Rebecca Clifford. Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 304 pp. $125.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-967981-2.
Reviewed by Roberta Pergher (Indiana University)
Published on H-German (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Chad Ross
The Virtues of Victimhood--Contemporary Uses of Holocaust Memory
Rebecca Clifford's study is of course not the first to explore the "conflicts and debates" behind "creating and maintaining official commemorations" of the Holocaust (p. 2). The cross-national comparison between two countries, France and Italy, is welcome, but even in this respect Commemorating the Holocaust is only the latest of a series of recent works to compare Holocaust memorialization between European countries--in particular between France and either Germany or Italy.[1] Yet readers tempted to dismiss this book as simply reworking the familiar should resist the temptation, for this is a meticulous, insightful, and original monograph, even if it also very much recommends itself for undergraduate use as a most succinct survey of established debates.
Although there are obvious differences between Mussolini's Italy and Vichy France, Clifford makes a strong argument for the comparability of the Italian and French cases. Both nations were subject to Nazi occupation, both passed their own anti-Semitic laws, both collaborated with and resisted Nazi anti-Jewish measures. And in the postwar period both nations whitewashed their problematic pasts, papering them over with narratives of "good people"--the bons Français and the brava gente--who were duped and victimized and who eventually resisted en masse. Armed with these parallels, Clifford is able to show symmetries and important differences in the evolving patterns of memorialization in the two countries. Of particular interest is her exploration of the diverse ways in which different groups and generations understand ceremonies of remembrance, her emphasis on organized civil society groups (as against either survivors themselves or official state bodies) as "memory activists," and her account of states' reaction to and sometimes cooptation of such civil society initiatives, a process that led eventually to a more open public acknowledgment of shameful pasts.
One of the strengths of this book is its attention to the differences between the "embodied memory" of those who directly experienced the Holocaust and the "cultural knowledge" of later generations. If there is one point that shines through the complex narratives of the two nations, it is that Holocaust survivors were not the ones driving the adoption of public and state rituals of memorialization. In fact, as Holocaust commemoration gained a foothold in the national public arena, it generally did not respond to survivors' specific needs, even if some were able to find meaning in such rituals. The corollary of this insight is that for Clifford societies did not turn to commemoration because past experiences forced themselves to the surface and demanded expression. Indeed, the notion of trauma barely figures in the book. Rather it was contemporary needs and concerns that regulated not only the willingness to remember but also the shape of remembrance. In Clifford's view these needs originated in evolving international contexts that in turn had varying national effects. Above all, it was the end of the Cold War that was the watershed moment in reconfiguring public memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust. For one, there were chilling reminders of the continued power of racist violence in the form of right-wing parties at home and the murderous ethnic conflict in former Yugoslavia abroad. For another, the collapse of the communist parties and the undermining of a broad resistance consensus ushered in political and cultural uncertainty. It now proved possible and necessary to ask about collaboration and indigenous perpetrators--and about who inherited the responsibility for past crimes. To sustain, and reinvent, a sense of the good France or the good Italy, commemoration of war and Holocaust now became a crucial practice, establishing the nation's commitment to justice and humanitarianism in the present.
The book proceeds chronologically, alternating between chapters on France and on Italy. After a wonderfully succinct survey of the history and historiography of Jewish persecution in Italy and France, Clifford moves swiftly to tackle the history of commemoration. Developments in France, which for the most part preceded similar ones in Italy, serve as the foil against which the Italian case is explored. The Italian case in turn serves as an opportunity to highlight broader European developments against country-specific ones. The result is a well-organized, clear, and convincing analysis of the conflicts and debates surrounding Holocaust commemorations in both countries.
The most important commemoration for French Jews remembers the grande rafle du Vél' d'hiv', the roundup of 13,152 people, including over 4,000 children, on July 16, 1942. Year after year, starting in 1943, the memorial took place in a public space, but for the first two decades the event was mainly an expression of private grief under Jewish community auspices. Erroneously thought of as "silent" about their experience, Jews were in fact remembering the Holocaust in the "semi-public" context of their communities. Yet French deportee associations and the French public displayed for many years a remarkable "inability to listen." The murder of innocent Jews did not readily fit into the cherished narrative of French resistance; and was thus left out of the official recognition of the deportation of political opponents. Significantly, Jews themselves did not want to be singled out as different. They wanted to fit back into French society and be regarded as primarily French rather than Jewish. Then, in the early 1970s, a series of developments brought the Holocaust into the limelight: the new scholarship on collaboration opened up the discussion of Jewish victims and their perpetrators; as they came of age the children of deported Jews chose to be more publicly active than their parents, demanding justice and an official recognition of Vichy's role in persecution; and a new wave of Jewish immigration, primarily from Algeria, led to greater comfort with the assertion of one's Jewish identity. Commemorations in the 1970s and 1980s were thus marked by greater official awareness and a willingness to acknowledge the specificity of the Jewish plight. Questions of responsibility started to emerge, but for a few more years, they remained unanswered.
The end of the Cold War brought the breakdown of leftist narratives of resistance, evident in the rise of historical revisionism and right-wing activism, as well as increased racial violence at home and abroad. And more specifically to the point, there was much public outrage in the early 1990s over the desecration of Jewish graves and the not-guilty verdict of a high-ranking Vichy official. It is in this context that Clifford places the creation of an official Holocaust commemoration in 1993. Yet it was neither survivors, nor Jewish organizations, nor the state that pushed for a national day of remembrance. Clifford highlights the initiative of the Comité Vél' d'hiv' 42, a second-generation collective comprising relatives of Holocaust survivors, which in 1992 penned a petition to the president of the Republic François Mitterrand demanding that the government recognize Vichy's responsibility for the persecution of the Jews. Mitterrand, in the wake of a series of controversies, granted the Vél' d'hiv' commemoration official status, but he refused to acknowledge state responsibility. While the connection between Vichy and the postwar Republic was self-evident for the Comité, for President Mitterrand there was no such connection. The disagreement went right to the heart of the question of what "France" was--the state or the people. It was Jacques Chirac who became instrumental in affording meaning to the official commemoration. He exploited the articulation of state responsibility to assert contemporary civic values. His speeches positioned France as the country of the Rights of Man and as the moral leader in humanitarianism. This new narrative expediently replaced the old myth of the Resistance, with the mantle of the bon Français shifting from the Resistance fighter to the rescuer of Jews, who acted out of moral superiority rather than political conviction. The new consensus over a "duty" to remember led to a change in attitude across various institutions, including a French bishop's apology for the silence of French prelates, a police officers' union apology for the police's involvement in the Holocaust, as well as official investigations into expropriations and attempts at restitution. For participants in the Vél' d'hiv' commemoration, the face of remembrance changed greatly with the presence of authorities, the military, a hierarchical seating order, official speeches, all around a newly created memorial. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that officialdom created an artificial commemoration that sidelined the "embodied memory" of survivors.
As in France, postwar Italy saw an emerging narrative of mass resistance that when conjoined with the widespread desire to leave the Fascist ventennio behind left little room for the commemoration of victims. But unlike in France, even the deported, many of whom had been forced laborers, were denied official commemoration as they did not easily fit with the celebration of victory through partisan heroism on Liberation Day. In a similar vein, the Jews killed in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre were remembered primarily as martyrs of the Resistance rather than as Jewish victims. Just as in France, Jewish organizations were happy to go along with the brava gente myth and the notion of rescue and resistance and preferred to remember the Holocaust within their local communities. The most important celebration commemorated the deportation of Rome's Jews on October 16, 1943. That the deportation had taken place at the hands of the Germans rather than the Italians made it easier to talk about it in public. A more sustained interest in the Jewish plight emerged only in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the wake of progressive Catholicism, the Eichmann trial, and the resurgence of right-wing politics. Yet remembrance remained local and communal until the 1990s.
Even more so than France, Italy experienced a real crisis following the end of the Cold War. Tangentopoli, the corruption scandal that shook the country in the early 1990s, ensnared every party with ties to the Resistance and eventually led to their collapse. The compartmentalized memory of Fascism and the Resistance, created to suit a forward-looking and European Italy, was now up for grabs. The mid-1990s thus saw the search for new national identity amidst the growth of the extreme right and racist violence against immigrants, the fear of a resurgent Fascist ideology, and the experience of ethnic violence in nearby Yugoslavia. In this context, a powerful discourse of reconciliation emerged, endorsed particularly from the right. It entailed a revisionist reading of the past, where every side--anti-Fascist and Fascist--had fought for its own vision of patriotism. Clifford discusses a series of cases which gained a lot of media attention that illustrate the proliferation of this kind of thinking: the controversy over Combat film, shown on national television, in which everyone was a victim, including the Fascists, and which implied the moral equivalence between Fascism and the Resistance; the controversy over the naming of a square in Rome after Fascist leader Giuseppe Bottai; and the controversy over the exoneration of Erich Priebke in the trial for the Fosse Ardeatine massacre. The massacre, whose victims had earlier been commemorated as Resistance fighters, was now portrayed as an entirely Jewish affair even though Jews had only made up a fraction of victims. The verdict led to Jewish protest, which in turn led to media commentary about the place of Jews in Italy, who were portrayed as unwilling to forgive and forget. At the same time, there was a growing sense of alarm among scholars and memory activists that Italians did not know about the Holocaust. Voices calling for an official commemoration, also in light of similar laws in other European countries, emerged. Two proposals were put before parliament in 1997 for the institution of an official commemoration--with very different aims and functions: one focused on Italian responsibility for the persecution of Jews, the other on Fascist responsibility for a number of crimes against citizens; one proposed on October 16, the day of the Rome ghetto clearing, as the day of commemoration; the other suggested January 27, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz. The right tended to focus on the Italian persecution of Jews; the left tended to oppose the focus on Jews as it seemed to obscure the other crimes of Fascism and hinder an indictment of Fascism as a whole. Jewish organizations were generally not involved in the debate. Clifford points out that they joined the discussion with some hesitation as they feared an anti-Semitic backlash if the Jews were made to carry all the burdens of Fascist crimes. Both proposals were shelved, however, and a law for the commemoration of the Holocaust was accepted only in 2000. By then, most European countries had instituted an official Holocaust commemoration day. As in France, a slate of apologies followed also in Italy, including one from the Catholic Church for its silence. An official investigation looked into the expropriation of Jewish property. Even the Fascist successor party, Alleanza Nazionale, condemned the racial laws and voiced the obligation to remember. There was a general recognition that apology actually enhanced public perception of politicians or institutions. And as in France, there was a widespread sense that in the past the state had deliberately concealed what had happened.
The big difference between France and Italy lies in the meaning of the official celebration. The Day of Memory (Giorno della Memoria) in Italy has a different relationship to the state, raises different questions of responsibility, and offers a different purpose of commemoration than its French counterpart. In fact, the day involves no official overarching narrative, no single official ceremony, no national platform, and no clear link to civic values in the present. It is organized not by the state but by civil society organizations. Though it explicitly commemorates the Holocaust, in practice this provides a lens for the discussion of other issues. Depending on how it is celebrated, the day can perform a variety of different symbolic and public functions. A common feature is the extensive national media attention every year, allowing some kind of collective understanding of the past to be expressed. Often the event has led to discussion of the brava gente myth and of Italians' indulgence in self-exculpation. As in France, a feature of recent Holocaust memory has been the celebration of national "Righteous," such as Giorgio Perlasca, who saved five thousand Hungarian Jews. As a Fascist, Perlasca was an ideal figure for the purpose of reconciliation, confirming the recent trend to celebrate moral, rather than political heroes, and for rescuers to replace resistance fighters as usable icons of the past. In other words, the official commemoration of Jews has allowed for a depoliticized and dehistoricized look back at the past, enabling contemporary commemoration to sidestep conflict between Fascist sympathizers and anti-Fascist ones. To muddle the waters even more, an official Day of Remembrance (Giorno del Ricordo) was instituted in 2003 to commemorate Italian victims of Yugoslav partisan violence in Istria. This event introduced a new narrative of Italian victimhood in competition with the acknowledgment of Italian guilt and responsibility observed on the Day of Memory.
In both countries, one of the themes that emerge from Clifford's excellent study is that laws that instituted official celebrations following the end of the Cold War emerged out of an interaction between civil groups, the state, the media. Surprisingly, Jewish organizations were not centrally involved in this dialogue, a dialogue marked by important generational differences. In France change took place quickly in the early 1990s, whereas in Italy the process was slower and came later in the same decade. In both countries, the persecution of Jews became part of national history, something that the nation commemorates, rather than just being the preserve of Jewish organizations. Overall, the book will be of interest to memory specialists, Holocaust students, and postwar Europe scholars. It is ideal for graduate classes, but because of its clarity and concision also very much suited for advanced undergraduates.
Note
[1]. Giacomo Lichtner, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (Edgware, UK: Valentine Mitchell, 2008); Caroline Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory: France and Germany since 1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
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Citation:
Roberta Pergher. Review of Clifford, Rebecca, Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40885
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