Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (66 page)

The cabinets, corners, hallways, and even the canteen that plays music of the time and serves Guernsey
gâche
(a traditional type of raisin bread) are all stuffed with artifacts large and small, carefully labeled. The museum has become the Island's attic, and at first glance the jumble of items appear to be without an overall pattern, resembling our memories of historic events, particularly traumatic ones, when we relive them. Yet, this first impression is illusory, because the pattern to the layout of the museum is quite strong and reflects a distinct view of Occupation from the Islander's perspective. Unlike many modern museum displays that provide predigested sound bites of history, carefully wrapped in media to capture flagging
attention spans, the German Occupation Museum expects from visitors an engagement with history in all of its complexity. It is a view shared by the Channel Islands Occupation Society that history is to be understood and faced for what it reveals, for good or ill. There is nothing of public relations or overt justification in the displays, for the museum takes a warts-and-all perspective on the events of the Occupation.

The main portion of the museum (taken separately from the Canteen, Occupation Street tableau, Fishermen's Memorial Room, and Liberation Room) unfolds much as the Occupation unfolded for the Guernsey civilians. On entering the museum, the visitor's eye is pulled down and to the right by the figure of a small child dressed for travel, his suitcase at his feet. It is in the interplay between the small figure and the first two rooms of the museum that we see an initial theme. The small figure represents the children evacuated before the onslaught of German power that drove the French and British forces from the shores of Dunkirk, and that swept up Guernsey in their wake. The first two rooms of the museum emphasize the power and military force of the German occupiers as they descended on demilitarized Guernsey. The cabinets from floor to ceiling are filled with weapons and uniforms—helmets, daggers, dress uniforms on mannequins, pistols, and all the other accoutrements of war. These are rooms much cherished by small boys who visit the museum.

But there is also a dual focus in these rooms, where the Island is viewed through the eyes of the young German soldiers coming to Guernsey. Paintings of their homeland, watercolors of the Island, folk art and carvings used to while away the time (including a never-completed dollhouse), letters home to sweethearts and families are displayed along with temporary grave markers of those Germans who never were to leave the Island. These rooms take much of the approach of Rev. Ord: acknowledging the humanity of the common soldier and differentiating him from the fearsome evil of the Nazi juggernaut that rolled across the Island.

The next two rooms thematically emphasize the panoptical Occupation and the rhetorical resistance. There are the “Don't Be Yellow” posters urging Islanders to stay, a bomb of the type deployed in the initial air raid that ended the opportunity to leave, and framed copies of newspapers now controlled by the Germans, opened to particularly important dates for Guernsey. It is in this room that a feeling is set up of unending surveillance and the monitoring of the population. In the following room comes the Islander response of resistance through the gathering and disseminating of information and the symbolic attempts to resist psychological control. In this room is the centerpiece of the museum: a tableau of a family in their kitchen, secretly listening to a wireless set. The father sits at the kitchen table with the wireless set on his lap; the mother stands watch at the window, a guard against surveillance by Germans or informers. And their little girl stands close by, her pets brought in for the night to spare them from the German stewpot. On the end of a cabinet is a wicked little visual joke: amid a series of references to food, such as recipes using carrageen moss for blancmange and ways of cooking with a sawdust burner, is a poster offering a £5 reward for the return of Mrs. De Guerin's white Scotch dog “Sarah.”

Many aspects of Occupation life, from posters for amateur theatrics to homemade dolls, are displayed here. This room also contains a fascinating juxtaposition of collaborators and patriots. Anonymous letters sent by informers share the room with photos of fraternizing civilians with Organization Todt staff at a celebration of Hitler's birthday and Guernsey girls with soldiers at the La Valette Swimming Pools. Yet these are side by side with articles revealing the more overt campaigns of resistance. On display are the Victory brooches bearing the likeness of King George. There are the German warnings that were posted about marking
walls with V's, and Edmund Blampied's cartoon of two girls who “committed the heinous crime of writing the letter “v” on a wall.” And Red Cross messages are displayed here, with their coded language designed to thwart the German censor and send news off the Island.

The room that follows is a remembrance of Festung Guernsey (Fortress Guernsey) and the role the Island played in Hitler's plans for an Atlantic Fortress. The emphasis is upon the mines, the railway line, the gun emplacements, the heavy artillery, and the tunnels, all of which changed the face of the Island. It presents a tableau of a German POW clearing the mines from the beaches following Liberation. In tableau, too, is a memorial to the Organization Todt workers, one of whom is shown attired in ragged clothes and pushing a rail truck filled with soil from the construction of the many tunnels. The room that follows is also a tribute to those under imprisonment, although in a different sense. There is a display about the Guernsey Prison, so often filled to overflowing with Islanders. For the most part, however, the room concerns the deportees to the German camps at Laufen and Biberach, and displays homemade items from the camp. At the end of the room is a tableau of Ambrose Sherwill sitting in a mockup of the small British Camp Seniors' Room at Laufen.

The final room of the main portion of the museum is a small room located behind a prison door, a space given over to themes of martyrdom and memory. In this room are commemorated the resisters who died in Continental prisons (such as John Ingrouille), civilians who served prison terms for resistance (such as Winnie Green), and slave laborers who died throughout the Channel Islands. Hanging in a cabinet are the striped pyjama suits worn by German political prisoners who died at Sylt Prison Camp in Alderney. There is a special section set aside to commemorate the three Jewish women, Auguste Spitz, Therese Steiner, and Marianne Grunfeld, who were to be victims of the Holocaust. And beside a display about the fate of the Jews in Guernsey is a touching and disturbing item: Marianne Grunfeld's suitcase.

The focal point of the room is actually a sculpture of three suitcases by Jennifer Anne Snell, a locally born artist. Built out of concrete, they mirror the concrete fortifications that desecrated the Island's beauty. The suitcases are completed with original leather fittings and patches, bringing to mind all the piles of suitcases found when the Nazi death camps were liberated, and according to the artist, they are designed to reflect “travel, deportation, evacuation, and exile.”
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But this sculpture also functions to bring the museum full circle, back to the statue of the small boy with his cap, traveling jacket, and suitcase that greeted visitors at the entrance. It reflects, as does the museum as a whole, the journey through five years of Occupation taken by the Guernsey Islanders, and the memories shared only by those who traveled those years together.

We are rapidly losing the opportunity to directly tap the memories of discourse and rhetorical resistance as waged by the Channel Islanders. Many researchers eschew private memories because they consider them tainted by time and subject to the self-interest we all have in being the heroes of our own lives. These are legitimate concerns, but such problems with memory are generally part of the universal coping mechanism that all of us possess. The vagaries of memory, especially of traumatic events, usually provide a means for the mind to heal itself rather than an attempt to cover dark secrets. Except for private, contemporaneous accounts, it is unlikely that a true picture of the resistance of the powerless can ever emerge. In official accounts, written or overseen by those in power, we generally find in the descriptions of those under domination a similar dim and stolid compliance. What is not apparent in the official transcript is the extent to which this apparent compliance shelters acts of resistance. Performed compliance offers such a perfect mask that those reading official transcripts, even
decades after events, are easily gulled into the same mistaken reading foisted on the dominant at the time.

Rarely is there available any type of private documentation revealing the unfiltered views and methods to thwart domination utilized by those under the control of others. Slaves in the South, forbidden legally to learn to read and write, expressed in the words of spirituals both their discontent and desire to escape.
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But these views must be deciphered rather than read at face value. The discontent in many onerous political, business, or academic climates may leave no private paper trail at all behind them that can be read by subsequent generations. Those who wish to read only the officially sanctioned view of history found in public documents will find plenty to support a picture of happy slaves, contented women during times and places where they lacked legal rights, workers pleased with their lot, and widespread collaborators under conditions of military occupation. This, then, is the value of these private Guernsey diaries, written despite the difficulties and dangers involved, and offering an insight not just into means of resistance but also into the views of a general populace toward the actual profiteers, fraternizers, and collaborators in their midst.

The subtlety of rhetorical resistance, particularly under domination of arms, and its inability to effect an actual change in the power structure may foster little but contempt in some quarters. Repeatedly, the view is put forth that these acts of resistance were even welcomed by the Germans as a “safety valve” to dissuade wider revolt. Were these verbal and symbolic acts “a matter of hollow posing,” a poor substitute for acts of overt aggression?
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I agree here with James Scott that there is little sign from a social psychology perspective that the narratives, symbolic rituals, and small acts of defiance found in the hidden transcript of the powerless will lead to some kind of “harmless catharsis that helps preserve the status quo.”
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Instead, the “fires of resentment” are stoked by those resistant acts and narratives, just as grumbling and expressions of frustration in everyday life tend to feed rather than cool the flames of anger.
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And through these shared small acts and narratives, a connective web is formed of the like-minded, a community that may be called into action should the opportunity present itself. We should not expect to find acknowledgment of most forms of rhetorical resistance in either private or public writings by the Germans. As we have seen in this study, successful resistance is deftly hidden, and this understanding gives new who's-fooling-whom meaning to an unnamed German officer's view that the Guernsey Islanders were “obsequious peasants.”
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What is important in the case of Guernsey is that the Germans themselves treated the rhetorical resistance with some of the respect they would have accorded overt resistance, expending time, effort, and resources to come down hard on defiant Islanders. From the comically excessive response to the V-campaign to the arrests and subsequent deportation of Islanders for verbal defiance, acts of disrespect, and skirting the rules against wireless possession and news dissemination, the Germans verified the effectiveness of rhetorical resistance by their very response to it.

This examination of the Guernsey resistance has provided a tentative outline for a rhetorical resistance that is likely to arise in other conditions of extreme power differential. It remains to be seen if, under other situations of domination, there is a universal need for community support and clearly shared values as preliminaries for resistant acts. These elements, generally established through interpersonal communication, seem to be foundational before the symbolic elements of subversion are likely to develop to any great extent. In many cases, we could look for these elements as established in the home or within groups of friends. However, in some situations, these private nurseries of oppositional strength might be augmented by
churches, with the clergy providing both practical support and the nurturing of a set of countervalues.
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Thus, in studying instances where long-term opposition to domination remains primarily rhetorical, the first steps of analysis may be to identify the sources of support, to delineate the values shared by the community, and to detail how these vital preliminaries to resistance were communicated within those private and quasi-public spaces sheltered from panoptical surveillance. In onerous situations of domination, a new morality may also be forged: an “imperative to be honest and ethically responsible among those who counted as ‘us,’ contrasted with the distrust and duplicity in dealings with ‘them’ and with the official world generally.”
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Considering the multilayered complexities of community support, resistant acts, and ethical understandings, it is little wonder that the Guernsey Occupation has defied easy analysis.

When it comes to the structure of rhetorical resistance itself, as it emerges in other situations of long-term opposition to power, we might expect the specifics to vary from the three primary approaches noted in the Guernsey Occupation. The trio of rhetorical resistance elements identified here may serve, however, as touchstones for discovering other discursive and symbolic means of opposition. In other instances of a dominated population, do rumor and gossip serve the same functions of expression, information verification, and control that they did during the Occupation? Although it is unlikely outside of a political or wartime setting that propaganda would be a substantive factor, understanding the narratives—the jokes, stories, and folktales—of subjugated populations is a clear necessity to deciphering their hidden transcript. And finally, we should seek commonalities in the form that symbolic defiance takes across situations marked by a power differential. Each culture will have its resonant symbols and methods that are comfortable for average people to exploit, such as Joan of Arc and resistance poetry in World War II France,
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and King Christian X and chain letters in Denmark during the same period.
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And within countries and individual organizations, there are likely to be multiple subcultures, each with its own view of creative and effective means of symbolic subversion. Unique rhetorical resources may be tapped in each case to construct and deploy an effective counterbalance to oppression.