Volume 38, Number 18 · November 7, 1991
Tricks of Memory
By Robert O. Paxton
The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944
by Henry Rousso, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Harvard University Press, 384 pp., $37.50
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.
Review, 1796 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |