Customer Reviews

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

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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)

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.

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.

"Algeria Hotel" by Adam Nossiter. Subtitled: "France, Memory, And The Second World War". Houghton Mifflin Company, New York 2001.

Adam Nossiter is an excellent writer. In this book, he has attempted to catch the conscience of the French Nation by examining their memory of collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War. Armed with an excellent command of the French language, he spent some three years in the towns of Bordeaux, Tulle and Vichy, itself. He was at Bordeaux for the trial of Maurice Papon, who had collaborated with the Germans in the removal of French Jews from France. The author, Adam Nossiter, interviewed various people, high and low levels, about their war time experiences. He records a general reluctance of the French to discuss their roles in the war and at the Vichy government center in that tiny spa town. When the interview came to the question of the French Jews and the Vichy collaboration which permitted the Nazis to transport the Jews out of France, the people being interviewed really shut down.

The author has expended a great effort on making the book great literature. His writing delves into the basic human condition in that he examines why we are willing to forget the bad times, the evil that has been done , and we bury the those memories under "good" memories. Having said that, I would like to record that the statement of Maurice Papon, on page 84, really defines the difficulties of the Historian in reconstructing the past, event the recent past. The author has written excellent literature, but Mr. Nossiter has missed the mark in writing History. After I had finished the book, I was able to quote "Mark the music" (Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice", 5.1), as to the quality of the writing, but as to the history, I struggled to recall if Maurice Papon had been convicted of collaborating, and if so, what was his sentence?

The book has period photos of the certain buildings in each town. One of the most poignant was the photo of Fr. Jean Espinasse, the R.C. priest who attended the victims of the hanging in Tulle.

I didn't know much about wartime in France. So, I found the book about Vichy, Bordeaux, and Tulle very informative. The author writes extrememly well, and the subject is intersting to say the least. the author also was extremely creative and thorough in ferreting out survivors of that period for interviews.

All in all, while I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to readers intersted in a view of France not often seen in the popular histories, it seemd to go on a bit. I found the part about Vichy the most readable, and memorable.

I'm not really sure why I didn't enjoy it more. At the conclusion, I was left with a feeling that there was less there than met the eye.

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.

The author takes upon himself a thesis too difficult argue successfully. His conclusions are evident before his evidence is presented. I found the narrative clumsy and repetitive.