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Memory
The (Im) persistence of Historical and Collective Memory: The Collective Forgetting of Vichy France and the Victims of the Holocaust
The unstable nature of human memory even on a personal level has been a persistent theme since Sigmund Freud's analysis of hysterics, to the modern day queries over the 'repressed memory' syndrome of alleged victims of childhood abuse. The fear of 'forgetting' such horrific historical events as the Holocaust in Europe and the crimes of the those collaborators of Vichy France has also spawned an additional, historical query into the nature of collective, human memory and the dangers of the unwillingness of human beings to confront the past.
Cognitive psychology suggests additional challenge to the difficulty of interpreting the Holocaust and also the "Vichy Syndrome" of a lack of historical guilt, that stretch beyond the moral allegations of fear or callousness. There may be a mental process that inhibits a full moral and intellectual apprehension of a traumatic event, as it occurs at the time, that effectively disrupts the accurate recording of such an event 'in the memory,' of the subject or subjects in...
This can take place not only an individual level but also on a collective level.
Vichy France provides a particularly instructive case study of such an example of a willed or unwilled collective forgetting, because it is a story of a nation that would prefer to think of itself as purely the victim of wartime atrocities. Yet many of its citizens either ignored the deportment of Jews in Vichy's midst, or openly collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. Is the forgetting of the Vichy French simply an act of calculated historical re-writing? Or does it have its roots in the cognitive, functional structure of the human mind?
The French scholar Henry Rousso states that France has never truly come to grips with France's bowing to the military and political pressures of Hitler during World War II. Subsequent to the unification of France, he states that that rather than real memories being formed, politicians have simply attempted to formulate highly directed displays of recollection intended to achieve self-interested political goals of the moment, rather than to meaningfully interpret the full guilt that France bears. Rousso calls such constructed…
Works Cited
La Capra, Dominick, History and Memory after Auschwitz. "Chapter 1: History and Memory: In the Shadow of the Holocaust." Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. "Introduction: The Neurosis." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Foreword by Stanley Hoffmann.
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