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after the violence: memory / 9
disappeared. As recurrent and familiar “tropes” in memorial sites, objects
are also ambiguous artifacts. Not legible in themselves, they can elicit a
nostalgic and sentimental cult of the past prior to the catastrophe, a celebration
of the heroism of survival, a fetishist glorification of violence, a
voyeuristic and sensationalist spectacle of past horrors, or the artificiality
of kitsch. Bones in particular have yielded the most debate, dialogue, and
controversy. As recalcitrant and elusive “objects,” they lay bare the difficulty
of representing violence and death.
Part III, “Re-membering Memory,” hones in on the ethical dimension
of memory politics as a process of constructing meaningful narratives
about the past for the present. Literature is a privileged medium to reflect
upon the longstanding impact of traumatic violence and to explore constructive
responses and reparative modes of forgiveness and care. In “Toward a
Critical Reparative Practice in Post-1989 German Literature: Chista Wolf’s
City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010), Anke Pinkert probes how
after historical rupture sustainable bonds can be imagined in a still divided
present. She traces the systemic violence that has marked German unification
since 1989, leading to chronic and ongoing unbalances and asymmetries
between the two former Germanies. A critic of this aggressive takeover,
Christa Wolf has been relegated to the margins of the public sphere, ridiculed
as naive for her ethics-oriented writing, and subjected to a politics of shaming.
Wolf’s last novel retraces how this symbolic exclusion from post-1989
society led to a personal crisis that the narrator seeks to resolve through an
ethics of self-healing. Yet, beyond the individual cure Wolf reasserts a sense
of collective solidarity and a hope for new collective bonds by reclaiming
the utopian and elating moment of East German crowds demonstrating
peacefully in 1989 for a future they were not yet able to imagine. Richard
Golsan’s chapter “Paradoxes of Remembrance: Dissecting France’s ‘Duty to
Memory’” takes up France’s often vexed efforts since the 1990s to come to
terms with the Vichy past. Inspired by the imperative to fulfill a “duty
to memory” (devoir de mémoire) toward the Holocaust’s victims, these efforts
resulted in the trials and prosecutions on charges of crimes against humanity
of former Vichy officials. Focusing on the trial of former collaborator
Maurice Papon, which lasted from October 1997 to April 1998 and was
the longest trial in modern French history, Golsan shows how in the name
of political vigilance the “duty to memory” led to problematic comparisons
between the Nazi regime and the Yugoslav wars or the massacre of Algerians
in Paris on October 17, 1961. These comparisons distorted both the Vichy
and Nazi past. On a more positive note Golsan draws on Tzvetan Todorov’s
notion of “exemplary memory” to explore constructive ways of performing
the “duty to memory” through recent literary fiction. In Boualem Sansal’s
novel The German Mujahid and in Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH about the
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