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.

The previous chapter discussed the problem of speaking for others. This one turns to the question of how we can speak about others, how we can understand what their pain means to them, when it is not commensurable with our own. Or even more radically: How can I know that someone else is in pain, let alone have any real knowledge of what that pain feels like? Wittgenstein answers these questions with breathtaking directness. Neither dismissing nor solving the problem, he tells us all we can know and all we need to know: ‘If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me’ (Philosophical Investigations, p. 223). I can doubt most things if I put my mind to it; and of course I cannot know precisely how another's pain feels. But if I see a woman who has been hit by a truck, it would be better to call an ambulance than to consider the merits of philosophical scepticism. As Wittgenstein puts it in another passage, ‘Just try – in a real case – to doubt someone else's fear or pain’ (Philosophical Investigations, p. 102). We cannot directly share it, but we know it when we see it.

The case of trauma and of trauma texts nevertheless complicates the recognition of the other's pain. Wittgenstein refers to suffering which is visible (‘I see someone writhing in pain’) and has ‘evident cause’. Its source and its signs cannot be misinterpreted: the truck hit the woman and she is crying in pain. The causes and symptoms of trauma, however, are less obviously manifest and more easily mistakable. This is suggested in one of the most frequently quoted passages in trauma studies, where Freud describes the survivor of a train crash in Moses and Monotheism:

‘Jamais nous n'avons été plus libres que sous l'occupation allemande’ (Situations, III, p. 11). This was Sartre's provocative summary of the Occupation shortly after the liberation of Paris in August 1944. If we do not progress any further into the article of which it is the first sentence, ‘La République du silence’, we might suspect that for Sartre and his friends, and by extension perhaps for French people in general, the Occupation was not so bad after all. Indeed, with a degree of provocation to match Sartre's, the historian and novelist Gilbert Joseph has argued that Sartre and Beauvoir had, as the title of his book (to which the title of this chapter refers) puts it, une si douce occupation. According to Joseph, Sartre and Beauvoir's Resistance activities never got beyond talk, and they were careful not to put themselves in real danger. They spent the Occupation pursuing their literary careers and sexual conquests, cementing their intellectual credentials and enjoying a high time. If some of their wartime writings (such as Sartre's play Les Mouches and Beauvoir's novel Le Sang des autres) and some of their post-war statements implied support for and maybe even active participation in the Resistance, this was all part of their self-serving self-mythologization. Joseph reports that on one occasion he asked the historian of the Resistance, Henri Noguères, why his monumental five-volume Histoire de la Résistance en France never mentions Sartre, only to be told bluntly: ‘Parce que Sartre n'a jamais été un résistant’ (Une si douce occupation, p. 366). In a subsequent letter, Noguères underscored his earlier statement: ‘Je maintiens qu'en une vingtaine d'années consacrées à des recherches et des travaux sur l'histoire de la Résistance en France, je n'ai jamais rencontré Sartre ou Beauvoir’ (quoted in Une si douce occupation, p. 366).

The previous chapter suggested that Camus's first novel, L'Etranger, is informed by the tragedy of a war which it never once mentions. This chapter examines problems of interpretation and ethics in two later works in which reference to the war is either widely taken for granted (La Peste) or explicit (La Chute). Camus emerged from the Second World War as an established author, after the publication of L'Etranger and his philosophical essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe and the staging of his plays Caligula and Le Malentendu; and, more than Sartre and Beauvoir, his association with the Resistance was strong because of his work on the clandestine newspaper Combat. So he had a claim to both artistic and moral credentials. The ethical question for post-war, post-Absurdist Camus is how to move beyond the impasse of L'Etranger, in which one man kills another in part because he can see no good reason not to. His second novel, La Peste, on which he had begun work during the war, was published in 1947, and marked a new phase in both his writing and his ethical thinking. The move from individual isolation to solidarity and collective revolt would later be theorized in his book L'Homme révolté, leading to his bitter split from his one-time friends Sartre and Beauvoir, and to competing visions of him as the champion of even-handed moderation or an emblem of ineffective liberalism. In Debarati Sanyal's words, Camus has been ‘either celebrated as an exemplary witness to the atrocities of the century or denounced as an accomplice of an imperialist imaginary’ (Memory and Complicity, pp. 57–58). This problem of interpreting his overall stature and achievement is matched by difficulties of restricting the sense of his most important works. In this chapter I want to suggest that the textual complexities of his two major post-war novels, La Peste and La Chute, frustrate the attempt to identify his writing confidently with any settled position.

La Peste does not mention the Second World War any more than L'Etranger; yet the assumption that Camus's novel, set in the Algerian city of Oran, implicitly refers to the mainland French experience of Occupation was quickly accepted, and has remained so ever since its publication.

I begin this chapter with two apparently unrelated facts. In 1961 the naturalized French philosopher of Lithuanian descent Emmanuel Levinas published Totalité et infini, a book which one might plausibly claim to be the single most important work of ethics to appear in France in the twentieth century. On 16 November 1980 Louis Althusser, the leading Marxist philosopher of his generation, strangled his wife Hélène. I say ‘strangled’ rather than ‘murdered’ because Althusser was never charged or tried for any crime relating to the incident. Instead, he was judged to be not legally responsible for his acts on the grounds of mental health. Most of the remaining decade of his life was spent in psychiatric institutions.

What is the link between Levinas's book and Althusser's act? There certainly does not appear to be much in common between a work of philosophical ethics and a fatal assault. Nevertheless, Levinas and Althusser are connected by at least one important biographical factor: both of them spent more or less all of the Second World War in German prisoner of war camps. Levinas had the good fortune to be mobilized at the beginning of the war, then taken prisoner early in the hostilities in 1940, and held in various POW camps until 1945. To call this ‘good fortune’ may appear to be in poor taste, to say the very least. But Levinas was a Jew of Eastern European origin, and if he hadn't been a member of the French army at the time of his capture, instead of spending the war in a military prisoner of war camp, he would almost certainly have been arrested on racial grounds, deported and murdered in a death camp, like many of his family. So one might say that being a prisoner of war saved his life.

Like Levinas, Althusser was mobilized in 1939, taken captive in June 1940 and spent most of the next five years in POW camps, mainly Stalag XA. It is not a matter here of using their five years of captivity to explain what the two great philosophers subsequently said, wrote, did or thought.

When reading Semprun's prodigious literary output, it is hard to forget his remarkable life, from exile and imprisonment in Buchenwald to the clandestine struggle against Franco's regime, expulsion from the Communist Party, success as an author and a period as Minister of Culture in post-fascist Spain. His work is almost invariably, irresistibly treated as a form of testimonial life writing, tied to his experience, especially (though not exclusively) to his experience of Buchenwald, and also more broadly to his standing as a pre-eminent witness to European history and politics in the twentieth century. To dissociate the man from his work might seem, Régis Debray suggests, simply absurd (‘Semprun en spirale’, p. 9). Semprun was an extraordinary person whose traumatized and resilient engagement with the dense fabric of reality is reflected in his writing.

Semprun, then, is one of the great literary witnesses of the twentieth century, in particular to the experience and aftermath of the Second World War. He is comparable in stature to Elie Wiesel, with whom he published the book Se taire est impossible. And, as with Wiesel, his fictional output is sometimes overlooked because of the power and importance of his personal testimony. The next chapter will examine how, in Wiesel's case, fictional storytelling is integral to his literary production even though it sits uneasily with his commitment to bearing witness. This chapter examines Semprun's turn to literature in the 1960s, and then in particular his practice of fiction, which becomes a tense space of witnessing and invention, telling and not telling, exposure and reticence.

What can literature do?

To begin, I shall concentrate on two early texts, both produced before Semprun's expulsion from the Communist Party: the semi-fictional Le Grand Voyage and his contribution to the symposium ‘Que peut la littérature?’ What is at stake in both these texts are the capabilities, limits and value of literature at a transitional moment in Semprun's life and career as an author, and at a tense moment in French literary and intellectual culture.

In 1964 the French communist student newspaper Clarté organized a symposium in Paris with the title ‘Que peut la littérature?’

Testimonial literature crystallizes the problems involved in gathering together the shards of experience in a communicable tale. Shoshana Felman suggests that we now live in an ‘era of testimony’ in which ‘testimony has become a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times – our relation to the traumas of contemporary history: the Second World War, the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, and other war atrocities’ (‘Education and Crisis’, p. 5). Testimony, though, is not the promise that the sense of experience can easily be restored or conveyed: ‘What a testimony does not offer is, however, a completed statement, a totalizable account of those events. In the testimony, language is in process and in trial, it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge’ (‘Education and Crisis’, p. 5). In short, testimony becomes a central genre precisely when it is perceived as problematic and, at the limit, maybe even impossible.

This chapter deals with the problems of testimony and storytelling in the work of Elie Wiesel. Wiesel has become, along with Primo Levi, perhaps the world's best-known witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Born into a Jewish community in Sighet, Romania, in 1928, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and later to Buchenwald. He saw his mother for the last time at the gates of Auschwitz, and was present at his father's death in Buchenwald. After the war, he lived for a while in France before moving to the United States and gaining citizenship there. He wrote about his experiences, first in Yiddish and then in French, which remained his principal literary language until his death in 2016. His first French work, La Nuit (1958), is widely read and accepted as one of the most important Holocaust testimonies. Wiesel went on to achieve high visibility as a writer and human rights campaigner, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Between September 1939 and March 1941, the friends, lovers, fellow writers and intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir saw little of each other. Sartre was mobilized at the beginning of the Second World War, and then held for ten months as a prisoner of war. During this period of painful separation they wrote to each other prolifically, sometimes more than once a day, as Sartre's Lettres au Castor and Beauvoir's Lettres à Sartre testify. Their posthumously published correspondence during the long, anguished months of their separation covers more than 500 pages of printed text. This is striking in part for its sheer length. It is not as if they had nothing else to do, and their correspondence was by no means their only written output for the period. Sartre assiduously wrote in what would be published as his Carnets de la drôle de guerre whilst working on his novel Le Sursis and his philosophical magnum opus L'Etre et le néant; and Beauvoir also kept a substantial journal, published as her Journal de guerre, and she worked on her first novel L'Invitée. If nothing else, war was very good for their productivity as writers, even if not everything they wrote at the time was initially intended for publication.

Another striking feature of the correspondence between Sartre and Beauvoir is how little it has to say about the war. It is not that they had forgotten about it. Of course they hadn't. It was the cause of their separation, and it affected every aspect of their lives. But it was as if it was too big to be seen, so totally present that it did not need to be mentioned. It is (relatively) unspoken and (absolutely) ubiquitous, ubiquitous because unspoken. The war was, according to Sartre at one point in his Carnets de la drôle de guerre, ‘insaisissable’. It is both there and not there. As their contemporary and sometime friend Albert Camus put it in his Carnets from the same period, ‘La guerre a éclaté. Où est la guerre?’ (OEuvres complètes II, p. 884).

A central concern for the writers discussed in this book is how to perceive, experience and recount the war, how to integrate it into an intellectual and aesthetic project, when it is simultaneously elusive, intangible and all-pervasive.

The chapters in the previous section discussed how war is a lingering and also problematic reference point in the works of those who lived through it. How it should be understood, represented and emotionally processed remains unresolved. Just as trauma is all the more disturbing when it goes unnamed in a life or text, the Second World War inflects post-war experience and writings when it is not explicitly present. The chapters in this section discuss three men – Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur and Louis Althusser – who in many respects were very different from one another. Levinas was Jewish, and is best known for his work in ethics; Ricoeur was Christian, and is best known for his work in hermeneutics and narrative theory; and Althusser was a Marxist, and is probably best remembered today for killing his wife. Yet all three have in common that they spent most of the Second World War as prisoners of war. When they returned from captivity they were profoundly changed; and each of them would go on to rank among the key thinkers of their generation. The issue here is: where are the traces of war in their post-war thinking and writing? I begin with the case of Paul Ricoeur.

Whose life story is it anyway?

Ricoeur was born in to a Protestant family in 1913. His father was killed only two years later in the First World War, so war played a defining part in his life from its earliest stages. He proved to be a brilliant student and was on the verge of an academic career when he was conscripted in 1939, despite his pacifist convictions. He was taken prisoner in 1940 and spent the rest of the war as a POW. After the war he resumed his academic career, establishing himself as one of the most prolific and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. At a time when hermeneutics was out of fashion and largely misunderstood in France, his work in the area made him one of the world's leading thinkers in the philosophy of interpretation, rivalled only (perhaps) by Heidegger and Gadamer. His astonishingly wide-ranging writings dealt with virtually every area of importance in philosophy; and he also wrote hugely important work on narrative and its role in the construction of the self.