French novels about the Nazi era — a trend?

Sign and Sight is a website that provides a roundup of European cultural journalism. In this week’s magazine roundup there was this item:

Le Nouvel Observateur 10.01.2008 (France)

“What he says is scary.” With these words the magazine introduces its interview with Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, whose new novel
“Le Village de l’Allemand ou le journal des freres Schiller”
(Gallimard) relates how two Algerians living in the Parisian banlieues
discover that their father, a hero of the Algerian liberation movement
FLN, had formerly been an SS officer. For the Nouvel Obs, the novel “strikes at the heart of our illusions.” Sansal has this to say
about the situation in his country: “We live under a national-Islamic
regime, in an environment heavily influenced by terrorism, and it’s
patently clear that only a very thin line separates Islamism from
Nazism. For Algerian youths, their country is an ‘open-air prison.’
And for those gradually perishing in the cities, it’s a ‘concentration
camp.’ They feel imprisoned not only by walls and impenetrable borders,
but also by a dark and violent regime that doesn’t even leave them room to dream.”

Under
the old rule of two times, it’s a pattern, three times it’s a trend —
I’ve noticed that French literature seems to be tackling the subject of
Nazis and its own complicity — sometimes from the point of the view of
the Nazi officers.
Last year’s award winning “Les Bienveillants” by Jonathan Littell
, which has yet to come out in English (but should soon), Another novel
— whose name escapes me right now (I promise to track it down later)
about the infamous Velo D’hiver roundup in France, as well as Marc Levy’s novel, “Les Enfants de la Liberte” and now Boualem’s Algerian prism on the events.

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