Cashing In on Céline’s Anti-Semitism
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/12/cashing-in-on-celines-antisemitism
Potier told Gallimard that the first French reprint of Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets in nearly eight decades should be done in the spirit of education, rather than in one of sensation; he proposed that the original texts should be accompanied by in-depth exegesis, and put into context by interdisciplinary scholars and historians. Potier had in mind, perhaps, the very scholarly “critical edition” of Mein Kampf that enabled the recent reissue of Hitler’s work in Germany for the first time since the war.
Antoine Gallimard, accompanied by the Jewish writer and historian Pierre Assouline, who is writing a preface to the new edition, politely refused. For them, Céline’s texts belong to literature and do not need more than a literary critic’s preface and notes. In their eyes, the French-Canadian edition, which has notes by a Céline expert named Régis Tettamanzi, is sufficient.
Although it is very unlikely that the French government will seek to ban the book, a growing chorus of prominent voices—among them, historians, politicians, and Holocaust survivors—have already threatened legal action against Gallimard. One of them, the well-known Nazi hunter and French lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, deemed Gallimard’s project “unbearable.” Other voices, though, argue that it is better to reprint the work with the addition of critical context than to let people access the plain texts online, where illicit versions are available.