And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (45 page)

Gaston Gallimard was alarmed. Fearing that the Nazis might move against his publishing house if Drieu La Rochelle were to leave, he urged Paulhan to form an editorial committee acceptable to the Germans to ease the editor’s workload. Long negotiations followed, with Paulhan convinced that the
NRF
could be rescued only if it became a purely literary journal supported by weightier names like Gide, Mauriac, Valéry and Claudel. But Gide was living in
Tunisia, Mauriac belonged to the writers’ resistance group, and Valéry and Claudel refused to help. With no agreement forthcoming, Drieu La Rochelle increasingly felt he was wasting his time, time he could more usefully devote to his own writing. On March 15, 1943, he noted in his journal, “I have again announced that I am leaving the
Revue
and this time it should work: I have exhausted my rage and I have nothing more to prove.”
²⁰
The last edition came out on July 1. Twelve days later, Drieu La Rochelle wrote, “At last the
NRF
is truly dead. Poor old Paulhan holding to his heart the debris of French literature (Surrealists, Jews, professors who believe they are as free as Baudelaire or Rimbaud).”
²¹

Still, Éditions Gallimard suffered no reprisals. The rules of the game for the publishing world had been in place since the late summer of 1940 when René Philippon, the president of the Syndicat des Éditeurs, and the Propaganda Staffel agreed on a regime of self-censorship that would prevent publication of new books by Jewish or anti-German authors. The small print added that if French publishers were uncertain about the suitability of a new book, they could send the manuscript to the Propaganda Staffel for approval or rejection. The Nazis had also long since “cleansed” the publishers’ backlists. In the summer of 1940, after the “Bernhard List” named 143 prohibited titles, including works by German exiles like Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque and Stefan Zweig, some 20,000 books were seized. In late September, the new “Otto List”
^*
—which probably took its name from Otto Abetz—named 1,060 titles, many by French authors, including Gide, Mauriac, Julien Benda, Georges Duhamel, Aragon and, most absurdly, Flaubert (whose
Madame Bovary
suddenly recovered its nineteenth-century reputation for immorality). Oddly perhaps,
Mein Kampf
was also banned, but apparently only because a French translation had been published in 1934 without the authorization of Hitler’s publisher.

After the Otto List, a far wider sweep followed, with German military police raiding seventy publishing houses, closing eleven of them, and confiscating over 700,000 books. But the Nazis were not yet satisfied. In July 1942, the Propaganda Staffel issued an updated Otto List of 1,070 titles; some books on the first list were removed as mistakes, and others were added. Then, in May 1943, a third list was
issued, naming 1,554 authors, including 739 “Jewish writers in the French language.”

In his memoir, Heller said that a total of 2,242 tons of books were burned. He noted, “I was able to visit the place where these books were stocked before their destruction. It was a vast garage on the avenue de la Grande-Armée. In the sad light coming through dusty windows, I saw piled up, torn, dirty books, which for me were the objects of a veritable cult. A mountain of horror, a dreadful sight which reminded me of the autos-da-fé in front of Berlin University in May 1933.”
²²
Heller said he could not resist taking some of these banned books and hiding them in the Propaganda Staffel, even joking that his office had become an annex to the French National Library. He did not identify the books he smuggled out, but from this imprisoned library he could have chosen works by Heinrich Heine, Mann, Zweig, Freud, Jung, Marx and Trotsky and, among French Jewish authors, by Max Jacob, Benda and Blum.

In practice, many booksellers as well as riverside
bouquinistes
hid banned books and sold them under the counter to trusted clients. But the Germans also frequently raided stores looking for illegal titles. Until December 1941, Shakespeare & Company, on the rue de l’Odéon, was shielded by Sylvia Beach’s American nationality, but things changed after the United States entered the war. Shortly after Christmas, a German officer appeared at the bookstore and, not for the first time, tried to persuade Beach to sell him her only copy of Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
. When she refused, he announced that all her books would be confiscated that afternoon. In the hours that followed, she and friends hid all of her stock in an empty apartment four floors above the shop. By her own account, she even had the name of the store painted over and its bookshelves dismantled so that, when the Germans returned, they found nothing.

But Beach’s troubles were not over. In late September 1942, she was arrested as an “enemy alien” and, along with some three hundred other American women, was interned in Vittel, a spa in the Vosges Mountains, where many British were already being held. Astonishingly, after six months, she was freed, albeit embarrassingly thanks to the intervention of an old writer friend and new collaborationist, Jacques Benoist-Méchin. She returned to Paris and, for the rest of the occupation, tried to go unnoticed. She avoided a fresh
internment, but she also accepted that the two-decades-long adventure of Shakespeare & Company was over.
^*

French publishers, who had no interest in testing German tolerance, learned quickly to operate inside the new straitjacket. And this was no less true of Aryanized Jewish publishers, like Calmann-Lévy, now Éditions Balzac, and Ferenczi, which reappeared in 1942 as Le Livre Moderne.
^*
One exception was Éditions du Seuil, then a small Catholic publisher, which initially suspended operations because one of its partners, Jean Bardet, was a prisoner of war and the other, Paul Flamand, joined Vichy’s cultural movement Jeune France.

Many other publishers, however, went out of their way to ingratiate themselves with the Germans, none more than Bernard Grasset, then France’s most powerful publishing figure, who saw himself as the ideal interlocutor between the Nazis and the publishing industry. In one letter to a friend on August 3, 1940, he boasted, “As far back as one goes on the two sides of my family, you will not find a Jew or Jewess.” In another letter the following day, he offered this: “The occupiers are essentially racist. I have a clear tendency to be one. In brief, on a number of points that I will call ‘doctrine’—‘doctrine’ as opposed to ‘politics’—I share many of their sentiments.”
²³
Later that year, Grasset summed up France’s situation in a collection of essays he published and prefaced
À la recherche de la France:
“The French find themselves entirely in the hands of a nation that has risen to the summit of unity and strength, and by the virtue of one man.”
²⁴
Robert Denoël, whose publishing house was initially closed by the Nazis, went further by selling part of his company to Germans. Hachette, on the other hand, was almost immediately requisitioned by the Nazis because of its large distribution network.

Industry-wide issues were handled by the Comité d’Organisation du Livre, one of the many organizing committees created by Vichy to manage the economy. But publishers also had direct relations with the Germans, with potentially troublesome manuscripts sent for Heller’s verdict. In his memoir, Heller recalled being impressed by
Camus’s
L’Étranger
and offering to obtain additional paper for its publication. Thus, when it suited them, the Germans overruled French institutions they had themselves approved, such as the commission created by French publishers in 1942 to manage the perennial shortage of paper.
^*
Many publishers—Stock, Flammarion, Payot and Plon among them—also lobbied the German Institute for German books that they could translate. The inimitable Grasset could not resist lobbying for the right to publish Goebbels’s memoir,
Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei
(From the Kaiserhof to the Chancellery), in translation. “It is in your interest as it is in ours that we ensure Dr. Goebbels’s masterly work the distribution it deserves,” he wrote to Goebbels’s publisher, Eher Verlag.
²⁵
The institute followed up by creating the Franco-German Translation Committee, which listed over one thousand German books worthy of translation, including a collection of Hitler’s war speeches. Numerous contracts were signed, although fewer than half the books on the list were ever published.

Most publishers focused on the French market, which expanded rapidly in the early years of the war. In fact, although the paper shortage meant smaller print runs, the number of new titles increased annually until 1943. In his memoir, Abetz even claimed that in 1943 France published more new books than either the United States or Britain—further proof, he said, that Goebbels’s order to dismantle French culture had been ignored.

Escapist books were the most popular. Simenon published ten thrillers between 1940 and 1944, while Marcel Aymé’s popular science fiction stories included
Le Passe-muraille
(Walker Through Walls). Colette’s three novellas published during the war—
Le Képi, Chambre d’hôtel
and
Julie de Carneilhan
—sold well, as did historical novels, adventure travel stories and cookbooks with tips on how to make the best of rationing. No less than in theater, nostalgia for better times fed an appetite for biographies of great French figures of the past, not only the inevitable Joan of Arc and Napoleon, but also Louis XIV, Richelieu, Molière, Voltaire, Fragonard and Diderot.

Contemporary events were also covered. A number of books offered analyses or personal accounts of France’s defeat, such as Henry Bordeaux’s
Les Murs sont bons
, Bertrand de Jouvenel’s
Après la défaite
and Chardonne’s
Chronique privée de l’an 1940
. Here, too,
the Germans occasionally meddled: they authorized Montherlant’s
Le Solstice de juin
after it was banned by Vichy, and they promoted Paul Mousset’s
Quand le temps travaillait pour nous
, which won the 1941 Renaudot Prize. Long-forgotten authors also published myriad anti-Semitic tracts, including a practical handbook,
Comment reconnaître un juif?
(How to Recognize a Jew?). A still greater harvest comprised books praising Pétain, among them Georges Suarez’s
Le Maréchal Pétain
, José Germain’s hyperbolic
Notre chef, Pétain
, René Viard’s
De Charlemagne au maréchal Pétain
and Guitry’s special edition of
De 1429 à 1942
, paying homage to French heroes from Joan of Arc to Pétain.

More surprisingly, many books by authors who were either
attentistes
or were linked to the resistance appeared during the occupation. New plays by Anouilh, Montherlant and Sartre were routinely published before their premieres. Sartre brought out his long existentialist treatise
L’Être et le néant
, while Beauvoir published
L’Invitée
, a stormy love story set on the eve of World War II. Initially censored, Mauriac’s
La Pharisienne
was published thanks to the German Institute’s Epting, while no one raised objections to Paulhan’s meditation on language,
Les Fleurs de Tarbes
(The Flowers of Tarbes). In the first two years of the occupation, Aragon published a collection of poems,
Le Crève-coeur
(Heartbreak), and two novels,
Les Voyageurs de l’impériale
and
Aurélien
. Still more bizarrely, Elsa Triolet’s novel
Le Cheval blanc
(The White Horse) came out in 1943 and
Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs
(A First Snag Costs Two Hundred Francs) in 1944. Saint-Exupéry’s
Pilote de guerre
(published in the United States as
Flight to Arras)
, which he sent to Paris from his exile in the United States, was published in a small edition in the unoccupied zone in 1942, but it was quickly banned by the Germans. His most famous work,
Le Petit prince
(The Little Prince), also written in the United States, was published in New York in 1943 and in France only in 1945. Desnos, too, published several books of poems, including
État de veille
, before he was arrested by the Gestapo in early 1944. And along with
L’Étranger
, Camus published a philosophical essay,
Le Mythe de Sisyphe
(The Myth of Sisyphus),
^*
and the plays
Le Malentendu
and
Caligula
.

Still, if the publishing industry’s concern for its survival led it to
collaborate, other institutions linked to the world of letters fared little better. Of these, the Bibliothèque Nationale, on the rue de Richelieu, had perhaps the unhappiest experience. In the summer of 1939, thanks to the foresight of Julien Cain, its general administrator then, the library evacuated its most valuable books and documents. But within weeks of the occupation, Cain
^*
was ousted by Vichy for being Jewish and replaced by Bernard Faÿ, a Catholic monarchist and a historian of American civilization who had translated Gertrude Stein into French. When he took over, Faÿ introduced himself to the staff with these words: “I have been named because I have the confidence of the marshal and the confidence of the Germans.”
²⁶
He promptly dismissed all Jews, banned Jews from the library and accepted books seized from Jewish collections.