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PARTISAN REVIEW
formally or with whom he carries on casual conversations adopt pos–
tures ranging from limited remembering through misremembering to a
transparently self-ordained amnesia. Although he has done extensive
documentary research, Nossiter's principal interest is the individual
response in France to its own unmastered past. He measures personal
memories of events against archival or newspaper accounts of the same
episodes, and reveals with understated irony how often remembering
"had turned out to be a matter of choice." He calls this the "will to
efface," a kind of mental virus that infects its host and gradually blunts
the penchant for honest confrontation.
Nossiter divides his volume into three sections, each testing the
power of recollection. The sections are identified with particular locales
in France: Bordeaux, where the trial of accused collaborator Maurice
Papon had been dragging on for months; Vichy, whose residents insist
on separating the Petain government from the pleasant summer resort
that mirrored the "true" source of the town's reputation; and the village
of Tulle, where in June
1944
the Germans hanged ninety-nine male res–
idents and deported more than a hundred others (scarcely a dozen sur–
vived the war) as reprisal for a Resistance attack on a military barracks
in the area, during which forty German soldiers were killed. Better
known-though Nossiter does not discuss this in detail-is the next
day's atrocity at nearby Oradour-sur-GLlne, where the Germans razed
the village and burned alive in a local church all the citizens they could
get their hands on, mostly women, children, and elderly men. In the case
of German crimes in Tulle, the virus of forgetfulness suddenly disap–
pears; details of that day remain etched in the consciousness of numer–
ous current inhabitants, including those not born at the time and those
too young to have witnessed the crime-though most are reluctant to
speak of it today.
In Bordeaux and Vichy, Nossiter finds considerab le memory distor–
tion but little accurate remembering. He can excavate only a miniscule
number of community voices that spoke up at the time in behalf of free–
dom, democracy, and the sanctity of all human life in France, including
foreigners and Jews. But among the aged former bureaucrats or their
younger family members he does not find one able to approach the sim–
ple eloquence of the surviving French Jew who testified at the Papon
trial: "It's a wound that doesn 't heal, that can't heal. There is something
irreparable, something that doesn't move. It's the inhuman conditions
that were the fact of the Shoah." Nossiter unearths little evidence that
the populace in Bordeaux and Vichy share this sentiment, or even pay
conscious homage to the "inhuman conditions" the witness described.
