1st Edition

Auschwitz and After Race, Culture, and "the Jewish Question" in France

Edited By Lawrence D. Kritzman Copyright 1995
    346 Pages
    by Routledge

    346 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    Introduction; I: Histories, Memories, and Politics; 1: The Voice of Vichy; 2: The Holocaust's Challenge to History; 3: Cendres juives; 4: War Memories; 5: Anti-Semitism in France, 1978–1992; II: Identities and Cultural Practices; 6: From the Novelistic to Memory; 7: Critical Reflections; 8: Jewish Identity in Raymond Aron, Emmanuel Berl, and Claude Lévi-Strauss; III: Philosophy and Jews; 9: Blanchot, Violence, and the Disaster; 10: Discussions, or Phrasing “after Auschwitz”; 11: Difficult Freedom; IV: Writing After Auschwitz: Literary Representations; 12: Beyond Psychoanalysis; 13: On the Holocaust Comedies of “Emile Ajar”; 14: Georges Perec and the Broken Book; 15: Exiled from the Shoah; 16: The Writing of Catastrophe; V: Cinematic Images; 17: La vie en rose; 18: The Languages of Pain in Shoah; 19: Duras's Aurélia Steiner, or Beyond Essence

    Biography

    Lawrence D. Kritzman is Edward Tuck Professor of French and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He has edited Politics, Philosophy, Culture, a selection of interviews and essays by Michel Foucault.

    "Auschwitz and After represents a truly notable step toward providing substantial insights into...Jewish identity in post-war France." -- French Review