Multidirectional Memory by Rothberg Michael

Author:Rothberg, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2009-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Counterpublic Witness:

Charlotte Delbo’s Les belles lettres

Nineteen sixty-one, the year of Chronicle of a Summer’s release, was a year in which Les Temps modernes published excerpts from Primo Levi and Frantz Fanon in their May issue and later juxtaposed accounts of the Eichmann trial and the October 17 massacre of Algerians in Paris.1 Nineteen sixty-one also marks the year of Charlotte Delbo’s first book publication. In the last couple of decades, Delbo has been justly hailed as one of the most articulate memoirists of the Nazi camps, primarily on the strength of her trilogy Auschwitz et après (Auschwitz and After) and her posthumous La mémoire et les jours (Days and Memory). Delbo’s newfound reputation derives from the at-once emotionally searing and formally challenging quality of her work; in an effort to capture the extremity and long-term traumatic impact of the Nazi camps she experiments with documentary form.2 Critical appreciation of Delbo, a non-Jewish survivor who was part of the Communist French resistance and who maintained contacts with the intellectual Left in France after the war, has not yet, however, led to a rediscovery of her works that do not focus on Auschwitz.

Although Delbo had written Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return), the first volume of her Auschwitz trilogy, soon after her return from the camps, it took her years to decide to publish it. Appearing in 1965, that volume turns out not to be her initial book publication. Four years earlier, in 1961, Delbo published her first experiment in documentary form, the ironically titled Les belles lettres—not a Holocaust memoir, but a collection of letters pertaining to the Algerian War.3 These letters, generally selected by Delbo from well-known French newspapers and magazines, such as Le Monde, but occasionally from overtly political sources, such as Les Temps modernes, France-Observateur, and Vérité-Liberté, provide a more or less chronological capsule history of some of the most important controversies surrounding the war during the period between late 1959 and early 1961. In between the letters, which are reprinted in standard typeface, Delbo inserts her own brief and often cutting commentary in bold type. Delbo’s comments and her selection of letters locate her within the heterogeneous leftist metropolitan resistance, which, as the war dragged into its seventh year, was becoming increasingly radicalized. The formal innovation and provocative content of Les belles lettres, which has been almost completely ignored in the recent wave of Delbo criticism (including my own previous work), suggest the need to reread the emergence of Delbo’s powerful oeuvre in light of an as-yet-unremarked political and historical context. While there is no reason to doubt Delbo’s claim that she let her Auschwitz memoir sit for twenty years in order to see if it would stand “the test of time,” the evidence of the social and political context of her publishing history suggests a supplementary reason why she finally began to publish: the urgency of the charged political climate of the 1960s, with its anticolonial struggles that tore at the fabric of postwar Europe.

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