Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance

In her book, Debarati Sanyal analyzes how French and francophone literature and film reflects on the question of complicity – understood as the multiplicity of “subject positions, histories, and memories” (1) – regarding the Holocaust, colonialism, and terrorism.  

Memory and Complicity’s theoretical framework consists of three elements. First, building on Susan Suleiman’s and Andreas Huyssen’s observations regarding the status of the Holocaust in contemporary mnemonic practices, Sanyal argues that the Holocaust has transformed into “a paradigm for genocide, human rights violations, historical trauma, and collective remembrance” (3). Second, referring to, among others, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and Max Silverman’s idea of palimpsestic memory, Sanyal announces the examination of “memory’s movement across generations, subjectivities, and sites of trauma” (5). Third, drawing on Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory and Richard Crownshaw’s concept of critical memory studies, Sanyal defines her approach as “critical multidirectional memory studies” (9), departs from associating trauma exclusively with the experience of victimhood, and claims that “surviving a trauma” should be distinguished from “receiving its memory” (8). 

Sanyal illustrates her approach in the first chapter of the book, where she describes the soccer match played in the courtyard of Auschwitz’s crematorium between the SS guards and the members of Sonderkommando. Referring to Primo Levi’s notion of the grey zone, she demonstrates the match as a symbol of “an all-encompassing web of culpability … displacing the burden of guilt from oppressor to oppressed” (24). As a result, the soccer match functions in Sanyal’s analysis “as a transhistorical and transsubjective site of culpability” (36) that enables further reflection on different dimensions of entanglement in atrocities whose analysis through the static figures of perpetrators and victims turns out to be insufficient. 

Subsequent chapters follow this approach, linking the variety of canonical French and francophone sites of traumatic memory to the Holocaust, and this way reflecting in a nuanced way on the multiple positions of accomplices in particular moments of the past. Through the examination of, i.e., The Fall by Albert Camus, Sanyal explores the relationship between the history of WWII and the Algerian War of Independence regarding “the politics of complicity” (89), whereas an analysis of Night and Fog by Alain Rensais – the documentary revealing the realities of the concentration camps – leads her to the investigation of the “transcultural politics of concentrationary memory” (123) with regards to Guantánamo Bay detention camps.  Memory and Complicity presents an erudite approach to both the notion of complicity itself, and to French and francophone canonical texts, whose reinterpretation leads to a more nuanced perspective on the relationship between the Holocaust and sites of colonial or terrorist memory.

Author of this entry: Mateusz Miesiac.

Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.