Abstract
‘Presence and Absence of the Shoah in Strasbourg – A Regional Narrative’ tells a particularly Alsatian story of the absenting of Jews from the postwar narrative of the city of Strasbourg, and through it, the author explores the tension between regional specificity in a border region with a distinct local identity and a unique history, and a broader national narrative in France. Jews in postwar Strasbourg were absented from the narrative of the war through the double impulse of containment and universalisation. This article uses these double impulses to raise the question of the significance to the postwar of border regions in the making of national narratives.
Keywords
In 1898, the Jewish community of Strasbourg celebrated the inauguration of its Grand Synagogue. The neo-Roman building that took three years to build stood proudly and confidently, just across from the Ill River that circles the city and delineates its core. But the Grand Synagogue was not to stand for long. Less than 50 years after its inauguration, in October 1940, Hitler Youth were brought to the now German-occupied city for the express purpose of burning the synagogue down. In the postwar decades another Grand Synagogue was built on the edge of parkland, further out from the city centre. On the original site, a large commercial centre – a Place des Halles – was constructed. Today, all that remains of this extraordinary mark of Jewish presence in this border city is a small memorial, overshadowed by the vast concrete ode to capitalism next door. The Jews of Strasbourg are only barely present in the once-considerable space that marked their place in the narrative of the city. The synagogue memorial encapsulates the tension between the presence and absence of Holocaust memory in the cityscape, and the regional specificity of Strasbourg’s narrative of the Holocaust.
The synagogue memorial is one of a multiplicity of sites in Strasbourg where the city’s narrative unfurls. In Strasbourg, this narrative must articulate belonging to the national French project, while taking into account a strong regional border identity. Strasbourg and Alsace are unique in France. The city is the heart of the tiny region, nestled between the Vosges mountain range and the Rhine. Strasbourg is both enclosed, and open to those who have coveted it, a state symbolized by the rivers around the city. Strasbourg is encircled by two arms of the river Ill, and serviced by the Rhine, the great river that reaches from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea. The Rhine has made Strasbourg a crossroads of Europe, as well as leaving the city open to invasion. Most recently, the city’s story is also the story of Franco–German animosities, and the layers of this history can be perceived in Strasbourg’s buildings. 1 Medieval half-timbered buildings sit alongside streets of Wilhelmian architecture. Layers are placed, untidily, one upon the other, so that each remains visible, and, at times, contrasting narratives appear together. The central focus of the city, a gothic cathedral built with the distinctive pink granite from the Vosges, tells a similar story. Once the highest building in the world, it was constructed for Catholicism, but became a Protestant church in 1521, under the Reformation. When the city was incorporated into France, in 1681, it was returned to Catholicism. The ways the Holocaust and the city’s Jews are absented from these same buildings can offer insight into the tensions between local and national belonging in this significant border city. In this article, I will explore the way the city’s various spaces, including museums, memorials, and juridical systems, create a unique narrative of absence in its commemoration of the Holocaust.
Strasbourg, and the region of Alsace more widely, feature in the recent move to a closer study of border regions in Europe as a way to unpack the construction of nations and identities; to ‘unravel the complex relationships between territory, sovereignty and identity’, 2 in the words of two scholars, or to bring to light ‘the dynamics of national sentiment at the grass roots’, according to another. 3 Where Alsace is concerned, the scholarship has focused particularly on the interwar period, and with good reason. 4 Alsace-Lorraine was lost to France in 1871 following the Franco–Prussian war, and only regained as part of the Versailles treaty in 1919. In the wake of the First World War, at a climactic moment for nationalism, how was national identity negotiated between this periphery and its old/new centre? Alsatians, after all, referred to France beyond the Vosges as ‘the interior’.
In fact, the history of Alsace is of complex national belonging that stretches beyond the First World War. The region was first attached to France in the wake of the Thirty Years War in 1648. It had been thoroughly Germanic, but from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, French and German influences were to blend so efficiently in this region that ‘Alsace’, as an entity, only really came into being when around it, France and Germany became. 5 This, in a sense, was also the beginning of the region’s troubles, as a pawn in a Franco–German national contest, where prestige and national expression were linked to territory. As Jean-Marie Mayeur has pointed out, an Alsatian born in 1865 under the French Second Republic would, had they managed to live to their eighties, have lived through four changes of national belonging. 6 Indeed, in 1931, one town councillor suggested that Strasbourg might do well to install ‘standardised monuments’ with ‘detachable heads’, in order to best deal with the frequent changes of regime. In the wake of the First World War, for example, the heads of the three Hohenzollern emperors that staffed the central post office could have been replaced with those of the city’s liberators, Marshals Foch, Joffre and Pétain. 7
The cynicism expressed by this particular functionary was perhaps a reflection of the fact that in the aftermath of that war, the people of Strasbourg had not served the greater cause of the victor, their reinstated fatherland, and their war could not be written into the nation’s values. The harmony that would normally exist, ‘between memory, identity and heritage’ was disrupted. 8 The war memorial erected in the Place de la République in 1936, in what Alison Carrol calls ‘a symbolic commemorative space’, testifies to the difficulty of constructing a narrative of war memory and national belonging in the city. A mother holds her two dead sons in her arms. Neither wears a uniform, and their hands are linked in death. The inscription reads ‘To our dead’ [A nos morts]. It is not clear who, exactly, these soldiers died for, and in this way, the monument is both inclusive and suitably unspecific. 9 This is one example of what Marie-Noële Denis sees as the typical Alsatian monument to the dead, ‘neither patriotic, nor civic … making reference, not to the nation that makes heroes, but to their “little fatherland,” which weeps for its victims’. 10
The reintegration of Alsace in France following the First World War was difficult. But the German Empire was not Nazism, and the experience of the Second World War was to prove traumatic. In 1940, the region was reclaimed by Hitler as part of the Reich, and returned to France on the war’s end, after five years of intense Germanisation. Alsatians experienced harsh Nazi rule, the forced enlistment in the German Army of more than 130,000 men from Alsace and neighbouring Moselle, and devastation in the battles of the Liberation. Hitler, as Frédéric Hoffet put it, ‘did more for the cause of France in Alsace than all the patriots brought together.’ 11 For Alsace, 1945 marked another return, and in important ways, this return was particularly fraught and painful. 12 For Nazism had left a deep scar throughout France. Given the legacy of Nazism and the forced incorporation of Alsace into Germany, how might the region forge a tale of identity from the events of the previous five years?
The history of the region’s difficult reintegration following the First World War has been explored through the various prisms of local politics and class, gender, and monuments. Yet confessionalism, too, makes the region unique in France, and thus provides a useful prism through which to explore the question of regionalism. Alsace’s history of varied identity allowed space for the co-existence of three significant religious populations: Catholics, Protestants and Jews. Alsace, and its capital Strasbourg, were truly multi-confessional. Indeed, religion was so central to the region’s identity that it was decided, in the wake of the First World War, not to complicate an already difficult return of Alsace to France by imposing the 1905 law that separated Church and State in France. It is a mark of the region’s continuing sense of separateness that Alsace – with parts of Lorraine – remains the only region of France where the law is not imposed.
Jews have a history of long-standing implantation in the region’s numerous towns and villages. And they quickly took up residence in Strasbourg once the ban that had excluded them was lifted in 1793. Paula Hyman, Vicki Caron and Freddy Raphaël have demonstrated how Jews were significant as peddlers and middlemen in a region where vital news, cash loans and goods were brought by those who travelled from village to village. 13 Alsatian Jews were also distinct in France, and they comprised the country’s largest Jewish population. Ron Schechter has explored the way Alsatian Jews were used to enunciate the national project in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. 14 Could Jews be trusted to be loyal to the nation if they maintained a sense of specificity? To what extent could the nation accommodate the Jews’ other sense of belonging? Discourses around Jews maintained tension between recognition of Jewish specificity, and the desire to deny the same in the interest of national cohesion. This, in Maud Mandel’s words, is the ‘well-entrenched [French] political tradition of cultural integration’. 15 This tension, between presence in and absence from the national narrative, continued into the aftermath of the Second World War. Here, the question of whether there was space within the French national narrative focused on the specificity of Jews and of their wartime experience. But what place was allotted to the wartime experience of Alsatian Jews in the construction of a local narrative, and how did this compare to the national narrative?
The synagogue memorial is the only public site dedicated to the playing out of the Holocaust in Strasbourg. It is placed along a walkway that leads up from the rue du Marais vert to the commercial centre, les Halles. This walkway, the Allée des justes parmi les nations, the Righteous among the Nations Way (See Figure 1) is tree-lined, and paved. On either side there are pictures, and monuments. The passers-by on a fine day in late June look straight ahead as they make their way down the slope. If they stopped to read and to look, making their way from top to bottom, right to left, they would be exposed to a series of palimpsested narratives, from Nazi barbarism, to French honour, to crimes against humanity, committed under the authority of the ‘government of the French State’. This is the place where Strasbourg’s Great Synagogue once stood, and the jumble of monuments that mark this place are indicative of the deep tensions surrounding its absence.
Allée des justes parmi les nations, Strasbourg.
At the top of the walkway, on the right, is the monument to the synagogue, a low bench of black marble (See Figure 2). This was the first monument commemorating the destruction of the synagogue to be paid for by the city, inaugurated ceremonially in 1976. Large letters engraved on it, chosen by the Jewish governing body, or Consistory, tell us that ‘nevertheless, the Nazis could not erase the words of the prophet’, and Isaiah 56:7 follows, first in Hebrew, and then in French: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples’. At the bottom of the marble slab, the Consistoire israélite du Bas-Rhin, and the Communauté israélite de Strasbourg are named: these are the official governing body of Jews in the Bas-Rhin (Northern Alsace) department, and the Strasbourg Jewish community. A visitor must read the words, crammed on one of the edges, in order to discover what the slab stands for: ‘Here, since 1898, the Strasbourg synagogue stood. Burned down and destroyed by the Nazis on 12 September 1940’. And on the ground, a weathered plaque of the same pink granite of the Cathedral, stone from the synagogue itself, exhorts the passer-by to ‘stop, before this stone, the sole vestige of the former synagogue, erected in this place in 1898 and destroyed by Nazi barbarism in 1940’. It is the work of this one, present stone, to evoke the absence of what was a significant building.
Monument to the synagogue in Strasbourg.
Further down the walkway, on the same side, there are photos of the synagogue. Four blown-up, black and white photos placed on a dirty concrete wall with an unkempt garden patch beneath show the building as it stood, proud and ostentatious in the city (See Figure 3). This is the very first memorial, established in the 1960s and financed by the Jewish community. Another explanatory plaque notes that ‘This was the site of the Great Synagogue of Strasbourg from 1898 until the Nazis set it on fire in 1940 and razed it to the ground in 1941’.
Photographs of the old synagogue, Strasbourg.
Until 2012, this modest monument occupied the space alone. In that year, the walkway became the Allée des justes, part, no doubt, of the recent French rediscovery of themselves as descendants of justes: those who had behaved righteously during the Second World War. 16 The first Allée des justes was established in Paris in 2000. In that same year, the date that had marked the anniversary of the Râfle du Vel d’Hiv – the 1942 round up and internment of 12,884 Jews in Paris’s winter velodrome – became the date of celebration of the justes. The French policemen who arrested Jews were absented from the national narrative, along with their victims. In 2006, the mur des justes, with the names of all those recognised by the State of Israel for their efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust, was inaugurated in the street of the same name. And in January 2007, these same justes made it to the Panthéon, the nation’s national mausoleum. Twelve years earlier, in 1995, newly-elected president Jacques Chirac had apologized for the role the French played in the Râfle du Vel d’Hiv. This was part of a wave of late-twentieth century apologies, in France and elsewhere. Many possible reasons are listed as provoking this collective outpouring of remorse. 17 Whatever the cause, however, it would seem that one consequence in France was the relegation of guilt, and the concomitant absenting of Jews from the narrative of the war. With the creation in 2012 of the Allée des justes on the site of the synagogue memorial, the specificity of the experience of the Jews of Strasbourg was replaced by a French national story, creating a memorial space where national and regional narratives compete.
When the walkway became the Allée des justes, a further memorial was established on the left hand side of the walkway. This is a memorial to the righteous. The monument to the justes is a very different stela from the marble slab opposite (see Figure 4). On a high metal panel, the text from the Pantheon, in Paris, ‘dedicated to the 2225 French declared “Righteous among the nations”,’ and inaugurated by then President Jacques Chirac in 2007, is reproduced: Under the cloak of hatred and night that fell over France in the years of occupation, thousands of lights refused to go out. Named by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem as ‘Righteous among the Nations’, the highest distinction offered by the State of Israel, or remaining anonymous, women and men of all backgrounds and statuses, saved Jews from antisemitic persecution and from the extermination camps. Braving the risks incurred, they incarnated the honour of France, its values of justice, tolerance and humanity.
Monument to the Justes parmi les nations.
Until the creation of the synagogue memorial in 1976, monuments were erected by Jewish communities, and placed in the Jewish cemeteries that punctuate the Alsatian countryside, a reminder of how closely the Jews of Alsace once lived among their fellow non-Jewish Alsatians, but also a containment of presence to the places of Judaism. In 1951, a monument was placed in the Jewish cemetery of Cronenbourg, on the outskirts of Strasbourg, on the initiative of the Strasbourg Consistory and the Jewish community of Cronenbourg. This was one of several memorials being erected by Jewish communities in Jewish cemeteries throughout Alsace.
19
In Cronenbourg, in striking contrast to the Allée des justes, the inscription on the memorial states: 1951. The Community of Strasbourg erected this monument in memory of its members, deported and assassinated in the Nazi camps, and who have remained without a grave, and in memory of all the other victims of racial hatred. 1940–1945.
20
The containment to cemeteries of memorials to the Jewish dead was in keeping with the nature of confessionalism in Alsace. In Strasbourg, through the nineteenth century, Judaism coexisted alongside Catholicism and Protestantism. In the early decades of that century, the confessional atmosphere in Strasbourg was characterized, in the words of Thomas Kselman, by ‘religious pluralism and confessional tension’, 21 with Catholics, Protestants and Jews living newly, and not entirely comfortably, side by side. Protestants had been fearful since 1815 of the possibility of Catholic violence against them. Rumours to this effect were still circulating in the early 1820s. 22 In 1819, Jews in Strasbourg had felt the heat of the so-called Hep Hep riots, the mob attacks on Jews that took place in nearby southern and central Germany. Strasbourg may have been a site where these different religions interacted, but tensions such as those described above also meant that Protestantism, Catholicism, and in particular Judaism were compartmentalized and, in this way, contained. For 30 years following the Second World War, the evocation of absent Strasbourgeois Jews was understood to be a uniquely Jewish affair.
The Second World War was difficult everywhere, of course, but it was difficult in Strasbourg in ways particular to the city, and to its region. This was grounds for tension between narratives of regional specificity and nationalism. The German army reached Strasbourg in June 1940, and by the nineteenth of that month, the Swastika was raised over the Cathedral. The region figured on Hitler’s list of ethnically German border areas to be returned to the Reich, and so Alsace-Lorraine was understood to be part of Germany, rather than occupied or Vichy France. When war broke out, the entire population of Strasbourg, including the city’s Jews, was evacuated to the departments of Haute Vienne and the Creuse in central France, which had been designated for this eventuality. Within the space of a few hours on 2 September 1939, almost 100,000 people left the city. Nine months later, in July 1940, the newly-appointed Gauleiter Robert Wagner authorized the return home of evacuated Alsatians, excluding Jews. By January of 1941, 70 per cent of the region’s pre-war population had returned. Wagner’s job was to implant National Socialism in the space of a decade. All traces of both French and Jewish presence in the region had to be destroyed; wiped away from the very stones. Thus, for example, the names of Jewish soldiers who had died in the First World War were removed from monuments to the dead. 23 And on 12 September 1940, Hitler Youth, brought in to Strasbourg especially for the task, burned the synagogue to the ground.
Already, by 1919, Alsatians had fought in two wars, where not only did they fight for the losing side on both occasions, they then found themselves newly attached to the winner. Twice over, Alsace had been the spoils of war. How might Alsatians legitimately write the sacrifices that their soldiers had made into a broader story? The names of former soldiers’ organizations reveal how difficult this process of mythmaking was. In 1919, those Alsatians who had refused to fight for Germany, either by leaving the region, or deserting, founded an association that they named the Federation of Voluntary Enlisted [La Fédération des engagés volontaires]. In contrast with the post-First World War soldiers’ organization, the association of Alsatians who had fought in the Second World War called themselves the Association of the Escapees and Forcibly Enlisted [L’Association des évadés et incorporés de force]. 24 These soldiers became popularly known as the malgré-nous, or ‘against our will’, 25 and they represented the region’s greatest tragedy, in the postwar reckoning. They were second-class citizens in the German army, Volks- instead of Reichsdeutsche (German by ethnicity, but not by nationality), scattered throughout German units, and overwhelmingly sent to the Russian front. 40,000 of these men lost their lives fighting for Germany. In the postwar quest to rebuild the national myth in Alsace, attention came to focus on the malgré-nous, an example that allowed for the re-writing of the Alsatian wartime experience as one of victimhood. 26 It is striking that in the municipal archives, the folder promising extracts from the local newspaper, the Dernière nouvelles d’Alsace, on the postwar ‘dead and disappeared’ is entirely about efforts to bring home those malgré-nous who were still being held as prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. 27 The evocative possibilities suggested by these forcibly enlisted soldiers were enhanced by the fact that many of them languished in Soviet prisoner of war camps for years after the war. The last malgré-nous to return to Strasbourg arrived home in 1955, to broad press coverage.
The focus on the malgré-nous was reflective of a greater desire to respond to the impossibly difficult questions of identity and belonging raised by recent events by closing in around an identity that was Alsatian. This is clear from the rapid reopening of Strasbourg’s museums. The Alsatian Museum, the museum in the heart of the city, whose collection stood in for the expression of an organic Alsatian identity, reopened as early as the autumn of 1945. Indeed, the city’s report on the immediate postwar noted how all of Strasbourg’s museums undertook ‘particularly intense’ activity. In 1948, the museums chose to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the region’s attachment to France, one way, perhaps, to expunge the immediate past. The exhibition ‘French Alsace’ occupied ‘all available space’ in the Rohan Castle, the Historical Museum and the building belonging to the Society of Friends of the Arts. 28 This is worthy of note given that the city still struggled to house its citizens at this time. According to a contemporary observer, one third of the city’s lodgings had been lost through bombing, and this issue was intensified by the presence of the ‘innumerable’ government and military officials in Strasbourg, there to sort through the interminable mess of the post-war. 29
The desire to place emphasis on a unified and uncomplicated Alsatian identity comes through, also, in a speech given in 1949, by the then Mayor of Strasbourg Charles Frey, the conservative democrat who, as Mayor in the prewar, had supervised the city’s evacuation, and who had acted as Mayor of the Alsatian refugees in the Perigueux during the war. On 23 November 1949, the anniversary of Strasbourg’s liberation, he spoke on the occasion of the inauguration of a plaque to commemorate municipal personnel who had been killed during the war. He told those gathered how the varied fates of the 130 remembered were ‘like a dramatic summary of the fate of Strasbourg:’ … three of them, one employee and two permanent workers, fell in the field of honour among the ranks of the French army in the course of the winter of 1939–1940 and in France’s campaign in that tragic spring of 1940, while thirty-eight fell in the ranks of the Wehrmacht, into which they had been forcibly enlisted. Moreover, we count fifty-one forcibly enlisted men who have not returned, and over whose fate the cruellest of uncertainty hangs. The entire Alsatian tragedy of the occupation shows itself to us in the comparison of these figures. In the sombre appraisal of the infamy committed in Alsace by arrogant germanism allied with brutal Nazism, what has rightly been named the ‘inexpiable crime’ will remain the mobilisation of a great number of young Alsatian men, not even sparing those who, in this same war, had already worn the uniform of the French. … All these men and all these women, those who fell in the field of honour in rightful combat for the Fatherland, and those who were sacrificed to a bad cause, who served our City in good and bad times, we unite them in the same memory, in the same feeling of affectionate reverence.
30
In terms of the absence of Jews from postwar efforts to rebuild, events in Alsace appear to be in step with the broader French trend. Maud Mandel writes of the ‘strange silence’ in postwar public discourse in France on Jews and the Jewish experience during the war. The particularity of Jewish losses through the deliberate wartime policy that had deprived them of any means of subsistence meant that their needs were specific, and great, in the postwar. In order to deal with them, government authorities would have had to write legislation that would recognise the specificity of their suffering and restitute them for their losses. These same officials, however, were anxious to return to the previously established relationship between Jewish citizens and the state, a relationship that since the Revolution had conceived of Jews “in terms of the individual, in terms of the private person”.’
33
Events in Alsace, however, demonstrated the ongoing tension between national and regional understandings of the wartime experience. In 1951, the Alsatian lawyer and writer Frédéric Hoffet had felt it necessary to write a Psychanalyse de l’Alsace, a book in which he sought to ‘explain’ his region to the French, and to present it as ‘more faithfully French than ever’. 35 Events were to justify his concern. In 1953, the region was at the epicentre of a national crisis that brought its belonging into question. On 10 June 1944, in the south-western village of Oradour-sur-Glane, SS soldiers had massacred 642 men, women and children in reprisal for resistance activity. Of the 66 soldiers who were identified as having taken part in the massacre, 14 were Alsatian, all but one of them forcibly enlisted in the German army. In 1953, 11 Alsatian men and six Germans were tried in Bordeaux for the massacre. All the defendants bar one of the Germans were found guilty. While the Alsatians received lighter sentences than the Germans, the region as a whole was outraged. The First World War monument described by Alison Carrol was veiled in protest, just one response of many throughout the entire region, including demonstrations, flags flown at half mast, and assertions of autonomism. 36 Alsatians understood the guilty finding as ‘an accusation against the entire province’. 37 The national government, seeking to ensure unity, approved an amnesty for the Alsatian men. The ‘intense but brief national crisis’ 38 brought on by the Bordeaux trial was averted, yet it emphasized the specificity of the Alsatian experience, and the limits of national belonging. Unsurprisingly, Alsatian rhetoric stressed local, Alsatian unity.
The nature of this unity in Alsace, and specifically in its capital, Strasbourg, meant that Jews were absented: from the city’s administration, its public face, and its documentation of itself. Yet this cannot be characterized as silence, or ‘forgetting’; 39 rather, it betrays a desire to write Jews out of the narrative of the city and absent their story from the cityscape. This is part of the work of uncomplicating the specifically Alsatian history of war, of creating a story that reconciles regional and national narratives. Gabrielle Petitdemange calls the memory of war in Strasbourg a ‘history-fiction’, part of a longer story, reaching back into the Revolution, of ‘total … adhesion of Alsace to the French nation.… The liberators of 1944 follow on from the soldiers of the Year II’. 40 That Jews were absent from this process of defining and controlling the narrative can be seen in the categorisation of non-returnees. It is clear, also, in the process of rebuilding the city’s monuments, many of which were deliberately destroyed by an occupying force bent on literally effacing France from Strasbourg’s identity. In the post-war period, discussion of what monuments might be appropriately erected, and where, was intense. Amid concern that memorials to the war were springing up spontaneously around the city, administrators wrote, revised and distributed proper procedures for the building of monuments. 41 Many were rebuilt, and new ones erected, but none spoke to the Jewish experience of the War.
Jews were present in certain of the city’s discourses, but the spaces in which they could be present underscores their other strategic absences. In September 1945, a Mr and Mrs Bloch took the city to court. The Blochs’ apartment had been sequestered by the occupying forces, and then sold to the city in May 1944, as the former retreated. The city had rented the apartment out, and the Blochs, who were now once again in possession of their home, sought that rental income, and a ruling that in buying their apartment, the city had acted in bad faith [mauvaise foi]. 42 The city, which had indeed purchased the apartment, but then returned it to the Blochs in good time, wanted the plaintiffs to withdraw the charge of bad faith. Correspondence between the lawyers representing both parties stretched well into 1950. The normality of this process is noteworthy. Yet this case, one of several similar cases, is hidden away. Their litigious nature means that special permission from the office of the Mayor, as well as the signing of a guarantee promising that the files will not be used ‘to damage the city’s reputation’, are required in order to consult them.
The Blochs’ case was part of a broader issue with housing. In the wake of the war, the city administration sought ways to distance itself from the previous regime, even as it was obliged to deal with the legal consequences of that regime’s activities.
43
One of the most urgent issues faced was the crisis in housing. Mandel describes how the ‘the sudden, massive return of three thousand foreign-born Jews’ to Strasbourg caused ‘widespread resentment’ among the native-born population.
44
These Jews returned to what Mandel calls a chilly reception. Though sympathetic to their plight, the prefect considered their presence a burden on the city’s French citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish alike: ‘I try to reconcile all these diverse antagonisms, but I have to pay attention to the discontent that has already taken hold in all parts of the population on this subject of the return of the foreign Jews.’
45
all available premises were occupied and yet the population that had gone into exile during the war did not stop flooding back in. Thousands of families, almost always honourable and of perfect good faith, were threatened with expulsion from their accommodation by tenants from before the war.
46
Nonetheless, it is abundantly clear that stories of the return of Jews to the city are not the stories that the city wishes to tell of itself. That story can be found, rather, in the city’s museums, their collections restored and reopened to the public so soon after the end of the war. The Historical Museum’s promotional literature informs the visitor that its intent is to present ‘multiple aspects of the city’s history: political, economic, social and cultural, as well as urban’. 47 Jews appear, in an early section, being massacred in 1349 with no explanation of the reason for the massacre, or its authors. This is their only appearance, in an exhibition that seeks to tell a national story of the city, obliging it, at different moments, to be either French or German. The challenges that this approach provokes come to a head with the section that tells the story of Strasbourg in the Second World War. Here, there are photos of Nazis with no commentary. Pictures of ‘arrested doctors’ (presumably for crimes committed at Struthof and Schirmeck) are displayed, but the viewer is not told whether they were German or Alsatian. (This may have to do with the uncomfortable fact that when the Nazis reclaimed Alsace, certain public figures, especially those involved in the local autonomist movement, made common cause with the invaders.) 48 The visitor then walks to the next section, following the arrows, to discover that Strasbourg has suddenly become a ‘city of Europe’, thus neatly reconciling these conflicting impulses. 49
The Alsatian Museum contrasts interestingly with the Historical Museum. It presents an ahistorical view of the region, with no interest in national belonging or the significance to the region of particular historical moments. Under German rule, the Alsatian Museum was a centre of Francophilia, and the exhibition was constructed to represent Alsace as intrinsically and timelessly French. 50 In its contemporary incarnation, there is clearly no longer a need to stake out belonging to one national tradition over the other. If, as Jean-Marie Mayeur puts it, the Museum ‘sums up an entire history’, 51 then this is the constructed story of a fixed, unchanging Alsace, which takes no account of the fluid and often contested nature of identities in this border region. 52
The Alsatian Museum has a Jewish collection, donated by the Société d’histoire des Israélites d’Alsace et de Lorraine in 1907, on the Museum’s suggestion that a collection of objects be created, relating to Jewish history, customs and the religion ‘in our land’. 53 This collection, and by extension Judaism in the story of Alsace, is physically contained, presented in three rooms dedicated to ‘Jewish antiquities and folklore’. 54 This, again, is the absence of containment, whereby Judaism in Strasbourg becomes invisible because it is confined to its own ahistorical narrative, rather than being incorporated into the city’s broader story. Presenting Judaism in three rooms of the Alsatian Museum is akin to the early postwar construction of monuments to murdered Jews in Jewish cemeteries. 55 When Jewish history in the city and surrounding region is presented as Judaism, then it becomes exclusive and excluded, fixed in timelessness, belonging only to Jews, and not to the city. 56
Strasbourg’s urban spaces have been reimagined many times over the last centuries, 57 and yet ‘the sedimentation’ of the city’s long history remains visible in its stones. 58 Here is the tension of Strasbourg’s story, of its uniqueness and strong regional identity, and the desire, and concomitant push, to belong to the broader nation. This tension is illustrated by the strategic absence of Jews from the city’s wartime and post-war history. Jews were, of course, absent from the city during the war. But in the war’s wake Jews returned in proportionately large numbers, to take up life in their region again. 59 They were absented from the city’s narrative of itself in two, cohabiting ways. They were hidden away through their specificity – placed in separate rooms, or dealt with in the quiet, inaccessible, juridical space. And their specific experience was elevated to the plane of the universal, thus becoming engulfed by broader meaning.
The synagogue memorial captures this process of double absenting, through both its placement and its form. If, as James E. Young puts it, memorial markers are ‘perceived in the midst of [their] geography, in some relation to the other landmarks nearby,’ then the vast commercial centre that overshadows the synagogue memorial, and its place around a walkway that leads to a tram stop, speak to the memorial’s irrelevance in the larger narrative of the city. 60 When the memorial does form part of this narrative, then it is co-opted as an exemplar for broader themes that deny the specificity of the events it represents. For example, the 50th anniversary of the destruction of the synagogue was commemorated with the production of a brochure entitled Il y a 50 ans, la destruction de la Synagogue [Fifty Years ago, the Destruction of the Synagogue]. 61 Catherine Trautmann, then Mayor of the city, contributed an introduction and a concluding passage. For her, to remember the destruction of the Quai Kléber synagogue on this 50th anniversary was not simply to ‘turn to the past’. Rather, the purpose of the commemoration was to enable the citizens of Strasbourg to take on ownership of their past in all of its complexity, ‘lucidly’. This meant that they must remember ‘that without respect for religious and cultural diversity, only death and barbarism remained’. 62 A second passage by Trautmann concluded the booklet and supported the first passage. This one, entitled ‘Racism and Antisemitism’, provided reflections on how to combat this scourge. This was the colonizing French narrative, offered by Socialist Trautmann and Gaullist Chirac alike, that obliterated specificity through the universalization of experience. And as in 1976, it was much more straightforward to remember a building than to remember the Jews who had made use of it. There was still no place for them in a city monument.
Yet over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Strasbourg, stones with Hebrew inscriptions have been discovered, re-used in buildings around the city. Most often, these are fragments of medieval gravestones. 63 Strasbourg’s Jews are present in the city’s very stones. These fragments form a fascinating contrast with the stones of the synagogue memorial, which, as part of the city’s narrative of the aftermath, serve to absent the Jews of Strasbourg. This absence is part of the very Alsatian project of un-complicating what is, in a national frame, a most complicated regional history. This project is what Jean-Marie Mayeur calls a ‘frontier memory’, requiring the constant reworking of the link between regional uniqueness and belonging to France, 64 and the development of Petitdemange’s ‘history-fiction’. In this process, Jews were absented, either driven into an irrelevant niche, or generalized out of existence, but not for reasons of national universalism, rather, for very particular reasons of regional specificity. On the surface, this absenting may appear to be the same as the ‘strange silence’ Mandel described for France. Yet if we explore the process, we uncover the delicate balancing act that has been undertaken in a bid to maintain Alsatian specificity, and claim, at the same time, adherence to French universalism, in the postwar.