Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"intelligent, intimate and elegantly presented . . . Algeria Hotel is a salutory lesson in the lessons of history."--Richard Bernstein The New York Times
About the Author
Adam Nossiter, formerly a reporter for the New York Times and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, is the author of Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers, which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Sewing Room 1
I. Bordeaux, Papon, and the Exigencies of Memory
The Stain on the Stone 19 1 Papons Wager 23 2 The Missing Context 38 3 The Exigencies of Memory 56 4 The Judgment of Papon: Historys Revenge 75
II. Vichy and the Pleasures of Forgetting
BordeauxVichy 95 5 The Past Effaced 97 6 Reimagining the Past 119 7 Interlude: Escape from Vichy 145 8 Vichy and the Jews 174 9 Vichy Lives 208 10 Postscript: Xavier Vallat at the Parc 215
III.Tulle: Living Memory
VichyTulle 219 11 Its Normal Life 220 12 Unavoidable Past 226 13 Measuring Silence 232 14 A Difficult Story 240 15 The Privileged Witness 246 16 Living Memory 256 17 Woven History 269
Conclusion 273 Notes 279 Bibliography 288 Acknowledgments 299