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The Legacy of the Occupation
Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder
Representing the unrepresentable
‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’
Theodor Adorno
Structure of today’s lecture
• Vichy France and the Jews
• Reading Dora Bruder as social history
• Patrick Modiano
• Dora Bruder: Histoire/histoire
• Memory and Oblivion
• Places and Traces
• Making connections
The Jewish population in France
• History of the Jewish population in France
• Emancipation and Anti-Semitism
• The Dreyfus Affair
• C20th Immigration
• Russian pogroms
• World War I/Russian Revolution
• 1930s rise of Hitler
Vichy France and the Jews
• Vichy and Nazi legislation• 1940 ‘Statut des juifs’• 1941 Revised ‘Statut des juifs’• Registration and wearing of yellow star• Round-ups and movement restrictions• July 1942 rafle: Les Tourelles and Drancy camp• Statistics
Reading Dora Bruder as social history
• Origins of parents
• Registration of Jews
• Different ‘categories’ of Jews
• Exclusion of veterans
• Wearing of the yellow star
• Police round-ups (‘rafles’)
Patrick Modiano
• Born 1945• Father of Jewish
Italian origin• First novel: La Place
de l’étoile (1968)• Rue des boutiques
obscures (1978) Prix Goncourt
Dora Bruder: Histoire/histoire
• Fact, Fiction and Truth
Documents
• Newspaper advert• Birth register• School register• Registration of Jews• Police register• Letters to and from
camps• Deportation list to
Auschwitz
Fictional “sources”
• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables• Patrick Modiano, Voyage de
noces• Film: Premier Rendezvous• Fredo Lampe, Am Rande der
Nicht• Felix Hartlaub, ‘Notes et
impressions’• Roger Gilbert-Lecomte• Maurice Sachs• Jean Genet, Miracle de la
Rose
Fact and Fiction
And here is what disturbs me: at the end of their flight across a district whose topography and street-names have been invented by Victor Hugo, Cosette and Jean Valjean just manage to escape a police patrol by slipping behind a wall. […] This garden where the pair hide is that of a convent, which Victor Hugosituates precisely at no. 62 Rue de Petit-Picpus, the same address as that of the Convent of the Holy Heart of Mary where Dora was a boarder. (46-7;51-2)
Memory and Oblivion
• Memory and Forgetting
• Collaboration and Guilt
Traces and Places
• Ghosts on Parisian streets
• Changes between past and present
• “Zone militaire. Défense de filmer et de photographier”
Making connections…
• Structure of Dora Bruder
• ‘Coincidences’
• Identification of Modiano/narrator with Dora’s story
• Modiano’s running away/arrest
• Position of reader
D’hier à aujourd’hui
D'hier à aujourd'hui. Avec le recul des années, les perspectives se brouillent pour moi, les hivers se mêlent l'un à l'autre. Celui de 1965 et celui de 1942 . (8; 10)
La ville était déserte [le 19 septembre], comme pour marquer l’absence de Dora. Depuis, le Paris où j’ai tenté de retrouver sa trace est demeuré aussi désert et silencieux que ce jour-là. (137;144)