I WAS EXTREMELY enthusiastic about my work for the Franco-German Youth Office; I even planned to write a guide and manifesto for young German au pair girls in Paris. And that is exactly what I did. The book ended up having a huge impact in Germany, due to the timing of its publication: it came out just after one of those young German girls was murdered in the upscale Parisian suburb of Neuilly.
That book also marked, for me, the beginning of a period of friction with two Youth Office executives: its general secretary, then in Bonn, François Altmayer, and the head of the French section, Robert Clément. Even though the Youth Office had given its blessing to the book’s publication, even though it had actually followed the ideas I set forth in the manifesto, it was unpleasant for eminent men to have to admit that the ideas of a young female secretary could be of any importance.
In public appearances and conferences on Franco-German relations, I was invited as a specialist and placed by the organizers next to the Youth Office’s directors, who coldly ignored me. Whenever I spoke, they made it plain that “Mrs. Klarsfeld is speaking only for herself,” even though the audience was well aware that what I was saying was in no way at odds with the Youth Office’s policies. I was helping to raise public awareness about the situation of au pair girls, and I was helping those girls by giving them practical advice on specific aspects of their daily and cultural life. I also wrote on their behalf in the “manifesto” part of the book:
The French and the Germans still have a false image of each other: young French people see young Germans as hardworking, serious, sociable, polite, disciplined, courageous, and intelligent, but also bellicose, militaristic, authoritarian, arrogant, withdrawn, humorless, lacking a critical sense, false, and nationalistic. Meanwhile, young Germans regard young French people as kind, charming, happy, open, and intelligent, but also lazy, unpleasant, superficial, frivolous, and careless. These enduring clichés can be altered by sustained contact with the other nationality, however. From a German standpoint, in order for young people to acquire a genuine sympathy for France during their travels, they need to spend a prolonged period of time there, to gain a fluent understanding of the French language, to forge long-lasting personal relationships, and to enjoy a broad range of social contacts.
Au pair girls are the only ones to meet all these conditions. They are able to engage in a specific form of travel that corresponds to what the Franco-German friendship requires of young people. Generally, returning to Germany more open-minded and with their character enhanced, they are worthy of the best help we can offer them.
But a secretary had no say in the matter—that is what I discovered, to my displeasure.
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AN INCIDENT WITH VOGGENREITER, my book’s German publisher, further cooled my relations with the Youth Office while also revealing the German section’s subjection to the Bonn government, even though in theory the Youth Office was an independent binational organization.
In a chapter entitled “Germany in Paris,” I gave the names and addresses of cultural associations, including Franco-German Exchanges, which organized conferences on German history at the Sorbonne. Now, this was a French charity with friendly links to the German Democratic Republic (GDR). My German publisher, who was hoping to sell a number of copies directly to the education ministries of the different administrative regions in the Federal Republic of Germany, was obliged to withdraw all the books from sale and to remove the page containing these addresses. The youth minister, who was planning to distribute the guide to German girls about to leave for France, pulled out at the last moment.
I was given a severe dressing-down: “Don’t you understand? You mentioned an association with links to East Germany! It’s unbelievable…” We could not understand each other: for them, Germany belonged to the Federal Republic; for me, it belonged to the entire German people.
* * *
SPRING 1966. I used to take little Arno for walks from Porte de Saint-Cloud to the Jardin des Poètes. We had decided that our son would be Jewish, that he would be circumcised by a rabbi and be named after Serge’s father. The Youth Office had granted me one year’s unpaid leave. I changed diapers and doted on my baby. Each smile that lit up his face was a precious moment of happiness.
Whenever I could, I would go to the mayor’s office in the fifth arrondissement. There, in a room hidden amid a labyrinth of corridors, I found Marguerite Durand’s feminist library. I was researching a subject close to my heart—the German woman as seen by the French—on which I hoped to write a book. Each weekend, I would stroll along the Seine with Serge and Arno, and I would pick up books from the secondhand stalls there, written by French travelers, prisoners of war, or journalists about the romantic, domestic, professional, and social lives of German women in the twentieth century. I learned a great deal about my fellow citizens and their observers. Around this time, a magazine, La Femme du XXe siècle (The 20th Century Woman), asked me to write an article on the postwar German woman.
I have come to wonder what drove me—and so many other German women—to leave our homeland. Of course, there were some obvious reasons, to do something specific in France or elsewhere: the in-depth study of a language and civilization. But, in my opinion, there is something more profound and often unconscious beneath this urge: the desire for liberation.
Under Wilhelm II, our ancestors’ world could be summarized by the three Ks (Kinder, Kirche, Küche—“children,” “church,” “kitchen”). For a decade or so, under the Weimar Republic, our grandmothers were finally able to breathe and hope. Then Hitler sent them back to the children—and to the factory when the needs of the war machine became great enough.
Once again, it took the trauma of losing a world war to give the German woman a second chance. Our mothers worked; they actively contributed to rebuilding the cities from ruins. In return for which, German society largely opened its arms to them, enabling them to become laborers, engineers, doctors, farmers, teachers, or business leaders, without forgetting to ask them, too, to produce the men of tomorrow. Women actively contributed to the reconstruction of a new Germany. Sadly, this country was not new in any meaningful sense, because, as before, women still played practically no political role. What I mean by political is participation in the real task of shaping our nation’s destiny. How many women have done that in the history of Germany? Once again, German public opinion is veering dangerously toward the idea of a domesticated woman, devoted exclusively to the well-being of her husband and her natural reproductive function.
I joined the Social Democrats in 1964. After my book was published, Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, received me in his office, where he told me about his stay in Paris, in his early twenties, in 1937, after he had fled Nazi Germany. I know many Germans consider him a traitor, but I admire him for not having followed the injunction: Recht oder Unrecht, mein Vaterland (My country, right or wrong).
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I SAW WILLY BRANDT again two years later, at a reception given in the summer of 1966 by the German embassy in Paris; he looked crestfallen by his second electoral defeat. The comments about him in the German press had been scathing. He was labeled a “drunkard,” and his political career was deemed over. I told him again how much confidence I had in him: “There is a whole younger generation in Germany that admires you for your stand against the Nazis. We need a German like you as our chancellor. Don’t lose heart; I have confidence in you.”
Impulsively, I took his hand. He smiled at me warmly. The look in his eyes reflected his honesty, and the creases around them the incessant struggles he’d faced, swimming against the tide of German opinion. For me, his voice was that of the German people, and his face was the true face of Germany.
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WHEN I RETURNED to the Youth Office in October 1966, my position as a researcher had been axed—for “budgetary reasons.” I found myself stuck behind a typewriter, or sometimes working the switchboard, and once again I was frustrated.
In December, our entire family rented an immense apartment on Rue de l’Alboni—overlooking the Seine, almost opposite the Eiffel Tower and with the metro roaring just under our windows. Serge and I paid two-fifths of the rent, Serge’s sister Tania and her husband, Alik, the same, and Serge’s mother, Raïssa, one-fifth.
Food was my responsibility. Two or three times a week, I would go to Les Halles to stock up. We were able to hire a cleaning lady and two au pairs—one for the morning, the other for the afternoon—to look after the children. For my sister-in-law and for me, this meant a considerable increase in our freedom. We lived communally. It was a fascinating experience, like a little kibbutz in the middle of Paris.
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DURING THIS TIME, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the minister president of Baden-Württemberg, was preparing to become chancellor of Germany. A few French newspapers discreetly mentioned his past as a Nazi propagandist. Shocked, I immediately scanned the German press. The only protests came from a great writer, Günter Grass, and a great philosopher, Karl Jaspers, who wrote: “What seemed impossible ten years ago is now happening almost without resistance. It was probably inevitable that former Nazis would occupy high-ranking political positions, simply because there are too few non-Nazis to look after the functions of the state. But that a former National Socialist should now rule the entire Federal Republic implies that the fact of having been a Nazi no longer has any significance. No one objected when he was elected minister president of Baden-Württemberg, but chancellor? That is something else altogether.”
I remembered Hans and Sophie Scholl’s final leaflet: Who were they writing it for? For us, for all of us: “Once the war is over, the guilty must be severely punished in the interests of the future, so that no one will ever want to do something like this again … Do not forget the bastards who run this regime! Remember their names, so that not one of them may escape! So that they cannot, at the last moment, change sides and pretend that nothing ever happened.”
As soon as Kiesinger was elected to the head of the West German government, there was a conspiracy of silence about his past in the newspapers. Particularly once the coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats was sealed. Then Willy Brandt became the country’s foreign minister.
We had to react, but how? I decided to follow the Scholls’ example. The essential thing, in fighting against Nazism, is to recognize before acting that success is not a certainty. What matters most is to try, courageously, to follow your conscience, with your eyes wide open. My first act was a public statement.
I went to see two daily newspapers with my article. But they politely ushered me toward the offices of Combat. I had some difficulty finding the old building on Rue de Croissant, in Montmartre, that was home to the newspaper that preserved the spirit of the French Resistance.
The young editor I met, Michel Voirol, seemed surprised to meet a German who wished to protest against Kiesinger’s nomination. My first op-ed appeared on the day of his official visit to Paris, on January 14, 1967.
Mr. Kiesinger is a reassuring presence for Germans of a certain age. He has always walked in step with the German people. Like them, he went the wrong way for ten years, when he was a member of the Nazi Party … Willy Brandt is more frightening to Germans. How dare he always be right in the major decisions of his life, and to have indissolubly linked morality to politics. He is also reproached for his courage in leaving Nazi Germany when he was neither a Communist nor a Jew, simply a free German. Many Germans do not like Brandt’s courage and clear-sightedness; in fact, they cannot forgive him for possessing those qualities.
I was not motivated by hatred for Kiesinger nor by a morbid fascination with the past or even by despair. I believed that Germany had a bright future and that it lay with Willy Brandt. In a second article, published in March 1967, I wrote:
As a German, I deplore the accession of Mr. Kiesinger to the position of chancellor. A former Nazi Party member at the head of our nation: this is equivalent to the public absolution of a certain era and a certain attitude. Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil” in relation to Eichmann, but for me, Mr. Kiesinger personifies the respectability of evil. Mr. Kiesinger was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 until 1945, and his defense during the postwar trials could be summarized as: “I did not resign because remaining in power allowed me to limit the damage.” Well, I may only have been born in 1939, but I know too much about the concentration camps and the ruins of Europe to thank Mr. Kiesinger for the way he limited the damage …
Only Willy Brandt can give a new direction to Germany’s political life … So any countries who fear Germany’s ambitions should help Brandt to become chancellor. The countries of the East in particular should welcome him with all the consideration and respect due to a man who was—and remains—their ally in the battle against Nazism. They should regard him as their only valid contact and refuse all dialogue with Mr. Kiesinger. Last, they should help Brandt in his efforts to solve the German problem by bringing the two Germanys closer together within a socialist framework.
Each political stand I took increased the hostility toward me from my superiors and colleagues at the Franco-German Youth Office. No one mentioned those articles in my presence, but it was clear that they were trying to make my working conditions ever more unbearable.
* * *
WHILE THIS STORM was brewing at work, however, the joys of family life absorbed me at home. Everything was cheerful and happy between us. Arno was growing up, while Serge—after resigning from the ORTF—soon got another job at Continental Grain. When he told me he was going to Israel for the war, I did not try to dissuade him: I had been to Israel with him the previous year, and I knew how strong his attachment was to the Jewish cause.
Surrounded by such a family, I felt loved and secure. I would need those feelings in the ordeal that awaited me.