Annette Wieviorka, L’heure d’exactitude. Histoire, mémoire, témoignage. Entretiens avec Séverine Nikel (The Hour of Precision. History, Memory, Testimony. Conversations with Séverine Nikel), Albin Michel, 2011, 250 pp.
This book, the fruit of long conversations conducted by Séverine Nikel, editor-in-chief at L’Histoire, with Annette Wieviorka, is not the eternal and complaisant dialogue meant to flatter an author’s work and life. Informed and exacting, Séverine Nikel poses questions that ought to interest all those who have had “a concern” for the memory of the genocide and for its multiform evolution over the past thirty years or so. Annette Wieviorka retraces this itinerary with precision—she who has known how to wed this movement, to become its analyst and its witness. Her answers are visibly very worked over, which makes the reading of this book captivating.
Annette Wieviorka first recalls, and rightly so, that memory, on the threshold of the 1980s, was not yet what it has become in recent years, an obligatory institutional course. Her first book, Les Livres du Souvenir. Mémoriaux juifs de Pologne (The Books of Remembrance. Jewish Memorial Books of Poland) (which appeared as early as 1983, in collaboration with Yitskhok Niborski), argues, on the contrary, for recourse to the memorial source as pertinent as the administrative archive. She recalls that Christopher Browning’s latest book rests principally on testimonies. This allows one to appreciate the fundamental evolution of the “testimony” source, so often rejected by a considerable number of historians on account of its unreliable character.
Another subject taken up by the author: how is one to characterize the Jewish communist Resistance? A relatively delicate question, since it addresses fluctuating identities. These resistance fighters were communists first, but they “never tried to attack the deportation trains.” Fifty years on, with the collapse of the communist system playing its part, it is their Jewishness that surfaces, in a bitter sadness: “When the memory of their dead at Auschwitz became obsessive, because the young people of that time were now grandparents, when the presence of the genocide became insistent in the public space, some expressed regrets, even remorse or guilt at not having put their courage at the service of saving their own.” In a few sentences, the essential is said. The first generation of communist Jews and Jewish communists—all the nuances are called for—no longer exists, nor do their inimitable accents. The second generation, the one born in France and which spoke French with “the somewhat cheeky, drawling accent of the Parisian titi (street urchin) crossed with turns of phrase come from Yiddish”—Henri Krasucki is the very example of it—the one that conflated Jew and communist, no longer exists either. There remains the third generation, absent from Annette Wieviorka’s book—analyzed, let us recall, by Hélène Gluckmann-Oppenheim and Daniel Oppenheim some years ago already. Of course the third generation speaks French without an accent and is over-credentialed compared with the preceding ones. That is another story.
There also return, in L’heure d’exactitude, the debates that marked Annette Wieviorka’s generation, notably the one that pitted the “functionalist” historians against the “intentionalist” historians, or again the question of testimony, of witnesses. The author examines the contributions of the great historians of the Shoah (Hilberg, Friedländer in particular), their evolution (L’Allemagne nazie et les Juifs (Nazi Germany and the Jews) by Friedländer is seen by her “as a masterpiece of the writing of history”). Annette Wieviorka recalls the evolution of the complex question of testimony—of which she has become a recognized specialist—which runs from the constitution of the archives in the Warsaw ghetto by Emanuel Ringelblum down to the formation of the immense holdings known as the “Spielberg” collection (52,000 testimonies gathered to this day). As for these testimonies recorded in the 1990s, much has been said to the effect that they could not be reliable (too late, too standardized), but Annette Wieviorka advances a more nuanced thesis, namely that those of these accounts which are not contaminated by other sources (readings, films) are, as it were, encapsulated, intact. “Those are the ones that particularly interest the historian.” The question of testimony is therefore multiform; it even continues to live on, as the polemic between Claude Lanzmann and the writer Yannick Haenel has shown.
It is scarcely possible to evoke all the themes of this book that have marked out Jewish memory. Here are a few others: the discovery of the fichier juif (the “Jewish file,” the wartime registry of Jews), the Mattéoli commission, the Auschwitz museum. One cannot but disagree with certain ideas, for example the one according to which the accounts of the Shoah would be settled “from the threefold point of view of the judicial (with the Touvier and Papon trials), the symbolic with Jacques Chirac’s speech, and the material.” To be sure, these remarks concern public policies, but, as long as a single survivor is still alive, he will have the right to reject them, and we along with him. It is in no one’s power to assert that these measures are satisfactory, all the more so as all these reparations came late.
What counts is the reflections that this book of history and memory, of the history of memory, gives rise to.