Sarkozy Sort of Rhymes with Memory

The Times had a very interesting story on yesterday's front page: "By Making Holocaust Personal to Pupils, Sarkozy Stirs Anger."

In short, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has announced a plan requiring all French fifth-graders learn the history of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. At length, reports Elaine Sciolino, this has made many unhappy for several reasons: it makes children carry the 20th century's greatest grief at too young an age; Sarkozy has infused it with too much Judeo-Christian language and religious overtones; it is another part of an incoherent agenda by Sarkozy, who has the stated goal of making France a relevant international force but hasn't yet created a defined means to achieve it; and it might anger immigrant Africans and Muslims in the country, who certainly demographically overwhelm Jews there and everywhere.

As someone who only follows French politics through the Times and the New Yorker, Sarkozy strikes me as very interesting: hyper-motivated, tenacious, slick, and someone who enjoys the trappings of fame. Why else barbecue with the Bushes in Kennebunkport, Maine, or invite the press along for vacations with his new wife, supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni?

But I like this proposal. That it's mandated is perhaps mildly odd, but the question of memory, I believe, is becoming all the more acute in the 21st century. The number of people intimately connected to this era is dwindling ever more rapidly and the need to ensure its place in current events is important.

Yes, World War II, on a moral level, is now best and only identified with the Holocaust, i.e. everyone knows what it was at least on a general level; those years, times and events have been institutionalized for assumed perpetuity in our collective memory in many forms; and in the 21st century, information is more widely disseminated and available than ever before. Yet, that last point worries me, as the bits of information among the torrents now available that seem to ge the most attention are totally useless. Sarkozy, I want to believe, seems concerned about making the Holocaust relevant, not just remembered, and perhaps having all fifth-graders learn about it so deeply and intimately will combine the personal with the collective, the present with the past in a meaningful way so that the memory and the problem of evil versus that of compassion, equality and democracy will guide these kids' decision. (Yes, yes, I'm going in an overly earnest, perhaps naive, direction for this blog.)

I wonder if Sarkozy happened to read Tony Judt's recent essay in the New York Review and became inspired? Reprinted from a lecture in Germany on Arendt, Judt, the most interesting and articulate scholar of modern Europe there is today, commented at length on how the memory of the Holocaust is becoming increasingly marginal in 21st century memory. Overall, he addresses why it took a generation to begin to recognize and memorialize the Holocaust, and seems to argue for not using "the Holocaust" as justification for political goal or moral shorthand, but for a meaningful example of what can happen.

Quoting at-length: "Maybe all our museums and memorials and obligatory school trips today are not a sign that we are ready to remember but an indication that we feel we have done our penance and can now begin to let go and forget, leaving the stones to remember for us. I don't know: the last time I visited Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, bored schoolchildren on an obligatory outing were playing hide-and-seek among the stones. What I do know is that if history is to do its proper job, preserving forever the evidence of past crimes and everything else, it is best left alone. When we ransack the past for political profit—selecting the bits that can serve our purposes and recruiting history to teach opportunistic moral lessons— we get bad morality and bad history."

Like a good postmodern academic, Judt concludes by not answering anything definitively: "After 1945 our parents' generation set aside the problem of evil because —for them—it contained too much meaning. The generation that will follow us is in danger of setting the problem aside because it now contains too little meaning. How can we prevent this? How, in other words, can we ensure that the problem of evil remains the fundamental question for intellectual life, and not just in Europe? I don't know the answer but I am pretty sure that it is the right question. It is the question Hannah Arendt asked sixty years ago and I believe she would still ask it today." But really, you should spend 15 minutes reading the whole thing.

I wonder what Judt, very much on the left, would think of this idea of Sarkozy, very much to the right of the center. Judt probably would find it opportunistic: The French president trying to cozy up to Israel, or something like that. (Again, the end of Judt's speech focuses on not using the Holocaust for political gain and politicians are inherently political.) But as someone who can't make it through his sister's history of our paternal grandparents's survival in the Holocaust, or even someone else's personal history without nearly crying, I think I'd like to be a fifth-grader in France right now.