And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (10 page)

The Propaganda Abteilung had little difficulty controlling the mass media, since newspaper editors were either convinced Fascists or eager to please the Germans. In any event, newspapers were subject to censorship—anything remotely critical of Germany or the occupation was excised—and were expected to promote Nazi interests. A still stronger propaganda tool was Radio-Paris, a new French-language station with studios at 116 bis avenue des Champs-Élysées, which was run by a Dr. Bofinger, imported from Radio Stuttgart. Its political broadcasts were designed to whip up hatred for Jews, Communists, Freemasons and the British. These were in turn answered daily by the BBC’s French service in London, known as Radio-Londres, in a program called
Les Français parlent aux Français
.
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But if Parisians ignored the political programs on Radio-Paris, they were
drawn to its cultural and entertainment programs, which included classical and popular music, live theater and chat shows discussing cooking, children’s health and topics of interest to women. Further, Parisians had little choice in what they listened to. They risked arrest if caught tuning in to the BBC, which was also frequently jammed. And while Vichy operated Radiodiffusion Nationale, the prewar government radio now known familiarly as Radio Vichy, its signal was often too weak to reach Paris and northern areas of the occupied zone.

The Propaganda Staffel was less assured in handling France’s cultural elites, particularly in determining how tolerant it should be in managing the performing and creative arts. Since decisions had to be taken quickly as to whether, say, the screenplay for a new movie would be approved or paper be issued for the printing of a specific book, much depended on which German official was considering the case. Some were almost proudly philistine; others were surprisingly flexible. In fact, on more than one occasion, German cultural officials approved books, movies and plays that Vichy wanted banned on moral grounds.

The Propaganda Abteilung, however, also faced competition from the German embassy, notably from Otto Abetz, the newly appointed ambassador. As Berlin’s prewar representative on the France-Germany Committee, he had understood the prestige enjoyed by artists and writers in France, and he was now eager to reach out to them. As an appendix to the embassy, he installed a new German Institute in the elegant eighteenth-century Hôtel de Monaco at 57 rue Saint-Dominique, on the Left Bank, which until just weeks earlier had been the Polish embassy. Abetz also brought with him numerous Germans with knowledge of France, including Friedrich Sieburg, a former Paris correspondent for the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, who in 1930 published
Dieu est-il français?
(Is God French?), portraying France as charmingly trapped in the past. Friedrich Grimm, a jurist and broadcaster who was named legal attaché in the embassy, was also an experienced propagandist. The institute’s director, Karl Epting, was another old Paris hand. He had previously run the German student-exchange bureau in Paris, while his number two, Karl-Heinz Bremer, was a historian who had taught German at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris before the war. Also enthusiastically Francophile was Gerhard Heller, a former student of French literature and now the Sonderführer in charge of literature
at the Propaganda Staffel. And in 1942, after the embassy assumed charge of all cultural activities, leaving only censorship to the Propaganda Abteilung, Heller, too, came under Abetz’s control. Abetz and Epting proved a good team: political events and intimate dinners were held at the embassy, while lectures, small concerts and receptions for visiting artists were hosted by the institute. And French cultural figures would be seen at both. Ordinary Parisians eager to get to know the occupiers could in turn learn German at the institute.

Abetz and Epting also worked with Laval and Vichy’s delegate in Paris, Fernand de Brinon, to create the Groupe Collaboration. The organization’s very name explained its function. As the successor to the France-Germany Committee, it became a kind of pro-German cultural and intellectual club and, by early 1944, had over 42,000 members across France, among them a good number of writers, musicians and painters. It was organized into sections addressing the economy and society, science, literature, the law and the arts, with the arts section in turn divided into theater, visual arts and music. Presided over by Alphonse de Châteaubriant, a writer who was the editor of the new collaborationist weekly,
La Gerbe
, it sponsored concerts by German orchestras, hosted receptions for visiting German luminaries and organized conferences across France. For German soldiers and for Parisian speakers of German, Epting’s institute opened a German bookshop, Rive-Gauche,
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on the corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel and the place de la Sorbonne, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. While the Propaganda Abteilung devoted much of its time to propaganda and censorship, then, the embassy and the institute set out to seduce the leading lights of French culture. In time, French intellectuals were invited to contribute articles to the institute’s two journals,
Cahiers de l’Institut Allemand
and
Deutschland-Frankreich
. Then, from 1941, at Goebbels’s insistence, the institute began arranging for delegations of French artists and writers to visit Germany. All this was possible, of course, because France’s cultural life had returned to close to normal with almost unseemly haste.

Sacha Guitry, whose artistic talent was matched only by his vanity, was among the first to reach Paris. He missed his elegant home on
avenue Élisée-Reclus, beside the Eiffel Tower, as well as the exquisite art collection it contained. He also missed his adoring public. And before leaving Dax, in southwestern France, he was further persuaded that he should return to Paris when a German officer recognized him—presumably from his movies—and hailed him as a French cultural treasure. Once he reached Paris, he announced his presence by requesting an audience with General Harald Turner, the administrative governor of Greater Paris. Guitry’s immediate plan was to reopen the Théâtre de la Madeleine with his play
Pasteur
, casting himself in the title role. For this, he needed the approval of censors at the Propaganda Staffel, who insisted on cuts, including the final scene, where “La Marseillaise” is sung. Furious, Guitry appealed to Turner, and on July 31, barely six weeks after the fall of Paris, the play was performed as written. Turner even led the audience in rising for “La Marseillaise” and then visited Guitry in his dressing room. Offering his compliments, the general asked Guitry what he could do for him. “For me, nothing, thank you,” the Frenchman reportedly replied, “but perhaps the return of some prisoners.” And as a result, eleven prisoners of war were indeed released.
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For his next production, Guitry decided to celebrate French culture through a staged tribute to notable late greats: Rodin, Monet, Renoir, the playwrights Edmond Rostand and Octave Mirbeau, the composer Saint-Saëns, his own father, the actor Lucien Guitry, and the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt. Accompanied by early film footage, Guitry proclaimed his own text, including Mirbeau’s deathbed words: “Never collaborate!” When the Propaganda Staffel stepped in after eleven performances, though, it was to demand that Bernhardt, a Jew, be excluded. Guitry refused to comply and canceled the show. With Guitry back on stage, however, other
théâtres de boulevard
were soon presenting light comedies inoffensive to the German censors. Visitors arriving from the unoccupied zone in the fall were often surprised by and disapproving over how normal Paris seemed. In response to complaints heard in Vichy, a columnist in
La Gerbe
asked why the
vichyssois
should consider Parisians to be bad citizens just “because we try to forget our sorrows, and their piteous burden, by going to see a show.”
⁵
The columnist might have further annoyed those trapped in the bourgeois dullness of Vichy by noting that music halls and cabarets were also doing a roaring business.

The Comédie Française raised a different issue. Like the Paris Opera and other pillars of French culture, this historic theater
remained Vichy’s responsibility. The Germans could censor its productions, but Vichy wanted to ensure that it not go dark or worse, as in the case of the Grand Palais, which was turned into a temporary parking lot for German military vehicles. Because the Comédie Française had stayed open until five days before the occupation, most of its actors were in town. The company’s provisional administrator, the respected director Jacques Copeau, therefore quickly arranged a performance at a Paris school to show that the company was still active. Then, on September 7, the theater’s own curtain finally rose again, albeit with a bizarre program designed by Vichy. It began with a lecture by Abel Bonnard, a right-wing poet and member of the Académie Française, who later became Vichy’s education minister. This was followed by readings from a series of traditionalist French authors. Copeau also addressed the audience in fervently
pétainiste
terms, proclaiming that there was hope because France was confessing, condemning and amending its errors and because, “in spite of all the disasters, we maintain a secret but unshakeable faith in the deep powers of the homeland, in the soul of the race, in the lasting strength and survival of the French spirit.”
⁶
The show was repeated on September 15 before the company returned to its traditional repertoire, with plays by Corneille, Shakespeare and Mérimée.

The opera world was even quicker off the mark. In 1939, the Paris Opera at the Palais Garnier and the Opéra-Comique at the nearby Salle Favart were brought under the same administration, with the immensely experienced Jacques Rouché in charge. In the late summer of 1940, it was his job to reopen both theaters, all too aware that senior German officers found opera more to their liking than French-language theater. Further, in the eyes of the Germans, the Palais Garnier had now acquired a special aura. On his only visit to Paris early on the morning of June 23, Hitler had asked to see the opera house before any other building. Accompanied by his chief architect, Albert Speer, and his favorite sculptor, Arno Breker, he took a three-hour tour of an empty and silent Paris that also included Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, the Panthéon, Notre-Dame cathedral and other tourist sites, but the opera house, Speer later wrote, was “Hitler’s favorite.” It appears that the Führer had studied Charles Garnier’s neo-Baroque extravaganza as an art student and even knew his way around the building on his first visit. Speer added, “He seemed fascinated by the Opera, went into ecstasies about its beauty, his eyes glittering with an excitement that struck me as uncanny.”
⁷

On August 24, before an audience packed with uniformed German officers, the Paris Opera reopened with the same production of Berlioz’s
La Damnation de Faust
that was being staged when the house closed on June 5. It is not known whether Rouché made a point of picking a French composer for the first production, but
La Gerbe
’s music critic Louis Humbert applauded the decision as conciliatory. After all, he noted, Berlioz loved Germany and had been influenced by Beethoven, Weber and Glück when composing this opera based on Goethe’s play. The production was followed by a reprise of Massenet’s
Thaïs
and, somewhat oddly, in late October, by Beethoven’s operatic ode to freedom
Fidelio
, with a German favorite, the French soprano Germaine Lubin, in the role of Leonora.

By the fall, the opera house was offering shows on Wednesday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Its ballet company also returned to the stage under the direction of Serge Lifar, the dancer discovered by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes twenty years earlier. For the ballet’s opening performance, on August 28, one-third of the seats were occupied by Germans, including Ambassador Abetz and General Otto von Stülpnagel, the German military commander. At the Opéra-Comique, another French opera, Messager’s
La Basoche
, was chosen to open the season on August 22. Soon operetta, also much loved by the Germans, was being presented by several theaters, including the Châtelet, the Mogador and the Bouffes Parisiens. French instrumentalists and singers could entertain the German military elite without assuming political risks, so long as programs did not include music by Jewish composers. This was quickly made clear to Jean Wiener, a Jewish composer who presented himself at the Propaganda Staffel in the fall of 1940. A German officer told him, “If I don’t see your dirty name on a poster, perhaps I will leave you in peace. Do you understand?” When Wiener recognized the man as a well-known German musicologist, the reply was rapid: “I don’t know you. Get out!”
⁸

Movie theaters, on the other hand, reopened immediately after the fall of Paris—no fewer than one hundred by early July. In the main, they showed French movies because of the German ban on British and American films, films made by Jewish directors and films starring Jewish or anti-Nazi actors. German-language films were screened in the Rex, Marignan and Paris theaters, now designated Deutsches Soldatenkino and open only to German soldiers. For French moviegoers, the main change was the end of double features. But French
moviemaking as such had stopped, not least because most top producers, directors and actors had fled Paris during the exodus and were in no hurry to leave the Côte d’Azur.

Nine months earlier, the declaration of war had forced cancellation of the inaugural Cannes Film Festival, but the resort was now once again the informal capital of French cinema, with a trio of beautiful young actresses—Danielle Darrieux, Micheline Presle and Michèle Morgan—as its glamorous icons. “We were totally carefree,” Darrieux recalled with some embarrassment decades later. “We’d have our feet done, we’d go to the beauty parlor all the time. We were very young, very pretty and fashionable stars, we didn’t give a damn about what was happening up north.”
⁹
Darrieux and many other movie celebrities spent the rest of 1940 at the Grand Hôtel, which the photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue likened to “an ocean-liner immobilized by the war.” The hotel’s manager was the father of Louis Jourdan, the young screen idol who was now engaged to Presle. “It was extraordinary,” Presle recalled. “We’d meet the producers on the terraces, we’d go out on boats for picnics on the islands. We were far from the war. And then people began to leave, the producers, most of the producers were Jewish.”
¹⁰
A photograph taken on the beach that summer shows Morgan and Darrieux sitting cheerfully on the knees of the producer Gregor Rabinovitch, with a smiling Presle standing behind them. “He was as happy as a king,” Darrieux remembered. He was also among the first Jewish producers to leave France.