a foreign context, one step removed from that of the students, allows them to develop the skills to explore the world of memory closer to home. |
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Let me lay out briefly the history of the memory of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre presented so well by Farmer, but with a focus on elements outside the parameters of her account that I found helped students engage in the history of memory. The SS Das Reich division had been decimated on the Eastern Front in Russia and in June 1944 was composed of a heterogeneous group of replacement soldiers including forcibly conscripted Alsatians (referred to in Alsace as the malgré-nous or "despite ourselves"). Faced with Resistance units intent on liberating France, German troops in central France pursued the practices of brutality and violence developed earlier on the Eastern Front. Rather than seeking to engage directly with Resistance forces, they terrorized local communities in order to discourage any support for the Resistance.3 Because there is no evidence that Oradour was aiding the Resistance, some have even suggested that SS officers may have sought to spur the disparate elements of the division in their inhumane mission by having them engage in a particularly brutal, yet safe, massacre in a town without Resistance ties.4 |
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How has this tragic event been remembered and commemorated? In the year following the massacre, notables with local connections organized the few survivors and their families in the area into the Association nationale des familles des martyrs d'Oradour-sur-Glane (ANFM), which oversaw preservation of the town ruins and their designation as a national historical monument. Oradour became emblematic of the shared experience of victimhood of the unengaged at a time which Charles de Gaulle incarnated the alternative myth of a people in resistance, of national honor redeemed, though in fact only a small minority of the French had participated in Resistance movements. Given that mass murders committed by German forces elsewhere in France were more clearly in reprisal for Resistance actions, Oradour took on a unique status as the embodiment of innocence destroyed by military force. The fact that the Vichy-appointed war-time mayor had heroically offered himself in place of the people of the town and that the massacre of the women and children involved locking them in the church and setting it ablaze made the event one which could be seen to reconcile liberated France with local officials and the Church compromised by Vichy. Even the Communists, whose postwar legitimacy was based on reference to their losses in the Resistance, honored Oradour as a massacre of the innocents. But the ANFM firmly rejected efforts by Gaullists and other republicans to use destruction of their town in the service of French national unity and by Communists to generate support for peace campaigns and the disarmament of Germany. |
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However, the real rupture between community memory and that of the nation came in 1953, after Alsatian malgré-nous members of the SS Das Reich division were found guilty by a French military court of sharing in collective responsibility for the Oradour massacre. Alsatians condemned the trial for ignoring the suffering of their region when it was forcibly annexed to the Nazi Reich. The French parliament, in the interests of unifying a nation still afflicted by the different wartime experiences of the regions of France, responded quickly with an amnesty for the malgré-nous soldiers. In the terms of Henry Rousso's "Vichy Syndrome," this was the time France was experiencing a transition from an "unfinished mourning" for an ideal of France lost in the 1940 defeat and in the years of the Occupation, to an amnesia embodied by amnesties for those found guilty in the postwar purges.5 |
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Oradour survivors and those who identified with them in the Limousin region were outraged by the amnesty of the Alsatian soldiers who had participated in the massacre. They still experienced an "unfinished mourning" for individuals who had died and whose murder demanded justice. Their outrage was compounded with mourning for an ideal of the France that had betrayed them by the amnesty. Oradour returned the cross of the Legion of Honor it had been awarded after the massacre and maintained until recently a distant relationship with the national state, refusing to accept participation of any representative of the state in the commemoration of events in the town. In sum, inhabitants, who rejected association of their town with the Resistance, revealed a spirit of resistance in their refusal to collaborate with the dominant national reconstruction of the wartime past. And in the new town of Oradour-sur-Glane built next to the ruins, the survivors' association mandated a community of mourning: "From 1953 until the early 1960s, there were no weddings, no dances. No associational life took place in Oradour other than that of the ANFM."6 |
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Indeed, from the first years after the war, survivors and inhabitants of the Limousin sought to control memory of the massacre. Following the Vichy prefect's lead,7 the survivors' community adopted the Christian discourse of martyrdom, although it was necessarily a martyrdom conferred by the community of memory since martyrs (like resisters, but unlike the inhabitants of Oradour) die for their avowed refusal to recant.8 The Catholic Church took a leading role in memory of the massacre that it had not held in the de-Christianizing town before 1944.9 In 1945 the bishop of Limoges rejected as inappropriate the Catalan republican refugee artist Apel.les Fenosa's memorial sculpture, commissioned by the Comité de Libération in the Limousin, of a naked pregnant women whose body is being consumed by flames.10 Critics had praised the statue when it was displayed in 1945 at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris; rejection in the Limousin was a prelude to later conflicts between national agendas and local expressions of mourning. Appreciation of Fenosa in Paris drew on critics' recognition that artists like Fenosa had not compromised themselves during the Occupation. But the bishop sought to assure that memory of a community of moral innocence was not traduced by the alien world of expressionist imagery. |
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Conflicts between national and local
memory traditions well predate the postwar period. Writing in the
first decades of the twentieth century, Maurice Halbwachs had in
mind collective memory of sites like Third Republic Oradour, where
a social community could pass along a collective memory and the
identity that it conferred.
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Bits and pieces of this community—distinctly elements of a
prewar cultural and sociological world that no longer existed—were
among the artifacts conserved for posterity. The Oradour of the
preserved ruins evoked a rural France of the past as well as the
massacre: "a vitality of rural life that has vanished from the France
of today."
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And although there were a number of refugees in Oradour, some of
whom died in the destruction of the village, preservation of their
memory was not at the heart of efforts by local notables, individuals
in the cities of the Limousin with family connections to the town,
to preserve the Oradour they remembered and the memory of its destruction.
The dedicated and inspired individuals who promoted preservation
of the Oradour ruins were themselves maintaining a fundamental element
of pre-war Third Republic France—the urban bourgeoisie's relations,
imagined and lived, to the countryside. Yet in the decades after
World War II, the rural world of the type represented by prewar
Oradour—evoked in Vichy discourse and temporarily revived by
the agricultural black market during the Occupation
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—largely disappeared in France and with it the means of passing
on a collective memory that functioned to recreate the identity
of such rural communities. However, the devastating destruction
of Oradour in one day rather than through a generation of out-migration,
as well as the role of the state in assuring preservation of the
Oradour ruins and in the construction of a new adjoining town of
Oradour-sur-Glane with homes for the survivors, allowed the nurturing
and preservation of a collective memory. Elsewhere the state has
been solely an agent of the erasure of such collective memories
through its role in the transformation of rural France and the resultant
destruction of the social community necessary for transmission of
memory. |
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In discussing this history, students saw that exploration of texts and experiences reveals what makes our own situation unique and helps us pose questions about our world which may not immediately occur to us, but without providing answers or oppressive "parallels" which limit our ability to understand either the past or the present. Contemplation of the survivors' community at Oradour led students to ask about the sociological and moral basis of survivors' communities following criminal disasters, the right and possibility of survivors and those who speak in their name to control the memory of their loss, and the interplay between recognition and respect for individual loss and the incorporation of an attack on national sites such as that of September 11 into a national narrative. And finally, to draw on a French phrase, tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, students asked if there was a danger that the attempt to understand what drove individuals to commit an atrocity could weaken the unequivocal condemnation of an unforgivable crime. Or, as Marc Bloch suggests, is the historian's job to understand rather than to judge?14 Has the time not yet come for historians to examine the events of September 11, 2001? How, the example of Oradour asks us, do we know when this time has come? History offers more complicated and revealing narratives than the two-dimensional moral and legal narratives of innocence and guilt at the heart of collective memories. But if collective memory is, as Nora reminds us, a phenomenon of the present, historians too live in that present and must carefully consider when, why, and how to pose and answer questions absent from the collective memories and the identities they otherwise affirm. |
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In recent years, Oradour-sur-Glane has been the site of projects framed in terms of "reconciliation" which mark a new chapter in the history of the memory of the massacre. The national memory of Oradour was of a town massacred by Germans; the local memory was of a town massacred by Germans and denied justice by the French. As a deputy, François Mitterrand had voted for the amnesty of the malgré-nous in 1953 and as such his name had been placed on the list of deputies posted by the town on a roll of shame at the entrances to the town ruins for more than a decade. After his election as president, Mitterrand visited Oradour in 1982. He was given a cold reception, but this did not stop him from evoking Oradour to denounce the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in July 1982. "Military interventions, when they encounter resistance, provoke Oradours. I didn't accept them in France, I will not accept them in Lebanon."15 However, Mitterrand's refusal to "accept" such actions sounded hollow to the ANFM in light of his amnesty vote. |
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On the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre in 1994, Mitterrand again went to Oradour and spoke cryptically of the town's experience. "Having lived myself these times, I understand the disarray [le désarroi] of families who could believe themselves abandoned during these years."16 Such a past weighed on Mitterrand, but in keeping with his biographical revelations at the time about his involvement as a youth in right-wing organizations and his government service in the early years of the Vichy regime, Mitterrand in his last years may have come to see reflection on the trajectory of his own life as a way for the French to work through experiences whose repression fed the Vichy Syndrome. De Gaulle's conferral of the honor of the Resistance on a demoralized France had been the act of a man of extraordinary prescience and courage bestowed on a France crippled by the legacy of collaboration and failure to rise to the challenge posed by the Occupation. Mitterrand's more troubled past (and troubled way of dealing with it) was a past with which many French could identify, even if the Frenchmen of later generations sought to purge it through rejection of him. However, Mitterrand spoke at Oradour primarily of reconciliation in Europe, leaving it to his prime minister Edouard Balladur to speak of Oradour as an epitome of national unity. Both presented working toward the new Europe as a "never again" response to the massacre at Oradour. And for both, the "renaissance" of the new Oradour alongside the ruins of the old was emblematic of Oradour's meaning and significance. |
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Mitterrand used his visit to unveil the project to construct a Centre de la mémoire d'Oradour, a project initiated by the Conseil général de la Haute-Vienne, but which marked re-entry of the state into commemoration of the massacre at Oradour. The Centre was designed to preserve objects, documents and photographs of prewar Oradour and of its destruction. The world of ruins, like the memory held by survivors and their families, was disappearing. The Centre would supplement the respectful silence and call for introspection at the preserved ruins with an historical presentation designed for visitors who had not lived through the war or its immediate postwar memory and could no longer be led to reflect on it by survivors. The Centre would offer a new sense of the shared European experience by putting the destruction of Oradour in the context of similar Nazi massacres on the Eastern Front. The Oradour of local memory was unique; that of the Centre would be one of many similar massacres, unique in that it took place in France rather than on the Eastern Front. In another act of reconciliation, the opening of the Centre was marked by an exposition of the work of Fenosa, whose monument dedicated to the martyrs of Oradour-sur-Glane finally took its place at Oradour at the entrance to the Centre. |
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Nonetheless, the Centre, in placing
the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane within its historical context,
does implicitly challenge elements of the ANFM memory. The ANFM
interpreted Oradour-sur-Glane as a quintessential French village,
isolated from the war until the Nazis' brutal entry on June 10,
1944. But as the director of the Centre has written, "the population
of June 1944 was not that of the thirties." One exhibit shows the
birthplace of all who died in the massacre. Many were refugees.
One-quarter of the dead came from outside the department of the
Haute-Vienne, including thirty from other nations in Europe. A few
were Jews.
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A Parisian newspaper commented by recasting the memory of Oradour
in light of what Rousso characterizes as the obsessive phase of
the Vichy Syndrome, which focuses on Jewish memory: "Something the
inhabitants had always been quiet about.... For fifty years, in
a muffled or violent way, representatives of the families refused
to consider other victims than those of the peaceable Limousins
arbitrarily chosen by the Nazis. No one recalled nor named the Jews."
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The survivors' community had presented Oradour as a small rural
village, consonant with a certain essence of a timeless France.
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And the insularity of such communities made the culture remembered
after the war—and in opposition to the state after 1953—distinct
from that of a town as a demographic entity which included all its
residents. In contrast, the presentation in the Centre suggests
more clearly that wartime Oradour was the essence of another timeless
France as well, home to the displaced and persecuted—and in
the multi-ethnic France of today this has joined the lost rural
world as a resonant living memory.
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Why was the presence of the few recently arrived Jewish refugees rarely mentioned? Because the ANFM, led by Limousins with prewar connections to Oradour and embodied by the few traumatized survivors, remembered the village of the Third Republic destroyed by the SS. The Oradour of the ruins was an expression of collective memory, built upon and nourished by an existing social community in the Limousin.21 By contrast, the collective memory communities of refugees had been broken by wartime upheavals. Because of their hasty departures or death in the destruction of the village there was no postwar community in the Limousin to carry on the refugees' memory. Some observers have spoken of the competition of victims, but if this seems appropriate for the conflict between Limousins and Alsatians, both endowed with strong identifiable communities of memory,22 the small place given refugees in the Oradour community's collective memory of events is better explained by the absence of a community to sustain a collective memory. Perhaps recognition in the Centre that the Oradour of 1944 was marked by diversity makes it a reflection of the rebuilt Oradour of today, in which survivors and their families live with newcomers to the town.23 |
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Mitterrand had invited the French
to reflect with him on his own personal experience as one way to
respond to the fissured French past. His successor as president,
the younger Jacques Chirac, spoke more easily of France's responsibilities,
without the need to confront a troubled personal wartime past. This
was exemplified in Chirac's recognition of the responsibility of
France for complicity in the Holocaust, the step Mitterrand would
never take. He did so in a speech on the anniversary of the Vel'
d'Hiv round-up of Jews on July 16, 1995. Chirac chose the same day
four years later—while his prime minister Lionel Jospin was
visiting Auschwitz—to go to Oradour for ceremonies to open
the Centre. There he promoted "the choice of reconciliation, which
is not that of forgetting but that of memory taken on [la mémoire
assumée]."
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Then, in October 2000, the town reclaimed the cross of the Légion
d'honneur that survivors had turned in to the prefecture in Limoges
in 1953. |
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These steps toward resolution of conflicts over how events are to be explained, justice served, and ruins preserved reveal the continuing importance of the place of Oradour within French political discourse. Local initiatives to preserve the ruins of Oradour suggested the centrality of the event and constituted an implicit rejection of efforts to make it representative or emblematic of anything else. Nevertheless, since 1944, many in France have sought to make Oradour what Ian Higgins terms a "proverbial myth": the final product in the process whereby a person or place comes to function like a common noun, without necessary reference to historical detail.25 In the months after the massacre, Oradour served as a call to arms for resisters. However, in 1953, the year of the trial and amnesty of the Alsatian malgré-nous and of parliament's second major amnesty of those convicted in purge trials, resister Jean Cassou angrily identified destruction of the Resistance legacy with the war-time destruction of Oradour: |
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Why and how was this country betrayed? What about treason? What treason? Where was the treason? How, under what law, to what end, and with what concerns did the people of this country live during that time? What did they do, and why did they do it? Everything went up in smoke, in exactly the same way as a little village called Oradour.26
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Oradour also revealed its deep rhetorical power during the French-Algerian War, when France learned to speak of itself as other than victim through evocations of Oradour. Critics of the war and its prosecution could not help but ask if the French army in Algeria was acting like the German military in France fifteen years before. And there was no more painful self-accusation than to ask where the Oradours of today were. Pierre-Henri Simon believed that the French army's principle of the "collective responsibility" of indigenous communities in Algeria for acts committed by individuals thought to receive support from them was "exactly the principle by which Hitler's men justified the massacre at Oradour."27 In a much remarked-upon editorial of March 13, 1957, Hubert Beuve-Méry, director of Le Monde, responded to Simon that though the French were not yet "Hitler's conquered," they must now "learn that they no longer fully have the right to condemn in the same terms as ten years ago the destroyers of Oradour and the torturers of the Gestapo."28 |
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Yet that same year several prominent French intellectuals used Oradour to make a different accusation. They condemned as a new Oradour the May 1957 massacre of males in Melouza (Algeria) by the Front de la Libération Nationale army because of the town's presumed support of a rival nationalist movement.29 And since the independence of Algeria, Oradour has continued to provide a way for French intellectuals to criticize Algerians' murderous assaults on fellow citizens, thus reasserting France's place as a humanist conscience legitimated by its experience as the victim of inhumanity. Particularly striking was the full-page Plantu cartoon in L'Express in January 1998 depicting a wall map of Algeria showing fifteen cities, each named Oradour-sur-Glane. Beneath the map was a frowning mustached, recognizably North African figure with a swastika on his headband and armband.30 |
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But the way in which Oradour has been invoked to give meaning and context to the troubling and ill-understood massacres in Algeria fifty years later raises questions about future invocations of September 11, 2001. Can even the most inhumane events later become means for commentators to render less alien and threatening tragedies from which we may otherwise seek to avert our view? If so, what are the costs? The issue of shorthand references to tragedies shorn of their particular historical context, or of the meanings given them by those directly affected, haunts events like the September 11, 2001 massacres. Students were aware that there were as yet no references in the press to "September 11" or "World Trade Center" as generic terms for deadly inhuman violence. This was both a sign of respect and of recognition that, removed from its particular historical context, it was as yet unclear how reference to the tragedy could work rhetorically without harming the speaker by possibly challenging the universally cherished unity of the sort Oradour evoked among the French in 1944 and among Americans after September 11, 2001. But, if students saw that some French later criticized their nation's actions in Algeria with reference to Oradour, they had trouble conceiving of situations in which Americans might make similar use of September 11, 2001. Would there be future circumstances in which American responsibility for civilian casualties somewhere would evoke references like the French use of Oradour? |
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Identification of apparent analogies
among selected events to condemn perpetrators of atrocities is problematic
and, for historians, certainly secondary to a dialogue with the
past that raises new questions about the present—and with the
present that asks new questions of the past. Oradour is not New
York City, Washington, or Pennsylvania; World War II was not the
campaign against terrorism; the instantaneity of contemporary media
with its ability to create an imagined community of individualized
victims a far cry from the wartime papers in France.
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But contemplation of issues raised by such differences can enhance
our understanding of the past and the present. We can ask, what
narratives develop to sustain and respond to the collective memory
of tragedy and why? The immediate representation of the Oradour
massacre drew on the image of "German barbarism" developed in World
War I
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and this has never fully given way to the specific World War II
context of the Eastern Front presented in the Centre. The events
of September 11, 2001 initially evoked references to crusades and
wars of civilization, but these too show signs of receding before
more historically situated analyses of events. |
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Consideration of Oradour underscores that local memory of a tragedy can conflict with national memory. Jean-Jacques Fouché has suggested that the insularity of community memory in Oradour reveals elements of local Limousin culture.33 My students were aware that cultural differences between New York City or the Washington Beltway, and "middle America," so evident in national discourse before September 11, 2001, were seemingly forgotten afterward. But if memory of September 11, 2001 or similar events in communities targeted by terrorist attacks comes to take different forms than national memory of these events, might this reflect not just the obvious element of direct experience, but the reemergence of cultural differences between the communities affected and other regions of the United States? In any case, reflection on Oradour suggests that memory of tragedy for those directly involved can also involve memory of injustices done in response. |
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Both the Oradour of 1944 and the World Trade Center buildings and Pentagon of 2001 are emblematic of representations of national identity in France and the United States. Yet exploration of such sites, at first stymied and then encouraged by reflection on their destruction, can reveal these icons are more complicated and diverse social universes than their initial public representations suggested. Oradour in 1944 was home to refugees and later attention to them has encouraged a fruitful renegotiation of the relation of the history of the massacre and collective memory of the massacred community. How will the diversity of those who died at the World Trade Center, epicenter of a certain form of globalization, be remembered in the narratives, nationalist and humanist, told of the events of September 11, 2001 and why? Some 300,000 visit Oradour each year. What memorials to those who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania will be most appropriate as pilgrims to sites of national mourning and regeneration become civic-minded tourists? It will be the work of the liberal arts, and history foremost among them, to engage with this question. |
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This essay was written in the immediacy of national tragedy. In addition to the contexts which history can offer us to interpret the world in which we live, history can also provide us opportunities to think with and through collective traumas. Certainly an issue which concerned students in class at the time, and motivated me to write this essay later in September, was whether speaking of September 11, 2001 was by its very nature exploitative if it went beyond discourses of grief, respect, and anger. One response is that the care and detail devoted to Oradour and its memory was not just good historical practice, but exemplary of the kind of attention traumatic events like September 11, 2001 will need and deserve from citizens and historians. |
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Notes
1
Pierre Nora, "General Introduction: Between Memory and History" in Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 3.
2
Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For my brief review of this fine book see French Politics and Society 17:2 (Spring 1999): 56-60. Let me take this opportunity to thank my student colleagues in History 96, who helped me think in new ways of the events of June 10, 1944 and of September 11, 2001. And I would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Gordon Wright, who taught me to teach, and from whom I first heard the story of Oradour-sur-Glane.
3
Jean-Jacques Fouché draws from the work of Omer Bartov on German troops' actions on the Eastern Front to make this argument in Oradour (Paris: Liana Levi, 2001).
4
Jean-Claude Peyronnet, "D'Oradour à Pristina," Libération (July 16, 1999), p. 7.
5
Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
6
Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 178.
7
Fouché, Oradour, pp. 200-201.
8
By this standard, Oradour became a site of martyrdom in 1953 when it confronted the state over punishment of the malgré-nous Alsatians.
9
Fouché, Oradour, pp. 196-197, 212.
10
Bertrand Tillier, "Le Monument aux martyrs d'Oradour-sur-Glane par Fenosa," Vingtième siècle 55 (July-September 1997): 43-57.
11
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
12
Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 14.
13
Fouché, Oradour, pp. 21,99.
14
Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), pp. 139-144. For Primo Levi writing on the Holocaust, "Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: 'understanding' a proposal or human behavior means to 'contain' it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him. Now, no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler.... We cannot understand it, but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative...." "Afterward" to The Reawakening trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1995), pp. 227-228. In any case, as Bloch's Strange Defeat suggests, the historian writing as citizen precedes the historian writing as historian in the face of contemporary events. See Gérard Noiriel, Les Origines républicaines de Vichy (Paris: Hachette, 1999), p. 33.
15
Ian Higgins, "Jean Tardieu's Oradour," French Studies 48 (October 1994): 430-431. Mitterrand's dictum reveals the problems inherent in comparison of massacres: equation of victims can suggest equation of perpetrators—particularly problematic in this case.
16
"M. Mitterrand donne acte aux familles d'Oradour d'avoir pu se croire 'abandonnées'," Le Monde (June 12-13, 1994), p. 20.
17
Fouché, Oradour, p. 127 (quoted), 204-207. Local histories recognized the presence of refugees among the dead, but they had little place in the community's collective memory.
18
Blandine Grosjean, "Oradour, le martyre désenclave," Libération (July 16, 1999), p. 12.
19
Note the concession of Fouché, director of the Centre, to community representatives to maintain the phrase "an ordinary Limousin village" because of its place in their telling of the story of Oradour. Oradour, p. 87 Fouché's excellent history of the events of Oradour complements Farmer's examination of the history of the memory of these events.
20
Interpretation of Oradour in these terms resonates with contemporary France in that Alsatian refugees who came to the area in 1940 had difficulty integrating into and being accepted in the Limousin. Farmer, Martyred Village, pp. 18-19.
21
But perhaps the community's decision not to identify as Jews the Jews who died in the massacre should also be placed in a postwar environment, different from that today, in which Frenchmen, including many Jews, saw any differentiation of Jews from others murdered by the Nazis as perpetuating the Nazi system of discrimination and undercutting the role of memory of the dead in reconstructing republican culture and national unity.
22
In a gesture to forward national reconciliation with Alsace, Chirac was accompanied by a delegation of Alsatian representatives, led by the mayor of Strasbourg, Roland Ries, the son of a malgré-nous. For Ries, efforts at reconciliation with Oradour were part of an engagement with the memory of Alsace's experience during the war. He also went to Tambov in Russia, where many Alsatian malgré-nous soldiers had been interned and perished, and accompanied a delegation of Strasbourg's Jewish community to Auschwitz. Nicole Gauthier, "La mission de reconciliation d'un fils de 'malgré-nous'," Libération (July 16, 1999), p. 13. Yet Ries rejected any idea of a pardon for Alsatians forcibly incorporated into the German military since this would imply "collective responsibility." Nicole Gauthier, "La mémoire écartelée des Alsaciens," Libération (December 28, 1999), p.23. Reconciliation with Germany, which has not asked pardon and whose SS officers were not punished for the Oradour massacre, has been more problematic. Lucas Delattre, "À Oradour, dernière étape de la reconciliation franco-allemande," Le Monde (May 30, 2000), p. 3.
23
Farmer writes of tensions between those with ties to the community destroyed in 1944, "old residents of peasant stock," and the newcomers. Martyred Village, pp. 186-187.
24
Henri de Bresson and Georges Chatain, "Oradour-Auschwitz: devoir de vigilance pour M. Chirac et M. Jospin," Le Monde (July 18-19, 1999), p. 5. In the world of contemporary French politics, however, Chirac's efforts at reconciliation could be interpreted as reifying other fissures. Chirac placed Oradour in the context of a number of massacres of civilians from the Vendée to Kosovo. However, Jean-François Revel criticized Chirac for not including any massacres by Communist states in his list and thus maintaining an illicit differentiation between Nazism and Communism. La Grande parade. Essai sur la survie de l'utopie socialiste (Paris: Plon, 2000), pp. 126-127. This debate had taken on new life two years earlier with publication of Stéphane Courtois, ed., Le Livre noir du communisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997). Contributors to Le Livre noir refer to villages destroyed by Communists in Ethiopia and Afghanistan as the Oradour-sur-Glanes of these nations (pp. 753,776).
25 Higgins, "Jean
Tardieu's Oradour," 430. This is the place of the Holocaust in
contemporary discourse. And, in turn, those working within the
tradition of Holocaust denial have turned the tools of suspicion
and doubt on the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre. Their examination
of witnesses' accounts and the town's ruins follows the methodology
of Holocaust deniers who raise nit-picking questions in order
to challenge well-established facts. They follow the SS in attributing
blame for the massacre on the Resistance. Vincent Reynouard, et
al., "Le Massacre d'Oradour. Un demi-siècle de mise en
scène": http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/fran/polpen/Oradour/CLCora1.html.
26
Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, p. 54.
27
Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace. Algeria 1954-1962 (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 115.
28
Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Les porteurs de valises. La Résistance française à la guerre d'Algérie (Paris: Seuil, 1979), pp. 71-72. The 1997-1998 trial of Maurice Papon, complicit in wartime deportation of Jews and later in brutal repression of opposition to the Algerian war in France, could again evoke the memory of Oradour. Georgette Elgey expressed surprise that neither the prosecution nor the defense in the trial of Papon, held in Bordeaux, raised the prosecution in 1953 by a military court in Bordeaux of malgré-nous Alsatians and their parliamentary amnesty a week later. "Un procès bordelais oublié," Le Monde (April 14, 1998), p. 11. But it is perhaps precisely the contested nature of France's effort to resolve the malgré-nous' responsibility that explains absence of reference to it in the Papon trial.
29
Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 133.
30
L'Express (January 15, 1998).
31
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991).
32
Fouché, Oradour, p. 21.
33
Ibid., pp. 91, 212, 241.
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