The Hitlerian Superego—An Introduction

The name of Normandy has always had a special meaning for me, for I was born just after the Second World War. When I was still just a little boy, my mother made a point of teaching me how our forebears had exiled themselves from Normandy over three hundred years earlier and settled in the region that had then only recently been given the name of New France. When I was a little older, like all children of my generation, I was plunged into a deluge of films, books, toys, personal accounts and images of every kind inspired by World War II. I remember that for a long time I secretly refused to acknowledge (or perhaps was simply incapable of acknowledging) that the Normandy of my ancestors and that of the Battle of Normandy were one and the same place.

When eventually I visited Normandy for the first time I was already thoroughly grown up. I had had plenty of time to read and form a clear picture of the region. There was no longer any place in my mind, I felt, for the myths and denials of my childhood. And indeed I was not particularly surprised by the look of the Norman interior: the mysterious beauty of the farmland patchwork of hedge and field, the gentle geometry of rolling hills and dales, the depressing aspect of old towns that have had to be rebuilt and now look like anonymous suburbs anywhere—all this corresponded rather well to the image I had formed before setting out.

As for the coast, it seemed at first to hold no greater surprises for me than the countryside, yet as the hours passed I fell prey to a discreet but persistent malaise. Walking along a deserted beach, I realized what the source of this feeling must be. There was, after all, an element of truth in my childhood denial, for a part of the Normandy coast, the site of the Atlantic Wall and the Landings, had never really been restored to Normandy. The French complain that these beaches have simply been abandoned to the hordes of tourists who wander