The Holocaust poses a challenge to creative writers: can and should horrific events be used as the subject matter for literature? In the early post-war years French novelists were often reticent about giving direct, fictional portrayals of the Holocaust. Some developed experimental approaches which questioned and tested the limits of literary representation, crossing boundaries between truth and invention, testimony and fiction. Throughout these works there is a sense that the Holocaust both must and cannot be represented, that the memory must be kept alive even if the subject resists the capabilities of literary fiction. Despite the passing of time, there is no sign that the Holocaust is fading from the French literary scene. On the contrary, Jonathan Littell’s controversial novel Les Bienveillantes (2006) and a host of other recent publications suggest that it continues to fascinate and challenge French novelists.

Histories of Holocaust consciousness sometimes begin with a chapter on forgetting and silence. Yet, if there was not in fact silence (as the preceding chapters have tried to show), why were so many convinced that there had been one? Psychiatry had an explanation ready to hand. The psychic trauma of the Holocaust had led to a repression of memory, and, now in the 1970s and 1980s, that repressed memory was at last boiling to the surface, helped along, of course, by the exertions of a new generation no longer in thrall to the kind of obfuscating stories that Gaullists and Communists had once told. How this psychiatric template emerged in the French context owed much of course to the work of child psychologists like Claudine Vegh but also something to the literary experiments of Romain Gary, Patrick Modiano, and Georges Perec. All three adapted and played with the template, as did Gary in La Danse de Gengis Cohn (1967), Modiano in La Place de l’étoile (1968), and Perec in W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris, 1975).