Vanessa Springora: “The masculine figures that were my father and my grandfather explain why I turned to Gabriel Matzneff at 13”

In SurnameVanessa Springora relies as much on Zweig or Kundera as on archives unearthed after the death of a mythomaniac and toxic father whom she had not seen for ten years – as well as on photos of her grandfather father wearing Nazi insignia… – to embark on a real archeology of the men in her family, and more precisely of the name she inherited.

Understanding that the tender grandfather who had taken care of her, replacing a father incapable of doing so, was not the one she believed, the author of Consent embarked on a Russian doll-shaped investigation. Or how a name can contain not only the story of a father and grandfather, “but the trajectory of the last century and the rugged geography of an entire continent. »

Madame Figaro . – To what extent Surname et Consent are they related, for you?
Vanessa Springora.– I insisted, when the Consenton my need to reclaim my history, but there was a “before” my meeting with Matzneff. The imprint left on my life by the male figures that were my father and my paternal grandfather partly explains why I turned to Gabriel Matzneff at 13… The figure of the rapist and that of the fascist are very close to me . I was struck by the terminology used about the Mazan rapes. Hannah Arendt was widely cited, the “banality of evil”, “ordinary” rapists; In SurnameI also speak of these ordinary men, and of these choices which are made in spite of oneself, without reflection of their own, in another context, political this time. In the sexual predator that is Gabriel Matzneff, capable of abusing children and adolescents for decades, and in total negation of the suffering he inflicts, to the point of displaying it in his books, I see the same denial of the other that we find among Nazi assassins and torturers, incapable of seeing in the deported and massacred populations, the Jews, the homosexuals, the Gypsies, similar people that we are in the process of annihilating. In this regard, Surname continues the exploration of the psyche of the executioner.

Your grandfather and your father have in common that they lied, one to hide what he had done during the war, the other in a sick, pathological way. Isn’t writing a way for you to undo these lies?
This is precisely the other link with Consentwhere it was in fact a question of undoing the lie of Gabriel Matzneff’s books, his unequivocal way of telling what had happened, by imposing his version of things. The lie by omission destroyed my father, who had to live from his early childhood with something unsaid, the family secret hidden by an assumed name, Springora. My grandfather forged it to pass it on to him in 1946, my father being conceived at the end of the war, he was the child of a past that had to be repressed. My grandfather was presented to me as a hero who was forcibly conscripted into the German army, then sent to Normandy where he deserted, then was hidden in Rouen by my grandmother before settling in France to escape. to the Soviet regime, in his native country, Czechoslovakia. In reality, although he had Czechoslovak citizenship, he belonged to the German-speaking community of the Sudetenland which sided with Hitler and imposed the holding of the Munich Conference of 1938, at the end of which Germany The Nazis annexed the Sudeten region, then all of Czechoslovakia. My grandfather not only enlisted in the German army: he joined the police in Berlin, joined the Nazi party… This repression weighed heavily on my father and explains, in my eyes, his mythomania. It is perhaps no coincidence that I adopted one of the etymologies of the name Springer, the real name of my grandfather: “Spread the word”, therefore breaking the silence, undoing the fiction.

Could you tell us a word about this title, Surname and the question of the name?
It structures the book, which is divided into four chapters, the family name, the father’s name, the assumed name and the “proper” name, taken in its double meaning, that is to say as a ” name to oneself”, and like a name without stain, immaculate. The name my grandfather gave himself allowed him to whitewash his past. The name is therefore the origin of fiction, it is the beginning of a story, of myth, of legend. We also build ourselves according to our surname, which bears geographical, cultural and social origins. Our name often determines our choices, our affiliations, and sometimes conflicts of loyalty. Identity begins there, and when you have a false name, like my father, and you discover it late, it is very complicated to overcome this flaw. The name is also the heritage of our fathers; we women do not have our own name. Tradition dictates that we inherit that of our father and then take that of our husband. I sometimes wish I could go back to older rituals where we could baptize ourselves at the age of majority. Among the Lakotas, for example, one changes one’s name four times in a lifetime, depending on one’s symbolic age. This seems to me a way of regaining control of its history.

I insisted, when the Consenton my need to reclaim my history

Vanessa Springora

Your grandfather changed his name to something else, and you “made a name” for yourself with Consent as someone told you…
When you are a young man born into a German-speaking community in 1912, shortly before the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is very difficult to position yourself outside of your close circle. The first instinct is to adhere to its culture, to the loyalty that its name demands. But we must also have the capacity to detach ourselves from it, to exercise our critical mind, to clarify in particular our own consent, in this case to barbarism. To tell ourselves that even if we are determined by our origin, we must maintain this space of freedom allowing us to act in our soul and conscience, independently of our membership in a community. It is this entire trajectory from a family name that we inherit, to the name that we make for ourselves, our “proper name”, that I am telling. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not the fame that interests me, but the fact of re-naming yourself, of naming yourself again. The impossibility of explaining where the name I bore came from left me with a feeling of imposture and illegitimacy, because I had no roots to cling to. Today that I know what this name hides, I believe that Surname was also a way of reconciling myself with this father who had never been able to be one for me. This is perhaps what we also lack today: the ability to understand the person we designate as our enemy.