And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (6 page)

*
Laval’s name reads the same from right to left as from left to right, prompting quips that he was at home on either extreme.

*
Another explanation offered for his suicide was that he had been diagnosed with an acute case of renal tuberculosis, which, he told friends, was incurable.
¹³

*
Having been drummed out of the Communist Party, Breton finally met Trotsky in 1938 in Mexico, where they signed a manifesto,
For an Independent Revolutionary Art
. Two years later, Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City by a Soviet agent.

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CHAPTER 2
_·
Not So Droll

THE DECLARATION OF WAR
disrupted Max Ernst’s bucolic existence in southeastern France, where he was sharing a stone farmhouse with his latest love, Leonora Carrington. She, too, was a Surrealist painter, although, at twenty-two, something of a beginner. Two years earlier, she had met Ernst in London and, like many women before and after, she had been swept off her feet by the dashing silver-haired painter, twenty-six years her senior. Ernst was still married to Marie-Berthe Aurenche, but he evidently preferred Leonora. And after some stormy scenes in Paris, including one where the possessive young Leonora slapped the jealous and aggrieved Marie-Berthe, Ernst and Carrington settled in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, north of Avignon. Leonora had admired Ernst as an artist from the moment she had seen his work, while he was fascinated by how she had created her own Surrealist vision in her teens, in the unlikely setting of a prosperous northern English family. Their farmhouse soon became a Surrealist menagerie, with Max sculpting animal-like deities and Leonora painting walls and ceilings with her own strange fauna.
Ernst was particularly happy to be away from the political squabbles tearing at the Surrealist movement, although his own relations with Breton remained good. In the summer, friends would take the train down from Paris, curious to see how Ernst and his beautiful muse were faring in their rustic Surrealist laboratory.

The declaration of war ended their idyll. One morning in early September 1939, two uniformed French gendarmes came to arrest Ernst. Although he had lived in France for seventeen years and had been denounced as a “degenerate” artist by the Nazis, he remained a German and, as such, an
étranger nondésirable
—an undesirable foreigner—to the French. He was immediately driven forty miles to the northwest to a castle in Largentière, which served as a temporary holding center for German and Austrian nationals in the area. A few weeks later, he was moved to an abandoned brick factory outside Aix-en-Provence, known as the Camp des Milles. From there, he sent word to Jeanne Bucher, his dealer in Paris:
Chère Jeanne, S.O.S., Max
. Held with several hundred other detainees, Ernst hardly found the situation comfortable, but he was not abused and was allowed to work. Further, he was brought paint, clothes and food by Leonora, who turned to Éluard for help. Finally, in December, thanks to the intervention of Albert Sarraut, a former prime minister, Ernst was freed and could return to Leonora and their simple peasant life in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche.

That the French authorities found Ernst so easily suggested that they kept tabs on the many thousands of foreigners who had been flooding into France from central Europe. In truth, they did, but on September 10 Daladier’s government also set up a new structure to deal with the foreigners. All citizens of the Reich were ordered to register with the police. Some were immediately sent to internment camps; others were told not to leave their homes. In the weeks that followed, around twelve thousand German and five thousand Austrian “undesirable foreigners” were detained and spread among dozens of internment camps, some hurriedly improvised, others in the foothills of the Pyrenees already holding tens of thousands of Spanish refugees who had fled Franco’s victory earlier in the year. Unknowingly, France’s democratic government was preparing the way for the German occupation. A year or so later, when arrests of Jews, Communists, Freemasons, resistance fighters and other perceived enemies began, a network of concentration camps was ready to receive them.

Over the same period, Britain also interned several thousand “enemy aliens,” as would the United States two years later, when over 100,000 Japanese Americans were detained. But most of the politicians, university professors, union leaders, journalists, artists and intellectuals held in France in 1939 were either Jews or known opponents of the Nazi regime and, as such, posed no threat to France. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, foreign Communists were arguably more credible candidates for internment, but in practice French authorities made no such distinction. Only internees with well-placed French friends in political or artistic circles had a chance of obtaining early release. But since a majority of these exiles had fled Germany or Austria with few belongings and were living in France as nearly destitute refugees, few had the right connections. Instead of internment, younger refugees were given the option of joining the French Foreign Legion; the Russian-born painter Nicolas de Staël was one who did, although he was sent to Tunisia and saw no action. Gide found the roundup of guiltless foreigners to be a dismaying spectacle, and he described France’s behavior as “morally deficient.” According to his close friend Maria van Rysselberghe, “he suffered to see France suddenly being inhospitable to those whom it had initially protected.”
¹

These included an impressive catalog of artists and intellectuals. At the Camp des Milles, for instance, along with Ernst were the artists Hans Bellmer, Max Lingner, Hermann Henry Gowa and Wols, the German writers Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Kantorowicz and Thomas Mann’s son Golo, as well as several German journalists, an opera producer and two Nobel laureates in medicine, Tadeus Reichstein and Otto Meyerhof. Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish philosopher, was arrested with the Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher (whom she married in 1940) and sent to an overcrowded camp for women at Gurs, in southern France. Thomas Mann’s brother, Heinrich, had the misfortune of being sent to Le Vernet, south of Toulouse, which soon earned the reputation of being the harshest camp, with brutal guards and little food. Koestler, who had narrowly escaped execution by Franco’s forces during the Spanish war, was picked up in Paris—although born in Hungary, he was raised in Austria—and also sent to Le Vernet, leaving his English girlfriend, the young sculptor Daphne Hardy, almost penniless in his Paris apartment. Koestler, whose memoir
Scum of the Earth
includes extensive descriptions of the miseries of life at Le Vernet, was freed
from the camp in January 1940 after Jean Paulhan, the editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, testified to his “loyalty towards France.” Gustav Regler, a German novelist who had been wounded while fighting for the Spanish Republicans, returned to France from Florida, where he had been convalescing in Hemingway’s home. He offered his services to the French army and was instead also sent to Le Vernet. Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher and literary critic, was arrested and held in the camp of Vernuche, near Nevers in Burgundy, for three months before being allowed to return to Paris.

By the end of 1939, close to half of the “undesirable foreigners” had been freed, but a new wave of arrests of Germans and Austrians was ordered on May 13 after the Wehrmacht entered French territory and anti-German hysteria again gripped France. That same month, Erwin Blumenfeld,
^*
a German Jewish photographer who went into exile in France in 1936, was taken to Le Vernet in a train crowded with hundreds of other refugees. Years later, he described their reception:

We had to undress, in broad daylight, on the main street, and line up naked behind our luggage. The inhabitants of Le Vernet passed by without looking at us. While we were searched, even to our prostate, for hidden treasures, like money, weapons and drugs, a horde of emaciated anthropoid apes entered the camp at the double: skeletons with hollow eyes stepping out of
The Triumph of Death
by Brueghel. I thought I was hallucinating: neither France nor I could fall this low. Someone took the negro Fenster’s bugle. Another fellow had to hand over his Cross which he had won in the Foreign Legion fighting for France.
²

Soon, with the Germans deep inside France, Blumenfeld noticed that Nazi internees were suddenly receiving better treatment than the rest. He added: “Schwarz, who had his nose broken at Dachau, said it was worse here. At least German cruelty was exercised in a punctual and orderly manner.”

Ernst, who was still with Carrington in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, was again arrested after a deaf-mute neighbor denounced him for
sending light signals to the enemy. A single gendarme with a rifle came for him, and he was taken to the internment camp of Loriol in the Drôme, then once again to the Camp des Milles. One month later, as German troops were occupying Paris, Ernst was allowed to leave the camp—along with hundreds of other detainees—and he hurried back to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche by foot, hoping to find Leonora. She had vanished. After his arrest, she had fallen apart. Later she wrote, “I wept for several hours, down in the village; then I went up again to my house where, for twenty-four hours, I indulged in voluntary vomiting induced by drinking orange blossom water and interrupted by a short nap.”
³
After three weeks, an English friend and a Hungarian refugee arrived and, alarmed by her condition, persuaded her to leave with them by car for the Spanish border. They eventually reached Madrid and made contact with the British embassy. When Ernst arrived at their house, he found it locked. He broke in to recover some of his and Carrington’s paintings before slowly making his way to Marseille.

Many other foreign interns were also released or escaped before the German army reached their camps, although Walter Hasenclever, a German playwright in the Camp des Milles, chose suicide, taking an overdose of sleeping pills on June 22. Carl Einstein, a German art historian, escaped from a camp near Bordeaux; then, on July 5, finding himself trapped at the Spanish border, he jumped to his death from a bridge. The fate of Münzenberg, the former Comintern agent, was murkier. He was arrested in Paris on May 14 and sent to a camp south of Lyon. Five weeks later, the camp commander ordered some prisoners, including Münzenberg, to march to another camp, but since no military guard accompanied them, they were now free. Münzenberg’s body was found four months later. The cause of death was hanging, although it was never clear whether he was a suicide or, as many still believe, a victim of the Soviet secret police. Koestler was luckier. After being briefly rearrested in late May, he fled Paris with Hardy. He then signed up for the Foreign Legion under a false name to avoid further arrest. At first, Hardy followed him as he shunted between army barracks and mounting disarray. Finally, Hardy found a place on one of the last ships leaving Bordeaux for England, where she arranged for the publication of Koestler’s political masterpiece,
Darkness at Noon
, which she had translated from German. Koestler himself joined thousands of other foreigners trying to leave France,
and he, too, eventually reached England through Casablanca and Lisbon.

One paradox is that, while these “undesirable foreigners” were already victims of the conflict, the rest of France was still coming to terms with the idea of war. By October 1939, France had some 2.6 million men mobilized, many undergoing training, some stationed along the Maginot Line, even more joining the British Expeditionary Force in the north, where the German attack was expected. With memories of World War I still fresh, Paris was initially swept by fear. Trainloads of children were evacuated to the provinces, gas masks sold out,
métro
stations were readied to serve as air-raid shelters, anti-aircraft balloons were hoisted above the city, evening blackouts were ordered and sirens were tested. Because of the disruptions, theaters and movie houses were temporarily closed. Many movie productions were halted, since most actors and technicians had been mobilized. Pointing to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Daladier’s government also dissolved the French Communist Party and denounced its members as unpatriotic, prompting the party leader, Maurice Thorez, to desert the army and head for Moscow.

Strangely, those other fifth columnists, Hitler’s French sympathizers, fared better. Those who openly called on France to break with Britain and make a deal with Germany were sanctioned, as were vocal pacifists, like the writer Giono, who was jailed for signing a “Peace Now!” petition. The Surrealist poet Péret, no friend of Berlin, was also imprisoned for making defeatist remarks. But no move was made to disband pro-Fascist parties. Censorship of newspapers kept pro-German views out of the public eye, although Daladier picked an unlikely propagandist when he named the playwright Jean Giraudoux as minister of information. Giraudoux’s own democratic credentials were hardly immaculate. In 1939, he had published the texts of five xenophobic lectures in
Pleins pouvoirs
(Full Powers), in which he defined the concept of French nationality so narrowly that it could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. Certainly, there was no ambiguity when he included “hundreds of thousands of Ashkenazis escaping from Polish or Romanian ghettos” among the foreigners “swarming in our arts and in our old and new industries, in a kind of spontaneous generation reminiscent of fleas on a newly born puppy.”
⁴
He also proposed a Ministry of Race to control immigration, adding that “we are in full agreement with Hitler in proclaiming
that a policy only achieves its highest plane once it is racial.” For all that, though, he was an ineffective propagandist, at least compared with Paul Ferdonnet, a French journalist broadcasting over Radio Stuttgart, the Nazis’ international broadcast station.