BYSTANDERS, JEWS, AND HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

Carolyn J. Dean

History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024)
Theme Issue: “History and Ethics,” edited by Andre de Lemos Freixo and João Ohara

This article revisits the vast historiography on everyday life in Vichy France to address the moral questions and historical claims implicit in the bystander category. It addresses how historians conceive the relationship between bystanders and Jews, arguing that they implicitly erase the structural violence between the two groups by reproducing the liberal ethics implicit in the slogan “never again” in their own method—and in spite of their commitment to a boundary between history and memory. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial and political theory, it suggests that the category, if rethought, might account for popular complicity in genocidal violence.

Photo by Erik.