Caroline James and Guénaelle Bauta, "How do you teach a nation’s history?"

 

          As HIA fellows we were faced with a haunting, yet provocative question; how do you teach a nation’s history? With the National Center for the History of Resistance and Deportation as our backdrop, we individually mulled over the exhibition, searching for historical perspective on the Holocaust; we found ways that history, memory, and shame shape the ways in which we tell our national historical narrative. A thorough introduction by Rémi, a former HIA fellow, set the tone; this center specifically displays acts of resistance specific to Lyon, but more than a hundred museums addressing region specific resistance have emerged in France. With well over 120 museums focusing on the resistance in France, one cannot help but question the historical fullness France presents regarding the holocaust. Despite positive framing, France is nonetheless culpable for its collaborative and compliant role in the Holocaust. Though it is undeniably easier to find funding and material based on a resistance perspective, a social and ethical responsibility remains to tell France’s Holocaust history in its fullest form. In order to assuage the direction of the future, the path to national healing requires ownership of oppression and critical discourse. 

 

The infamous Klaus Barbie trial, which took place in 1987 in Lyon, is a micro-level example of discourse stalemating. Facing Barbie for the first time since he committed atrocities against them, former Holocaust victims made emotionally charged testimonies. In some detail, his victims described Barbie deriving pleasure from physically assaulting them and at times, brutally raping women. Despite tears and shrill screams of victims reverberating through the room, Barbie, in his German tongue (the language of the Nazi regime) refused to address any testimony given. Barbie’s silence could be perceived as political; his greatest means of showing remaining solidarity with Nazi ideals. In any case, it was disturbing to watch him thinly smile as his smug silence dug into his victims’ psycho-emotional wounds.

In the afternoon, discussions with the center’s curator centered around one main question; how does one tell a history which threatens a society’s peace?  As previously states, Resistance museums leave something to be desired for historical clarity as well as social impact. However, the Holocaust is not the only history France struggles to frankly confront with public discourse. The shameful and recent history of Colonization and slavery is a societal wound which still remains to be explored. While her words were pregnant with a variety of meanings, a Holocaust victim in the Barbie trial expressed sentiments which potentially characterize the problems bore from relative silence around issues of importance: “This was worse than slavery,” she said. Narratives of oppression can become competing when one is addressed over another. Crimes against humanity cannot be judged against a gradient, it is rather a society which should be judged by the way it treats the history of its crimes against humanity; by the way it ensures that justice be properly given to victims left in the wake. Movies, nor music are sufficient medias for facing a painful history. However, these mediums are well suited means to bolstering more meaningful, permanent and collective forms of acknowledgement.

It is understandable, and in some ways inherently human, to desire a positive perspective of ourselves. Nonetheless, silence bred in the heat of shame is still not excusable. We must face our reality and gallantly take responsibility for that which we find horrid enough to merit our shame. In doing so, we join the victims in our history of oppression and greet them with solidarity and meaningful change; this is the way, the only way, to ensure that we remove the scratched A-track of history and are able to turn in a new direction. Though we may excuse it, in a self-serving effort to excuse ourselves, our silence is always political; it answers the questions we ask ourselves about what we will do with our history.