Celui du faux est un problème auquel les spécialistes de chaque période historique ont dû se confronter, mais qui a subi une accélération et une exaspération avec l’histoire du temps présent, aussi à cause de la présence simultanée des protagonistes qui ont rendu plus complexe une scène historique et commémorative profondément marquée par le rapport entre historiens et témoins, et par la particulière articulation de la mémoire publique et de la mémoire privée. L’événement qui a souffert avec le plus d’acuité du problème du faux à l’époque contemporaine est certainement le génocide des Juifs commis par les nazis pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, car c’est justement au cœur de l’entreprise génocidaire qui a eu lieu la plus grande falsification qui a alimenté tout discours révisionniste ultérieur. La négation de l’extermination, avec le tentative des nazis de dissimuler et détruire les preuves de leur culpabilité, est en effet consubstantiel au déroulement des faits, œuvrant ainsi sur deux niveaux: à l’origine, sur la suppression systématique des traces et des témoins éventuels; plus tard, sur les différentes étapes de l’opération historiographique. Le sophisme négationniste par lequel la réalité meurtrière des chambres à gaz ne peut être prouvée que par ceux qui les ont vus en fonction de leurs propres yeux, c’est à dire par ceux qui y ont perdu la vie, remet en question non seulement la réalité historique de l’événement mais aussi, par conséquent, la mémoire des survivants qui, avec la falsification de leur expérience, sont obligés de faire face depuis l’époque de la persécution nazie. L’historien est devenu donc le protagoniste d’une contemporanéité dans laquelle histoire et mémoire ont fini par se retrouver souvent inextricablement liées. / The problem of false is a problem that specialists of different historical period had to confront, but it has been accelerated and exasperated with the history of the present time, also because of the simultaneous presence of the protagonists who made more complex the historic and commemorative scene deeply influenced by the relationship between historians and witnesses, and the specific articulation of public memory and private memory. The event, which has most deeply suffered the problem of false in the modern era is certainly the Jewish genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, because it is precisely at the heart of genocide that the greatest falsification, that has fueled all subsequent revisionist discourse, began. The denial of the extermination, the Nazis attempt to conceal and destroy evidence of their guilt is indeed consubstantial with the sequence of events and works on two levels: during the Holocaust, by the systematic removal of traces and potential witnesses, and later on the different stages of the historiographical operation. Revisionist sophistry by which the murderous reality of the gas chambers can be proven only by those who saw it with their own eyes, for example by those who have lost their lives, questions not only the historical reality of the event but also, therefore, the memory of the survivors, who with the falsification of their experience, are forced to face since the days of Nazi persecution. The historian thus became the protagonist of a contemporaneity in which history and memory have ended up often inextricably linked.

What is the relationship between writing in the present and the traumatic historical events that form the subject of that writing? What narrative strategies do authors employ in order to negotiate the ethical and epistemological problems raised by this gap in time and experience? “Trauma theory” is undermined by clinical controversies and contradictory claims for “literal truth” and “incomprehensibility”. Similarly, the Holocaust has been considered inherently unrepresentable unless by those who witnessed it, leading to a false opposition between genres of “testimony” and “fiction”. A way out of these dead ends is to consider the role of the first-person narrator in contemporary Holocaust narratives. While use of this device risks an inappropriate level of identification with those whose experience is both extreme and unknowable, I argue that this problem may be resolved to an extent through “transgenerational empathy”, an approach to the past that is self-reflexive, incorporates ideas of time, memory and generations, and moves both towards and away from the victims of the past in a simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. For this theory I draw on Dominick LaCapra’s definitions of empathy and “empathic unsettlement”, and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of the “fusion of horizons” between past and present. Transgenerational empathy involves giving equal weight to “memory” and “history”. An over-emphasis on memory leads to narratives that are merely identificatory, such as Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments. In contrast, W. G. Sebald’s use of a narrative persona in The Emigrants and Austerlitz enables transgenerational empathy in narrative by simultaneously imposing layers of distance while establishing close personal connection. Similarly, Jonathan Safran Foer’s third-generation aesthetic of “post-postmemory” in Everything is Illuminated uses a “dual persona” device to foreground empathically the abyss at the heart of any attempt to recapture the past. My analysis of these authors draws on the writings of Gillian Rose, Paul Ricoeur, Marianne Hirsch and Jacques Derrida. However, the concept of “transgenerational empathy” would benefit from further research, both in terms of its “temporal dimension” and the use of narrative personae by other contemporary authors such as Philip Roth.

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