Transnational Heritage in Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid

Abstract

Boualem Sansal's novel The German Mujahid (2008) recounts the Schiller brothers' respective trajectories through their combined diaries after the murder of their parents, Hans and Aïcha Schiller, in a remote Berber village in Algeria in 1994, and the subsequent discovery of their father's dark Nazi past. The essay examines how the diary as a genre is used to reconstruct the brothers' lapses of memory, and ultimately becomes a tool in the quest for identity. Beschea-Fache demonstrates that the novel questions familial and national responsibility for crimes and the politics of transmission of memory, and explores possible responses through the brothers' journeys. Drawing on the multifocal structure of Sansal's novel, the essay examines the politics of memory transmission in the familial, national, and global spheres and thereby illuminates the limitations of a transnational heritage. Against the commonly held belief that one's sense of belonging is dependent on one's community inclusion in the national history (Renan 1882; Nora 1989), Sansal's protagonists help us rethink how national identity is produced.

Notes

¹ In this study, because a translation of the novel exists, I will integrate the translated text into my analysis. However, when necessary, I will also provide the original text in the footnotes because of the importance of some culturally charged terminology.

² In this context, French banlieues roughly correspond to housing projects. They developed in their contemporary form in the 1970s, mainly to respond to a housing crisis – due to the Baby Boom and because numerous workers and their families settled in France – urban developers created low-income housing projects to accommodate the rapid population growth around the cities. In French culture, banlieues and cités have very broad and complex connotations, and refer to a stigmatised ‘subculture’ that combines working class, immigration, location, and youth as some of its main components (Fregnac-Clave 2008).

³ Beur, a term coined in the early 1980s, designates children of North African immigrants. In popular culture, it is often associated with the banlieue, referring to youth, boys, and young men for the most part, who have difficulty within the school system, with integrating into mainstream society, and who are stereotypically associated with delinquency. In the 1990s, however, many successful young Beur helped challenge stereotypes and rehabilitated the Beur and banlieue image, even though strong stigmatisation remains.

⁴ Ali is in fact a friend of Hans Schiller, who fought with him during the Algerian war of independence.

⁵ I am using my literal translation here to illustrate the point, ‘Mon pauvre Malrich, tu portes bien ton surnom’ (Sansal 2008: 47).

⁶ Here, the use of a more literal translation of the original text allows access to some specific cultural connotations that can be lost in translation. The English translation only refers to self-righteousness (2009: 9), while the French precisely uses the terms ‘good citizen’ (2008: 11).

⁷ The translation of the novel is a British-English version; therefore the term used for cité is estate. But in American English the term estate is not used to designate public housing project. The cité, as mentioned in a previous note, has a rather broad meaning, and refers to a low-income housing neighborhood. To avoid any confusion in terminology, I will use the French term cité in the article; however, the term estate might appear occasionally when it is part of a quote from the translated novel.

⁸ The French original uses an expression equivalent to ‘consign to oblivion’.

⁹ ‘Dis, ton père était allemand … il était nazi? Je lui ai répondu: Bien sûr que non, il avait émigré en Algérie, il était avec les combattants de la liberté pour libérer ton bled … il est mort en martyr’ (2008: 150).

¹⁰ The term kapos refers to Nazi concentration camp prisoners who held any administrative positions.