The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War [Hardcover]

Adam Nossiter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 16, 2001

Adam Nossiter spent part of his youth in France. During those years, in the mid-1960s, President de Gaulle forged the myth that France bravely resisted the German occupiers of World War II and that the nation was innocent in the crimes of the Holocaust. Collaboration with Germany and the deportations of Jews were subjects not dwelt on -- not until many years later.
THE ALGERIA HOTEL is Nossiter's intensely personal confrontation with the effects of this awakening to the underside of the French record in the war. For three years he lived and traveled in France, listening to people talk about the war -- mapping their stories, silences, evasions, and even lies. In Bordeaux, Nossiter follows the trial of Maurice Papon, the retired French official accused a half century later of orchestrating the deportation of Jews. He settles in Vichy, the seat of France's wartime government; shadowed by the Algeria Hotel, which housed the agency for Jewish affairs, Nossiter journeys into the dark heart of France's compromises with the Nazis. In Tulle, he listens for the echoes of a single afternoon when the Nazis carried out a terrible massacre of the town's residents.
An artful weave of vivid portraits, clear-eyed reporting, and meticulous historical research, The Algeria Hotel is an absorbing and resonant portrait of a nation and its people. Illuminating the many ways painful memories of the past leave their mark on the present, Nossiter reveals deep truths about how we remember and why we forget. The result is a searching and beautifully written narrative of how the French today live their lives haunted by the war and its crimes.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nossiter takes on some weighty issues in this disappointing study. A former New York Times journalist and author of Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers, he spent part of his childhood in De Gaulle's France, which prided itself on resisting the Nazis, until in later decades, a much uglier truth France' s cooperation with the Nazi regime and its deportation of Jews began to come to light. Nossiter attempts to explore the effects of this double consciousness through three communities. First, he focuses on the trial, in Bordeaux, of Maurice Papon, who was instrumental in deporting French Jews to the camps of Eastern Europe. Nossiter then moves on to Vichy, a resort town-turned-headquarters of P‚tain's Collaborationist government. The book's last section deals with the southern working-class town of Tulle, where, in retaliation for a Resistance raid, the SS rounded up the town's men and publicly hanged 99 of them in a single afternoon. Nossiter has done his homework: the book is replete with names, facts, anecdotes and observations. But he set himself a near-impossible task to take the pulse of an entire country and compounds it with a first-person narrative that keeps readers from engaging with the people and events described. Add to this the fact that Nossiter is delving back 50 years, and the result is a series of disconnected and uneven vignettes connected by Nossiter's constant reminders to readers of what he's trying to do. His voice is not compelling enough to carry such a lengthy, weighty narrative. Nossiter's exploration will likely be sought out only by Francophiles (and Francophobes) and those interested in scholarly research on the topic.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

It should surprise no one that the four years of fascist rule in France, anathematized with the humble disyllable "Vichy," spark memories so painful and humiliating for those who lived through them that many have felt that the entire episode was better relegated to oblivion. Employing journalistic persistence and scholarly fastidiousness, reporter and author Nossiter (Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers) explores the peculiar relationship between truth and memory via interviews with some who witnessed that time, many of whom wished never to recall what they had seen and some who simply denied it altogether. This book ponders the function of memory and the willingness of the French to come to terms with their history. Not a scholarly study but a journalist's investigation, this is an excellent complement to the work of Robert O. Paxton (Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944) and is recommended for both public and academic libraries. Michael F. Russo, Louisiana State Univ. Libs.,
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395902452
• ISBN-13: 978-0395902455
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,323,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fascinating and illuminating, uncovers the myths of the past, August 8, 2001

By 

Larry Mark "editor of MyJewishBooks.com" (nyc) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War (Hardcover)

Should sleeping dogs be left to lie (or tell lies)? There are those who wish not to remember, and those who find it difficult to forget. In 1966, Adam Nossiter was six years of age and living in Paris' 14e with his family. His father was a reporter for The Washington Post, covering France and President de Gaulle. His father was enamored with the big-nosed President. It was a time that you heard "[ I / That person ] was in the resistance" as much as you heard "Bonjour." De Gaulle promoted the myth that all of France was in the Resistance against Hitler and that the Vichy government was benign. Not even the Jews of France and the Marais discussed the deportations of 25% of their co-religionists. The film, "The Sorrow and the Pity," was banned from French television. Why mess up a pleasant life and a myth-based collective conscious with reality, let's just forget. As a child, Nossiter remembers that he stayed away from their home's sewing room. It was the place where it was said that the prior tenant, Thierry de Martel, a famed brain surgeon (but a right wing, anti Semitic French nationalist) killed himself when German troops entered Paris in June 1940. The sewing room cast a shadow on the author's childhood, just a WWII, its war crimes, and its myths cast a shadow on French society to this day.

In light of the recent trend of some French citizens to face the truth about not only Vichy collaboration, but Vichy's striving to do rid the country of democracy and the republique and replace it with authoritarian rule, Nossiter travels to three towns in France to illuminate France's population and their legacy of WWII. He lives there over 3 years. His quotes the papers from the time, its ads, the trials, its calls for a Juif-free culture. In Bordeaux, he follows the unsettling six month trial of 87 year old Maurice Papon, who stood accused of deporting 8 of 10 trains of 1,560 French Jews to their deaths (as the post-war head of the police in Paris under de Gaulle, he also helmed the murders of dozens of Algerian protestors). The trial provokes the population and stirs up memories; it is seen as an irritation by many of the old guard. In a dilapidated Vichy, the seat of the collaborationist government, the author researches what really happened during the war, and what myths were created about collaboration and resistance. Why were only 28,000 of the 1.5 million Vichy functionaries ever reprimanded? Is living in Vichy like residing in a town named Dachau? Why should Vichy take the blame when Petain was just as popular in Paris? In Tulle, a town relatively shielded from the war, he listens for the echoes of a Nazi massacre that occurred in June 1944. Nossiter, a former reporter for The NYT and the Atlanta Journal Constitution brings to French History the same keen observations that he brought to his previous work on Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Can a time of illogic be judged from the current time of logic? How do you live with the past? How do the victims continue to live with the persecutors? How do myths make life easier? Nossiter's writing style pulls you in with the force of a whirlpool. By the way, for those wondering about the title, the Algeria Hotel in Vichy housed the offices of the Commissariat Generale aux Questions Juives (but if you ask some of people who worked for the commission, they will tell you to this day that they didn't know what went on there)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A worthwhile read, April 6, 2002

By 

Judith Bradley - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War (Hardcover)

As a reader with no particular agenda except that a book be well-written and/or informative, I found Nossiter's latest work to be a bit weak stylistically but strong in reportage.He describes all too well the phenomena of the Emperor's new clothes - townspeople turning a blind eye to the obvious, and rationalizing their actions to an extreme. Shadows of the horrors which occured hang over the selected three towns he visited even today though the people and the physical settings have changed almost beyond recognition.I found especially interesting the part the American Embassy in Vichy and its employees played during these dark days.A book which increases my knowledge of a time and place and which impels me to do further reading on the subject is one I like to recommend to others.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A compelling read, March 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War (Hardcover)

Usually, there's nothing like a thorough French bashing to put me in good spirits...I feel I'm entitled after living there for many years. But this book was very effective in showing the compromising, cowardly side of the French during WWII in a very subtle and unsettling way. Nossiter, like a good journalist, lets people tell their own stories, and somehow get people to talk themselves into some pretty deep holes. My one criticism is that the book is too scholarly, the topic is certainly dramatic, and I think that it drags a bit in some places. I once read that the French haven't yet figured out which side they were on in WWII. So true.