This paper is trying to answer the theoretical and philosophical question that the panel raises by a concrete historical case. The panel examines a possibility of constructing a multidirectional memory and multidimensional historicism of the colonial atrocities in North Africa, on the one hand, and the genocide of the Jews and non Jews by the Nazis on the European soil.
To achieve this task, I have chosen three iconic historical protagonists (Maurice Papon, Germaine Tillion, and Yacef Saadi) whose life itineraries and destinies have been crossed trough time and through the symbolism of the physical space: Europe and North Africa during and in the aftermath of WWII.
Maurice Papon was a Vichy regime official whose career shifted from his appointment as secretary of the prefecture of the Gironde in 1942, through his terms as a prefect in Morocco and Algeria, to the end of the Algerian War in 1962 when he was a prefect in Paris.
Germaine Tillion, the iconic figure of French Resistance worked as an ethnologists at the Musée de l’Homme and in 1934 was sent to Algeria on a scientific mission to work on the Berber speaking population in the Aurès. Once there, her mission was interrupted in May 1940 and she returned to the occupied France. She joined the Resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Ravensbrück.
Saadi Yacef, the iconic symbol of the Algerian War and the “Battle of Algiers”. He was the FLN's military chief of the Zone Autonome d'Alger (Autonomous Zone of Algiers), during the siege of the Casbah.
Through a description and analysis of the life experience of the three protagonists and the historical discourse and events that surrounded them, the paper tries to offer a practical answer to the following theoretical the question: Could it be methodologically and epistemologically possible to juxtapose and/or bridge the human experience(s) of the victims and survivors of the Nazi camps and the victims and survivors of the Algerian War and of the French colonial atrocities in North Africa?
By raising and trying to answer these questions, the paper tries to upset the limits and also the lines of flight [lignes de fuite] between the “center” and the “periphery”, the “periphery” and the “center”, the colonial setting and the hexagon, History and Memory?
Middle East/Near East Studies