When Paris Went Dark (4 page)

Paris’s arrogance made it a metropolis more difficult to “occupy” than any of the other European cities the Nazis controlled by force between 1939 and 1945. Nevertheless, Adolf Hitler brought German civilians and German soldiers by the thousands to the city, attempting to colonize it culturally, using it as a model for the greater Berlin that the Reich would soon begin building. Parisians themselves tried to avoid as much as they could the fact of the Occupation, presenting a “city without a face,” accepting—some say too “collaboratively”—but not welcoming the presence of a confident enemy in their midst. For four years, both sides—the Germans, with their French collaborators, and the average Parisian—lived in this
faux
Paris, attempting to create a lure for the other, a trap or decoy in which to snare an antagonist.

Der Deutsche Wegleiter für Paris: Wohin in Paris?
(The German Guide to Paris: What to Do in Paris) began publication within a month of the Occupation (July 15, 1940). At first it was only sixteen pages long, but it would grow to more than one hundred pages by its last issue, two weeks before the Liberation. The purpose of the guide was to “offer” Paris to the thousands of soldiers who would be visiting the capital for the next four years.
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But the author of this little article also warns the soldier not to be seduced by this untrustworthy city. Remember, it intones, that there are many other beautiful places you will visit as a Wehrmacht soldier, so “in the middle of the sweet and easy life of the City of Lights… keep in your heart, as every German should, a motto: ‘Don’t fall into sentimentality; the strength of steel is what we need now; direct yourself to clear and sure goals; and be ready for combat.’ ”
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Guardians of Nazi morality would remain concerned that the world’s most attractive city would turn its soldiers into the same decadent military that they had defeated during the Battle of France.

Hitler had several reasons for breathing a sigh of relief that Paris had fallen with nary a shot fired even before the Armistice had been signed. First he wanted to enhance the image of National Socialism worldwide—to show that he and his cohort were a sophisticated and cultured race, worthy of continental leadership. In addition, he sought to mollify the bellicose Winston Churchill, for Germany was still desperately seeking a cessation of hostilities with Great Britain now that France had been subdued. Perhaps allowing a retreating British Expeditionary Force to escape from the port of Dunkirk had been one of the Führer’s signals to the English; treating Paris with respect was definitely another. But a stubborn Churchill refused to read such signals favorably. And so the Occupation of Paris would last for more than fifteen hundred nights, much longer than any of the parties had foreseen.

We shall see how Nazi ideology was quite ambivalent about urban centers: they imagined building cleaner, more idealized city environments so as to reduce the filthy, the foreign, and the aberrant. When confronted with a site such as Paris they were truly befuddled. But had they not occupied other major metropolises, other centers of art and the gay life? What was different about Paris? The difference resided in the place Paris had in the world’s imagination—that and the fact that it was the capital of one of Germany’s most powerful and traditional foes. Now the German Occupation of Paris sought to freeze Paris, to make it static, less dynamic, and to reduce it to a banal tourist site. For a great lot of the Germans, the city remained a sort of El Dorado. Many had visited Paris as tourists before the war; a substantial number of the elite had
studied there. Many of the upper echelons of the Occupying forces spoke excellent French. Those who only knew the city secondhand still recognized it as the ideal city of freedom, charm, and beauty.

Nevertheless, Paris confronted Hitler with a conundrum that he and his acolytes would never completely solve. How does an occupier vigorously and efficiently control a city while maintaining the appearance of a benevolent trusteeship? By its very nature, a metropolis is difficult, if not impossible, to govern predictably. The Occupation authorities had organizational problems; these were evident from the day the first German motorcyclist entered the city. In his study of the period, the American historian Allan Mitchell explains that the administration of the Occupation never fully recovered from early mistakes, despite the myth of German precision and efficiency: “The basic problem was that the German command itself was in virtual chaos. The first phase of the Occupation was therefore characterized by a welter of titles, acronyms, ill-defined prerogatives, and overlapping duties as the German bureaucracy struggled to adapt itself to the particular circumstances of occupied France.”
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As France’s civic and cultural capital, Paris demanded a more flexible and entrepreneurial management than its occupiers were prepared to develop. Their administration of the capital was more layered and confusing than elsewhere in France, particularly because of German bureaucracies overlapping with their Vichy counterparts. The Nazi government’s concern for its image as the new custodian of the world’s most recognized city added further complications. The occupiers were organizing to take material advantage of a conquered city while ostensibly protecting an important part of the world’s patrimony. They also had to ensure that they not appear beguiled by Paris, for such lack of martial attention might encourage restless residents of other occupied cities.

The history of the Occupation is, in part, a melodrama about an often feckless bureaucracy attempting to remake an iconic city into a Potemkin-like hamlet. City planning, as any urban historian will confirm, is an oxymoron. There had been no greater example of planned urban reconstruction than that effected by Baron Haussmann, under the aegis of Napoleon III, between 1852 and 1870. Yet in 1871, the
forces of the Paris Commune (the world’s first communist government), in retreating before the French army could crush it, would use the city’s modern accoutrements (fountains, cobblestones, lampposts, kiosks, benches, and other street furniture) to construct barricades across widened boulevards. They also set this new Paris afire. So the Nazis had occupied a city steeped in the blood of revolt and massacre, of civil strife, and had somehow convinced themselves that they could succeed where even the French themselves had failed. They were both seduced and apprehensive.

But they were not fools: they knew that to occupy was to establish relations with sympathetic and ambitious citizens as well as those who feared and loathed them, and they were quite adept at it. Cities under occupation demand new urban identities of their stressed inhabitants. Often those identities can take on attributes of the occupier; those individuals, for whatever reason, become integral to the confidence of the “foreign” visitor. In writing a history of this period, one needs regularly to remember that there are many less visible lines of demarcation between “occupier” and “occupied.” Language and uniforms are but the most obvious markers of “otherness”; the less obvious—the occasional, accidental, and coincidental acts of “cooperation” and “accommodation”—remind the student of this period that his effort can only suggest the complexity of human relations in such a stressed environment. Daily life was—is—always a matter of accommodation to unexpected and noxious events; the Occupation inflected the small and large decisions that constitute daily life in myriad ways. It imposed an attuned sensitivity on the French that raised moral issues that, to their credit, are still being debated.

A citizen of a city as robustly occupied as was Paris must “accommodate” himself continuously to an unpredictable reality. Just obeying Nazi and Vichy injunctions was an example of such accommodation; but was answering the occupiers’ innocuous questions or having affective or sexual relations with them or selling them bread or shoe polish also a form of collaboration? Is there a hierarchy of activities that makes one a collaborator rather than just an accommodator? Is a quick date or
a one-night stand more “accommodating” than selling coffee to the same officer day after day and even occasionally offering him a free croissant? These are questions that demand thoughtful answers, and thoughtfulness, as we will see later, was not prevalent in the postliberation period. Jean Dutourd’s astutely satirical novel
Au Bon Beurre
(
The Best Butter,
1952), written less than a decade after the events it describes, was a bestseller in France even though it satirized the compromises made by many Parisians. The owners of a dairy shop adapt themselves to every change that occurs in Paris during that period, but they do so to benefit from opportunities to make money, not for ideological reasons. “In exceptional times, exceptional actions,” reasons Monsieur Poissonnard, the grocer.
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Living under surveillance for four years stymied and disfigured earlier ethical certainties; all decisions demanded new justifications.

Paris during the Second World War survived many grievous injuries, but its most serious were not the visible wounds left behind by air raids, bombardments, fires, and disease. There were subtler marks, more difficult to evaluate, easier for history to ignore. These effects were often deeper, more traumatic. An occupation numbs a city’s vitality, the vitality that makes urban life attractive. Soon the citizen begins to feel alienated, disconnected from a familiar environment; though he is still physically engaged with the city, his emotional attachment to it weakens. Previously confident of his urban sophistication, which had allowed him to navigate a complex environment, he becomes tentative, anxious, angry, and impatient as he wonders how long before “his” city returns to him. One of the ironies is that an occupied city brings its citizens closer together physically—in lines, in movie houses, in cafés for warmth, in smaller living spaces, in crowded buses and trains—but separates them emotionally and sentimentally. Suspicion becomes the norm; openness diminishes. Generosity turns to covetousness; racial and ethnic markers become clearer and thus more compelling; objects—things—take on almost ethical value: “If I can’t have my city, then at least I can grab part of it, find something to call mine.”

There are eloquent examples of French people who lived not in Paris or Marseille or Lyon but in small towns and villages accommodating themselves to the sudden proximity of those with power over their daily lives. In her stunningly prescient novel
Suite Française
(1942, but unpublished until 2004), the French-Russian novelist Irène Némirovsky gives us a view of how intimate the Occupation became in rural settings: “The Germans had moved into their lodgings and were getting to know the village. The officers walked about alone or in pairs, heads held high, boots striking the paving stones.… They inspired in the inhabitants of the occupied countries fear, respect, aversion, and the amusing desire to fleece them, to take advantage of them, to get hold of their money.”
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Another book, the novella
The Silence of the Sea,
distributed clandestinely during 1942, was credited to a certain author named Vercors (in reality, Jean Bruller, a writer and member of the Resistance). A young woman and her uncle, who narrates, are forced to accept as a tenant a German officer who makes every effort to befriend them. Deciding early to resist the only way they can, they provide every courtesy to their tenant except to speak to him. Finally von Ebrennac, an anti-Nazi but proud German officer, decides that honor demands he ask to be transferred to the Eastern Front—in other words, to probable death. He announces this to the old man and his niece, and tells them:

French programs on BBC Radio would read
The Silence of the Sea
on the air with touching enthusiasm. Those who had not signed on to the Vichy experiment believed that it presented a France that still had the wherewithal to struggle against apparently impossible odds. It boldly put forth the ethical questions that would haunt France for decades: Which actions, exactly, constitute collaboration and which constitute resistance?

Living in cities, where so many serendipitous encounters occur, is different from living in more intimate villages and towns. Knowing a city by maps alone cannot explain or contain the on-the-ground facts of that city; too much is unseen by the innocent visitor, even less by an occupier. Not only cul-de-sacs and alleys but also the daily lives of a city’s inhabitants are invisible to the mapmaker.
Stadtluft macht frei
(city air makes one free): a totalitarian regime can only partially rule a metropolis. Conquerors tend to forget this age-old belief.

Perhaps the most informative and moving accounts of the war in Europe came from the dispatches and journals of A. J. Liebling, correspondent for
The New Yorker.
Liebling stayed in Paris until forty-eight hours before the arrival of the Germans. Throughout the war, he traveled to the United States, to North Africa, and England; he landed at Normandy on D-day and was one of the first journalists to enter the liberated city. For four years, though, he had been frustrated about not knowing what was going on in his beloved Paris. His only information came from tales brought back by escaped prisoners and from the dozens of little newspapers published clandestinely in France during those years. Reading those scraps of information was as if “one were to try to piece together a theory of what is going on behind the familiar facade of a house across the street where a friend is held prisoner by a kidnap gang. These tiny newspapers are like messages scrawled on bits of paper and dropped from a window by the prisoner.”
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I know how he felt, for even though we have learned much about what was going on since the
war, there remain so many contradictory stories and theories, so many attempts at explanation and exculpation, that unraveling them seems at times to be an exercise in frustration. But the stories themselves are worth remembering, for they speak of a period and a place—Paris—that still demand our sentimental and intellectual attention.