After the Deportation
Memory Battles in Postwar France

Examines the change in memory regime in postwar France, from one centered on the concentration camps to one centered on the Holocaust.

Philip Nord (Author)

9781108478908, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 December 2020

480 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.91 kg

'Philip Nord's 'After the Deportation' is a significant addition to a body of scholarship that, for more than a decade, has revised the notion that in France, as in other countries, Jews and non-Jews alike were silent about the Holocaust in the postwar period. … Nord fleshes out and expands this revisionist perspective by making important methodological choices. In over 400 densely packed pages, he provides a comprehensive analysis of shifting public representations of a specific phenomenon - deportation itself, of Jews as well as non-Jews - in histories, novels, poems, plays, movies, paintings, architecture, monuments, exhibits, and ceremonies. … The book is an instant work of reference, the building block for comprehensive exam lists and future works on this question … Going forward, historians might imagine analytical frameworks that, building on this mighty achievement, consider reception and intimate, familial worlds with as much care as cultural production and public memory.' Stéphane Gerson, The Journal of Modern History

A total of 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. In this compelling new study, Philip Nord addresses how the Deportation, as it came to be known, was remembered after the war and how Deportation memory from the very outset, became politicized against the backdrop of changing domestic and international contexts. He shows how the Deportation generated competing narratives – Jewish, Catholic, Communist, and Gaullist – and analyzes the stories told by and about deportees after the war and how these stories were given form in literature, art, film, monuments, and ceremonials.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Heroes and Martyrs
1. Le Parti des Déportés
2. The Concentrationary Universe
3. Monster with One Eye Open
4. The Triumph of the Spirit
5. The Six Million
6. The Thirty Years' War
Part II. Shoah
7. Holocaust
8. The Teaching of Contempt
9. Witnesses
10. Generation
11. 'The Return of the Repressed'
12. Shoah
Epilogue and Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Jewish studies [JFSR1], The Holocaust [HBTZ1], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]