988773

research-article2021
MSS0010.1177/1750698020988773Memory StudiesKaplan

Article

Memory Studies

Too painful to forget, too painful

2021, Vol. 14(4) 834­–855
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
to remember: Ashes of memory sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1750698020988773
https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020988773
in Marguerite Duras and Alain journals.sagepub.com/home/mss

Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour

(1959) and Duras’s La douleur (1985)

Brett Ashley Kaplan

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Abstract
This essay threads the striking images of the couple’s embrace at the beginning of Hiroshima mon amour
through an examination of the film’s exploration of memory and victim and perpetrator traumas. Duras and
Resnais render the lovers almost indistinguishable as, they hold each other, encased in ash. As they embrace,
something gently falls on them, encrypts them, isolates them from their surroundings but simultaneously
embeds them in their respective histories. If, for Derrida, ash becomes the paradigm for the trace, we can
see how this image becomes paradigmatic for memory’s unspooling threads; the film rejects an either/or
memory or forgetting when it is a question of traumatic pasts. By re-reading Hiroshima mon amour through
the powerful metaphorics of ash and against echoes of the international and dramatic rise in racist discourse,
an increased anxiety about nuclear catastrophe, and a return to Duras’s wartime “memoir” La douleur, I show
that these texts’ representation of memory and the rotating axes of perpetration and victimization open up
larger questions about the trauma of both sides of the culpability line. This reading reveals the fluid border
between victimization and perpetration in ways that help explain how both victims and perpetrators are
traumatized. Interpreting the film and memoir in this way helps to blaze a path to envisioning an understanding
of committing crimes as itself inflicting (self-imposed) trauma. The most optimistic possible implication (one
that is completely unlikely) is that if perpetration is also viewed as traumatizing then perpetrators would no
longer fling nuclear bombs at the racialized other and expect to sleep well.

Keywords
ashes, Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, memory, perpetration, Resnais, trauma, victimization

“I would prefer ashes as the better paradigm for what I call the trace—something that erases itself totally,
radically, while presenting itself.”

—Jacques Derrida

Corresponding author:
Brett Ashley Kaplan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 3080 FLB, 707 S Matthews, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Email: bakaplan@illinois.edu
Kaplan 835

Figure 1.  The lovers entwined, 2:20.

Hiroshima mon amour (1959), directed by Alain Resnais from a script written by Marguerite
Duras, tussles with memory’s vagaries as it examines the enduring trauma of nuclear catastrophe
through the love story of two unnamed characters: Elle (Emmanuelle Riva), a French woman who
fell in love with a German soldier during World War II and Lui (Eiji Okada), a Japanese architect
marked indelibly by the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. The architect draws out the memo-
ries of the past story of complicity and love between the French actress and the German soldier as
the current lovers play out their present through their pasts and superimpose one upon the other
ceaselessly. The very structure of the famous and enduring image of the entwined bodies of the
lovers near the beginning of Hiroshima mon amour (see Figure 1; 2:20) insists on a turning of
victimization into something else: ashes into sweat, memory into stark present. Cathy Caruth
(2013), through reading Jacques Derrida and Sigmund Freud, locates “a history that burns away
the very possibility of conceiving memory, that leaves the future itself, in ashes” (p. 81). The stun-
ning image of the ashed lovers functions as an apt metaphor for the “burning up” of memory itself
in the aftermath of catastrophe and as the image threads its way through our imaginaries it provides
a space through which to unpack the indelible nature of memory as trace.
The striking images of the couple’s embrace set the scene for the film’s exploration of memory
and victim and perpetrator traumas by rendering the lovers as almost indistinguishable; race and
gender disappears, initially, as they hold each other, encased in ash. As they embrace, something
gently falls on them, encrypts them, isolates them from their surroundings but simultaneously
embeds them in their respective histories. Even though Duras (1960) specifies that the two should
be “racialement, etc., éloignés le plus qu’il est possible de l’être” (p. 11) the racial difference
between them remains unstable, and the ash visually erases their shared trauma.1 If, for Derrida,
ash becomes paradigmatic of the trace, we can see how this image metamorphoses into a paradigm
for memory as Hiroshima mon amour unspools its threads and rejects an either/or memory or for-
getting when it is a question of traumatic pasts. The film revisits this powerful scene by cinemati-
cally underscoring this very superimposition many times, including, as I discuss below, the
catalyzing moment when the hand of the Japanese lover transfigures into the hand of the dead
German soldier, and the intercutting of the traumatic landscapes of Nevers and Hiroshima.
By re-reading the film through the powerful metaphorics of ash and against echoes of the inter-
national and dramatic rise in racist discourse, an increased anxiety about nuclear catastrophe, and
a return to Duras’s wartime “memoir” La douleur, I show that these texts’ representation of mem-
ory and the rotating axes of perpetration and victimization open up larger questions about the
836 Memory Studies 14(4)

trauma of both sides of the culpability line, revealing the fluid border between victimization and
perpetration in ways that help explain how both victims and perpetrators are traumatized.
Interpreting the film and memoir in this way helps to blaze a path to envisioning an understanding
of committing crimes as itself inflicting (self-imposed) trauma. The most optimistic possible impli-
cation (one that is completely unlikely) is that if perpetration is also viewed as traumatizing then
perpetrators would no longer fling nuclear bombs at the racialized other and expect to sleep well.
While Hiroshima mon amour has been read extensively, no one has to date argued that its con-
tradictions, ambivalences, and valences construct a case for an ethical approach to trauma that
considers both victims and perpetrators. I argue that Hiroshima mon amour and La douleur (to
which I turn at the end of this essay), when read together, expose how deep and ineluctable trauma
experienced across gender, racial, national affiliation, and victim-perpetrator implication in the
aftermath of nuclear catastrophe can lead us to an enhanced understanding of perpetration and its
co-habitation with victimization. The embrace of the couple, their loss of the racial distinctions and
victim-perpetrator differences that are meant, precisely, to mark them, their dramatic and dual veil-
ing in ash remain as traces throughout the film, as memories of catastrophe that crack open exter-
nally imposed distinctions. By thinking through what Caruth (2013) terms a “language of ashes”
(p. 87) we can see how traumatic pasts will always be at once visible and invisible, remembered,
and forgotten.

Doubly intolerable
As both the enormity of scholarship and the vastness of arguments and disagreements therein dem-
onstrates, Marguerite Duras is one of the most known, prolific, loved and hated, French writers and
screenwriters. Among her many texts, the peak in terms of wide circulation is her autobiographical
novel, The Lover (L’Amant, 1984) which won the Prix Goncourt in 1984 and was made into a
popular film in 1992; but already in 1959, Hiroshima mon amour had been nominated for the Best
Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Born in Saigon in 1914 (and died in Paris in 1996),
Duras’s youth experienced abroad shaped the aesthetic of her writing which often includes uncon-
ventional desire, isolation, marginality, and longing. Susan Suleiman (1991) discusses the side-
lining of the avant-garde in connection with the marginality of women’s writing and notes that
Duras felt in 1974, before she became a world-renowned writer, “doubly intolerable” (p. 185)
because her work was both revolutionary and avant-garde. Duras may also have keenly felt doubly
intolerable because she was both French and somehow not French and because she consistently
resisted social norms and gendered sexual expectations.
Alain Resnais (1922–2014) directed numerous films that have become canonized and widely
appreciated for their innovative narrative structures, explorations of complex and novel cinematic
devices, and interpretations of the diffuse, changeable nature of memory. Resnais worked through-
out his career and to great effect with writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet (L’Anneé dernière à
Mariendbad) and with Holocaust survivor Jorge Semprun (La guerre est finie, Stavisky). Invited to
make a feature-length film about Hiroshima after his groundbreaking early Holocaust documen-
tary Nuit et Brouillard (1955), which expanded the international scope of Holocaust memory,
Resnais famously struggled; only when Duras agreed to write the script did the project soar. As
Roy Armes explains, Duras was brought in to the scripting of Hiroshima in order not to remake
Nuit et Brouillard into a film about the atomic bomb. The ashes at the beginning of the film, then,
metaphorize both the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and carry the trace of the ashes of the crema-
torium during the Nazi genocide. Derrida (1987) describes ashes as “ce qui reste sans rester de
l’holocauste, du brûle-tout, de l’incendie l’encens” (p. 43).2 Becoming more and more convinced
that one could not make a documentary about the bomb, Duras’s script was meant to be a “love
Kaplan 837

story. . .in which the atomic agony would not be absent” (Armes, 1968: 66). The original docu-
mentary drive of the project that became a fictional feature film explains why Resnais insisted on
visual detail of Hiroshima and the bombing: before the appearance of the entwined bodies, a freeze
frame holds on an aerial map of the area to be bombed. The credits roll over this map then a blank
screen flickers while Giovanni Fusco’s modernist score plays and then we see the ash-covered
nudes. This entwinement in ash gives way to the bodies covered in sweat that then yields to suc-
cessively clear bodies. Lovers emerge from the ash as if filming Pompeii backwards. Resnais
(1960) notes that, “Dans Hiroshima, le début n’est pas seulement une représentation du couple,
c’est une image poétique. Et la cendre sur les corps, ça ne se réfère à aucune réalité anecdotique,
c’est une pensée” (p. 938).3 The poetic image, the thought (pensée) that Resnais imagines here, is
expressly not meant to refer to any identifiable “real” and yet it affectively carries the weight of the
bomb, the Shoah, and the memoryscapes of impossible pasts. The intense proximity of the pair
makes it initially impossible to separate the bodies because the film equally gazes at them through
the ash as victims but this common victimization changes polarities throughout, thus visually
underscoring the film’s eschewing of any simple assumption of innocence and guilt. Hiroshima
mon amour employs the language of ash to demonstrate the aftereffects of war on those aligned
with victimization and perpetration.
Duras spells out a slightly different image for the entwined bodies than the more abstract ver-
sion discussed by Resnais. She explains in the synopsis (1960) that, “Ce couple de fortune, on ne
le voit pas au début du film. Ni elle. Ni lui. On voit en leur lieu et place des corps mutilés—à hau-
teur de la tête et des hanches—remuants—en proie soit à l’amour, soit à l’agonie—et recouverts
successivement des cendres, des rosées, de la mort atomique—et des sueurs de l’amour accompli”
(pp. 9–10).4 Here the description does not quite match what the film performs—parts of bodies
appear but intact; they appear, in fact, less like the victims of the bomb than she perhaps envisaged
and more in keeping with Resnais’s poetic image. They are sculptural rather than mutilated, their
psyches rather than their bodies traumatized.
Hiroshima mon amour could be fruitfully compared to other postwar films that treat nuclear
catastrophe. In Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949) for example, the main character, a detective
whose pistol has been stolen, and the criminal who stole it, are both traumatized veterans of the
Second World War. A later Kurosawa film, Record of a Living Being (also called I Live in Fear,
1955), focuses on a patriarch who experiences renewed and acute terror of a subsequent bomb after
the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests. Living in fear, he attempts to export his entire family to Brazil where
he hopes to be safe from another racially motivated bomb. While the main character, Nakajima
(played by Toshiro Mifune), is an extreme example of a PTSD sufferer, the film argues that every-
one in Japan in 1955 was and rightly should have been worried about another nuclear attack. While
I do not have space here for a sustained reading of these fascinating Kurosawa films, I mention
them to underscore that when Hiroshima mon amour was set (Duras specifies 1957) the expecta-
tion would have been that everyone who survived the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
would carry (literally) in their bones radiation and figuratively the ineradicable past nuclear catas-
trophe; but they might also be weighed down by the fear of a possible future apocalypse.5 It remains
unclear, because we are not granted much of his consciousness, whether the Japanese architect in
Hiroshima mon amour suffers from PTSD or stoically moved on from his experience of victimiza-
tion, perhaps because that experience was shadowed by his role in fighting with the Axis powers?
This remains an open, intriguing question that the film staunchly refuses to answer.
The voice-offs that inaugurate the dialogue and dialectical nature of Hiroshima mon amour
offer a long series of negations that speak to the impossibility of witnessing and/or fully remember-
ing the experience of victimization. “Lui: Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien. Elle: J’ai tout vu.
Tout” (Duras, 1960: 22).6 He begins the dialogue by insisting, before we have heard her claim, that
838 Memory Studies 14(4)

Figure 2.  The mushroom cloud at the Hiroshima Peace Museum, 4:45.

she can have neither seen nor remembered, and he repeats this verbatim several times. As Elle’s
voice-off claims to see the hospital at Hiroshima, the image discloses people in the hospital looking
directly at the camera so her claim on vision becomes deflected back at the unnamed hospitalized
injured. She then asserts that she saw the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum four times, as if the
layering of visits could turn her into a witness. Established in 1955, what she experiences would
then have been only two years old. Some of the (1955) representations of the bombing are quite
schematic. A stylized mushroom cloud appears on the wall (see Figure 2; 4:45) and the simplified
nature of these images underscores that the photographs are reconstructions, that Elle can have had
no access to the traumatic event itself. But Duras also has Elle observe keenly the way that the visi-
tors to the museum imbibe these reconstructions. By thus reminding us of the mediations of mem-
ory, Duras and Resnais underscore the traces of nuclear catastrophe that stretch beyond individual
psyches: thus, that Elle could not have remembered directly is evident—she was in France at the
time the U.S. bombed Hiroshima, but that she remembers in a more global sense is also under-
scored. In other words, the structure of the negations explains the unstable nature of postmemorial
witnessing. By issuing these negations Duras and Resnais highlight the inherent impossibility of
true witnessing, all we can do is embrace under the rain of ash. As Primo Levi (1986) famously
asserted “we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses” (p. 63)—only those who perished in the
worst can be said to be witnesses and this assertion met by negation puts this truth into play.
At the moment of the bombing, Elle and Lui were in two very different situations in relation
to victimization and perpetration. The bomb occurred 1 year after Elle had survived being shorn,
going mad, and losing her lover. Duras thus structurally situates her as a survivor of victimiza-
tion more than as a collaborator with the enemy; but as we are invited to identify with her
Kaplan 839

victimization we are also invited to complicate that stance by recalling with her, her love for the
German soldier. Lui, on the other hand, was fighting with the Axis powers: “Ma famille, elle,
était à Hiroshima. Je faisais la guerre” (Duras, 1960: 39).7 This is the only mention of him fight-
ing in the war while his kin were in Hiroshima during the bombing; his victimization through
affinity with the horrible deaths of members of his family is doubled by his association with
Nazism. Duras and Resnais thus structurally situate him as a victim—due to the pathos evoked
in this loss—but also implicitly as a perpetrator through his engagement in the war on the Axis
side. In describing perpetrator trauma, Raya Morag (2012) points to how “The posttraumatic
perpetrator simultaneously addresses his or her guilt as well as society’s indirect complicitous
guilt, thus defining the conflictual character of the perpetrator complex” (p. 125). And Morag
(2012) rightly argues that discussing the trauma of the perpetrator can be “perceived as unseemly
or even unimaginable” (p. 96). This sense of the impossibility of understanding the traumatic
nature of perpetration appears here in the form of the elision of any elaboration on Lui’s involve-
ment in the war. His experience is simply erased, burnt up. Because angry locals in Nevers vic-
timize Elle by accusing her of collaborating with the enemy, her role in relation to perpetration
remains ambiguous. In parallel, the Japanese architect’s family were victims of the bomb, but he
escaped their fate precisely because he fought on the Axis side in the Pacific theater; this partner-
ship with Axis powers remains present but undiscussed.
Resnais, describing his and Duras’s assumptions about the German soldier, notes (1960)
that : “C’est aussi pour laisser sa liberté de jugement au public que nous n’avons pas indiqué
que le soldat allemand était anti-nazi, c’était pour nous implicite” (p. 937).8 This fascinatingly
indicates that Resnais and Duras had it in mind that Elle’s wartime lover was anti-Nazi but
decided to make that important point part of the narrative neither visually nor semantically.
When Elle remembers that she and the German soldier were to travel to Bavaria and be mar-
ried, she says nothing about how she feels about relocating not only to Germany to but to the
place that came to be—for good reason—considered the spiritual home of Nazism. Had the
film indicated specifically that the soldier held an anti-Nazi political position, then his situa-
tion as perpetrator would be less clear. As far as I have seen, critics of the film have not picked
up on this implicit assumption that the German soldier was anti-Nazi, but they have found that
the memory of the soldier is implicated in a larger history. Sarah French (2008) argues that the
film was ahead of its time in terms of grappling with memory—before the “memory boom.”
And she also stresses that there is a sort of claustrophobia to Elle’s melancholic memory, that
that memory surfaces as a trap for her, an inescapable scene of trauma.9 Cathy Caruth (2013)
finds that “Traumatic memory. . .totters between remembrance and erasure, producing a his-
tory that is, in its very events, a kind of inscription of the past; but also a history constituted
by the erasure of its traces” (pp. 78–79). Indeed, the return or resurgence of Elle’s memories
of the war are crucial to the text, yet while these do not dissolve into the universal they signify
profoundly beyond this character’s history.10 The negations that characterize much of the
film’s dialogue indicate that none of this can ever be or has ever been forgotten. They demon-
strate that, try as one might to resist, reject, or deny the indelible impact of nuclear catastro-
phe, one will always and forever be traumatized by it and the past will perpetually intrude into
the present (and, as we saw in some of Kurosawa’s films, into the future as well). Most critics
assume that Elle forgot the memory of the German soldier until the hand of the Japanese archi-
tect triggered it. But I argue here that the film offers a more nuanced view of memory and one
that represents the uncanny simultaneity of remembering and forgetting at once that resonates
with the structuring of both major characters as simultaneously victims and perpetrators. We
see again, in our mind’s eye, the couple enfolded in the ashes of catastrophe neither forgetting
nor remembering.
840 Memory Studies 14(4)

Figure 3.  The twitching hand of the Japanese architect, 19:10.

The symbol of love’s forgetfulness

“A huge fireball going up on the back of the mushroom cloud like the devil mounting heaven. The most
beautiful thing we have ever seen, boiling in its own blood. . .and spreading until it obscures the sun,
spreading above our heads and raining down the remains of the desert.”

—Nicole Krauss

Within the narrative of Hiroshima mon amour—and I stress that this may well be different than
the competing narratives of Elle’s memory—the memory of the German lover erupts very sud-
denly and violently through a postcoital and peaceful scene. The French actress and the Japanese
architect rest in the hotel together, she drinks her coffee while taking in the view from the balcony.
She returns to the bedside and watches her lover sleeping. A long hold fixes on her as she gazes
at the Japanese architect. A slight twitch in his hand (see Figure 3; 19:10) makes her face register
horror as Resnais intercuts a quick flashback of Elle kissing the bloody body of the soldier. We
see the traumatic memory emerge from the German hand to crack open the peaceful Japanese
scene; the hand of the German soldier now twitches and the war surges back into the present, she
kisses her dead lover, the German soldier has returned to haunt her. Wrapped as she is in a kimono,
while below the balcony Resnais inserts images of people peacefully biking along, the present in
Japan with the Japanese architect cannot hold her as the German/French past reclaims her. Duras
and Resnais visually indicate that war trauma does not end for her, as the traumatic memories
return unbidden, involuntarily; war trauma does not end for the architect as he sees all around him
evidence of genocide, and we wonder if his involuntary twitch were not a symptom of unspoken
trauma. He does not remember his dreams, he tells her, so we do not know what might be hidden
there.
Roger Luckhurst (2008) notes that, “Alain Resnais invented the traumatic flashback in
Hiroshima mon amour, the visual analogue of hands transposing one disaster upon another”
(p.185). This phrase, “traumatic flashback” captures the transfer of one traumatic scene to the other
that the hand conjures up. Robert Harvey and other scholars have termed this transposition of the
hands a Proustian moment for Elle as it brings back in a flood the hand of the German lover which
Resnais then intercuts with the Japanese architect’s hand (see Figure 4; 19:15). In an interview,
Jean Carta and Michel Meslin (1960) suggested to Resnais that this moment is Proustian: “C’est
Kaplan 841

Figure 4.  The hand of the German lover, 19:15.

un mécanisme semblable à celui de la mémoire involontaire chez Proust” (p. 943).11 Involuntary
memories in Proust appear unbidden, in just the way that Resnais intercut the memory of the
German soldier’s hand over, or behind or below, the present image of the Japanese architect’s
sleeping, twitching hand. The film offers no evidence that Elle had suppressed this memory up
until this point but its eruption is the first time that the audience sees what she may well always
have had in her consciousness. Indeed, the memory of the war and the German lover would likely
not have been forgotten by her; but then again they may have been too traumatic to be remembered.
Far from having repressed or forgotten her German lover, in the scene in the Tea Room she tells the
Japanese architect expressly “Je tremble d’avoir oublié tant d’amour. . . (Duras, 1960: 99) (see
Figure 5; 57:55).12 The love of the soldier was so great that the fear is of remembering, not forget-
ting, and we never know with certitude whether she forgot, or repressed, or refused to remember
or whether, in fact, memory had perpetually flooded her, coated her like ash, and the scene in the
hotel was merely one instance of a constant flow of traumatic flashbacks. In describing the dead
German lover she tells the Japanese architect how she found him, not quite dead, on the bank of the
river at the very moment of their rendezvous where, were they not star-crossed lovers, she was
meant to become his Bavarian bride: “le moment de sa mort m’a échappé vraiment.  .  ..je peux dire
que je n’arrivais pas à trouver la moindre différence entre ce corps mort et le mien” (1:00:02;
Duras, 1960: 100).13 Here Elle completely amalgamates herself with her dead lover in a figurative
reminder of the unforgettable image of merged bodies covered in ash that so strikingly opened the
film. While no explicit political discussion transpires here, Resnais and Duras also offer neither
political distanciation nor any indication that the German soldier was anti-Nazi.
Hiroshima mon amour combines the horror of Hiroshima with a love story, thus explaining the
curious title while again returning us to love in the time of ash. But is Hiroshima the love of the
title, the very beloved? Or does the title follow from the architect being termed “Hiroshima”? The
film also plays with the illusion that you can never exist in love. Elle explains that: “De même que
dans l’amour cette illusion existe, cette illusion de pouvoir ne jamais oublier, de même j’ai eu
l’illusion devant Hiroshima que jamais je n’oublierai” (Duras, 1960: 28).14 By comparing the
power of love with the power of a nuclear bomb, Duras insists on the mutability of memory and its
constant struggle with forgetting. In “The Cure by Love” Kaja Silverman (2005) explains that, Elle
“left Nevers forever, so that it, too, would remain both itself encrypted, and a crypt for the German
842 Memory Studies 14(4)

Figure 5.  “I tremble at forgetting such love,” 57:55.

Figure 6.  “I’ll remember you as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness,” 1:05:22.

soldier” (p. 34). In glossing on the Japanese architect’s promise to turn their adventure into the
horror of oblivion, Silverman (2005) notes that he makes “forgetfulness the master trope for under-
standing not only the French woman’s relationship both to himself and the German soldier, but also
her blindness with respect to the atomic cataclysm” (p. 34). Rey Chow (2013) stresses that, “the
most crucial—one might say sacred—sound effect is in fact the absolute silence of the German
soldier, whose death authorizes her narrative” (p. 48). The architect promises her that after he for-
gets her, “je me souviendrai de toi comme de l’oubli de l’amour même” (Duras, 1960: 105) (see
Figure 6; 1:05:22).15 But, in a sense, the film unspools a story about the impossibility of forgetting
traumatic loves or, as the title indicates, traumatic historical events such as Hiroshima. When it is
a question of love one temporarily forgets the war and the national allegiances that externally situ-
ate one vis-à-vis one side of the polarity of victimization or perpetration. Memory burns up, bodies
blur amid the ashes.
When Elle tells Lui that, “Comme toi, je suis douée de mémoire. Je connais l’oubli” (Duras,
1960: 31) the image behind her words is of the “Hiroshima gift shop” (written in English and
Kaplan 843

Figure 7.  “No, you are not endowed with memory,” 11:49.

Japanese (see Figure 7; 11:49), as if the tacky gift shop belied her claim.16 Already in 1959
“Hiroshima” had been commodified; indeed, when Elle insists that she remembers, she conjures a
mediated “memory” of what has already been rendered representation in the museum. This is no
one’s memory but a state’s attempt to instill memory.17 The film renders this forgetting multiple
times. In one of these moments, as in the opening when the lovers are combined bodily by being
covered in ash, Elle amalgamates herself with Lui through a shared battle against forgetting:
“Comme toi, moi aussi, j’ai essayé de lutter de toutes mes forces contre l’oubli” (11:56; Duras,
1960: 32).18 It’s at the point when Elle observes his skin (“C’est fou ce que tu as une belle peau,”
Duras, 1960: 36) that the scene comes into the present of the narrative at 15:48 minutes; until that
moment we do not know who speaks and only her unaccented French and his accented French
indicate who is (possibly) who.19 Resnais and Duras put pressure on skin in the film and this has
led scholars of the haptic to, as Jennifer Barker (2009) does, term Hiroshima a “profound instance
of haptic visuality” (p. 59). Barker (2009) continues to note that the film, “suggests that human
history is rife with pain and suffused with pleasure, and that both are spoken most eloquently and
understood most deeply through the touch of skin upon skin” (p. 67). This epidermal difference
between Elle and Lui, invisible at the embrace covered by ash, is made more visible as the film
unfolds and we learn that the actor was alienated from the very language of the text.
Emmanuelle Riva describes the fact that Eiji Okada not only did not speak French but, after
doing the whole script by rote once had to re-do it due to a technical difficulty. Riva remembers: “Il
a tout appris phonétiquement. Quelle performance!” (Roob, 1986: 62).20 The “foreignness” of the
Japanese architect and the French woman are thus oddly reversed. She, a foreigner, is in Hiroshima
to make a film about peace while donning a kimono, but the language they speak is her native
tongue, foreign only to him. He only speaks Japanese once in the film, very briefly near the end and
Duras expressly asks that his words not be translated (they are nonetheless translated in the English
subtitles but not in the French version (Duras, 1960: 120)). Whereas the image of the entwined bod-
ies makes them seem so indelibly together, this rendering of his speech as foreign and hers as native
and the fact that the explicit discussion of his skin pierces the opening dialogue and in a sense inau-
gurates the film proper, ultimately serves to delineate the lovers.21 This beautiful skin of the architect
recalls wartime perpetration in at least two ways: the disturbing reports of Nazis turning the skin of
Jewish corpses into lampshades and the effects—as shown near the beginning of the film—of the
844 Memory Studies 14(4)

Figure 8.  The German soldier, 39:12.

atomic bomb removing the skin of Japanese victims. This double victimization further resonates
with the hair of the victims of Hiroshima and the Nazi genocide.
According to Vincent Intondi (2015), “following the bombing of Pearl Harbor a majority of
Americans developed a genocidal race hatred toward the Japanese” (p. 11). Intondi (2015) charts
diverse responses to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and contends that various Black
communities found that “racism was at the heart of Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons in
Japan” (p. 3). Lui imagines that when the war ended for Elle—and a year gap separates the termi-
nation of war for Elle (August 1944) and for Lui (August 1945)—Elle was with the Allies, cele-
brating (23:18). “Lui: Le monde entier était joyeux. Tu étais joyeuse avec le monde entier” (Duras,
1960: 50).22 He does not picture her, 1 year before Hiroshima was bombed, going mad, bald, suf-
fering, ashamed. For her, Hiroshima meant the final, international end of the war, not unethical
destruction of innocent, racialized, human lives. Similarly, when she pictures her German soldier
lover (see Figure 8; 39:12) she imagines him striding, proud, marching over to enfold her; she does
not see him as part of a racist genocidal machine. A chiasmus emerges, then, between the image of
victory and finality and the madness and being shorn for Elle and catastrophic destruction for Lui.
As Elle’s memoryscape unfolds we see an image of the wartime couple embracing in the ruins
that has all the conventions of the romantic: a ruined castle, a deep shadow, an impassioned kiss
(see Figure 9; 41:08). This could-be-Rochester-and-Jane scene amid the ruins forcefully marks the
attachment to the German lover. The fluctuating cityscapes toward the end that intercut Nevers
with Hiroshima underscore the sharp differences between the two cities, the two lovers. Unlike the
naked embrace at the opening, though, these beautiful ruins remain intact and mark the stark dif-
ference between the pre- and post- bomb universes. Armes (1968) explains that the Hiroshima and
Nevers scenes feel so distinct because each had a different director of photography (Michio
Takahashi and Sacha Vierny respectively) but also because of specific lenses and lighting (pp.
Kaplan 845

Figure 9.  A kiss in the ruins.

80–81). Like the traumatic flashback of the hands, the scenes between the two towns that end up
naming the two characters offer both similarity and stark difference. We might also connect the
ruin of Hiroshima itself and this romantic ruin with Walter Benjamin’s (1940) famous ruminations
on the structure of history as ruin: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he [the angel of history]
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his
feet” (p. 257). In this context the implicit shadow catastrophe of the film is the Holocaust onto
which the ruin of Hiroshima swirls in an infinite loop.
If there was any confusion that each of the two characters are indelibly associated with each
place, the close of the film quashes it: “Hi-ro-shi-ma. C’est ton nom. . .Ton nom à toi est Nevers”
(Duras, 1960: 124).23 Thus the Japanese architect’s very name becomes synonymous with the
bomb while hers becomes synonymous with forgetting—the neverland of impossible memory. As
Deleuze (1985) phrases it, “the confrontation between sheets of past take place directly, each capa-
ble of being present in relation to the next: for the woman, Hiroshima will be the present of Nevers,
but for the man, Nevers will be the present of Hiroshima” (p. 116).

Femmes Tondues
Elle claims to have beheld “Des chevelures anonymes que les femmes de Hiroshima retrouvaient
tout entières tombées le matin, au réveil” (Duras, 1960: 24).24 This image of the anonymous masses
of hair may resonate with viewers in the postwar context in multiple ways. There were exhibits of
human hair at Auschwitz and revoltingly huge amounts of hair were found there by Soviet troops
at liberation. Some forty years later, in the context of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington D.C., a debate ensued as to whether or not to display the anonymous
masses of hair shorn from victims. Some women survivors and children of survivors protested
when the museum suggested displaying hair that could have been theirs or their mothers’ and the
museum responded by showing instead large-scale photographs of hair.25 Like the mediated images
that Elle sees at the museum in Hiroshima, like the schematic mushroom, the photographs of hair
mediate between the more alarming material of the real and two-dimensional images. The hair also
resonates with Elle’s own story as she was one of the femmes tondues—French women who either
had affairs with or otherwise collaborated with the German occupying forces who were publicly
shorn and thus shamed after the war. Through Elle, Duras effectively argues against the myth that
all in France were part of the resistance. Resonant with historical studies such as that of Henry
846 Memory Studies 14(4)

Rousso’s Vichy Syndrome, then, Duras, in refusing neat polarities between victim and perpetrator,
contributes to our understanding of the complexities of the occupation of France and challenges
tidy allegiances, merging her characters as they were at the onset.26
The appearance in Hiroshima mon amour of these “aesthetic collaboration[s],” in Hervé
Picherit’s (2017) words, have been read in a variety of ways (p. 94). Nancy Wood (1999) argues
that “certainly this is one of the film’s most flagrant violations of French national memory: it solic-
its our empathic identification with the loss suffered by une femme tondue: the death of her German
soldier lover on the Quai de la Loire” (p. 191). This empathic identification suggests that we see
Elle as, in a sense, both a victim of the judging townspeople and as a perpetrator for consorting
with the enemy. Kristine Stiles (1993) details several moments of marking of trauma including the
forced shaving of the heads of women such as Elle deemed “horizontal collaborators.” Stiles
describes a woman who was forced to wear a smeared swastika on her forehead and goes on to
explain that “these women with shaved heads were used as communal purgatives, scapegoats for
the French” (p. 40).27 By victimizing these women who fell in love with (as Elle did) or at least had
relations with the occupying forces the local populace thus used them as projections onto which to
fling and expiate their own guilt and culpability for being on friendlier terms with the enemy than
they were willing to admit after the war. Elle’s victimization as a femme tondue forms part of a
larger series of degradations that marked women for a series of different sexualized reasons. The
film doubly marks Elle as a victim of the townspeople who shave her head and as a perpetrator
through collaboration with her German soldier-lover. Building on the readings of these scholars,
we can see that the complex traumatization that Elle experiences both because she is victimized
and because she “collaborated” underscores Hiroshima mon amour’s revelations of both victim
and perpetrator trauma.
The memory of Nevers and Elle’s experience of losing her lover to a local sniper at the very
moment when she was meant be swept away by him to Bavaria and her being victimized as a
femme tondue are too painful to have been forgotten but too painful to have been remembered. And
this doubling reflects the doubling of victimization and perpetration. Abraham and Torok’s (1994)
construction of crypts that are psychically created in subjects who are unable to mourn helps
explain the impossibility of Elle’s access to this memory: “No crypt arises without a shared secret’s
having already split the subject’s typography. . ..Crypts are constructed only when the shameful
secret is the love object’s doing” (p. 131). The shameful secret of her liaison with the German sol-
dier creates a crypt that the hand of the Japanese lover unseals—it may have been unsealed at other
times outside the exegesis. This vision of the hand of the Japanese lover which then shifts to the
hand of the German soldier resonates with a moment in La douleur, and inaugurates an excursion
into that text. A turn to La douleur also expands my discussion of victimization and perpetration
because there, Duras herself is situated somewhere between the two poles—she is working with
the French resistance and married to an important survivor and writer, Robert Antelme, author of
the remarkable survivor memoir, L’Espèce humaine, at the same time as she befriends a member
of the Gestapo and then offers herself in the guise of Thérèse, a resistance fighter who turns into a
torturer. The biographical and literary rendering of her experiences comprise a fascinating counter-
weight to Hiroshima mon amour.

La douleur
Duras’s autobiographical collection of memories and stories, La douleur, appears under the sign
of forgetting. Published in 1985 but written during and immediately after the war, written, in
fact, before she was enticed to write Hiroshima mon amour, La douleur maintains the strange
status of memoir and fiction simultaneously. Laure Adler (2000) reports that a friend of Duras’s
Kaplan 847

who was with her in Paris during the war found that “Marguerite was playing with fire and
enjoying it” (p. 121).28 This “playing with fire” can be reconfigured as playing with or between
two lovers, one, her husband, Robert Antelme, a victim of the persecution of resistance members
who barely survived his time in the concentration camps, the other Charles Delval (Rabier) this
“hunter of Jews” who was also a hunter of resistance members and a perpetrator. It may be that
she also plays with the burning up of memory as the text is written under the sign of forgetting.
La douleur begins with Duras’s description of the unbearable task of getting information about
prisoners from nonchalant Vichy guards, and then eventually Antelme’s arrival in a shockingly
emaciated state. The text opens toward the end of the war, when Duras describes her unbeliev-
able anxiety over “Robert L.” (Throughout, she alters names so that the resistance fighter who
was to marry Duras in 1947, Dionys Mascolo, becomes “D.” and François Mitterand becomes
“François Morland.”) Duras wrote the first sections in journal form to describe the months of
waiting for her then-husband (Antelme) to return from the camps. She explains both that she
found the journals recently (i.e. close to the time of publication, 1985) and that she has forgotten
writing them, “Je n’ai aucun souvenir de l’avoir écrit” (Duras, 1985: 12).29 The notebooks that
Duras claimed she forgot when constructing La douleur thus resonate with the forgetting insisted
upon (and denied) throughout Hiroshima mon amour. Like Hiroshima’s “Elle,” the narrator of
La douleur sleepwalks: “Dans la rue je dors” (Duras, 1985: 15).30 But while she sleepwalks, the
revelations of the horror of the camps increase and she notes, “Le jour, la lumière du jour à pro-
fusion sur le mystère nazi” (Duras, 1985: 15–16).31 Despite the forgetting, the sleepwalking, the
confusion at the end of the war, the clarification of the mystery of Nazism—its resolution into
horror happens through the fog. Further, Duras claims that the text we read could not have been
written while she agonizingly awaited Antelme’s return; not only does it struggle to emerge from
under the sign of forgetting, then, but to emerge from the sign of impossibility—a sign that also
marks Elle’s two impossible loves of Hiroshima (the enemy soldier and the married Japanese
architect).
In rapid succession reminiscent of the series of negations toward the beginning of Hiroshima
mon amour, Duras (1985) imagines Robert’s death, and then his return, and then her death. Duras
encrypts Antelme’s death: “Sa mort est en moi” (p. 15) in much the same way as Elle aligns the
corpse of the German lover with her own, living, body.32 Duras creates temporally impossible nar-
ratives where life and death coexist. Indeed, Julia Kristeva (1989) finds that, “A somber and yet
listlessly delicate complicity with death emanates from Durassian texts. This complicity leads us
to x-ray our madness. . .” (p. 219). In revisiting, again and again, Robert’s return, Duras (1985) as
narrator of La douleur imagines: “Je ferme les yeux. S’il revenait nous irions à la mer, c’est ce qui
lui ferait le plus de plaisir. Je crois que de toutes façons je vais mourir. S’il revient je mourrai aussi”
(p. 39).33 The endless anxiety of possible futures creates this contradictory certainty. When, some-
time after Robert’s return and return to health, they go to the sea, it offers him no pleasure and he
sits, alone, and apart from their playful friends while silence stretches to war: “On entend toujours
les joueurs. Robert L., lui, on ne l’entend toujours pas. C’est dans ce silence-là que la guerre est
encore présente, qu’elle sourd à travers le sable, le vent” (Duras, 1985: 83).34 Despite apparent
closure which the offering of one testimony might suggest, silence becomes the place where the
war continues to rage. Like the characters in Kurosawa’s films who are indelibly haunted, for
Antelme too, whose brilliant text discusses this silence, the war continues even when not audible
and his silence prefigures both the silence of the Japanese architect about his wartime trauma and
the silence of the German soldier. For Antelme, it is the bombing of Hiroshima that takes him out
of his endless reverie: “Hiroshima est peut-être la première chose extérieure à sa vie qu’il voit”
(Duras, 1985: 81).35 That a survivor of the Holocaust would find the bombing of Hiroshima the
first thing to puncture his traumatic fog sets up the series of concerns in Hiroshima mon amour
848 Memory Studies 14(4)

Figure 10.  “I don’t even remember his hands very well,” 1:03:05.

around memory, forgetting, impossible love, and the shadow of one trauma over the other, the
memory’s residue in the form of ash.
Indeed, the written texts may be seen as a shadow over the film; hands figure prominently in La
douleur as they do in Hiroshima mon amour and in other works by Duras. While fearing that
Antelme had already been left for dead in a ditch, Duras (1985) imagines in La douleur, that “La
plante de pieds à l’air. . ..Ses mains sont ouvertes. Chacune de ses mains plus chère que ma vie”
(p. 19).36 As I discussed above, Elle’s sight of the slightly twitching —open, as she imagines
Antelme’s hands—hand of the Japanese architect in Hiroshima mon amour catalyzes a memory of
the dead German soldier. Elle notes: “Même des mains je me souviens mal. . .. De la douleur, je
me souviens encore un peu” (ellipses in original; Duras, 1960: 102)37 (see Figure 10; 1:03:05). A
stark disjuncture exists between what she says (that she cannot remember his hands) and what we
see (the hand of the German soldier) thus further illustrating the impossibility of knowing the status
of her memory/forgetting of this traumatic love. Using the words that would some decades later
entitle her wartime memoir, La douleur (translated as The War) Duras here prefigures that grief and
the connection with the hands of the lovers. The text that would not be published until some forty
years later had already been penned when she wrote the script for Hiroshima mon amour and this
may contribute to the film’s odd temporality.
In a further underscoring of the importance of hands in Hiroshima mon amour, during the scene
in the Tea Room with the architect, Elle finds that, “Les mains deviennent inutiles dans les caves”
(47:30; Duras, 1960: 88) and then Resnais inserts a close up of their four hands embracing.38 This
again is an image of literal and figural convergence, resonant with the opening entwinement in ash,
that binds them and because the next shot shows Elle, shorn in the cellar with bloody hands, it
binds them as victims of the war even though they were both implicated as perpetrators to varying
degrees. Hands take on multiple significances here as caressers, as symbols of victimization, as
images of the dead, as evokers of memory, as signs of forgetting, as memories of a caress.
A curious amalgamation in the resonance between Hiroshima mon amour and La douleur
between victim and perpetrator speaks to some of the mechanisms through which the complexities
of the axes of perpetration and victimization are revealed: Duras structures the survivor of a con-
centration camp and the German soldier in markedly similar ways in these two texts; in addition,
the Japanese architect, who at once can be seen as a victim of the bombing of Hiroshima and as part
of the Axis powers, offers a third vision of a lover with hands exposed. In the same reverie of
Kaplan 849

Antelme’s death from La douleur that I mentioned above, Duras (1985) imagines: “Je m’endors
près de lui tous les soirs, dans le fossé noir, près de lui mort” (p. 20).39 Just as Elle, in Hiroshima,
lies beside her dead German lover so Duras, in La douleur, conjures up an image of lying beside
her dead husband. Within the fiction of the film, the lover is both dead and an ambiguous perpetra-
tor—a German soldier who only implicitly figures as anti-Nazi; within the memoir, though, the
lover is alive and a surviving victim who went on to write one of the most moving texts about the
process and mechanisms of survival. A very different cartography of victimization and perpetration
emerges then, between the two texts, the two images of hands. In La douleur the narrator’s imagi-
nation calls up the hand and figures the lovers, one dead and one alive, lying together, whereas
these images are actualized in the film. Like the superimposition of sweat over ash, like the trans-
formation of the hand of the Japanese lover into the hand of the German lover, these literary and
cinematic metamorphoses all work to reveal the imbrication between the poles of victim and
perpetrator.
Because of its reflections on love, loyalty, desire, and guilt, one of the most interesting sections
of La douleur involves Duras’ complicated (that is an understatement) relationship with a member
of the Gestapo. This ‘Rabier’ (based on Charles Delval—Dionys Mascolo was having an affair at
the same time with Rabier’s wife, Paulette) strings her along with an endless series of promises of
information about her husband if she’ll only dine with him. Yet he seems to have a troubled desire
for her, which can be summed up as “il ignore qu’il ne sait pas encore ce qu’il va faire avec moi
dans cet hotel, s’il va me prendre ou me tuer” (Duras, 1985: 127).40 Duras describes all of her
interactions with Rabier as somewhere between sweet and horrible: on the one hand, he arrested
Antelme, but on the other hand, she develops a kind of pity for this man, and, out of respect for his
surviving wife and child, she refuses to reveal his real name in the published account. Nonetheless,
her descriptions fluctuate: sometimes she forcefully reminds us that he had been responsible for
“sending people to the crematoriums” (“envoyait [des gens] dans les fours crématoires” Duras,
1985: 115) and that his (German) adoration for Paris is painfully mixed with the worst:

Il regarde Paris avec amour, il le connaît très bien. Dans des rues pareilles à celles-ci il a arrêté des gens.
À chaque rue, ses souvenirs, ses hurlements, ses cris, ses sanglots. Ces souvenirs ne font pas souffrir
Rabier. Ils sont les jardiniers de ce jardin-là, Paris, de ces rues qu’ils adorent, maintenant exemptes de
juifs. Il ne se souvient que de ses bonnes actions, il n’a aucun souvenir d’avoir été brutal (Duras, 1985:
117).41

Rabier exemplifies aesthetic desire in place of social, political, and historical reality: just as he
adores Paris and can only remember sweet things about it, he finds endless psychological excuses
for the perpetuation of terror. Had Duras invented him he could not more perfectly embody the
mechanism through which aesthetic charm historically stands in for or masks the worst. Modes of
complicity haunt Duras’s war texts, but are very different for the perpetrators and the victims. As
with Hiroshima mon amour, modes of complicity vary between the aesthetic and the worst. When
Duras’s character in La douleur seems complicit in the erasure of the perpetrator Rabier’s memo-
ries of having been brutal this is a different conflation of the aesthetic with the worst than that put
forward by the survivors.
An even more striking reversal of perpetration and victimization arrives near the end of La
douleur in the section entitled “Albert des Capitales.” Duras (1985) announces by way of introduc-
tion, that “Thérèse c’est moi. Celle quit torture le donneur, c’est moi” (p. 138).42 The scene unfolds
in a fetid, claustrophobic room in which an informant, someone who likely betrayed Jewish people
and resistance fighters to the Gestapo, is brutally beaten by two men. Thérèse breaks solidarity
with the other women, who begin to walk out in disgust at this retributive violence, as she first
850 Memory Studies 14(4)

encourages the continuation of the beating in order to induce confession, and then finally breaks
down in tears. The men who torture explicitly attempt to elicit memory from the informant. As
Thérèse insists on extracting this memory from the naked, wrinkled, man we see the shift between
victim and perpetrator, the needle of justice moves, and we sympathize with the informant and
despise the actions of the resistance fighter. For her part Thérèse feels as though she watches a film,
perhaps prefiguring the film that Duras would construct the following year. Feeling caught in this
dark room, with “ce donneur de juifs et de résistants. Je suis au cinéma” and she says to herself “Je
dors” (Duras, 1985: 150) thus anticipating Hiroshima’s Elle who feels like a sleepwalker as the
memory of the German lover enfolds her under the sign of the ash from the nuclear bomb whose
name becomes synonymous with her new lover.43 Thérèse recalls that one of the torturers, who a
week before was a resistance fighter, had burnt up a German tank with a bottle of gasoline and “La
bouteille s’est cassée sur le crâne de l’Allemand qui a brûlé vif” (Duras, 1985: 151).44 But Duras
does not only switch the position of victim and perpetrator by writing this scene. She also aligns
them—the informer, too, she thinks, must imagine he is at the cinema, must feel a similar distancia-
tion: “Lui aussi doit se croire au cinéma” (Duras, 1985: 157).45 Like Elle, who wanders the streets
of Hiroshima in a sleepwalking fog of remembrance, Thérèse struggles with the reality of torture
and imagines that not only she but also her victim must feel there in the scene of torture and impos-
sibly and simultaneously elsewhere. They are both at the cinema, just like Hiroshima mon amour
constantly aligns victims and perpetrators in ways that refuse neat moral distinctions. It is against
this biographical and literary background of placing herself quite literally between victim and per-
petrator that Duras constructed the text of Hiroshima mon amour.

Conclusion
“I am burning, I am falling in ash.”
—J.M. Coetzee

Both texts—Hiroshima mon amour and La douleur—play with polarities of difference in mul-
tiple ways. While the former explores with great sensitivity the emotional and indelible effects of
nuclear attack, both works examine in nuanced ways the slippery lines between victimization and
perpetration. Because of their differing positions in the war the lovers in the film and memoir alike
are damaged beyond repair by these catastrophes. In the context of war, and especially considering
the cartographies of gender within those of victimization and perpetration during the Second World
War, the border between victim and perpetrator can be seen through the lens of Wendy Brown’s
(2010) analysis of actual walls and borders as revealing a “tremulousness, vulnerability, dubious-
ness, or instability at the very core of what they aim to express” (p. 24). Magical thinking that
understanding the revelations of Hiroshima mon amour and La douleur could change how perpe-
trators perpetrate; but thinking through trauma as both a problem for victims and perpetrators is an
important ethical step because one of the conditions of possibility for violent perpetration is the
myth that the bomb is launched against an other and will not boomerang.
Hiroshima mon amour demonstrates this conflicted character of the posttraumatic perpetrator
by focusing on the ineluctable nature of the two main characters’ experiences of trauma as both
aligned with perpetration and with victimization. They are both imbued also with memory and
forgetting. This double alliance structurally reveals how each are imbricated in the other—victimi-
zation within perpetration, forgetting within memory, and all of these revealed visually at the outset
through the imbricated bodies coated in ash—Hiroshima here resonating with the Shoah. Hiroshima
mon amour and La douleur might be considered in terms of what Françoise Vergès (2010) beauti-
fully describes as “modalities, finalities, time, location, routes, networks, zones of contact and
Kaplan 851

conflict. . . a cartography of crisscrossing events, one that cannot lead to a linear and coherent
narrative but rather to hybrid memories that are dynamically reconfigured” (p. 139). I have dem-
onstrated that the dynamic cartography of Hiroshima mon amour is enlivened by the rather strange
text La douleur and that the shattering of the polarities of victim and perpetrator therefore shifts the
traumatic locus in ways that suggestively encourage us to redraw our thinking about guilt and
innocence, memory and forgetting, and move yet further away from the postwar French myth of
universal resistance, and move closer to an ethical understanding of multiple traumatizations.

Note: translations are from published texts unless they were not translated, in which case they are my
translations; to save space I have put the English translations in the endnotes with the translation’s
page(s) after the French page. I am enormously grateful to Lilya Kaganovsky for a detailed response
to a draft of this essay which has improved it greatly. I would also like to thank Hapsa Wane for help-
ing me find many texts about the film; space constraints meant I could not cite all of our research so
some articles listed in the bibliography are not directly quoted but are fruitful for further reading.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Brett Ashley Kaplan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0117-4101

Notes
  1. “as dissimilar. . .racially, etc., as it is possible to be” (Duras, 1961: 9).
  2. “what remains without remaining from the holocaust, from the all-burning, from the incineration the
incense” (Derrida, 1987: 43).
 3. “In Hiroshima, the beginning isn’t only a representation of the couple, it is a poetic image. And the ash
on the bodies, this does not refer to any reality, it is a thought” (Resnais, 1960: 938).
  4. “In the beginning of the film we don’t see this chance couple. Neither her nor him. Instead we see muti-
lated bodies—the heads, the hips—moving—in the throes of love or death—and covered successively
with the ashes, the dew, of atomic death—and the sweat of love fulfilled” (Duras, 1961: 8).
  5. On how the film was received in Japan see Sek.
  6. “He: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. She: I saw everything. Everything (Duras, 1961:15, the
italicization is different in the published translation than in the original).
  7. 17:35; “My family were in Hiroshima. I was in the war” (Duras, 1960: np, this part does not appear in
my copy of the English translation).
  8. “It’s also to leave the public free to judge that we did not indicate in the film that the German soldier was
anti-Nazi—for us this was implicit” (Resnais, 1960: 937).
  9. Edward O’Neill (2004) argues that Hiroshima mon amour exemplifies a film wherein the catastrophes
discussed form part of a “tectonic shift in which the singularity of individual experience and utterance no
longer dissolves itself into the uniformity of a universalizable form” (p. 162). I agree that Elle’s memory
is not universal but I would stress, in contrast to this interpretation, that her “memory” stands in for a
larger claim than can be contained in an individual’s history.
10. Readings such as that of Lynn Higgins (1988), which argue that there are “no consequences” to the story
of the deep love Elle holds for the German soldier mistake the status of the negations throughout the film
(p. 20).
852 Memory Studies 14(4)

11. “It’s a mechanism similar to that of Proust’s involuntary memory” (Resnais, 1960: 943).
12. “I tremble at the thought of having forgotten so much love” (Duras, 1961: 64).
13. “the moment of his death actually escaped me.  .  .I couldn’t feel the slightest difference between his dead
body and mine” (Duras, 1961: 65).
14. “Just as in love this illusion exists, this illusion of being able never to forget, so I was under the illusion
that I would never forget Hiroshima” (Duras, 1961: 19).
15. “I’ll remember you as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness” (Duras, 1961: 68).
16. “Like you, I have a memory. I know what it is to forget” (Duras, 1961: 23).
17. As Christopher Hamilton (2015) aptly phrases it, “the film problematizes memory.  .  ..it suggests that the
process of remembering is itself also a process of forgetting” (p. 73).
18. “Like you, I too have tried with all my might not to forget” (Duras, 1961: 23).
19. “It’s extraordinary how beautiful your skin is” (Duras, 1961: 25).
20. “He learned everything phonetically. What a performance!” (Roob, 1986: 62). Cathy Caruth (1996)
picks up on this phonetic memorization and then Kali Tal (2004) severely critiques her assessment. Stef
Craps (2013) discusses this during an interesting argument about the problematics of these kinds of
cross-cultural comparisons of trauma and the case of Hiroshima mon amour.
21. Rey Chow (2013) describes the disembodied voice of the Japanese architect as an “acousmatic assem-
blage” (p. 43) or a voice emanating from an unseen body.
22. “The whole world was joyous. You were joyous with the whole world” (Duras, 1960: 50; slightly modi-
fied translation).
23. “Hi-ro-shi-ma. That’s your name. . ..Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers” (Duras, 1961: 83).
24. “Anonymous heads of hair that the women of Hiroshima, when they awoke in the morning, discovered
had fallen out” (Duras, 1961: 17).
25. See Ryback (1993).
26. See Rousso (1987) and Judaken (2007).
27. See also Duchen (2000), Moore (2005), and Virgili (2000).
28. Charles Delval was executed at Fresnes prison in 1945. Ronald Tiersky (2003) reports that Delval’s wife
Paulette was having an affair with Dionys Mascolo at the same time that Duras was with Delval and fur-
ther that “Paulette Delval had a child by Dionys Mascolo in June 1946; Marguerite Antelme did likewise
the following year” (p. 71). See also Bajomée (1985) and Hill (1993).
29. “I have no recollection of having written it” (Duras, 1986: 3).
30. “In the street I am like a sleepwalker” (Duras, 1986: 7).
31. “Light, the light of day, flooding in on the mystery of Nazism” (Duras, 1986: 7).
32. “His death is in me” (Duras, 1986: 6).
33. “I shut my eyes. If he comes back we’ll go to the seaside, that’s what he’d like best. I think I shall die
anyway. Even if he comes back” (Duras, 1986: 28).
34. “We can still hear the players. But Robert L.—we still can’t hear him. It’s in that silence that the war’s
still there, flowing across the sand and through the wind” (Duras, 1986: 67).
35. “Hiroshima is perhaps the first thing outside his own life that he sees” (Duras, 1986: 64).
36. “The soles of his feet exposed.  .  ..His hands are open. Each hand dearer than my life” (Duras, 1986: 10).
37. “I don’t even remember his hands very well.  .  ..The pain, I still remember the pain a little” (Duras, 1961:
67).
38. “Hands become useless in the cellars” (Duras, 1961: 55).
39. “I fall asleep beside him every night, in the black ditch, beside him as he lies dead” (Duras, 1986: 10).
40. “he doesn’t know yet what he’s going to do with me in the hotel, whether he is going to possess me or
kill me” (Duras, 1986: 105).
41. “He looks at Paris with love; he knows it very well. In streets like these he has arrested people. Every
street has its memories, its shrieks, its shouts, its sobs. These memories don’t cause Rabier any pain.
He and his like are the gardeners of that garden, Paris, of the streets they adore that are now free of
Jews. He remembers only his good deeds, he has no recollection of having acted harshly” (Duras,
1986: 96).
42. “Thérèse is me. The person who tortures the informer is me” (Duras, 1986: 115).
Kaplan 853

43. “I’m asleep” (Duras, 1986: 124), “this betrayer of Jews and members of the Resistance. I’m at the cin-
ema” (Duras, 1986: 125).
44. “The bottle broke on the skull of a German and he was burned alive” (Duras, 1986: 126).
45. “He too must think he’s at the cinema” (Duras, 1986: 130).

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Author biography
Brett Ashley Kaplan earned her Ph.D. through the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley
and is now the Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies and Professor in the Program
Kaplan 855

in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois. Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in
Holocaust Representation (UP Illinois, 2007) and Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory (Routledge, 2011)
examine the Shoah’s intersections with art and space. Turning to race and power in contemporary Jewish
American literature, she published Jewish Anxiety in the Novels of Philip Roth (Bloomsbur, 2015). She is fin-
ishing her first novel, Rare Stuff and working on Convergences: Portraits of Artists who Explore Jewishness
and Blackness (creative non-fiction). In addition to scholarly articles and book reviews in venues such as
H-France Review, American Literary History, Journal of Jewish Identities, Modern Philology, Textual
Practice, Criticism, German Quarterly, Contemporary French Civilization, Comparative Literature, Studies in
Jewish American Literature, she has written for more public outlets such as The Conversation, Asitoughttobe,
AJS Perspectives, and Salon.com Haaretz. She has conducted interviews published in Contemporary French
Civilization and 9th Letter and been interviewed on NPR, the AJS Podcast, and The 21st.