Abstract
If ‘the past is a foreign country’, as L. P. Hartley put it, Henry Rousso’s ego-history asks: what does it mean to be a historian of the present time? And what does it mean for people who, like him, were forced to leave their country of birth, had to learn foreign languages, realised that the religion into which they were born could have an overriding importance in the eyes of other people, or had to explain to suspicious clerks that their documents had been badly translated? Rousso explains how, for him, becoming a historian was to investigate and ultimately refuse given identities. His research on Vichy and the Second World War is an attempt to find meaningful explanations for the chaotic events of the twentieth century.
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