The paper I hereby propose for the XXth/XXIst Century French Studies Colloquium focuses on three important cultural texts of the postwar era, which each, in very different ways, grapple with the memory of World War II , the Nazi Occupation and with the history of the implementation of the Nazi Final
Solution in France. The texts in question are Alain Resnais's 1956 film Nuit et brouillard, his subsequent film Hiroshima mon amour (1959; screenplay by Marguerite Duras), and Georges Perec's moving autobiographical work W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1974). In my paper, I will call attention to an image that recurs in each of these texts, first surfacing in Resnais's 1956 documentary film Nuit et brouillard, one of the earliest films to have visually impressed upon postwar audiences the horror of Nazi Germany’s wartime "univers concentrationnaire," (the term David Rousset coined in the immediate postwar to
describe the vast network of detention and killing centers the Nazi regime erected across central and eastern Europe between 1933 and 1944). The image in question graphically captures traces of the final struggle victims of fascist persecution waged as they clung to existence in the gas chambers where they went unsuspectingly to their demise. Ten years after the war, Resnais’s camera comes to rest on one particular cement wall of the gas chambers at Mauthausen where he brings viewers face to face with fingernail markings that could only have been left through the exertion of almost unimaginable human force. This jarring image, which Resnais foregrounds as means of testifying to the abiding humanity of peoples whom the Nazis endeavored to annihilate, is one of the most haunting segments of Nuit et brouillard. What interests me critically are the modifications that occur when scenes strikingly similar to this appear in Resnais and Duras's Hiroshima, mon amour, and in Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance, constituting, I will argue, a kind of oblique quotation of Nuit et brouillard that illustrates how important this film was in shaping France's postwar cultural memory of the horrors of the Final Solution.

In Hiroshima, mon amour, I will examine the sequence of the film that shows"la jeune fille de Nevers" confined to the basement of her parents home where, ravaged by grief and loss, she claws the basement walls, leaving a bloody imprint of despair that is eerily reminiscent of that Resnais records in the gas chambers at Mauthausen, the camp site at which the director filmed the fingernail scrawlings in Nuit et brouillard. In the alterations that takes place between these two scenes, the subject of human suffering has, however, changed from a persecuted racial minority to an alluringly vulnerable, heartbroken French woman whose persecution has temporal limits that makethe “death” she encounters in the basement of a very different order than that experienced by those who entered the gas chambers at Mauthausen. One of the
central points I will make in discussing what, I will be arguing, is the "transferential" nature of this operation is the often widely overlooked fact that in the mid-1950s, there was considerable reluctance, even in progressive circles, to acknowledge the Jewish specificity of the genocide practiced in the Nazi killing centers where nearly half of Europe's Jews perished in gas chambers. As a number of critics have observed, Resnais's Nuit et brouillard certainly exhibits this reluctance, and this makes Resnais's
representation of the cavernous seclusion of "la jeune fille de Nevers," in Hiroshima, mon amour, which he and Duras present in visual terms strikingly similar to the representation of the gas chambers at Mauthausen in Nuit et brouillard, all the more intriguing. What meaning can be drawn from Resnais's
and Duras's refiguration of this scene in a context in which the victimization involves not the ravaged bodies of deported Jews, but a French girl who falls hopelessly and helplessly in love with the German enemy? Might this recurrence not evince at least an unconscious erasure of the history of Jewish persecution in the death camps in a manner similar to that in which Nuit et brouillard erased all visual evidence of the French government's contributions to the Nazi's pursuit of the Final Solution? This, in addition to this sequence’s explicitly eroticized qualities (rather unsettling given this image’s stark visual parallels with the gas chamber scene in Nuit and brouillard), raises a number of concerns regarding the political and cultural implications of this image’s “transfert de sens” from one Resnais film to another.

Subsequently, I will contrast Resnais's and Duras's repetition of this scene from Nuit et brouillard with its, once again, eerie reappearance in Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance, My analysis here will focus on a segment of the novel that, in yet another complex textual transference, reinscribes the Jewish specificity of the persecution that produced the fingernail markings in the gas chambers at Mauthausen. Occurring in the fictional, rather than the autobiographical portion, of Perec's novel, the "fingernail markings" are left on the walls of the cabin in which Cecile Winckler resided as she sailed across the ocean in a yacht that ultimately shipwrecks. When the boat is recovered, Cecile Winckler is found dead, but the fingernail imprints on the cabin wall bear witness to the ferocity with which she clung to life. What I find most compelling about Perec's displaced representation of his own mother's death at Auschwitz in this scene (a displacement that Perec critics have amply commented) is that it is shaped so directly by an image that undoubtedly owed much to his viewing of Nuit et brouillard, a biographic fact to which Perec’s writings of the early 1960s attest. What the comparison of these three texts reveals, or so I will argue,
is that it would take until 1974, and the deeply moving autobiographical account of the early life of a French-Jewish writer,Georges Perec, for the specifically ethnic and racial character of the persecution suffered by victims of the gas chambers to be restored to the image Resnais first projected in 1956. My main goal in this essay will be to examine how the circuitous, intertextual reinscription of this specificity through the repetition of one particularly haunting image evinces the complicated engagements postwar French literary and film culture had with the history and memory of the catastrophic ethnic and racial violence unleashed during the war.