ABSTRACT

Beginning with Marcel Ophus's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1970) there has been an attempt to question the idea of a totally unified, courageous and resistant wartime France. Even more startling have been the increasingly shocking revelations that the politics of collaboration were a mere extension of a deep-seated French anti-semitic tradition. In the shadow of these developments French writers and philosophers today are reflecting on the meaning of Jewish identity in the contemporary world.

Auschwitz and After analyses for the first time how the memory of Auschwitz and the collaboration continue to haunt the French. These critical evaluations are accompianed by provocative essays on the "jewish Question" and the politics of race as they have been studied by writers, historians, philosophers and film makers in postwar France.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

In the Shadows of Auschwitz Culture, Memories, and Self-Reflection

part I|68 pages

Histories, Memories, and Politics

chapter 1|10 pages

The Voice of Vichy

chapter 3|12 pages

Cendres juives

Jews Writing in French “After Auschwitz”

chapter 4|16 pages

War Memories

On Autobiographical Reading

chapter 5|18 pages

Anti-Semitism in France, 1978–1992

Questions and Debates

part II|49 pages

Identities and Cultural Practices

chapter 6|15 pages

From the Novelistic to Memory

chapter 7|21 pages

Critical Reflections

Self-Portraiture and the Representation of Jewish Identity in French

part III|70 pages

Philosophy and Jews

part IV|79 pages

Writing After Auschwitz: Literary Representations

chapter 12|16 pages

Beyond Psychoanalysis

Elie Wiesel's Night in Historical Perspective

chapter 14|15 pages

Georges Perec and the Broken Book

chapter 15|14 pages

Exiled from the Shoah

AndrÉ and Simone Schwarz-Bart's Un Plat De Porc Aux Bananes Vertes

chapter 16|16 pages

The Writing of Catastrophe

Jewish Memory and the Poetics of the Book in Edmond Jabès

part V|51 pages

Cinematic Images

chapter 17|16 pages

La vie en rose

Images of the Occupation in French cinéma

chapter 18|14 pages

The Languages of Pain in Shoah