POINT OF VIEW. D-day land or homage to the heroes?

For months in Normandy, the “D-Day land”, idiotic name of an unwritten project given by its detractors and now etched in people’s minds, worries, even unworthy. Let us add that this announcement in full crisis is awkward. We are indeed asking ourselves prosaically how to get through the winter and 2021. How many of us will still have a contract in a year?

A time when Churchill was not a cigar brand

But that is not the subject of course. Back to it. My generation is the one whose grandparents knew Verdun. Kids, we listened to stories of war or captivity. Our family memories were superimposed on the history which was an essential republican teaching. So I’m from a time when the NSDAP wasn’t a Bavarian football club, Yalta a convention center and Churchill a cigar brand.

I ran my first history museum 30 years ago. I have seen two new generations enter our museums. I also saw artificial snow falling from the ceiling to evoke Bastogne at the National War 2 Museum in New Orleans; I saw in Volgograd (Stalingrad), in May 2011, tightrope walkers disguised as soldiers on the sacred ruins of the “Pavlov house” in front of Soviet heroes. I met a teenage girl who thought the shoe of a gassed child at Auschwitz “cute” and a father telling his son that “Hitler is like Gaddafi”.

The complexity of the story to defend

Fortunately, I have also seen millions of people who seek and find answers thanks to our museums, which are above all places of reflection today in part intended for generations cut off from their history, and even, in some countries, of his teaching.

Few care about our jobs, know who our audiences are, know where our resources come from, know that beyond 80 characters, a text is only read by 10% of visitors, know that the USSR disappeared in 1989 becomes an enigma, know that we do not situate Poland where it all began. Imagine Danzig!

So this new project, if it is truly “a D-Day land”, is obviously to be denounced. The complexity of history in these times of amalgamations, shortcuts and postures, is indeed to be categorically defended. But imagine that this project is well written, is fair, is neither complacent nor touting, like so many things today. Imagine that those who do not like our museums or history – it is their right – can understand the stakes and the brutality of this three-month battle which is that of the liberation of Paris and of Europe. western. They will already know more than those, very numerous, who ignore that between June 6 and August 25, 1944, our country was destroyed. Not to mention Le Havre.

What will remain of this memory in 20 years?

As for the question of money, has Zanuck or Spielberg ever been criticized for having made a lot of it? And yet, there is so much to say about their films: an anthology of mistakes and affections. No one screamed scandal. Likewise, the question of the considerable economic repercussions for Normandy of this memory has rarely been debated since the 1960s. 6 to 7 million foreign and French visitors enter our museums, which they bring to life, and with us. , businesses and traders who feed this “memory tourism”.

Could Normandy do without it? No. However, the real question is to know what will remain of this memory in 20 years? Those who will be 20 in 2040 have parents who are 25 today. Thanks to “those of 1944”, they did not experience war and neither did their grandparents. It changes everything. What if we spoke amiably among ourselves about the project whose real name I believe is “homage to the heroes”?

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