| Description |
When Alain Resnais made his somber masterpiece on Nazi-occupied France, Night and Fog(1955), he was required before the film could be licensed for showing to delete certain scenes in which a French policeman’s kepi appears in deportation scenes at the refugee camp at Pithiviers (near Orleans). Thus the unpleasant truth that French police helped the Nazis deport Jews was erased from public memory by the censors. Henry Rousso’s account of the vanishing kepi recalls the opening anecdote in Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting. There it is the hat that remains, while its former wearer, an out-of-favor minister, disappears from an official photograph of the Czech prime minister and his cabinet standing on a balcony.
Kundera goes on to suggest that forgetting a painful past may be a tempting form of escape, and that much more than government censorship may be involved in what is remembered and how. Henry Rousso, in a somewhat different way (he is a researcher at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in Paris), explores similar ambiguities in how the German occupation of 1940–1944 has been commemorated, portrayed, remembered, and forgotten by ordinary people in France. He shows us a French Historikerstreit less bookish than the German one, no less bitter, with more varied ramifications in film, memorials, and popular commemorations. (Description from Source) |