The desire to know has a perfidious reward

We know Vanessa Springora on the impact of her first book, Consent (published in French in 2020 and in Catalan in 2021). The volume narrates her seduction by the writer Gabriel Matzneff when she was a teenager. She was in love, her mother consented to the relationship (hence the title), and he was a known pedophiliac propagandist. In the absence of her father, living with her estranged mother, Springora fell prey to a collector of young girls—and young boys—who didn't hesitate to turn many of her literary works into apologetics for pedophilia.

It so happens that Springora worked at the publishing house that published one of Matzneff's flagship titles, Las moins de seize ans (Those under sixteen years of age, which is now unobtrusive in the original edition and also in any translation… except on the Internet). He makes an extreme vindication of pedophilia, without subterfuge: "Coucher avec un/u enfant –writes-, it is a hiérophanic experience, a baptismal experience, a sacred adventure("To sleep with a creature is a hierophanic experience, a baptismal test, a sacred adventure.")

Springora emerged from that relationship affected, not while it was happening, but by mentally reworking it over time. She wrote Consent to exorcise her. And then, a few days after the publication of this harrowing memoir, she receives a call from the police informing her that her father is dead.

Her father, absent during the pedophile affair, absent from her life for the most part, now presents himself as a challenge to memory. Springora, who has a taste for literary introspection, goes to empty her father's apartment and soon begins to imagine her next book. The name of the fatherWhat he didn't expect was that, delving into his father's papers, discovering his ambiguous sexuality and an exacerbated mythomania (in the psychiatric sense of the word, that is, pathological lying), he would also find a trail he hadn't expected: that of his grandfather.

Nazi by obligation or conviction?

Springora has always wondered what kind of surname hers is. Technically, it's a hapax, the philological term for a word that only appears once in a language. Grandfather Joseph was supposedly a Czech refugee who entered France at the end of World War II and met her grandmother, so Springora thought the unusualness of her surname had Slavic origins. But it did, and it didn't. Little by little, her grandfather's—and father's—name led her to unravel a story very different from the official family one. Joseph Springora's real name was Josef Springer and he was born in Moravia, but he wasn't a Czech citizen. He was a resident of the Sudets, a German by nationality. The discovery of some photos of her grandfather with the gamma cross unhinged her. The Sudetenland, a Germanic city, indeed, welcomed Hitler enthusiastically when he annexed Czechoslovakia. Springora then began a series of trips and archival searches in search of the truth about Josef. Did he wear Nazi emblems out of obligation or conviction? And, worse still, did he collaborate in the Final Solution?

Like cancer, but in a positive way, the desire to know often skips a generation. That's why Vanessa is interested in her father's father, and why so many people in Europe have searched for the memory of their grandparents in ditches, crematoriums, prisons, and mass graves. Perhaps the interesting thing about this book isn't the outcome of the author's investigation (I won't give any spoilers), but the process itself. After all, Oedipus (the first protagonist of a detective novel) is horrified when he confirms his fate and gouges out his own eyes. The desire to know has that perfidious reward.

Now, is it better not to know?