Specialist in anti-Semitism in France and genocide, member of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, historian Tal Bruttmann has notably published The Logic of the Executioners (Hachette, 2003) and, in January, An album from Auschwitz. How the Nazis Photographed Their Crimes (Threshold, 304 pages, 49 euros). He responds to Worldat a time when the news is marked by an increase in anti-Semitic acts and when the Public Information Library of the Center Beaubourg, in Paris, is devoting a retrospective to the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who died in 2018, presenting the film Holocaust and the entirety of his work.
What place do you think the film “Shoah”, by Claude Lanzmann, holds in the memory of the event?
I would rather consider its place in historical research. It constitutes a fundamental moment firstly because he is the first to cover the entire event. The testimony of the victims and the executioners, the killing process, the Polish witnesses, etc. Then because Lanzmann understood the event, which is, contrary to what we think, even today, something difficult to understand. The concentration camp system has nothing to do with killing centers.
What about the transmission of the event today, in other words its persistence in collective memory?
It’s a bit like the myth of Sisyphus. As if, despite the film Holocaust, despite the work of specialists like Annette Wieviorka for thirty years, it was necessary, with each generation, given the singularity of this event, to re-explain things. But we must distinguish between knowledge of the event and its understanding. From the 1960s, there was the Eichmann trial, which brought him back to the forefront, then in the 1970s and 1980s a real popular awareness of him, notably through the American series Holocaust. Holocaustthe film, does not, as such, reveal the event, it rather reveals the concrete reality of the event.
Can we consider that the film marked a sort of peak in the collective consciousness of the genocide, before it entered history?
No, I do not think so. First of all, we must not have any illusions about the film. It was, undeniably, a momentous moment, which intellectuals seized upon. But did it leave its mark on the generation that was in school when it left? Who actually saw the nine o’clock? Furthermore, even if it is necessary to return to the teaching profession, the transmission of the event increases over time.
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