Histoire palimpseste, mémoires obliques. À propos de 'Sterne' de Konrad Wolf

Taking as its starting point Konrad Wolf’s film Sterne (Stars), the first German film to deal with the question of the Holocaust, this article examines how, in a film made in 1959 in a country that now no longer exists (the German Democratic Republic), there begins a process of superimposition, sedimentation, displacement and re-emergence, which one may call the "media memory", "public memory" or "oblique memory" of post-1989 Europe.
How does the "discourse of remembrance", this generalised culture of commemoration of the "Holocaust" that has appeared since the 1990s in the whole of Europe, lead us to re-read a film whose "poetics of parataxis" (of the acte manqué ) can restore to the past its own future, according to Paul Ricoeur’s formula.
This re-reading of Sterne aims therefore to examine the archaeology of our current culture of history, memory and remembrance regarding issues related to Fascism, Socialism, the Nazis and the persecution of the Jews, and to recognise the importance of a filmmaker whose status has changed since his death and the death of his country : his work teaches us what it means to be exposed to the inevitable contradictions and temporal dislocations involved when one delves into the vestiges of German history and attempts to save that country’s soul.