The Legacy of the Occupation

Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder

Representing the unrepresentable

‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’

Theodor Adorno

Structure of today’s lecture

• Vichy France and the Jews

• Reading Dora Bruder as social history

• Patrick Modiano

• Dora Bruder: Histoire/histoire

• Memory and Oblivion

• Places and Traces

• Making connections

The Jewish population in France

• History of the Jewish population in France

• Emancipation and Anti-Semitism

• The Dreyfus Affair

• C20th Immigration

• Russian pogroms

• World War I/Russian Revolution

• 1930s rise of Hitler

Vichy France and the Jews

• Vichy and Nazi legislation• 1940 ‘Statut des juifs’• 1941 Revised ‘Statut des juifs’• Registration and wearing of yellow star• Round-ups and movement restrictions• July 1942 rafle: Les Tourelles and Drancy camp• Statistics

Reading Dora Bruder as social history

• Origins of parents

• Registration of Jews

• Different ‘categories’ of Jews

• Exclusion of veterans

• Wearing of the yellow star

• Police round-ups (‘rafles’)

Patrick Modiano

• Born 1945• Father of Jewish

Italian origin• First novel: La Place

de l’étoile (1968)• Rue des boutiques

obscures (1978) Prix Goncourt

Dora Bruder: Histoire/histoire

• Fact, Fiction and Truth

Documents

• Newspaper advert• Birth register• School register• Registration of Jews• Police register• Letters to and from

camps• Deportation list to

Auschwitz

Fictional “sources”

• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables• Patrick Modiano, Voyage de

noces• Film: Premier Rendezvous• Fredo Lampe, Am Rande der

Nicht• Felix Hartlaub, ‘Notes et

impressions’• Roger Gilbert-Lecomte• Maurice Sachs• Jean Genet, Miracle de la

Rose

Fact and Fiction

And here is what disturbs me: at the end of their flight across a district whose topography and street-names have been invented by Victor Hugo, Cosette and Jean Valjean just manage to escape a police patrol by slipping behind a wall. […] This garden where the pair hide is that of a convent, which Victor Hugosituates precisely at no. 62 Rue de Petit-Picpus, the same address as that of the Convent of the Holy Heart of Mary where Dora was a boarder. (46-7;51-2)

Memory and Oblivion

• Memory and Forgetting

• Collaboration and Guilt

Traces and Places

• Ghosts on Parisian streets

• Changes between past and present

• “Zone militaire. Défense de filmer et de photographier”

Making connections…

• Structure of Dora Bruder

• ‘Coincidences’

• Identification of Modiano/narrator with Dora’s story

• Modiano’s running away/arrest

• Position of reader

D’hier à aujourd’hui

D'hier à aujourd'hui. Avec le recul des années, les perspectives se brouillent pour moi, les hivers se mêlent l'un à l'autre. Celui de 1965 et celui de 1942 . (8; 10)

La ville était déserte [le 19 septembre], comme pour marquer l’absence de Dora. Depuis, le Paris où j’ai tenté de retrouver sa trace est demeuré aussi désert et silencieux que ce jour-là. (137;144)