Geographies of Perpetration

Transcended, Negated Sites

Despite their frequent use and apparent transparency, both the expression and concept of “lieux de mémoire” prove highly ambiguous. The seminal work Lieux de mémoire, published in 1984 under Pierre Nora’s direction, dispelled from the very beginning the notion that its object of study could be reduced strictly to material spaces, as the project’s initial ethnographical dimension—as specified by its author—aspired to much more: “cartographier notre propre géographie mentale”.² Nora understood the expression “lieu” as a symbolic crystallization of the French ←7 | 8→nation’s collective identity and, consequently, the research sought to reflect on the varied representations of national myths.³ In searching for these crystallizations of memory in a society that had seen the traditional “milieux de mémoire”⁴ disappear—that is, modern society—Nora and the numerous authors under his direction strived to examine both material and immaterial products, in such a way that the term lieu de mémoire was applied both to physical monuments and to more intangible symbols such as the flag, national colors, or the national anthem, in addition to the territory itself, words, or even unequivocal abstractions like the notion of glory. Having said this, the fact that nation-states’ foundational myths would be meticulously revised in the post-World War II era proved inevitable, both in memory culture as well as through institutions calling for memory politics.

Barely a year after Nora had stirred the intellectual community (and not just the French) with his encyclopedic work, the director of Les temps modernes and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann shook Holocaust studies with his documentary magnum opus entitled Shoah (1985). Its topic likewise rested on sites: specifically those where the planned destruction of the Jews of Europe was carried out; places disfigured not only by the passage of time, but by those who had constructed them, as they proceeded to systematically dismantle these spaces after they had served their purpose (that is, the extermination camps of the so-called Aktion Reinhardt: Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka). The filmmaker visited these sites, either alone or—whenever possible—accompanied by survivors and witnesses, scouring their innermost cracks and minimal details which lay behind beautiful landscapes or ruins that displayed themselves before his eyes. There the central aim was to unravel the ghost of annihilation, of violence, and of the genocide for which these very sites were the stage, which ultimately could only emerge spectrally through the light of storytelling. Curiously, in order to account for the erasure and simulation that inhabited these places, Lanzmann searched for a paradoxical term that had connotations of both recognition and rejection: “les non-lieux de mémoire”.⁵

Despite their convergence, these two magna opera that articulate both memory and space point in two different directions: the first addresses the construction of national identity through its mental crystallizations; the second points to the destruction of one of the foundations of European identity as it existed in the first third of the 20th century (the Jewish population) by the Third Reich, which annihilated at the same time the memory of its crime by proceeding to destroy the very traces of this destruction.⁶ The foundational character of Nora’s work is confirmed in Étienne François and Hagen Schultze’s 2001 three-volume Deutsche Erinnerungsorte and, ten years later and with substantial changes, by Pim den Boer’s monumental Europäische Erinnerungsorte, which searched for myths and principles for a European identity that transcended the borders of the nation state, from the Krupp dynasty or Beethoven’s ninth symphony to physical places.

Two forces collided: the first, a return to a national memory under threat;⁷ the second, the demand for a transnational memory linked to catastrophe. In its ←9 | 10→own way, it is not exaggeration to hold that these works became, to a greater or lesser extent, lieux de mémoire themselves. In Lanzmann’s case, his film was recognized for decades as the Holocaust film and, with a certain excess, the director sought to dictate a specific poetics, consisting in rejecting the use of any archival materials whatsoever. Be that as it may, this metaphorization of space to address aspects that exceed a site’s materiality seems to indirectly confirm the primacy of time which had until then characterized memory studies. Certainly, memory itself constitutes a threat to the passage of time, as the past seems to be revived in memory, as if it had suffered no erosion at all.⁸