Michèle Audin

The article presents Michèle Audin's novel "La Maison hantée" (2025) as a striking example of a "roman croisé" in which documentary research, narrative imagination, and multiple time levels overlap: Starting with her move into a Strasbourg apartment building in 1992, a first-person narrator follows the traces of former residents and, using archival materials, chance discoveries, and careful reconstructions, unfolds a web of life stories that focuses particularly on the Caron-Fischbach family between 1930 and 1946; in the shadow of the Nazi annexation of Alsace, questions of belonging, linguistic coercion, and administrative violence become virulent, with the Jewish residents of the building and their gradual disappearance from the records emerging as a disturbing void that can be neither narratively closed nor fully explained historically. The narrative movement resembles a tentative traversal of spaces and times—stairwells, apartments, archives—in which voices overlap and contrasts are not resolved but rather kept visible. Against this backdrop, the essay argues that Audin develops a poetics of trace-finding that does not level the coexistence of fact and fiction but rather displays it: First, the historical novel is identified as a construct through the consistent self-reflexivity of the narrative voice, in that imaginative additions are explicitly marked and thus epistemologically transparent; second, Alsace appears as a paradigmatic space of intersecting identities, in which national attributions—especially under the conditions of Nazi language policy—are violently imposed and simultaneously made tangible in their fragility; third, the silence of the sources, for example in the case of the extinguished Jewish lives, proves to be not merely a deficit but a central bearer of meaning that marks the limits of historical knowledge and demands an ethically reflective form of remembrance. The essay thus makes it plausible that “La Maison hantée” understands history not as a linear narrative, but as a polyphonic structure riddled with breaks, in which the past can only be accessed through a process of approximation and intersection.