And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (43 page)

*
Interestingly, the Germans treated Shakespeare as a universal dramatist rather than an English poet.

*
Renowned for his wit, Bernard made a remark to his wife after their arrest that quickly did the rounds. Galtier-Boissière recorded it in his journal: “My dear friend, our position is improving. Yesterday we lived in anguish; from now on, we will live in hope” (p. 213).

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CHAPTER 12
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Writing for the Enemy

OF ALL THE FRENCH ARTISTS
forced to live under Nazi rule, it was inevitable that writers should take the clearest stances—and assume the greatest risks. Painters, composers, movie directors and actors could go about their work without either applauding or lamenting France’s humbled condition; at most, they would later be judged by the company they kept. But France’s writers had long presumed a right to opine on politics and, particularly since the 1930s, the public had grown used to hearing them hold forth. During the occupation, of course, only those on the far right were free to do so, and they carried on with their customary bombast, adjusting to the moment by variously praising Pétain, fueling anti-Semitism, justifying the occupation, even defending Hitler. In doing this, they were also writing their own sentences. After the liberation, there could be no ambiguity about their proselytizing: it was all in print. Paradoxically, the same was true for writers in the opposing camp. Although their clandestine newspaper
Les Lettres Françaises
and their underground books had had relatively few readers, the magic of the printed word—
in this case, denouncing the Nazis and Vichy—empowered them to judge their now-ostracized peers. The wheel of fortune had spun quickly. In just over four years, both sides had tasted the privileges and perils of being a writer in a land where words can speak louder than actions.

Yet despite their intense verbal cross fire, the line separating villains and heroes was often blurred. Those who ended up on the losing side included outright Fascists as well as Vichy supporters, anti-Semitic nationalists and cynical opportunists. Floating in the middle were old-fashioned conservatives, ardent Catholics and anti-Communists. And among the victors were many Communists and a smaller number of men and women who were inspired more by principle than ideology. During the occupation, positions also changed, above all as early
pétainistes
gave up on Vichy, with some siding openly with the Nazis and others opting for outright resistance. At the same time, personal ties could often override political differences.

From the beginning, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and André Malraux were political foes, but they remained friends; in 1943, Drieu La Rochelle became godfather to one of Malraux’s children. Similarly, the
résistant
Jean Paulhan never broke with the collaborationist writer Marcel Jouhandeau, even after Jouhandeau’s wife denounced him to the
Feldgendarmerie
, the Wehrmacht’s military police. Then there was the unspoken understanding between the collaborationist writer Ramon Fernandez and Marguerite Duras. Fernandez lived above Duras on the rue Saint-Benoît in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and never reported resistance meetings taking place in her apartment, while she tried to ignore noisy gatherings of Fascists chez Fernandez on Sunday evenings. They even shared a cleaning woman. For their part, Guitry and Cocteau were willing to use their German connections to help other writers in trouble. In a few cases, though, friendship became poisonous: Drieu La Rochelle’s wartime hatred of Aragon can only be explained by the intensity of their prewar ties.

In reality, politics aside, writers of renown in occupied Paris had much in common. Some were independently wealthy, others worked in publishing houses, many earned a steady income writing for an array of newspapers, and a number taught in senior high schools; few shared the winter cold or year-round food shortages suffered by other Parisians. Many were of bourgeois extraction and had attended the same schools or colleges, not least that home of intellectual excellence the École Normale Supérieure. They could be seen lunching or
dining in the Brasserie Lipp or attending the Concerts de la Pléiade or socializing at salons organized by wealthy hostesses. They read and criticized one another’s work, they gossiped furiously, they formed cliques, they insulted their enemies in private and shook hands with them in public. Several who joined the literary resistance even had cordial relations with a handful of “good” Germans—considered “good” because, while openly anti-Semitic and perhaps Nazi Party members, they were Francophiles. Whether Ambassador Abetz could be counted among them remains debatable, but he spoke French, had a French wife and probably helped free some writers from jail. Certainly, almost all the Paris literati came to know Gerhard Heller, the affable thirty-something Sonderführer who was the chief literature censor, initially in the Propaganda Staffel, then, from mid-1942, in the embassy itself. Karl Epting, the director of the German Institute, and his assistant, Karl-Heinz Bremer, both fluent in French, were also considered sympathetic to French culture.

Wandering through the Paris world of letters was a still more unlikely German, Ernst Jünger, who was posted to Paris as a Wehrmacht captain in April 1941. Still in his mid-forties, Jünger had made his name with his semiautobiographical novel
Storm of Steel
, inspired by his experience in World War I, for which he had received Germany’s highest honors for bravery. After he had been demobilized, he had studied etymology, but the immense success of
Storm of Steel
earned him a prestige and authority to speak out on public affairs. He was hardly a liberal. He criticized the Weimar Republic, he wrote an essay called “On Nationalism and the Jewish Question,” suggesting that Jews threatened German unity, and he endorsed the Nazi cult of courage and death. But he never joined the Nazi Party, and he declined an invitation to head the German Academy of Literature. At a stretch, his 1939 novella
On the Marble Cliffs
could be read as an allegory for the tyranny of the Third Reich. Certainly, by the time Jünger reached Paris, he found anti-Semitism distasteful and he positively disdained Hitler, to whom, in his journal, he gave the bizarre name of Kniébolo. And although he shared his political views only with his private diary, he, too, was soon considered a “good” German by many leading writers in Paris.

Working from the Wehrmacht headquarters in the Hôtel Majestic and living in the nearby Hôtel Raphaël, Jünger seemed to have plenty of time for himself, going to the theater or cabaret when he was not a guest at expensive restaurants or private homes. On a few occasions
he was assigned military duties: in his diary entry for May 29, 1941, he describes in detail supervising the execution of a German army deserter.
¹
With his reputation as a serious novelist serving as his calling card, however, he became something of an attraction at social events. Invited to dinner by Vichy’s Fernand de Brinon, Jünger met Arletty and Guitry, who in turn invited him to lunch at his mansion. At the writer Paul Morand’s home, he met the publisher Gaston Gallimard as well as Cocteau, who became a close friend. He visited Arno Breker before the German sculptor’s large show at the Orangerie, and he was received by Picasso. He also often found himself holding literary discussions with writers who he suspected were in the resistance.

Still, anyone reading the press after the fall of Paris would find no such nuances: collaborationists held court unchallenged, with some right-wing writers and journalists savoring the ultimate I-told-you-so. Had they not warned that the Third Republic was rotten to the core, had they not cautioned that Jews, Communists and Freemasons were leading France into an unnecessary war, had they not anticipated that Britain would be an unreliable ally? Now France was paying the price. And it could start building a healthy new society only once it had acknowledged its errant ways and eliminated its enemies within.

Persuaded by Vichy’s promise of a National Revolution, at least until Laval’s return to power in April 1942, even some moderate writers pinned their hopes on Pétain. Jean Zay, the Popular Front’s education minister, was struck by how many writers had betrayed themselves. In his memoir
Souvenir et solitude
he wrote, “Alas! How much kneeling and renunciation there is in French letters in 1941. If a few great writers save honor by the dignity of their silence, how many others, and not the least among them, rush to serve the new gods, curiously forgetting their past and their own works!”
²
Prewar Fascist intellectuals were at least consistent in celebrating the Nazi victory. For them, just as Vichy’s lessons of Catholic piety seemed irrelevant, its aged leader and his mediocre government were clearly incapable of saving the country. Rather, they believed that defeat had opened the way to a different future, one where France would take its place in Hitler’s new Europe. There, with Jews stripped of their power, international Communism defeated and the Anglo-American world neutralized, a Fascist France with its empire intact would eventually recover its stature and dignity. Put differently, the Nazis
did not have to recruit them; they were true believers. With few exceptions, the Fascists of the 1930s remained Fascists throughout the occupation.

Many of their ideas—of Nazi might, of British perfidy, of a global Jewish conspiracy, of Communist treachery—were trumpeted by mass-circulation dailies like
Paris-Soir, Le Matin
and
Le Petit Parisien
, which were directly under German control. These messages were in turn reinforced by Radio-Paris, the Nazis’ official French-language broadcaster, albeit contradicted daily by the equally propagandistic BBC in London. However, a more sophisticated form of collaboration was developed by a half-dozen weeklies, which, while subject to German censorship, competed for educated readers. Describing themselves as “political-literary,” itself an apt label for many French intellectuals, these publications followed editorial lines that were variously pro-Vichy, pro-German and anti-Semitic, but they also made room for literary voices.

One such weekly was
La Gerbe
, which was founded in 1940 by Alphonse de Châteaubriant, the writer who also headed the Groupe Collaboration. Cocteau, Guitry, Fernandez, Drieu La Rochelle, Anouilh and even Colette were among its contributors. Financed by the German embassy,
La Gerbe
paid well, which presumably won over writers who might otherwise have objected to its unwavering hostility toward Jews, Communists, Freemasons and Britain. In one absurd example of commercial interest trumping ideology, Éditions Denoël, which had accepted German investment, published an advertisement in
La Gerbe
for a book of short stories by Aragon’s wife, Elsa Triolet, a Russian-born Jew who was hiding in southern France. Two prewar right-wing weeklies opted to move to the unoccupied zone—
Candide
to Clermont-Ferrand and
Gringoire
to Marseille—although this did nothing to moderate their views. Even so, in 1941 and early 1942,
Gringoire
’s editor, Horace de Carbuccia, published several short stories by Irène Némirovsky under a pseudonym, despite the fact that as a Jew she was banned from appearing in print. Was Carbuccia acting out of compassion? It is more likely that he simply needed well-written material.

The most influential of these weeklies was the openly pro-Nazi
Je suis partout
, edited by Robert Brasillach. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure who soon made his name as a novelist, poet, journalist and polemicist, Brasillach embraced Fascism after the failed right-wing uprising of February 6, 1934. Writing first in
L’Action
Française
, the newspaper of Maurras’s ultranationalist movement, Brasillach came to see Hitler’s National Socialism as a purifying alternative to the decadence of the Third Republic. In 1937, still only twenty-eight years old, he became editor in chief of
Je suis partout
, which by then shared both his pro-German and his anti-Semitic views. That same year, he attended the Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg and came away hypnotized by the regimented rituals of Fascism and, it seems, by the strapping young Aryan warriors at the Führer’s command. Clearly influenced by this visit, Brasillach’s novel
Les Sept couleurs
presented a romantic view of Fascism through a prism of eroticism and mysticism.

When war was declared, Brasillach joined the French army, but he was captured and spent the next ten months as a POW.
^*
But the Germans, knowing him to be a friend, authorized the publication of his 1939 memoir,
Notre avant-guerre
(Before Our War), in which—erroneously—he traced the rise of French anti-Semitism to the moment that a Jew, Léon Blum, became prime minister in 1936.
^*
According to Brasillach, “The movie industry almost closed its doors to Aryans. Radio took on a Yiddish accent. The most peaceful people began to look askew at those with curly hair and hooked noses, who were everywhere to be seen. This is not polemic, it is history.”
³
He also provided a fanciful definition of Fascism: “It is a spirit. It is above all a non-conformist spirit, anti-bourgeois with an element of irreverence.” He added, “It is the true spirit of friendship, which we would like to raise to a national friendship.”
⁴
In April 1941, at Abetz’s request, Brasillach was released and returned as editor in chief of
Je suis partout
.

Closed by the French government in May 1940 for opposing the war with Germany, the weekly had already resumed publication in late February 1941. Two months later, it was apparent that Brasillach’s enthusiasm for the Third Reich was undiminished. Writing most of his newspaper’s editorials, he called for Blum, Paul Reynaud, Édouard Daladier and other Third Republic politicians to be sentenced to death; he singled out Jews who he said should be arrested; he applauded Germany’s seizure of the unoccupied zone in November
1942; and he called for summary execution of all
résistants
. After the
rafle du Vél’d’Hiv’
in July 1942, Brasillach wrote, “We must remove the Jews in a block, and not keep the young ones.” A frequent guest at German embassy receptions, he was particularly close to Bremer, the handsome number two at the German Institute, whom he likened to “the young Siegfried” of Wagner’s
Ring
cycle and who may also have been Brasillach’s lover.
^*
In August 1943, after a dispute with
Je suis partout
’s owner, Brasillach left the newspaper, but he immediately found a fresh outlet for his venom in
Révolution Nationale
. A Propaganda Abteilung report noted approvingly at the time: “Encouraged by his entourage, he has resumed his valuable political work.”
⁵