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Second Generation, Third Generation, and State Political Postmemory: The Holocaust and Its Literary Effects in Contemporary France

Author: Leichter-Flack Frédérique
Publication venue: 'Project Muse'
Publication date: 01/06/2016
Field of study

International audienceThis article aims to off er a refl ection on the interaction between literature , the postmemory of the Holocaust as Marianne Hirsch describes it and the political sphere in contemporary France. 1 In the fi elds of literature and fi lm, many works have dealt with the Holocaust. France is perhaps the European country where the idea of a "duty of memory" regarding the genocide of the Jews and the country's own past under Nazi occupation has been most discussed. One may observe the same interest in direct testimonies by survivors of the genocide in France as in the United States. However, the last fi ft een years have been characterized by two simultaneous phenomena: fi rst, the coming of age of a "third generation" with its own specifi c questions, which is willing to take over from the second generation and which has been extensively studied by psychoanalysts, and second, a complete renewal of the political context: the Holocaust, and the active role the French state played in it, are now considered inescapable parts of national political memory. Th rough a discussion of a number of particularly striking French-language contemporary works, this article will explore the eff ect on literary writing of the interaction between a gen-erational phenomenon and highly interventionist memory politics. I ask, fi rst, what is happening to literature regarding the family memory of th