Bracher2016 - Writing The Past in The First-Person

Timely Representations: Writing the Past in the First-Person Present Imperfect
Author(s): Nathan Bracher

Source: History and Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016), pp. 3-35
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/histmemo.28.1.3
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Timely Representations
Writing the Past in the First-Person

Present Imperfect
Nathan Bracher
The present article draws from Henry Rousso’s La Dernière Catastrophe (2012)
and Ivan Jablonka’s L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine (2014) to analyze
a series of novels published recently in France, dealing with the twentieth century’s
greatest tragedies, and to explain what they reveal about contemporary society
and current developments in historiography. The “present imperfect” refers not
only to the first-person narrative mode prevalent in these works, but also to the
“imperfection” stemming from the fact that (a) this past is not yet entirely over or
complete (thus “imperfect” in the etymological sense) and (b) the narrator thus
becomes irremediably involved in this history.
Keywords: France, World War II, historiography, memory, narrative, subjectivity, novel
For I believe, in fact, that we are all suffering from a consump-

tive historical fever and at the very least should recognize that we
are afflicted with it.
Friedrich Nietzsche1
… for it is evident that only an interest in the life of the present

can move one to investigate past fact. Therefore this past fact does
not answer to a past interest, but to a present interest, in so far as
it is unified with an interest of the present life.
Benedetto Croce2
Nathan Bracher
With their acute perception of all that is paradoxical and problematic in

our eagerness to propel ourselves from the present into the past, Nietzsche
and Croce provide a useful approach to France’s undiminished fascination
with the traumatic and often criminal legacy of World War II, not only
in political discourse and official commemorations, but also in a plethora
of contemporary cultural productions, and particularly in a prominent
series of historical narratives written in the first person. Having garnered
prestigious literary prizes, considerable commercial success and a veritable
firestorm of commentary from both literary critics and historians in highly
visible public venues, these books narrate the past in a distinctly personal
mode that merits critical scrutiny. The present article draws from Henry
Rousso’s La Dernière Catastrophe: L’Histoire, le présent, le contemporain
and Ivan Jablonka’s L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine: Manifeste
pour les sciences sociales, to consider what these twenty-first century narra-
tives of the previous century’s greatest tragedies reveal about contemporary
society and how they relate to current developments in historiography.3
From street names and metro stations to chateaus and cathedrals, and
particularly in political debate on every issue, it is certainly no secret that
the past in France is everywhere present. The French take their history very
seriously for a host of cultural, economic and political reasons. Within the
wide range of epochs, dynasties, wars, events, personalities and scandals of
France’s rich, momentous and highly conflictual past, World War II, the
Holocaust and Vichy continue to occupy a particularly prominent place
in French politics, culture and society. Hence the conundrum: now, some
seven decades after the cannons of World War II grew silent, five decades
after de Gaulle and Adenauer sealed the Franco-German reconciliation and
paved the way for the European Union, one could reasonably expect that
such pressing problems as France’s unending economic morass, political
gridlock, ethnic tensions, geopolitical decline, and confrontation with both
international and domestic terrorism should, if not definitively eclipse, at
least heavily overshadow the lingering concerns stemming from what Henry
Rousso has characterized as the “haunting past” of the World War II era.4
Yet such is not the case. It is true that, in the face of a much more
diversified population, a significant portion of which finds its roots in for-
mer colonies while vividly recalling both the slave trade and the practice of
slavery in the French Antilles, other memories have not only emerged as
prominent players in the public arena but even challenged World War II
4 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)
for the limelight in what Benjamin Stora, among others, has termed “the
war of memories.”5 Nevertheless, whether occasioned by some landmark
commemoration such as the 70th anniversary of D-Day and the Libera-
tion of Paris or the 100th anniversary of the onset of the Great War, or
by the individual inspiration of an individual author, historian, filmmaker
or journalist, the intense production of press dossiers and feature articles,
documentaries, feature films and historical novels has continued apace
throughout these first fifteen years of the twenty-first century.
THE TSUNAMI OF THE KINDLY ONES
We find the most salient literary example of this preoccupation with the
trauma of the twentieth century in Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes
(The Kindly Ones), which in 2006 received France’s most prestigious
literary prize, the Goncourt. It sold over 800,000 copies, becoming the
talk of the town not only in Paris, but throughout France and a major
part of Europe, since it also sold 120,000 copies in Germany, 85,000 in
Spain and 60,000 in Italy. The 900-page narrative also set off a firestorm
of critical commentary, with eminent historians and intellectuals such as
Pierre Nora, Edouard Husson, Claude Lanzmann and Christian Ingrao
weighing in pro or con in major Parisian daily newspapers. There has since
been no end of critical discussion of Littell’s epic plunge into the darkest
regions of Nazism and all that it represents.
For the purposes of the present article, I will simply point out the
crucial importance of its first-person narration. The Kindly Ones’ center of
attention is narrator Maximilian Aue, who is not only an “eyewitness” but
a perpetrator actively participating in the unspeakable slaughters carried
out by the Einsatzgruppen. Narrator Aue describes these in unbearably
minute detail, at the same time marshaling an unparalleled knowledge of
the war in general, Nazi ideology, the command structure of the SS, and
much more, all the while mixing in all sorts of unsettling sexual fantasies
and perversions. This curious cocktail of seemingly encyclopedic, accurate
knowledge of the war and the Holocaust, with a riveting, if disturbing,
first-person narration from the perspective of a perpetrator clearly played
a key role in the novel’s popularity.
Nathan Bracher
Littell’s The Kindly Ones can be seen as a sort of tsunami introducing

a widespread, durable trend, for we can point to a whole series of historical
narratives, most written in the first person, that have garnered prestigious
literary prizes and thus enjoyed significant attention in the press and media,
along with a wide readership. These include: Francis Humbert’s L’Origine
de la violence (Prix Renaudot poche 2010), Laurent Binet’s HHhH (Prix
Goncourt du Premier Roman 2010), Alexis Jenni’s L’Art français de la
guerre (Prix Goncourt 2011), Ivan Jablonka’s Histoire des grands-parents
que je n’ai pas eus (no less than three prizes: Prix Guizot de l’Académie
française, 2012; French Senate’s history prize; Augustin Thierry Prize
from the Blois symposium on History), Pierre Lemaître’s Au revoir là-
haut (Prix Goncourt 2013), Lydie Salvayre’s Pas pleurer (Prix Goncourt
2014) and David Foenkinos’s Charlotte (Prix Renaudot 2014, Goncourt
lycéen 2014). Patrick Modiano was not coincidentally awarded the Nobel
Prize for literature in 2014 for his long series of novels focusing intensely,
and in a very personal way, on the legacy of the Occupation and the plight
of Jews during the war, but in particular Dora Bruder. Also significant
in a slightly different vein, as will be discussed below, is Pierre Bayard’s
Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau? published in 2013.
Three of these prominent works implement a particularly striking
form of narration: Francis Humbert’s L’Origine de la violence, Laurent
Binet’s HHhH and Ivan Jablonka’s Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai
pas eus. While the first two are novels and the third is an innovative com-
bination of family biography, history, historiographical interrogations and
lyrical essay, each develops from a similar thematic and narrative matrix,
which can be aptly characterized as “the first-person present imperfect.”
In other words, they each feature the same basic architecture: namely, a
plotline structured according to a sort of “double helix” arrangement.6 The
narrative of one set of traumatic events of the World War II past is closely
and interactively interwoven with the story of the author/narrator’s own
very personal quest to uncover the truth about that past and decipher its
meaning for the present. As a result, the authors/narrators not only tell
the story of traumatic events experienced by some protagonist to whom
they are closely tied, but also relate their own shuttling between the past
and present in search of evidence that will enable them to recount and
interpret this highly sensitive, troubling past that, to borrow from Henry
Rousso, refuses to pass away.7
This personal involvement of the narrator in both the content of a

traumatic World War II past and the long, difficult search to reveal the
truth about problematic deeds or events is what requires that the book
be narrated in the first person. Such is the case for the author/narrator in
Fabrice Humbert’s L’Origine de la violence, a lycée teacher of literature
who also happens to write novels. The impetus for this narrator’s peril-
ous quest into his family’s most intimate and, of course, dark, mysterious
and sinister World War II past comes from a disquieting class visit to the
Buchenwald concentration camp. There he discovers a photo of a Jewish
prisoner who would later turn out to be his own grandfather, previously
unknown to him because his maternal grandmother had had an affair
long since swept under the rug by the rich bourgeois family. The author/
narrator thus engages in an unrelenting search for the truth about this
Jewish grandfather as well as about the behavior of the rest of his rich,
non-Jewish bourgeois family. What he discovers in the end is the source
of his own personal propensity for violence. Even prior to this shocking
discovery, this violence manifested itself in a number of ways, including his
love of boxing and his brutal beating of a drunken man who had banged
on his car one night in Paris.
Laurent Binet’s HHhH , which draws its title from Reinhard Hey-
drich’s nickname among his SS comrades, Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,
or “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich,” also explores and narrates an
unsettling World War II past. Some have questioned whether HHhH is
really a novel, since Binet himself constantly interrupts his own narrative
to decry the various “literary” artifices that, in his view, distort, betray and
even corrupt “History” with a capital H.8 In any case, the book contains
not two, but in fact three narratives almost inextricably intertwined: first,
the story of his own discovery of and obsession with the assassination of
Reinhard Heydrich, the infamously fabled “blond beast, ” Himmler’s
right-hand man and one of the chief engineers of the “Final Solution”;
second, the story of the two resisters, one Czech, Jan Kubiš, and the
other Slovak, Jozef Gabčík, who carried out Operation Anthropoid and
succeeded in killing Heydrich; and, along the way, a rather sensational,
and at times sensationalist, biography of Heydrich himself.
One of the most striking features of Binet’s book, however, is his
insistence on putting himself as both narrator and author front and center
in his text, even when he ostentatiously claims to berate literary authors
Nathan Bracher
while effusively praising the courage and determination of his heroes and
prostrating himself and his writing before the altar of History. He goes so
far as to insert himself into the harrowing, suspense-filled action during
the most dramatic moments of Heydrich’s assassination on that fateful
day of May 27, 1942, in Prague, when Kubiš and Gabčík leap out into
the street only a few meters away from Heydrich’s car and try to gun him
down. At this and other junctures, what Binet attempts with his narra-
tive is not only to reconstitute and recount, but actually to relive these
passion-filled minutes of History as if he himself (and of course through
his writing, we readers as well) were a central protagonist. What is clear
from the beginning to the end of Binet’s “novel” is that the past, and
in particular what he repeatedly designates as “History,” constitutes a
not-so-obscure object of desire. Binet himself indicates as much from
the outset, first in proclaiming his fascination with such an exceptionally
daring act of resistance, and second in confiding that it all began with his
love for a beautiful young Slovakian woman during his teaching stint in
Bratislava in 1996.9
For all of its intriguing specificity, Binet’s passion for History is by no
means an anomaly. On the contrary, this fascination if not obsession with
the World War II past is what occasioned the special summer 2011 issue
of Le Débat. In it, Pierre Nora, widely recognized as the dean of French
historians, was joined by fellow historians Mona Ozouf and Georges Duby,
literature professor Antoine Compagnon from the Collège de France
and a number of other writers and scholars, including Antony Beevor
and Jonathan Littell, in a discussion of “L’histoire saisie par la fiction” or
“History summoned [to court] by fiction.”10 The title is itself indicative
of the cultural phenomenon analyzed in the present article: rather than
assessing France’s success or shortcomings in reckoning with the con-
siderable political fallout of Vichy, French implication in the Holocaust,
and the aftershocks of the German occupation of France, these historians
and scholars consider the above-mentioned series of prominent histori-
cal narratives. They thus seek to identify and evaluate their distinctively
contemporary manner of approaching, perceiving and interpreting that
most problematic past of the Dark Years and World War II in general.
For Nora, the tidal wave of historical narratives in contemporary
culture and society marks nothing less than a “profound transformation of
the role and status of historians with respect to the objects of their study”
which has carried over into literature.11 We find the crux of the matter,
argues Nora, in a new relationship between historians as individuals with
their own subjectivities and the objects of their study. In an age that has
come to value the witness as a central figure in history and in which memory
in all its forms has acquired ever greater value, it is only natural that more
and more historical narratives focus on the self and on projections of self
into the past. Nora finds a parallel tendency in literature, since in recent
years more and more interest has been directed toward narratives such as
Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Hugo’s Choses vues, Proust’s À la
recherche du temps perdu as a chronicle of the Belle Epoque, and Mauriac’s
Bloc-notes. In all of these, prominent authors project their subjectivities
onto the events of their times in various forms of memoirs. Such narratives
represent a desire to inscribe the individual self in history, affirms Nora,
and naturally feature narration in the first person.12
A PAST THAT WILL NOT PASS AWAY
We can now return to our initial question. In the midst of so many urgent
challenges calling for innovative responses to a rapidly changing globalized
world inundated with new technologies, yet facing new forms of violence
and warfare and increasingly ominous signs of a potentially catastrophic
global warming, why maintain or pursue such an intense, almost obsessive
interest in the past, moreover in the most disturbing, unsettling elements
of war, genocide and destruction? At first blush, such continued fixation
on World War II narratives would indeed seem counter-intuitive. One
might well expect those unwilling or unable to face the daunting issues
of the present to hark back to some supposedly more harmonious time
when matters seemed simple and clear. Such was indeed the case for the
Vichy’s regime’s copious use of schmaltzy representations of France’s
agrarian, Catholic, patriarchal and decidedly non-egalitarian past in seeking
to tout the virtues of Pétain’s “Révolution Nationale” through the use
of nostalgic propaganda. In the radically different context of the last two
decades in the United States, the flurry of books, documentaries, press
articles and media attention devoted to “The Greatest Generation” clearly
carries a significant measure of nostalgic yearning for the social cohesion,
Nathan Bracher
moral consensus and undisputed triumphs widely attributed to America’s

World War II engagements.
But French memory is almost exactly the opposite. Although thanks
to de Gaulle and the Resistance, France secured a seat at the victors’ table
and on the UN Security Council, its memory of the war remains even
today indelibly marked less by any sense of victory than by the bitter,
crushing defeat of May and June 1940. Rather than fostering national
unity or ideological harmony, the ensuing Occupation ripped open the
already severely frayed fabric of French society, driving it to the brink of
civil war. While claiming to act in the national interest, Vichy repeatedly
pitted one social group against another, collaborating with the Germans
to brutally suppress any and all resistance while also aiding the Nazis in
the persecution, internment and deportation of Jews.
The unsettling character of those Dark Years helps us explain why,
instead of gradually abating and fading into oblivion, France’s interest
in World War II, as evidenced not only by popular cultural productions
but also by the activities of university historians, has actually increased
over the decades and has even come to focus more sharply on its most
traumatic aspects.13 In fact, this preoccupation with the experience of
the war has significantly changed. In terms of content, it now deals less
with the military struggle and the armed combatants, and more with the
plight of the civilian population, particularly with victims of forced labor,
aerial bombardments and genocide. The focus has also changed in nature.
In the immediate postwar period, representations of the conflict and its
various forms of collateral damage were made in hopes of creating a sense
of belonging to a community of suffering among those who had actually
lived through the events. The specificities pertaining to each social group
and the considerable disparities among their various sufferings, attitudes
and experiences were minimized in view of building a better world for
the children and future generations.14
As reflected in the novels that are the focus of this article, present-
day representations of the war are structured in the opposite manner:
composed by and for those who have absolutely no direct experience of
the ordeals of the war, these works turn away from the future to dwell
on a violent, catastrophic past, at times to an obsessive, even voyeuristic
degree. Rousso’s characterization of the situation resulting from this
cultural phenomenon merits quoting at length:
generations born several decades after the fact are asked to contem-
plate the memory of this catastrophe as if it happened yesterday, to
experience still today a share of its emotional impact, to carry moral
responsibility for it, and to accept part of its material cost. In 1945,
people sought to do away with differences among various experiences
of the war. In recent years, we have attempted to do away with their
expectations, since our generation no longer represents the future
for the generation of the war, nor the hope for a better future for
their children: instead, we remain mired, in part, in the traumatic
experiences transmitted and maintained by a catastrophe that we
have not experienced.15
If such a posture toward the past contains elements of paradox and anach-
ronism, it also points to the specificity of contemporary society and culture.
As Rousso points out, this fixation on the World War II past has
much to reveal about our present. When we dig deeper and ask where
the “memory boom,” the “commemorative frenzy” and the tendency
to sacralize firsthand testimony originate, we find what Rousso has aptly
dubbed “the last catastrophe”: the cataclysmic upheavals of the twenti-
eth century starkly visible at Verdun, Guernica, Auschwitz, Hiroshima
and Kolyma were pivotal events not just in terms of geopolitics but also
in terms of culture.16 The human and material destructions attained an
unprecedented scope and an unbearable intensity; pushing inhumanity
beyond any imagined limits, they posed and relentlessly continue to pose
the question of our very human identity.
THE ADVENT AND PREEMINENCE OF HISTORICITY
Demolishing the centuries-old, seemingly perennial Ancien Régime in a

chain of events spanning a mere four or five years, the French Revolution
introduced a keen sense of history as change and progression.17 Conse-
quently, the drive to understand not only how and why such a dramatic
turnabout had occurred, but even the forces driving human affairs and
what it all meant for the present provided the major impetus for the
spectacular development of history throughout the nineteenth century,
visible in publishing houses, universities, school curricula, philosophy
11
Nathan Bracher
and political ideology. In the wake of the twentieth century’s significantly

greater explosions of violence and rapid evolutions in every domain, came
the widespread feeling and the accompanying notion of “historicity,” sug-
gesting that the very fabric of human affairs, society, culture and existence
itself was thoroughly and fundamentally constituted by evolution and
change, and therefore eminently finite, limited, variable and contingent.18
In addition to this general sensibility so prominent in late twen-
tieth- and early twenty-first-century culture, historians observe a more
specific “historicity” of contemporary society in its paradigmatic man-
ner of relating to the past or, in other words, the ways of approaching,
discovering, revisiting, representing, commemorating, interpreting and
judging the past through all sorts of cultural activities and products. The
most salient aspect of this historicity is precisely its singular predominance
in virtually every domain. The twentieth-century past is dramatically
present in a large number of cultural productions. One finds it manifest
in Claude Ribbe’s depictions of Napoleon’s reinstatement of slavery and
France’s brutal colonial conquest as precursors to the Final Solution,19
in official legislation passed by France’s National Assembly declaring the
Atlantic slave trade (specifically singled out by the Taubira law of 2001)
and the Armenian genocide to constitute crimes against humanity (thus
invoking a twentieth-century judicial and ethical concept created in the
wake of Nazi crimes),20 in further revelations about the systematic use of
torture in Algeria, in heated debates over works representing Jan Karski,
in popular, but controversial cinematic representations of the massive Vél’
d’Hiv’ roundup of July 16–17, 1942, such as Roselyne Bosch’s La Rafle
and Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Elle s’appelait Sarah,21 and in the innumer-
able commemorations devoted to all aspects of the two world wars. The
historical narratives studied in the present article clearly participate in a
wider trend of society and culture revisiting a traumatic past.
Rousso provides one of the most apt and powerful characteriza-
tions of this contemporary historicity when analyzing Walter Benjamin’s
interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. For Rousso and Paul
Ricoeur no less than Benjamin, the artist’s striking depiction of “an angel
who seems to be moving away from something on which his eyes remain
riveted” represents nothing less than “the image of the Angel of History”:
The recent past sees itself rejected as a memory of horror while at

the same time it obsesses our consciousness to an unprecedented
degree. It does not pass away, it no longer passes—that is its traumatic
aspect—it must not pass—that is its moral and political version—for
the memory of this past, whether or not it is mastered, henceforth
serves as a wake-up call, a “warning” of a possible repetition….
In a few words of prophetic density, Benjamin expresses the
change of historicity in these last two decades: history as a view of
catastrophe, as a debt to the dead, the victims and the vanquished,
history as the new experience of a radical otherness that must nev-
ertheless reconnect the fleeting of time rushing by with the time of
ruins, without losing sight of the necessity of understanding amid
this acceleration.22
This compelling sense of the irremediable historicity imprinted on con-

temporary culture by the cataclysms of the twentieth century moreover
confirms Nietzsche’s contention that the experience of temporality is
constitutive of human existence as such. Incapable of enjoying the ahistoric
bliss characteristic of animal or childlike existence, we find that to be an
adult human being, argues Nietzsche, is to “understand the expression ‘it
was,’ a formula that delivers us over to fighting, suffering, and weariness,
and reminds us that our existence is ultimately nothing but an eternal
past imperfect.”23
In terms specific to our twenty-first century context, our own historicity
appears in the numerous, frequent and seemingly compulsive revisitations
of the past in its most troublesome aspects: history has acquired the status
of an existential and epistemological matrix, variously manifest in the form
of magistra vitae, moral compass or imperative, debt, ultimate reference,
arbiter of truth and foundation of identity.
HISTORY AS MAGISTRA VITAE
As has been the case throughout the long, multifaceted development of

history as a discipline, observes Rousso, narratives of the past are now
more than ever intended and received as magistra vitae, “teachers of life”
conveying important lessons for the present.24 We tend to pose the funda-
13
Nathan Bracher
mental questions of society, culture and human identity in the historical

mode, seeking in our acquaintance with the past our ultimate reference
for today, all the more since institutional pillars of reference or “master
narratives” have been for the most part abandoned or discredited. Yet the
paradox would have it that we return to fixate on acts of collective violence
committed in the twentieth century that were so extreme and far-reaching
that we constantly see ourselves in their wake. We thus find ourselves
compelled, as Rousso puts it, to “reflect on history when it reaches or
even exceeds the limits of what is comprehensible and acceptable.”25 As
the criminality of history can seemingly not be evacuated even from our
present, we scrutinize it in search of lessons.
We therefore return to the last catastrophe to make ourselves “stand
clearly apart from it,” all the better to pass judgment on its crimes and
even right its wrongs.26 We can observe this paradigm not only in books,
films and documentaries that often explicitly undertake the tasks of set-
ting the record straight and rendering justice, but also in legislative acts
that use the crimes of the twentieth century as an intellectual and ethi-
cal template for interpreting and judging those of other times, such as
when the aforementioned Taubira law was passed by the French National
Assembly and when the ferocious repression of la Vendée in 1793 by the
“colonnes infernales” sent by the revolutionary government in Paris was
presented as a genocide.27
Conversely, the steadfast courage and lucidity of those who protested
or resisted the evils of their time are presented as an intellectual and moral
compass for the nascent twenty-first century. Such is the case for Laurent
Binet in HHhH, written, as he affirms repeatedly throughout the text,
in fervent homage to Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík. These figures of the
Czechoslovakian resistance, proclaims Binet at the outset, “are, to my
mind, the authors of one of the greatest acts of resistance in human his-
tory, and indisputably the greatest feat of resistance in the Second World
War.”28 Openly disgusted by the decadence, mediocrity and superficial
concerns of his own time, Binet fervently proclaims his admiration for the
Czechoslovakians who sacrificed their lives in service to the Resistance:
How many heroes lie forgotten in the great cemetery of History….

Those who have died are dead, and it matters little to them
that we should pay tribute. But it is for us, the living, that it means
something. Memory is of no use to those that it honors, but it is

useful for those who use it. With memory I construct myself, and
in remembering I find consolation. (244)
For Binet, the momentous Czechoslovakian chapter of the World War II

past thus constitutes a preeminent magistra vitae, a moral compass, and
even a foundation for identity.
Pierre Bayard similarly returns to some of the most somber aspects
of the Dark Years in order to get his ethical and existential bearings. As
suggested by its very title, Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau? (Would I
have been a resister or an executioner?), he devotes his entire book to
determining his true mettle by projecting himself hypothetically into the
context of the German occupation of France. While such a project raises
no end of epistemological questions, Bayard’s rationale is highly reveal-
ing: “But only the study of violent historical crises and the way in which
individuals are transformed for better or for worse, at times completely
opposite of what one might have expected of them, shows how a largely
unknown part of ourselves, sometimes opposite of what we think ourselves
to be, is revealed in certain contexts.”29
THE PAST AS DEBT
The much debated “duty to remember,” so prominently invoked in the

wake of the crimes against humanity trials of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier
and Maurice Papon, and still discernible in many ways today, even if now
less often designated in those terms, stems from a sense of a deep-seated
debt to the past and to those who fell victim to its criminal violence. This
well-known feature of contemporary historicity also finds its origins not in
any historiographical or literary innovation, but in the brutality of events.
As Rousso recalls, the widely shared experience of irretrievable loss and
bereavement was created first by the millions of deaths on the battlefields
of World War I and then amplified by the murder of millions of Jews,
Roma and others in the context of the “Final Solution.” These unforeseen
and unprecedented catastrophes ushered in the tendency to approach the
past under the auspices of a grave political and moral obligation not to
be neglected or forgotten.30
15
Nathan Bracher
Even though they belong to a generation having no direct experience

of these most extreme manifestations of the violence of history, those writ-
ing today in the twenty-first century nevertheless often exhibit a very real
and keen sense of indebtedness and obligation. If History with a capital H
(such as it appears throughout HHhH), embodied by Jan Kubiš and Jozef
Gabčík and the whole host of martyrs of the Czechoslovakian resistance
who were killed in the wake of Heydrich’s assassination, provides Binet
with a moral compass for the present, it also represents a debt to the
past and a charge demanding accountability from the present—hence his
indignation at authors such as David Chacko, who, he alleges, play fast
and loose with the facts in order to write lucrative page-turners “without
any accountability to History” (255).
For Ivan Jablonka, the ties to a traumatic past that irrevocably bind
his own individual present are both acutely personal and starkly emblem-
atic of a collective tragedy. Setting out to write the biography of his own
grandparents, Matès and Idesa Feder Jablonka, young communist activists
who had fled poverty and oppression in their Polish shtetl to seek refuge
in France, only to be arrested by French police and detained at Drancy
before being deported to their deaths at Auschwitz, Jablonka engages in
methodical archival research to inscribe the story of their lives in the wider
current of dramatic events that determined the fate of social and national
groups throughout Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. At the same time,
Jablonka relates the story of his own irresistible personal engagement in
researching and writing his precisely detailed and rigorously documented
account of their short, tragic lives. As Jablonka reveals in the very first
pages of this Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus (Story of the
grandparents I never had), the impetus for this innovative manner of
integrating family stories into history comes from his keen awareness of
all that ties his life to that of his forebears, and engages his determination
to tell the story of their destiny and their murder.
My father’s parents are dead and [for me] have always been so. They
are my tutelary gods who watch over me and who will still protect
me when I have joined them.... I have always known about their
murder: there are family realities just as there are family secrets....
Do I still have the strength to carry these beings of whom I am
the projection in time? May I not nourish their lives with mine, instead
of constantly dying from their death?... It is madness to start from

nothing to try and track down the lives of these unknown people!
They were already invisible when they were living, and history has
pulverized them….
It is therefore urgent to rediscover their tracks, the traces of life
that they unknowingly left as evidence of their passage in this world.31
For all the loss, absence and regret that permeate Jablonka’s sense of
indebtedness to his grandparents and his commitment to perpetuating their
memory, these words testify to their indispensable role in structuring his
affectivity and impelling his research and writing as a professional historian.
HISTORY AS THE ULTIMATE REALITY
The virtual deification of History in the nineteenth century is widely

acknowledged. While Nietzsche trumpeted the death of God, he could have
just as well heralded the apotheosis of History, for with the predominance
of Hegel, Marx and Darwin, observes Alain Finkielkraut, “History was
made into a principle of reality, an all-powerful force, Reason or logos giving
meaning to all beings, things and events.”32 Coupled with the metaphysi-
cally senseless and ethically obscene human and material destructions of the
twentieth century, the unfinished business of the decolonization era, the
fall of the Berlin wall, and post–September 11 turmoil have clearly made
reading events as Hegel’s “prose of the world” singularly problematic and
unattractive, if not ludicrous. Yet we find a largely metaphysical notion of
History (often revealingly spelled with a capital H) often operative and
even openly invoked in recent historical narratives.
One of the most flagrant, if unwitting, recourses to History elevated
to the status of reality principle comes in Laurent Binet’s HHhH, where
“History” enjoys a quasi-divine status, appearing as an all-knowing, all-
powerful bestower of judgment and meaning. As the narrative approaches
the most intense moments of Heydrich’s assassination, Binet announces
“the wind of History beginning to whistle softly” (330) such as would the
immanent presence of some invisible divinity on the verge of its manifes-
tation in human affairs. In the very middle of his breathtaking narration
of the Czechoslovakian resisters’ bold attack, he pauses to pay tribute to
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William T. Vollman’s account of events in Europe Central: “This is per-

haps the first time that the voice of History resounds with such accuracy,
and I am struck by this revelation: History is a pythoness [Apollonian
priestess practicing divination] who says ‘we’”(347). Only gods speak
through an oracle, and they often act in an implacable, inscrutable man-
ner in the tragedies of history, such as when Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík
fail to notice a hidden passageway that could have allowed them to escape
from the Nazis: “Why didn’t they take it? History is the only true form of
fate.... History, that fate on the march, never stops”(421). Accordingly,
Binet presents the entry of Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík into History as
the honor and privilege similar to that of entering into the temple of a
divinity: “You are becoming something that is growing within you and is
already progressively starting to surpass you, but you also remain so much
yourselves. You are simple men. You are men. You are Jan Kubiš and Jozef
Gabčík, and you are going to enter into History”(217).
Similarly, Francis Humbert places L’Origine de la violence under
the sign of a metaphysical force from the very first pages. He explains the
background of his personal historical narrative first by stating that “the
image of Satan’s fall came to me again when I was taking notes on a book
about the history of Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century.”
He then continues by identifying Evil as the driving force of events in
modern Europe: “this coexistence of great thought, great art and what is
customarily called absolute Evil is perhaps the picture of Europe, in the
sense that it is not duplicitous, but merely reveals our history and our
destiny of a brilliant civilization tormented by its mortal sin.”33 Other
passages, such as “History is going to knock on the door,” “When war
broke out, History reasserted its hold,” and “History is going to run
us over,” personify History in a way that ascribes to it the attributes of
an all-powerful, malevolent divinity.34 Like Binet, Humbert confirms its
almighty power in affirming that “History is a sort of fate.”35
While events themselves seem to have debunked the notion of History
as a teleological dialectic or march of human affairs supposedly progressing
toward some desired finality and thus grounding ideologies that would
minimize if not simply ignore individual existence and subjectivity, historical
narratives of the twenty-first century, as we see in HHhH and L’Origine
de la violence, nevertheless invoke a History endowed with cosmic power
as the source of meaning and arbiter of destiny. The paradox stems from
a convergence of opposites specific to our time. On the one hand, many

experience these early years of the twenty-first century as lacking in any
direction or principle capable of either organizing the present or construct-
ing the future.36 On the other hand, even while shattering any number of
ideological illusions, the convulsive catastrophes of the twentieth century,
observes Rousso after Hannah Arendt, made visible rich networks of
signification. As complex, opaque and ambivalent as they were and can
at times even remain today, these major events were pivotal, marking a
sea change in the geopolitical order and in human culture and sensibil-
ity. They can thus occasion a veritable epiphany of history in the form of
narrative: “Whenever an event occurs that is great enough to illuminate
its own past, history comes into being. Only then does the chaotic maze
of past happenings emerge as a story which can be told, because it has a
beginning and an end.”37
Since the ordeal of war tends to define, organize and accentuate
thought and perception, those finding themselves adrift in an era devoid of
substance and meaning naturally gravitate toward its drama and intensity.
Such is the paradigm clearly visible in Binet’s respective attitudes toward
the present and the World War II past. His expressions of distaste for
contemporary society reach a crescendo when he turns to two phenom-
ena that seem to epitomize the omnipresence of the superficial and the
mediocre. Binet first decries the murder of René Bousquet, Vichy’s head
of police who negotiated the French state’s logistical and administrative
collaboration in implementing the “Final Solution” in France, particularly
in the infamous Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundup. Binet also expresses his displeasure
at the phenomenal success of Jonathan Littell’s unsettling Kindly Ones.
In Binet’s eyes, Bousquet’s murder not only constitutes a “scandalous
criminal attack against History” but also reflects the deeply flawed char-
acter of our time, since the “society that produces such behaviors, such
mentally ill people, disgusts me” (324). Concerning the fascination for
the central character and narrator of Littell’s best-seller, Binet offers his
own pithy interpretation: “He [Max Aue] sounds true (for certain easily
hoodwinked readers), because he is the mirror of our time: in a nutshell,
nihilistic, postmodern” (326).
Conversely, the story of the Czechoslovakians who carried out Opera-
tion Anthropoid clearly throbs with meaning and excitement, as Binet
explains when relating how he himself became totally engrossed in the
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subject: “this story surpassed the most improbable of fictions in its intensity
and suspenseful drama” (15). In the crypt of the church (now converted
into a little memorial museum) where Kubiš, Gabčík, Valčík and others
took refuge, held off the SS and finally died, Binet accordingly finds “every
human passion brought together in a few square meters” and even “the
entire history of the world contained in a few stones” (17). How not to be
absorbed by such an extraordinary chapter of History, particularly when,
as Binet amply indicates, his fascination for the people and events involved
in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich coincided with his involvement
with “a very beautiful young Slovakian woman with whom [he] fell madly
in love and with whom [he] was to have a passionate romantic relationship
that would last almost five years” (14). As Binet himself explains, he set
out researching and writing his book not for pedagogical, but for personal
reasons: “I did not want to make a history textbook. I made that story of
history my personal matter. That is why my visions of things sometimes
get mixed with the confirmed facts” (146).
SIGNATURE IMPERFECTIONS
We are now poised to appreciate the “present imperfect” in the full range
of its ramifications. All of the first-person narratives of the World War II
past discussed in the present article make their respective stories of his-
tory their personal matter of the present, and ours as well. Their signature
imperfection is both of a temporal and epistemological nature. It resides
first of all in the inescapable and unsettling historicity of our contempo-
rary experience of society, culture and individual existence as lacking in
substance, solidity, constancy, completion, wholeness, and integrity in the
etymological sense of the word. Though visible in the first-person narra-
tive strategies highlighted in the present article, it finds its origins not in
any ad hoc literary innovation or intellectual concept, but in the historical
catastrophes engulfing the twentieth century and spilling over into the
twenty-first as well. The Great War, the Holocaust, the Gulags and the use
of the atomic bomb were decisive, pivotal events that introduced major
reconfigurations on several levels. These were foundational, landmark
occurrences upsetting the preexisting order, reorienting and reorganizing
societies, cultures and nations. Irreducible to any sort of epiphenomenal or
domesticated status, these events challenge our capacity of understanding.

Rousso sums it up well: “The great catastrophes of the twentieth century
produced new figures of historiography.”38 The thoroughgoing historicity
of our contemporary era, with its radical imperfection, is part of the fallout
of the catastrophic events of the twentieth century. As such, it has crucial
implications not only for historians and historiography, but for all those
who write, represent or study the past in any number of ways.
The question of narrative mode is paramount, particularly since it
is emblematic not only of a textual strategy, but also of a specific manner
of relating to the past. The key to understanding present-day historical
narratives begins with noting the “transformation of the relation of the
[narrating] subject with respect to the object of study,” observes Nora, since
that is what explains the conspicuous and at times ostentatious presence of
the narrator in these texts.39 With the late nineteenth-century transforma-
tion of history into an academic profession practiced by university-trained
specialists methodically observing rules of evidence and documentation,
came the aspiration of making the discipline thoroughly “scientific.” As
“scientists,” historians were thus expected to keep themselves outside,
above and beyond the object of their study in view of obtaining knowledge
untainted by the historians’ subjectivity.40
Over the course of the twentieth century, however, the incommensu-
rable trauma of countless instances of what Emmanuel Lévinas has called
the absolute violence of history has rendered the ideal of the disinterested
historian removed from all involvement with events and personalities,
supposedly unmoved by their crimes and tragedies, both untenable and
obsolete.41 The amplitude and extremity of destruction have made it
impossible for historians and writers to claim to dominate or master the
past from some privileged, superior or exterior vantage point. Neither can
the subject–object reciprocity any longer be denied or ignored. It must on
the contrary be fully acknowledged and explored: “the narrator belongs
to the world he describes,” observes Ivan Jablonka, “we write history, not
about what is intrinsically important, but about what touches us or strikes
us and defies our understanding.”42
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OBJECTIONS TO THE OBJECTIVE MODE
What has been promoted as the “objective” mode of historical narrative

thus ignores and obfuscates the fact that “history is inseparable from
the historian.”43 As emphasized by Nietzsche and Croce and reiterated
throughout the present article, the writing of the past remains intimately
connected with the person producing the narrative and with the writer’s
specific temporal and cultural context. The choice of narrating the past
in the first person abandons the illusional fiction of the supposedly disin-
terested narrator/researcher discovering and disseminating “objective”
knowledge obtained thanks to the dispassionate implementation of the
scientific method. In openly displaying and actively examining the narra-
tor’s own pivotal historicity, the use of the narrative “I,” argues Jablonka,
enables us to achieve a fuller, more accurate understanding of the narrated
past and the writer/researcher/historian’s present.44 Analyzing the narra-
tion of the past allows us to shed light first on the existential, ideological
and cultural investment made by the writer/historian/researcher in the
production of his or her text, and second, on our own present with its
various modes of approaching, representing, interpreting and appropriat-
ing the past according to our own designs and inclinations.
Yet there are no guarantees. There is nothing automatic, certain,
risk free or inherently innocent about writing the past in the first-person
present. On the contrary, the entire enterprise of incorporating archival
evidence, eyewitness testimony, historical erudition and lived experience
past and present remains by definition a highly imperfect operation in a
number of significant ways, beginning with the very historicity that moti-
vates the first-person mode of narration. The cultural and epistemological
context of our twenty-first century ostentatiously exhibits the opposite
of all that would offer substance in the Aristotelian sense of a definite
causal principle or essence lending authenticity and solidity or perfection
in the sense of completion, wholeness and integrity.45 The first level of
imperfection is of a temporal nature: the use of the narrative “I” anchors
the narrative in a vantage point that is limited by the very specificity of
the writer/researcher/narrator’s human subjectivity. This subjectivity is
in every case situated in a particular time and place that ground the nar-
rator’s knowledge and sensibility in a cultural and epistemological context
by definition distinct and distant from that of the persons and events of
the past. As much as the narrator may strive to draw near to those past
persons and events by adopting the perspective of an eyewitness, viewing
events firsthand, up close and from within, as they unfold, Leopold von
Ranke’s ideal of experiencing events “as they really happened” will prove
unattainable.46
As Rousso points out, however, contemporary culture pulls precisely
in that direction, demanding “raw,” immediate intensity of perception
and emotion.47 Such is the case not only in various media productions
but in certain textual forms as well, as evident in Binet’s HHhH. Seeking
to re-enchant his own individual existence in the highly disenchanting
context of the twenty-first century,48 Binet heaps scorn on the artifices of
literary creation and on a society given over to the spectacles of sport and
other superficial distractions from the drama of events. He values instead
the irrecusable reality and testimony of History, which he finds first of
all in the documents and artifacts from the crypt of the church in which
the Czechoslovakian resisters took refuge and met their heroic death,
but also in an original edition of Vercors’s Silence of the Sea, discovered
fortuitously when on vacation in the home of a former book printer to
whom Vercors (Jean Bruller) gave a copy containing his own handwritten
dedication. Holding this precious volume in his hands, Binet expresses
his great pleasure in touching a concrete material manifestation of His-
tory: “I am on vacation and I am holding a bit of History between my
fingers. It is a very mellow and pleasant sensation” (319). When Binet
approaches the climax of his narrative, projecting himself into the shoes of
his protagonists in Prague on May 27, 1942, as they leap out in the street
in front of Heydrich’s car to assassinate “the blond beast,” the sensation
he (and his readers) experience is nothing less than electric:
I am there, exactly where I wanted to get. A volcano of adrenaline

enflames the Holešovice street curve. It is the precise moment when
the sum of individual micro-decisions, uniquely driven by the forces
of instinct and fear, are going to make it possible for History to
experience one of its jolts, or one of its most audible gasps. (348)
It is in such passages that Binet’s highly talented narrative makes the sus-
pense and anxiety most certainly felt by his protagonists clearly palpable
to his readers.
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The achievement of such narrative immediacy, however, comes at

a certain price. We may pertinently ask whether close narrative contact,
intensity of emotion and virtual reimmersion in past events can prove to
be productive, desirable or even truly possible without a clear awareness
of all the distance and alterity that definitively and irremediably separate
the present from the past, hence setting the narrator apart from the
protagonist and from the action narrated. Like numerous others, Binet
wants to be the contemporary of a momentous, tragic, yet in the case
of the Czechoslovakian resistance, heroic past: he seeks to partake of its
authenticity by participating vicariously in its battles, similar to the rather
belated anti-fascists of the late 1990s who wanted, observes Finkielkraut
wryly, “to be the contemporaries of that period of time [of World War II
and the German occupation]: To relive Vichy, but with arms in hand.”49
Binet’s narrative seems to equate such desired authenticity with
intensity of sensation and emotion stemming from a direct contact with
“History.” Whether it be through certain material artifacts testifying to
the material reality of past events and taking on the aura of veritable relics
of History’s Aristotelian substance, or through the intensity of vicarious
experience procured from reconstituting a rich, breathtaking first-person
narrative of the singular mission carried out by the exceptional men and
women participating in Operation Anthropoid, HHhH clearly puts a pre-
mium on immediacy. Notwithstanding his repeated lamentations of literary
travesty, Binet produces a hyperrealistic text that sets out on a sort of quest
for the Holy Grail of History and invokes that History as if it were a deity
whose being, precepts and imperatives were self-evident, suffering neither
questions nor explanations nor debate. He approaches the past as if the
problem consisted of tracking down and positively identifying a solidly
preconstituted truth grounded in the Aristotelian substance of History.
The problem of the past thus appears to be merely a question of
authenticity, of verifying whether such and such details, from the color
of Heydrich’s car (253, 255) to Churchill’s motivation for approving
Operation Anthropoid (325–26) were accurate. Binet’s oft-expressed
angst over the representational inadequacy of literary narrative to History
totally ignores the crucial problematics of historicity, i.e., of approaching
the past through the cultural, epistemological and historiographical prisms
of the present. The multiple instances of his own self-insertion into the
historical narrative itself testify to a desire to abolish the border, close
the gaps and reduce the disparity between the now and the then. Binet’s
determination to reconnect with a momentous past and even relive or
experience it firsthand amounts to a desire to touch History in all its sup-
posedly original purity and intensity. The problem is that such an intense
impression of immediacy comes at the expense of a clear delineation of
the sources of knowledge and a lucid reflection on the status of the nar-
rator as situated, grounded in certain values and perspectives that are not
those of the past, but of our present. The attempt to relive the past is by
definition predicated on the ignorance or denial of everything that situates
any and all approaches to the past in the present.
SITUATING THE PAST BY SITUATING THE RESEARCHER/NARRATOR

IN THE PRESENT
A more lucid and fruitful approach consists of thoroughly exploring all

that cannot be assimilated to the priorities, concepts and sensibilities of
our present or, in other words, examining the irreducible alterity of the
past as approached though the intellectual, cultural and existential filters
specific to the narrator and the narrator’s context, and finally, listening
attentively to all the resultant dissonances. The narrator clearly situates him
or herself by accurately situating perceptions, information, interpretations
and judgments in their respective contexts present and past. We find one
model for such an approach in Jablonka’s first-person historical biography
of his grandparents. As he proceeds to paint vivid portraits of his grand-
parents’ heretofore obscure and eminently tragic lives, tossed about and
swept away in the maelstrom of the late 1930s and early 1940s in Poland,
France and Europe, he clearly delineates his role as narrator, researcher
and historian, describing and assessing the evidence as found in various
sources of testimony, archives and historical erudition on events in World
War II Europe and explaining government, police and administrative prac-
tices and policies as they impacted his grandparents’ destiny. In so doing,
Jablonka brings the various and somewhat disparate components of his
investigative strategy, documentation, historical analysis and personal reac-
tion into juxtaposition without attempting to weave them into some sort
of seamless whole. This juxtaposition makes for rich interconnections and
contrasts precisely because each element retains its irreducible specificity.
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Yet his first-person narration and subjective implication in all of the

various components of his original project remain crucial to the knowledge
obtained and the strategy implemented to obtain it. His text explicitly
points out the involvement of his subjectivity as he goes about researching
the past, writing the narrative and reflecting on his own personal, con-
temporary manner of experiencing the past. Jablonka does not attempt
to abolish the borders between past and present. He instead refuses to
collapse the disparity between his own existence as a twenty-first-century
historian and the subjectivities of his Jewish grandparents, whose percep-
tions and worldviews had been forged first in the little Polish shtetl of
Parczew and then over the course of their political struggle as communist
activists facing anti-Semitism, police brutality and harsh imprisonment
in a highly nationalistic Poland trapped between the territorial appetites
and political designs of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Throughout
his Histoire des grands-parents, Jablonka conscientiously foregrounds the
distance between his own intellectual, cultural and affective subjectivity
and that of his grandparents, thus calling attention to the disjunction of
his knowledge and intellectual perspectives with those available to his
grandparents in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Jablonka’s insistence on
highlighting rather than ignoring the many discontinuities and uncertain-
ties of his historical investigation is precisely what allows his narrative to
sculpt in such vividly detailed relief the distinctive texture, contours and
configuration of his own clearly situated subjectivity as informed by the
sociocultural paradigms of twenty-first-century France, on the one hand,
and of his grandparents’ very personal experience of exile, war and geno-
cide in the 1930s and ’40s, on the other.
We can appreciate the elements and techniques operative in his Histoire
des grands-parents by observing them at work midway through the book, as
Jablonka recounts his grandfather’s experience as a volunteer infantryman
in the 23rd RMVE (Régiment de marche des volontaires étrangers, or
Marching Regiment of Foreign Volunteers) fighting the German invasion
of France on the frontlines near the little town of Missy-aux-Bois some
fifty miles northeast of Paris in early June 1940. Consulting the military
archives in the form of reports from commanding officers, recounting
various battles engaged by these scarcely trained, poorly equipped for-
eigners, many of whom were considered illegal immigrants or undesirable
aliens, in the face of an experienced, disciplined Wehrmacht with superior
armor, firepower and air support, Jablonka painstakingly reconstitutes his

grandfather’s ordeal and places it within the larger context of the political
and military debacle which over the course of those fateful weeks of June
and July 1940 was to culminate in a humiliating defeat and the implosion
of the Third Republic. At the same time, he details the perceptions and
assessments specific to his own subjectivity, i.e., his vantage point as the
protagonist’s grandson viewing the scene past and present as he retraces
his grandfather’s steps today.
For two full pages Jablonka conveys the intense drama of the action
in all its pathos, recounting advances, ambushes, retreats, bombardments,
artillery deployments, use of aviation, casualty tallies and troop movements,
all while situating the 23rd RMVE’s valiant but unsuccessful efforts to
stave off the implacable onslaught of the Wehrmacht within a broader
tableau of the rapidly deterioriating military situation in the western Sois-
sons sector of combat (199–200). Then, after outlining the catastrophic
situation of French defenses on all fronts, Jablonka suddenly has our
attention veer away from the battles to telltale political developments in
Paris: “On this 9th of June, 1940, Marshal Pétain considers the war to be
lost. The next day, the [French] government migrates toward the Loire
valley chateaus. Paris is empty” (201). Thanks to the sudden change of
perspectives within the same temporal context, Jablonka’s narration makes
the feckless resignation of the one known as “the Victor of Verdun,” who
was then France’s most prestigious military figure, the hasty retreat of
the French premier and his ministers to former royal summer residences
and the panicked flight of civilians from the “city of lights” all appear in
bitterly ironic contrast with the courageous determination displayed by
foreigners fighting to defend French soil.
TIMELY JUXTAPOSITIONS
But the juxtaposition of jarring perspectives on the desperate and ultimately

calamitous battle for France in the late spring and early summer of 1940
is just beginning, for Jablonka suddenly begins to narrate his own visit to
the battlefields that he has been describing:
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How peaceful this land is! I stand facing green and amber fields,
with the rural landscape stretching out to the horizon from where a
little wood, a farm and a row of high-voltage power lines stand out.
We stroll around Missy-aux-Bois at the hour of the siesta: a quiet
village, its streets shaded with plane trees and old walls covered with
rose bushes. The monument to the 23rd RMVE is on a side street:
enshrined in an enormous shrub molded in the shape of a crypt, a
column of stone juts out of a thick bed of white and pink flowers. (201)
Underscored by Jablonka’s observation “How peaceful,” the sharp con-

trast between the chaos and mayhem prevalent in early June 1940 and
the somnolent little village presently nestled in the bucolic landscape is
in fact established and conveyed to the reader by the “I” that inserts the
narrator’s subjectivity into the narration.
Thus explicitly present and situated as both historian and grandson,
Jablonka plays a crucial role in this phase of the investigation that he is
narrating, as we see when he engages conversation with a local old-timer
born right after World War I. Telling of the annual ceremony honoring
the combatants of the 23rd RMVE whose returning members have now
dwindled down to almost none, the elderly resident of Missy-aux-Boix
reveals his rather low esteem for these foreign French veterans, as he
compares them unfavorably not only to the French combatants of World
War I, but even to the German soldiers who had occupied the village
during World War II:
There was not very much fighting here, nothing to compare with
that on the Chemin des Dames in 1914.
He places his hand on my arm, and lowers his voice:
Those foreigners, you know, they weren’t really very serious.
They got into all sorts of mischief, they stole from farms. The Ger-
mans, they occupied the village, but they weren’t mean. (202)
Having just devoted several pages detailing the particularly fierce fighting
that, as reported by French officers in the military archives, took place in
the vicinity, Jablonka has no need to call explicit attention to the elderly
villager’s counterfactual distortions of the past and all the prejudice they
reveal.
Getting back into his car to resume his investigation, he not only
situates the troops deployed and weaponry aligned as they were in 1940,
but also conveys the unsettling effect of the highly disharmonious, if not
disjunctive perspectives that are telescoping together as he views his grand-
father’s traumatic World War II past through the lens of the disarmingly
serene and tranquil appearance of Missy-aux-Bois and surrounding area
as approached now in the twenty-first century:
We once again head north on National Highway 2 [RN 2], cross-

ing the Aisne river and heading left toward Juvigny. The little road
follows a crest line: to the north are the fields and the Chemin des
Dames plateau; behind me, a ravine spiked with trees, the ravine
separating the 9th Company and Captain Talec’s 10th. The machine
guns are camouflaged behind the slope, in a thicket, ready to spew
out death, while the mass of German armored units can be seen on
the horizon.... That’s what it’s like to be caught in the twentieth
century: we can make out the poppies amid the wheat, but crushed
by the Panzer tank tracks; we cannot enjoy the summer sky because
we are trying to imagine a deluge of shells and bullets; we are won-
dering whether we should play in the grass with our children or try
to make them understand. (202)
Although the reconstitution of his grandfather’s battlefield ordeal is

overlaid with his own thoughts and feelings and vice versa, never is one
subjectivity confused with or substituted for the other: the two remain
distinct, with the narration lucidly anchored in Jablonka’s own twenty-
first-century knowledge and sensibility.
Jablonka’s preeminent narrative role as investigator, historian, grand-
son and French citizen is clearly affirmed in the paragraphs that follow.
Continuing down the highway, he finds a historical marker testifying to
the heavy combat of early June 1940, praising the courageous efforts
of the French military units ordered to defend the area under highly
adverse circumstances, but omitting any mention of the units of foreign-
ers who were also intensively involved and who suffered heavy casualties.
Jablonka proceeds to point out the injustice that these foreign fighting
units have suffered in the selective and at times highly distorted memory
of the country that they defended with their lives: “That old gentleman
in Missy-aux-Bois was right: the three days of battle in the Ailette area
29
Nathan Bracher
are incomparable to the hell of Verdun, the universal massacre, four years
lost in the blood-stained mud of the trenches. It nevertheless seems to me
that the volunteers of 1940 were not unworthy” (203). Citing French
officers’ written battlefield reports that specifically praise the foreign-
ers for engaging in vigorous, sustained combat despite having received
insufficient training and arms, Jablonka delivers a wry assessment of the
anti-Semitism then rampant in the French military that too often did not
treat even these veterans with human dignity:
However, their courage was not worth enough for them to be treated
as human beings. As Lieutenant Garandeau said, about the 12th
Regiment of Foreigners, “Polish Jews, by nature uncourageous,
did their duty.” Valiant Yids!... like the legionnaires of the 21st
Regiment, used as cannon fodder in order to spare French forces,
and whose sacrifice in defending Sainte-Ménéhould en Champagne
was to inspire one general to utter the following victory cry: “Five
hundred fewer Jews!” To make use of the Jews while at the same
time getting rid of them! What a masterful feat! (203)
Jablonka’s ironic narration of such egregiously callous attitudes and behavior

allows us to better appreciate the injustice and tragedy inflicted on foreign
Jews such as Matès Jablonka, who had put life and limb on the line to
fight the Nazis and defend France, only to find themselves in many cases
interned in camps and eventually deported to Auschwitz.
Shuttling back and forth between eyewitness reports of the fierce
fighting as recorded in French military archives and a synthesis of the general
evolution of the military and political dimensions of the May–June 1940
battle for France, then veering abruptly back to present-day observations
gleaned from his on-site investigation of the battlefields, overlaid with his
own assessments of France’s treatment of the foreign regiments engaged
in those battles after the June 22, 1940, signature of the Armistice with
Nazi Germany, and of their presence or absence from various monuments
and commemorations, these pages of Jablonka’s Histoire des grands-parents
offer a useful paradigm for narrating the past in the first-person present
imperfect. Instead of seeking to flee a desultory, banal present in search
of a momentous past and in hopes of experiencing or even partaking of
the supposed metaphysical authenticity, substance or transcendance of
History, Jablonka probes the past to better understand the present and
vice versa. Avoiding the Scylla of exhibitionist confession while skirting

the Charybdis of vicarious indulgence in the agonies and ecstasies of the
tumultuous World War II era, Jablonka fulfills Rousso’s prescription for
a salutary exercise of contemporary history:
To write the history of the present time is on the contrary to postulate

that this present has a certain density and depth and that it cannot
be reduced to a sum of instants to be seized on the fly. Like all good
history, it is a matter of reconstituting a genealogy, inserting the event
into a duration of time and advancing an order of intelligibility that
strives to go beyond the emotion of the moment....50
At the same time, Jablonka provides a concrete illustration of the epis-

temological interest of implementing the “I of method” in narrating
history. Contrary to the fears of those insisting on a “scientific” approach
to the past necessitating the neutralization if not the total absence of the
researcher/narrator’s subjectivity, the use of the narrative “I” in fact offers
greater epistemological lucidity and interpretative accuracy precisely by
refusing the fiction of some supposedly pure or unmediated knowledge
narrated as if from above and beyond all culturally and temporally situated
human subjectivity.51 Narrating the past in the first person achieves this
result by foregrounding rather than ignoring or hiding the inescapable
contextual filters that mediate all historical knowledge not only through
various documents, traces and testimonies, but also through networks of
signification and interpretation that, although in flux, are specific to each
temporal and cultural setting.
THE VIRTUES OF UNTIMELY IMPERFECTIONS
As Rousso points out, “Paradoxically, to work on recent history is to

constantly gauge the continually variable distance from the subject or
object studied.”52 By making visible and explicit the mediation of histori-
cal knowledge, the narrative “I of method” constructs an intelligence of
the past as approached through the filters of the researcher/historian’s
present, thus making that present and the past under study more open to
future generations seeking to know and decipher both eras through its
own prisms. Writing the past in the first-person present imperfect goes
31
Nathan Bracher
against the grain of both the so-called “objective mode” of “scientific”

history and the various attempts to gain some direct access or immediate
experience of the momentous events and protagonists of the World War II
era. Hence the interest and necessity of all that is “untimely” in the astute
“meditations” on the use and abuse of history that Nietzsche so pithily
expresses in explaining his approach: “This essay is also out of touch with
the times because here I am trying for once to see as a contemporary dis-
grace, infirmity, and defect something of which our age is justifiably proud,
its historical culture.” The “untimely” aspect of Nietzsche’s observation
is “out of touch” in the sense of having stepped back from the assump-
tions and attitudes of his day in order to better subject them to critical
scrutiny. That is why he boasts of his ability as a classical philologist to act
“in opposition to the [present] age, thus working on the [present] age,
and, we hope, for the benefit of a coming time.”53
The more the researcher/narrator becomes implicated, involved
with the persons and events studied and the resultant narrative, the more
he or she must seek to maintain all of these elements at a critical distance,
which means that, through the implementation of what Jablonka, following
Bertholt Brecht, terms the Verfremdungseffekt and what Carlo Ginzburg
has called “defamiliarization,” the normal must be viewed as unusual, the
familiar as alien, and the subject as object.54 Writing the past in the first-
person present must by necessity remain active, ongoing, never finished,
and incomplete: in other words, irrecusably imperfect.
NOTES
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in Untimely
Meditations, trans. Ian C. Johnston, available at http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcle
aver/330T/350kPEENietzscheAbuseTableAll.pdf (accessed July 3, 2015).
2. Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice, trans. Douglas Ainslie
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1921), 12.
3. Henry Rousso, La Dernière Catastrophe: L’Histoire, le présent, le contem-
porain (Paris: Gallimard, 2012); published in English as The Latest Catastrophe:
History, the Present, the Contemporary (University of Chicago Press, 2016); Ivan
Jablonka, L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine: Manifeste pour les sciences
sociales (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 2014).
4. Cf. Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in
Contemporary France, trans. Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 2002). Originally published as La Hantise du passé (Paris: Textuel,
1998).
5. Benjamin Stora, La Guerre des mémoires (Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 2007).
See also Pierre Nora, “La Mémoire est de plus en plus tyrannique” (entretien
avec Jacques de Saint Victor), Le Figaro Littéraire, December 22, 2005; “Liberté
pour l’histoire,” Libération, December 13, 2005; and Boris Thiolay , “Esclavage,
colonisation: La mémoire à vif,” L’Express, September 22, 2005.
6. Cf. Ivan Jablonka, L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine, 297–98.
7. Cf. Éric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris:
Gallimard, 1996), available in English as Vichy, An Ever-Present Past, trans. Nathan
Bracher (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998).
8. Some have called the question into doubt. See Peter Tame, “‘Ceci n’est pas
un roman’: HHhH de Laurent Binet, en deça ou au-delà de la fiction?” in Marc
Dambre, ed., Mémoires occupées: Fictions françaises et Seconde Guerre mondiale
(Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013), 129–36.
9. Laurent Binet, HHhH (Paris: Grasset, 2010), 10, 14–16.
10. Le Débat, no. 165 (May–Aug. 2011).
11. Pierre Nora, “Histoire et roman: Où passent les frontières?” ibid., 8.
12. Ibid., 8–9.
13. Rousso, La Dernière Catastrophe, 144, 172.
14. Ibid., 142–44.
15. Ibid., 143. (All translations from this and other works cited are mine.)
16. Rousso, La Dernière Catastrophe, 15. For the “memory boom,” see Jay
Winter, “Introduction,” in Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between
Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006), 1–13; for “commemorative frenzy,” see Pierre Nora, “L’Ère de la
commémoration,” in Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 3, Les France (Paris:
Gallimard, 1992), 977–1012.
17. Alain Finkielkraut, “Qu’est-ce qu’un siècle,” in Finkielkraut, Nous autres,
modernes (Paris: Ellipses/Polytechnique, 2005), 179–93.
18. Rousso, La Dernière Catastrophe, 16–17.
19. See Jérôme Gautheret, “Quand Napoléon annonce Hitler,” Le Monde,
November 30, 2005.
20. Later ruled unconstitutional by the Conseil Constitutionnel. See
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/propositions/pion2642.asp; “France-
Arménie: La loi pénalisant le génocide censurée,” Arte-Journal, February 29,
2012, http://www.arte.tv/fr/france-armenie-la-loi-penalisant-le-genocide-
censuree/6439338,CmC=6439470.html; and Sévane Garibian, “Génocide
33
Nathan Bracher
arménien: De l’impunité,” Le Monde, March 5, 2012. (Websites accessed July

20, 2015.) For the Taubira law declaring slavery a crime against humanity, see
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/11/dossiers/esclavage.asp (accessed July 18,
2015).
21. See respectively, Nathalie Funes, “Affaire Audin: Les Révélations posthumes
d’Aussaresses sur un crime d’Etat,” Le Nouvel Observateur, January 8, 2014;
Richard J. Golsan, “L’‘Affaire Jan Karski’: Réflexions sur un scandale littéraire et
historique,” in Dambre, ed., Mémoires occupées, 183–90; Eric Roussel, “Qui était
Jan Karski?” Le Figaro, March 4, 2010; and “Dossier: La Rafle du Vel d’Hiv au
cinéma,” L’Express, March 10, 2010; and Jean-Luc Douin, “Elle s’appelait Sarah:
La Rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv romancée,” Le Monde, October 12, 2010.
23. Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.” I thank my col-
league Tom Siefert for clarifying Nietzsche’s original German.
24. Rousso, La Dernière Catastrophe, 34.
25. Ibid., 15.
26. Ibid., 144.
27. Ibid., 144–45. See Reynald Secher, Vendée: Du génocide au mémoricide.
Mécanisme d’un crime légal contre l’humanité (Paris: Éditions Le Cerf, 2011).
28. Binet, HHhH, 10. (Further references to this work will be given within the
text.)
29. Pierre Bayard, Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau? (Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 2013), 15.
31. Ivan Jablonka, Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus (Paris: Les
Éditions du Seuil, 2012), 10. (Further references to this work will be given within
the text.)
32. Alain Finkielkraut, L’Humanité perdue (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1996),
91.
33. Francis Humbert, L’Origine de la violence (Paris: Le Passage, 2010), 7, 11.
34. Ibid., 63, 73, 275.
35. Ibid., 280.
37. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (Difficulties in Understand-
ing),” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994), 319; cited by Rousso, La Dernière Catas-
trophe, 21.
39. Nora, “Histoire et roman,” 8.
40. See Rousso, La Dernière Catastrophe, 68–75; and Jablonka, L’Histoire est
une littérature contemporaine, 75–84.
41. See Rousso, La Dernière Catastrophe, chap. 2, “La Guerre et le temps
d’après,” 87–143. See among other works, Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et Infini
(The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1968), 210.
42. Jablonka, L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine, 287. Tzvetan Todorov
cogently makes the same point in “Les Sciences morales et politiques,” in Todorov,
Les Morales de l’histoire (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1991), 21–24.
43. Jablonka, L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine, 287.
44. Ibid., 284–301.
45. Marc S. Cohen, “Aristotle’s Metaphysics,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), http://plato.stanford.
edu/archives/spr2014/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/ (accessed July 10, 2015).
46. Cf. Rousso, La Dernière Catastrophe, 103.
47. Ibid., 210.
48. Cf. Alain Finkielkraut, Une voix vient de l’autre rive (Paris: Gallimard,
2000), 11–24.
49. Alain Finkielkraut, “Papon: Trop tard,” Le Monde, October 14, 1997.
51. Cf. Jablonka, L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine, 283–305.
53. Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.”.
54. See Carlo Ginzburg, “Making It Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary
Device,” in Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001), 1–23; and Jablonka, L’Histoire est une littéra-
ture contemporaine, 302–4.
Nathan Bracher is Professor of French at Texas A & M University. He

is the author of After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky’s
Suite française (Catholic University of America Press, 2010) and Fran-
çois Mauriac on Race, War, Politics, and Religion (Catholic University
of America Press, 2015). His current research continues to focus on the
politics of history and memory in France. ([email protected])
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Timely Representations: Writing the Past in the First-Person Present Imperfect

Author(s): Nathan Bracher

Writing the Past in the First-Person

For I believe, in fact, that we are all suffering from a consump-

… for it is evident that only an interest in the life of the present

With their acute perception of all that is paradoxical and problematic in

4 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

THE TSUNAMI OF THE KINDLY ONES

Littell’s The Kindly Ones can be seen as a sort of tsunami introducing

6 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

This personal involvement of the narrator in both the content of a

8 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

A PAST THAT WILL NOT PASS AWAY

moral consensus and undisputed triumphs widely attributed to America’s

10 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

THE ADVENT AND PREEMINENCE OF HISTORICITY

Demolishing the centuries-old, seemingly perennial Ancien Régime in a

and political ideology. In the wake of the twentieth century’s significantly

12 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

The recent past sees itself rejected as a memory of horror while at

This compelling sense of the irremediable historicity imprinted on con-

HISTORY AS MAGISTRA VITAE

As has been the case throughout the long, multifaceted development of

mental questions of society, culture and human identity in the historical

How many heroes lie forgotten in the great cemetery of History….

14 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

something. Memory is of no use to those that it honors, but it is

For Binet, the momentous Czechoslovakian chapter of the World War II

THE PAST AS DEBT

The much debated “duty to remember,” so prominently invoked in the

Even though they belong to a generation having no direct experience

16 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

of constantly dying from their death?... It is madness to start from

HISTORY AS THE ULTIMATE REALITY

The virtual deification of History in the nineteenth century is widely

William T. Vollman’s account of events in Europe Central: “This is per-

18 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

a convergence of opposites specific to our time. On the one hand, many

20 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

domesticated status, these events challenge our capacity of understanding.

OBJECTIONS TO THE OBJECTIVE MODE

What has been promoted as the “objective” mode of historical narrative

22 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

I am there, exactly where I wanted to get. A volcano of adrenaline

The achievement of such narrative immediacy, however, comes at

24 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

SITUATING THE PAST BY SITUATING THE RESEARCHER/NARRATOR

A more lucid and fruitful approach consists of thoroughly exploring all

Yet his first-person narration and subjective implication in all of the

26 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

armor, firepower and air support, Jablonka painstakingly reconstitutes his

But the juxtaposition of jarring perspectives on the desperate and ultimately

Underscored by Jablonka’s observation “How peaceful,” the sharp con-

28 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)

We once again head north on National Highway 2 [RN 2], cross-

Although the reconstitution of his grandfather’s battlefield ordeal is

Jablonka’s ironic narration of such egregiously callous attitudes and behavior

30 History & Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016)