Chapter Four
City Without a Face—The Occupier’s Lament
The glacial politeness of a patiently waiting bookseller… has a paralyzing effect. Strong nerves and a thick skin are absolutely necessary.
—Felix Hartlaub1
Paris Had Already Welcomed the Nazis—Before the Occupation
In 1937, for the last great international exposition before the war, Germany had been invited to build a massive pavilion just below the promenade on the Place du Trocadéro, where Hitler would stand for his iconic photograph on June 28, 1940, during his brief visit to Paris. (Opposite this Speer-designed edifice of fascist taste and ideology would stand the USSR pavilion, topped by striding figures carrying the hammer and sickle.) One imaginative historian has insinuated that this pavilion represented the first “occupation” of Paris by the Germans. She argues that one of the main aims of the Third Reich’s participation was to persuade the French of Germany’s kinship as a cultural innovator and respecter of tradition.2 Thousands of Hitler Youth were ferried to Paris for the fair; many of them would be back in just a few years for another sort of tourism.
The Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 had already impressed the world with the talents of Hitler’s master image-führer, Joseph Goebbels, who brilliantly combined international spectacle with fascist ideology. The Paris Exposition, though on foreign soil, would provide Goebbels with another venue in which to dazzle the world with the positive qualities of National Socialism. And there was one more way in to the French political psyche for the Nazis: pacifism was a dominant political sentiment in the late 1930s. This tendency allowed Hitler to encourage the French to let him continue his machinations in central and eastern Europe without interruption. It is hard today to overestimate the vigor, passion, and confidence felt by many French pacifists during this period. Their nation had barely survived the First World War, having been almost bled to death. No matter how often we read them, the statistics stun: 1.4 million dead (almost all young men), 4.3 million wounded, three hundred thousand civilians killed or dying from the war’s effects. The military casualties came to about 20 percent of the male population and about 10 percent of the population of France as a whole—by far the largest casualty rate of any of the Allies. As a result, after the war the nation was severely fearful of being overtaken demographically and industrially by its archrival. Yet strangely enough, the same French were supremely confident that they had emerged stronger militarily than their German rivals, especially given the strict terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919; they now read the German effort to impress through cultural activity—perhaps naively—as a tentative foundation for a peaceful Europe, despite Hitler’s rants about lebensraum (living space for a growing German population), and Jews.
Exposition of 1937: Germany confronts the USSR. (© LAPI / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)
International expositions were supposed to encourage peace among nations, emphasizing what they had in common and diminishing jingoistic reflexes. German visitors to Paris during the 1937 exposition were greeted with open arms, and, though the Spanish pavilion featured Picasso’s devastatingly pertinent painting Guernica (about the cruel bombing of that little town by the fascists), the tendency was to think positively, not defensively, about a resurgent Germany.*
Of course, we do not know if the future Occupation of Paris was then well formed in the collective minds of the Nazi leadership, but certainly every attempt was made by the Nazis to attenuate international anxiety about their cultural, political, and, especially, military intentions. The massiveness of their pavilion, its emphasis on up-to-date technology, and its attempts at being “modern” and “traditional” at the same time made a hugely favorable impression on the French. Even though the German pavilion contained not one photograph or other likeness of Hitler—its primary symbols being the striking swastika and eagle—his muscular presence was subtly felt. The legacy of this exposition would last until the first Germans marched into Paris only three years later to find many French citizens more than curious about how the occupier might bring a similar order to the chaos of a humiliated France. This state of affairs played a major role in the early success of the Occupation.
The Occupiers Are Surprised, Too
Beginning in the early 1930s, Paris was where Germans went to break out of the moral and artistic strictures imposed by the Nazis. Returning as conquerors reminded them of that freedom. Words like “paradise on earth” and “jewel” pepper the letters and memoirs of the first Germans to walk the streets of Paris in uniform. Even Goebbels’s irrepressible braggadocio was muted: “Paris ist gefallen” (Paris has fallen) was so somberly repeated on German radio on June 14, 1940, that it was a while before Germans went into the streets in celebration. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of Nazism, many young Germans from the upper middle classes and the aristocracy had spent time studying in Paris. “Paris envy” was a strong neurosis of the German imagination, and this state of mind never fully diminished until the last of them had slipped out of the city in late August of 1944.
Hitler’s racial obsessions, unsurprisingly, carried over to his view of the French “race,” which he believed had mixed unhealthily with Neger and Jewish blood. There were no more Joan of Arcs or Sun Kings for other nations to emulate. Paris had become so preoccupied with itself and its uniqueness that it had lost its sense of “Frenchness,” which, for these observers, was derived from the hardworking, deeply religious, traditional peasantry. The latter had become frustrated with Paris and its demands on the rest of the nation; Hitler believed and insisted that when German soldiers and bureaucrats confronted the French they should be careful to distinguish between Parisians and their compatriots in the provinces. Observers such as Friedrich Sieburg, in his Gott in Frankreich? (God in France?), had revealed themselves impatient with the “myth of Paris,” with its claim to superiority over other European cities and its casual disregard, as is clear in its history of revolts, for authority and stability. We have seen how metropolises were antithetical to Nazi ideology; the German city was not where the Nazis had found their most fervent supporters. Cities have always been resistant to autocratic control, and Hitler mistrusted them. A self-confident Paris would be even more threatening than other cities. And Paris in particular was too “metropolitan”; its porousness had invited too many Slavs, Arabs, Asians, Africans, and Jews into its compass. General Fedor von Bock, the officer in command of troops entering Paris for the first time, had met Hitler in early June in Brussels and remarked later that the Führer was worried about the city, about its potential for taking his victory away from him.
At the height of the Occupation there may have been as many as twenty thousand German personnel in the city: everyone from the highest echelons of the Wehrmacht to the lowliest ranks of the supply offices. Ambassadors; representatives of all of the Reich’s most powerful ministries; female secretaries, telephone operators, and nurses; medical personnel; archivists; intelligence officers; Gestapo; censors—the list was endless.* What was daily life like for these servants of the Reich? At first, they were delighted to be in a country with so many available consumer items; Germany had been at war for more than a year, and the sight of such excess meant that most of those first appointed to Paris spent every spare minute in department stores and other shops. The German mark had been set at a favorable rate vis-à-vis the French franc, and soon more Germans than French were shopping. This may have been the source of the first popular resentment toward the Occupier—a sense of “We know you are here because your army was stronger than ours, but it’s quite another thing to appropriate buildings, apartments, goods, and foodstuffs because you have the power to do so.” This negative dynamic soon became dominant, and more Parisians began to feel despoiled, insulted, and humiliated. The photographs of Germans browsing through the typical Seine bookstalls, negotiating with the bouquinistes, are only one example of how intrusive the military uniform must have been. Even when one tried to forget that “they” were there, an unanticipated sighting could throw one back into the state of despondency that afflicts the inhabitants of any occupied city. Many Germans understood this and went out of their way to be polite, helpful, and engaging to Parisians. But more often than not, these generous acts only reinforced the frustration and embarrassment of those under the thumb of a hateful bureaucracy.
Passing time. (Editions Granger / Collection Claude Giasone)
There was also the black market, in which Germans were involved both officially and unofficially. The Occupiers had decided that they could not stop the surreptitious purchase and exchange of goods and services, so they set up special units that took advantage of shortages from black marketers and bought themselves. To a large extent this strategy worked, but what it gained for the German economy it may have lost in terms of offering an unflattering image of the German as just another wartime hustler angling for a good deal.
The Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich* had taken for their headquarters Paris’s tourist gems, its grands hôtels: the Majestic, the George V, the Prince de Galles, the Meurice, the Continental, the Lutétia, and others. They also requisitioned dozens of smaller hotels throughout the city, both for the office and living space these institutions immediately provided and because this strategy emphasized the connection between cultural tourism and military occupation. The Germans were there to stay, but only temporarily; they were visitors, yet they were permanent reminders of Paris’s humiliation. Using tourism as a means of taming an occupied city is subtle and has psychological as well as practical consequences. Once the hard work of conquering has been done, the idea that one can enjoy a major cultural capital as a consuming visitor relieves a nagging guilt. It connects to the fanciful notion, in the minds of the Occupiers, that Parisians were, if not happy, at least complacent about the presence of so many Germans. “After all, you and your fellows are our best customers.”
Within weeks of taking over the city, German diarists, journalists, essayists, and bureaucrats evinced an almost palpable need to describe what they found and how they felt. Most of them took up many of Friedrich Sieburg’s assumptions, expressing their own fears that they might be seduced by a painted woman while trying to appreciate the art, history, and culture of Europe’s most admired city. This trepidation worked at all levels: French women were generally criticized because of their makeup and seductive fashions; it was suggested that Zazous, young men who dressed in zoot suits and wore long hair, should be sent to work in Germany. Too much emphasis was placed on eating as a form of entertainment, on cuisine as an art form. Yes, all this had made the city great, but such a laissez-faire culture could be detrimental to the morals of young Soldaten coming into Paris on permanent assignment or on leave. The Occupation authority immediately published guidebooks in German for Reich visitors to the newly occupied city, including lists and descriptions of its most “decadent” attractions (e.g., approved brothels for its officers and their men), and Paris was soon filled with camera-toting, bargain-seeking, question-asking, and naively curious German-speaking visitors. For the typical soldier, photographs were their diaries, and we know that there were thousands upon thousands sent back home. Perhaps the German propaganda arm wanted to encourage their soldiers to further appropriate Paris and its environs by use of the omnipresent camera. The Wehrmacht provided specially made photograph albums to their soldiers (many of these have been on sale at auction houses and on the Internet for years). Like any tourist, the soldiers in these modest records banally “naturalized” their presence in an unfamiliar and intimidating environment.
A second wave of soldiers on leave, along with civilian visitors from Germany and Austria, followed the initial invaders, but Parisians continued to resist seeing their occupied city as a tourist destination for their enemies. Stories about Parisians misdirecting the frequently disoriented German abound: “Yesterday, in the Métro, a German soldier was hovering over his guide to Paris. He finally asked a laborer where the Bréguet-Sabin station was. The old guy told him, but the German couldn’t understand. Then, overflowing with a sincere concern: ‘My poor boy. What an idiot you are. What the hell are you doing here?’ ”3 In 1968, the novelist Patrick Modiano chose as the title of his first novel La Place de l’Étoile, the punch line of a well-known anecdote. A German tourist approaches a Jew to ask where the famous place is. The young man points to his heart and says, “Here,” referring, of course, to the yellow star that Jews had been made to wear.
The same scene had repeated itself all over France; tightly disciplined formations of gray-green-clad, sturdy, and healthy young men marched by the thousands throughout a country still reeling from defeat and embarrassment. Goebbels and his sophisticated cadre of propagandists were well aware of the power that the city then had on the world’s cultural imagination. He wanted the world to recognize—and be relieved—that the Nazis appreciated that Paris was part of the international patrimony. (In fact, he may well have ordered that the Wehrmacht select its best-looking soldiers to be the first to enter and march in the capital.* But within the confines of a hypersophisticated capital city, their presence brought even more pride to the victor and a complicated combination of curiosity, apprehension, and shame to the Parisians. Very quickly, almost as if another Blitzkrieg had taken place, the German military had not only marched in with arrogant precision but also established itself “in the very interstices of daily life.”4 And they were there for the duration—not here and gone but established. This is the slowly understood certainty that forced Parisians to realize that their city, though unharmed and still familiar, was no longer theirs but rather theirs.
To further confound things, rules on informal interaction between Parisians and Germans were never made clear. Of course, the commander of Gross Paris promulgated warnings about inappropriate resistance to the authority of his troops, but the codes and protocols of day-to-day relations between citizen and soldier were left to the participants to establish. What rights did the citizen have to resist inappropriate orders or actions on the part of the German soldiers? Was a simple argument between a German and a Parisian a matter for harsh justice? What if a German soldier harassed a young Parisian woman or a woman refused his advances by making fun of him in public? Who had priority waiting in line or taking a seat in a bus or on the Métro? German punctiliousness often protected the daily civil rights of Parisian citizens, while German obsession with order undermined the greater freedoms of assembly, publication, and political action.
The average occupier was not a faceless Nazi focused on reducing French society to penury and humiliation. We, and especially the French, often accept a monolithic image of German repression, disdain, and cruelty. Such an image enables us to remember history only superficially, and it deprives us of a more dimensional evaluation of the infinite variety of interactions that occurred during the four years of the Occupation of Paris. We must remind ourselves, too, that even though Nazi aesthetics and racial policy held that the French were racially weakened, they were still considered at least “cousins” to the Germans. In German terms, as we have seen, the French were like distaff relatives who had failed to guard the Teutonic side of their heritage and had allowed themselves to “degenerate” from pure origins. Nevertheless, Paris beckoned to the prim German ethos as though it were a huge amusement park.
The Wehrmacht had gone out of its way to provide special canteens for their soldiers; cinemas, theaters, and cabarets had been set aside for them, and they would have access to the French ones that had quickly reopened. Certain movie houses were set aside for German audiences only, the most prominent being the enormous Grand Rex on the Boulevard de Poissonnière, which held more than 2,500 seats. The Germans requisitioned it for their troops, on assignment and visiting; it became the most popular deutsches Soldatenkino in Paris, so much so that the Resistance chose it for a major bombing attempt in late 1942, which killed or wounded more than a hundred Germans waiting in line.
In essence, the Germans appropriated a vibrant, heterogeneous metropolis and then attempted to fix and stabilize the imagined version of Paris that had existed in the collective memory of the cultured world. In doing so the Occupier sought, intuitively or purposefully, to vitiate the unpredictable energy that defines metropolises and thus to provide more security for his own purposes. The Occupiers wanted to unmake dynamic Paris, to create a static simulacrum, while preserving for their own enjoyment some of its most engagingly decadent attractions (jazz clubs, cabarets, bordellos).*
Each and every soldier stationed in France was offered a visit to Paris as a sort of reminder of the magnitude of the victory over that nation. Soon after June of 1940, tour buses filled with gawking German soldiers were a common sight in the streets and around the best-known monuments. Hitler would later insist, after June of 1941, that every German soldier on the Eastern Front have a leave in Paris (“jeder einmal nach Paris”—everyone once in Paris). Whether this happened, especially as the war progressed, is difficult to determine, but the official message was clear: Paris was now in German hands. Yet while the German propagandists, especially Goebbels, had sought through economic and cultural policies to reduce French cultural influence in Europe to the advantage of Germany, they could not bring themselves to destroy completely the transnational image of a brilliant Paris. All the Reich’s leaders, including Hitler himself, had made pilgrimages (and that is the word) to the city on the Seine. They went to show the flag, to buy (if not to loot), to indulge in the luxurious life still available to those with resources; they condescended toward the social laissez-faire of a quasi-degenerate populace. Through their own obsession with Paris, they unknowingly underpinned the notion that the city, though shackled, was still capable of resisting the imposition of Nazi orthodoxy, that Paris still possessed a strong immunity to noxious foreign influence.
Thousands of touring Germans visited the city during the Occupation. The journalist and former Wehrmacht soldier August von Kageneck describes how he and a few buddies were brought from their boring country assignment to the city:
One day in August [1940], they took us by truck to the capital. Hitler had preceded us as a tourist… in a deserted city.… We were set loose in Paris only after many instructions: we had [a total of] six hours to visit the city; an impeccable uniform was required; no relations with Frenchmen, and especially with Frenchwomen. And it was strictly understood that we were not allowed to seek out professional comfort.… Paris struck us with its general torpor. Few people were in the streets, only small groups of well-dressed German soldiers like us, following their guide.… I remember the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower decked out with flags bearing the swastika. I also remember going to Montmartre to find a willing woman. In vain. But I still see, in a street beneath the Sacré-Coeur, an Arab who wanted to sell us pornographic photos.5
After the Reich’s invasion of the USSR in June of 1941, Parisians were both elated that Hitler had made such a huge mistake and depressed to conclude that the war would last a long time—now the Wehrmacht would certainly not leave the Atlantic coast unprotected and would thus stay in Paris. For the German soldiers serving on the Eastern Front, Paris took on an even more fantastic aura. One source tells us that the editor of the Wegleiter, the German guidebook to Paris, received requests from many soldiers on the Eastern Front eager for a subscription to the publication. If they could not be there, they could at least dream about being there.
On the other hand, those assigned to Paris were not always happy. There was too much division among cadres, too many officers, too few chances for young German soldiers to even bond with their comrades. Most spoke no French, and most Parisians would not answer questions in German or even respond to friendly gestures. A profound sense of alienation and loneliness developed, even with thousands of fellow Germans and Austrians around. When sitting in a café, it was as if a cordon sanitaire had been established around each German soldier, so ignored were they by other clientele, not to mention the servers. Even at church, unless it was one frequented by Germans, the occupier felt out of place. Paris was like a city without a face, a Stadt ohne Blick (literally, a “city without a glance”)—a sentiment and a phrase that began to pervade letters, diaries, and even official reports. Young homesick Bavarians and Silesians, though happy not to be in Poland or Norway, were frequently abashed by the apparent rudeness of the Parisians.
Without the ideological arrogance of the true Nazi, the average soldier must have quickly realized that Paris’s architectural beauty was no substitute for human contact. The daily Pariser Zeitung (Paris Times) was not much solace. It contained mostly stories from German newspapers, local advertisements, entertainment listings, and a few articles in French. There was none of the “hominess” that the average soldier needed. Even the museums were closed if not nearly empty. (By now, 80 percent of the paintings in the Louvre had been hidden elsewhere; many great sculptures had either been buried or hidden in the country.) One may ask: Don’t soldiers always get homesick, always seek familiar bonding under the sign of danger, and yearn for a leave? Yes, but the danger in this case was not yet physical; the counterattack was literally muted. Surrounded by hundreds of thousands of perfectly pleasant people who paid you no attention day after day could be starkly discomfiting. To ignore someone’s presence momentarily negated the whole idea of cooperation and thus subtly undermined the Occupier’s authority.
Pariser Zeitung with French pages. (Editions Granger / Collection Claude Giasone)
A Dreamer in Exile
Felix Hartlaub, a young historian assigned as a record keeper in the Occupation bureaucracy, left us a diary of impressions that often mentions his efforts at trying to be just another face on the street.6 He reconciles his memory of having been in Paris as a student with his present assignment, noting in 1942:
The city… still has its charm, but it is a secret, sad charm.… In the richer quarters, around the Place de l’Étoile, for instance, one only sees closed shutters. The same is true for the most elegant businesses and mansions. In the Rue de la Paix, a Luftwaffe lieutenant affirms: “Good God! Everything is closed here!” The [Place de la Concorde], the Champs-Élysées without cars or buses is almost incomprehensible. The Louvre, emptied for the most part except for some large, ancient statuary, the Cluny Museum closed; at the Carnavalet [the museum of the history of Paris, in the Marais], where I went to celebrate my return, half of its contents are gone, and everything that remains is in impossible disorder.… The theaters are not well heated and only half full. Attendance is split between Wehrmacht soldiers and Parisians.7
A typical recurring concern for the German occupier was whether to wear civilian attire when moving through the city. Memoirs and diaries that have come down to us reveal even the most self-assured German’s anxiety about strolling through Paris in uniform. The proud victors soon realized that their uniforms brought them the blank if not hostile stares of a resentful populace. They heard Parisians refer to them as doryphores (beetles, because of the famous helmets), verts de gris and haricots verts (gray-greens and green beans, because of the color of the army’s uniforms), and bottes (for their heavy and noisy tread). (The more familiar Boche [similar to the GI’s “Kraut”] had been forbidden by both Vichy and German authorities from being spoken or written in public.) Even in mufti, Germans could more often than not be identified by other qualities: haircuts, posture, quality of civilian clothes, stoutness, and, of course, accent.
When not at work in their offices, many of the German bureaucrats who held military rank but were not themselves military men sought to melt into the crowd. Hartlaub describes how, in civilian dress, he would approach the ticket taker in the Métro with some apprehension. Germans rode free if they showed their ID cards, but Hartlaub tried to finesse this requirement by letting only a corner of the card peek from his wallet, hoping the ticket taker would allow him to pass through without comment. When she would hesitate, he felt the eyes of Parisians boring into his back. He walked along the station platform, avoiding eye contact with his uniformed compatriots, hesitating whether to offer a “pardon” or a “Verzeihung” when he bumped into them. He wanted to be an archetypical Parisian flaneur, an innocuous stroller taking in the pleasures of the Parisian streets, but he sensed that Parisians simultaneously recognized and ignored him. In the intimate crowding of the Métro, this sense became exaggerated; Hartlaub felt keenly that he was an object to avoid. Later, writing home, he was quite clear about these sensations:
I was rather naïve to think that I could be taken for a native [in my civilian suit]. My way of walking and my demeanor betray me immediately.… And should, for an instant, one not be noticed, the following instant, a shudder of recognition will be doubly felt in return. In a way, it would be easier just to wear the uniform; all would be clear for everyone. For instance, in civilian clothes, I run the risk of being taken for a spy. My embarrassment renders me completely stiff, causes me to lose all of my French, and cuts me off from everything as if with rusty scissors.8
Though this mild paranoia on an occupier’s part is rarely so carefully described, it must have marked everyone who was in Paris longer than a few weeks. It is ironic that the occupier sought to be part of the city where he did not belong, yet his attitude speaks to the psychological confusion from trying to combine conciliation with arrogance.
Hartlaub’s memoir is filled with passages that describe a beautiful but imposing city, one that offers itself to the tourist but threatens the occupier. Desperate to be an inhabitant and not a tourist, he admits repeatedly to his desire’s impossibility. For him, Paris is not just a physical, built environment, it is a malleable, flexible, kaleidoscopic site best invented and reinvented through the senses (more subtle than Hitler’s sense of the city). His pages are filled with references to the hard-stepping hobnailed boots that impose their authority on the citizen; he compares them with the articulated clicking of wooden-soled shoes worn by civilians. Close your eyes, he writes, and still you can “hear” the Occupation, just as you can see it with your eyes open. It has invaded the sensual lives of Parisians, not just their bureaucratic and physical lives. The sound of boots, one of the most persistent of his images, which seems to ring false on the cobbled streets of Paris; the silence that reigns in a city known for its noisy traffic; the often embarrassed posture of German soldiers and officers trying to accommodate themselves to a city that simultaneously attracts and repulses them: these are the themes of this subtle, sad, yet compelling memoir.
Sexually Occupied
And then there was sex. Many Parisian eyes were attracted not only to the German soldiers’ uniforms and their shiny accoutrements but also to their virile youthfulness. They evinced a sense of healthiness and physical beauty that mesmerized the French. Counterintuitively, the threatening German body became a desired one, especially once the Germans began taking off their clothes. They exercised and played football with bare chests; they marched together clad only in their underwear to rivers and pools; they were often seen nude sunning on rooftops or on beaches or riding horses in the countryside. The naturist ethic had long been part of German athletic culture, and the Nazis had appropriated it for its own purposes, to remind the Germans that their collective body must be healthy in order to fight the diseases of Bolshevism, Judaism, and anti-German sentiment. Soon, the Vichy government would also develop a highly athletic youth culture, emphasizing that a healthy body kept youth out of trouble. It kept youth patriotic and—why not?—pondering pleasures other than sex. Of course, the desired body is a sexualized body, and soon a new sort of “accommodation” and “collaboration” developed between young Germans and young French men and women.
Recent historians of sexuality have introduced us to a world that many intuited had existed; now, with more information, we have a much clearer picture of the libidinal Occupation.9 The average Parisian might have tried to be as unaccommodating as he or she could to the German presence, but before too long they saw that these young men (especially in the first year of the Occupation) were not all monsters. Perhaps it was the humiliating demasculinization of the French soldier, in prison or otherwise absent; perhaps it was the desire to humanize the occupier; no matter, there is little doubt that much attention was paid to the sexualized German body, especially in 1940–41.*
Another fascinated audience was composed of Parisian male adolescents who frequented the troops, offering to help them, wanting their recognition. Remembered one Frenchman: “What adolescent of my generation did not dream, even if only briefly and shamefully, of being a young, twenty-year-old SS soldier, leaning on his tank, spreading butter on his bread with his dagger. Ten or so of us would just hang around to watch him and to look intensely at the death heads on his uniform.”10 And the homosexual population of Paris, one of long-standing and relative freedom, did not ignore the masculine attractiveness of these young men. In fact, gay French men recount that, despite the notorious harassment, incarceration, and even murder of homosexuals elsewhere in Europe, in Paris the Wehrmacht seemed to turn a blind eye to activity that was a capital crime in Germany: “The hypervirility of the German military, its taste for physical culture, its propensity to nudism, or almost, struck the imaginations of Frenchmen and was at the origin of a true cultural shock that would have an influence on the gestation of homosexual identity.”11 In many ways, the German body had become Nazism’s earliest ambassador to the still stunned Parisians—particularly at night.
And the Germans were neither innocent nor adverse to the charms of Paris. Historians have estimated that between eighty thousand and two hundred thousand Franco-German babies were born in France during the Occupation.12 Enfants maudits (accursed children), generally ignored or humiliated by both their French and their German relatives, were incontestable proof of a sexual liaison especially forbidden by the Wehrmacht. Going to a bordello for “relaxation” was one thing; an intimate relation with a French civilian was another, yet these relationships were widespread. Youths of both sides were attracted to each other. There was a paucity of young French men; the German soldiers were lonely and often despised; and there were so many occasions, both in the provinces and in the cities, where female and male bodies came into semi-intimate contact: daily business interactions, on the buses and Métro, at swimming pools, parties, and fairs. Paris might have been generally sans regard (without a glance) for the average German soldier, but there were many times when a soldier’s own gaze was returned by an attractive Frenchwoman—or man. In fact, Colette, in the last essay in Paris from My Window, written in the spring of 1944, a few months before the Germans would leave, felt she had to comment on how Parisiennes had comported themselves:
One of the singularities of the war is the… dangerously feminine quality that has come over [French] women. Is it because of the complete occupation of our territory, the omnipresence of a foreign and virile [army], that women have affected the appearance of kids and the actions of schoolgirls? I don’t call into question their motives, knowing full well that they might hide good intentions. But the disorderly profusion of her hair, the indiscreet arrangement of her curls, her skirt of inappropriate length, whose looseness allows the breeze to give her a certain look, are errors, though graceful, that have occasioned not a few arousals. One wants to say to these “girls” of all ages, windblown and uncovered: “Shh.… We are not alone.”13
Some observers thought the heightened femininity of French women was a patriotic slap in the face to the occupier; others, like the increasingly prudish Colette, thought that females were playing a dangerous game. Whatever the interpretation, such libidinous exchanges were an important element in the new environment that the Occupation imposed, an element that complicated the task of its bureaucrats.
Not coincidentally, the Parisians were amused to learn that the Germans—both officially and personally—were obsessed with disease. It became a running joke that all one had to do to avoid their social importunateness was to sneeze into one’s hand, pick one’s nose, or cough deeply. The Wehrmacht papered all the places soldiers frequented with warnings about venereal disease; condoms were freely offered. Medical officers oversaw all bordellos. “For the Germans, France was not only the center of sexual amusement but also a country where [venereal] epidemics reigned, where clandestine prostitution was everywhere, and where the danger of venereal contagion was great—a country, then, where innumerable infected women represented a real menace for the health of German soldiers.14 Yet the Wehrmacht also recognized the sexual needs and desires of its front-line soldiers, especially those on leave from the devastating Eastern Front. Indeed, what was the use of “having” Paris if you could not benefit from one of its most delectable products? Thus the Wehrmacht refused to close bordellos, not only because they were crucial to morale but also because they were valuable to intelligence services, which used them to garner information.*
One of the most humorous yet informative memoirs of the Occupation was published by Fabienne Jamet, brothel madam par excellence and owner and manager of One Two Two, perhaps Paris’s best-known bordello. Sited at 122 Rue de Provence, in the chic 8th arrondissement, it was known throughout Europe—not just as a bordello but also as a meeting place for the city’s cultural elite. Soon after its opening in the 1930s, it had become the place where the upper-crust bohemian set gathered. On the first floor, there was an elegant café, where drinks, especially Champagne, were served to the sophisticated clientele, male and female, whether they were looking for sex or not. Most knew of the lavishly decorated rooms on the floors above—designed as harems, jungles, Roman baths, and so forth; as one climbed from floor to floor, the more “refined” the sexual offerings became. Having fled her business during the exodus in June of 1940, Madame Jamet returned to find the bordello still operating, albeit filled with German enlisted men, all wanting to taste one of Paris’s most famous delicacies. “[The Germans]… had requisitioned the One Two Two and had installed themselves there the very day of their entry into Paris, as if we had been as well known as the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides!”15 Rather than be relieved that the Germans had allowed her establishment to remain open and in business, Jamet was furious that this high-class establishment had been “invaded” by common soldiers, men who could never have afforded to patronize the place before the war. Jamet marched down the Rue Auber to the Place de l’Opéra, where the Kommandantur der Gross-Paris had set up its offices (the bureaucratic center of the MBF). There she asked to see a high-ranking administrator and, surprisingly, was quickly received. She ran a very high-class establishment, she told the bemused soldier-bureaucrat; it was known throughout Germany and had even received many German aristocrats and businessmen before the war. She was appalled that it now would serve only enlisted men, for her more respectable clientele would now no longer come. This would be, she exclaimed, a disservice to the Occupation authorities themselves! Politely, the officer assured her that she would hear from his office within a month. (We note that he did not jump up in Nazi horror at the degenerate culture of Paris and order Madame Jamet to find another profession.) A month later, she received a note stating that henceforth the One Two Two would be accessible only to German officers in uniform.
At first placated, Jamet soon realized that this restriction would not provide enough income to keep her establishment in the black; many officers came and bought Champagne and hired her girls, but even though the officers seemed to be everywhere in Paris, they were not numerous or needy enough to keep her business afloat. So she returned to the Kommandantur to plead that French men as well be allowed to return to the bordello. The idea that German officers would be rubbing shoulders in a bordello with the Parisians and French they were supposed to have under surveillance caused some consternation within the offices of the German authorities. Another month passed. Two Germans in civilian clothes, obviously Gestapo officers, appeared at the house’s door and asked for “Madame.” They had arrived at a compromise, they told her. French men would be permitted to come to the house, but only when accompanied by a German officer.
“Are you joking, Inspector? Do you really think that every time one of my French clients wants to fuck he is going to go up to a German officer in the street and say to him: ‘Captain, will you go with me to One Two Two? I want to get laid. If you refuse, I guess I’ll just have to.…’ This isn’t serious. I’m ready to assume my responsibilities, but that goes for you, too. At any rate, if you maintain this position, I’ll just close.”16
Four days passed, and another official letter arrived: “Madame, from this date on, French citizens are permitted to enter your house. Officers of the German army may only present themselves in civilian attire.”17 One Two Two remained open during the Occupation, and both German and French men enjoyed the offerings of Paris’s most renowned bordello.
These anecdotes—recounted by French madams as well as insecure Germans—refer to problems that were, for the most part, far removed from the daily preoccupations of Parisian citizens. When there is a paucity of foodstuffs, intermittent heat and electricity, a capricious foreign authority, a fear that one’s source of livelihood could be instantly ended, a concern that the wrong word or the wrong friendship could land you in jail or worse, and a need to keep one’s anger and frustration under cover, the last thing to worry about is how the poor Germans felt or whether or not a whorehouse is going to be successful. Yet to ignore the sexual aspects of the Occupation would remove a dimension that reveals a great deal about the forced intimacy between enemies living together in a city known for its libidinal energy.
A “Better” German
To assume his duties as a bureaucrat at the MBF, Wehrmacht Captain Ernst Jünger officially entered Paris, elegantly mounted on a horse, on April 24, 1941 (he had earlier visited in February for a weekend leave). Well known across Europe as a novelist and essayist before the war, he was, after soldiering in the Blitzkrieg, ready to enjoy an assignment in his favorite city. Jünger was an Einzelgänger—a loner—and deftly self-centered. Nevertheless he was well known in German and French literary circles, “a star among stars in the city of cities,”18 and saw himself as representative of the most sophisticated European, not just German, elite. He had studied in Paris and visited it before the war; like so many other high-level German soldiers and bureaucrats, he felt that assignment to Paris was a just reward for his chosen life of intellectual sophistication. Working closely with the head of the MBF, he secretly kept a meticulous, if strangely cold, journal of his life as a salonnier (he visited everyone from Cocteau to Picasso and was always invited to the best openings and most exclusive dinner parties). At the same time, he was witness to the chronic infighting among the Occupational entities in Paris. His diary does evince a sorrowfulness that edges from beneath the gloss that the Germans put on their stewardship of Paris. But he keeps rather silent on the everyday life of Parisians, on his ethical concerns about Nazism, and on his emotional life. Still, Jünger provides subtle evidence of how conflicted many of the Occupiers were about their situation. Doubtlessly much of what he wrote helped alleviate his own sense of responsibility, small as it might have been, for the excesses of the Occupation. Most likely Ernst Jünger often felt himself in danger for his scarcely hidden scorn for Hitler, the National Socialist Party, the SS, and the Gestapo. Nevertheless he was part of the bureaucracy that executed “terrorists” and hostages, that looted the city of its foodstuffs and its valuables, and that imposed curfews and other impediments on the daily life of Parisians.
Jünger’s diaries offer a kind of scaffolding for an understanding of how complex the Occupation was, one that gives shape and texture to an important though not universal German view of this long event, too often represented by most witnesses as engagement with a wall of implacable gray-green. Jünger was a true flaneur, engaged in a leisure activity (casual and purposeless walking through the city) that was open, for the most part, only to Germans, for Parisians usually had to have justifiable reasons for wandering the streets. He loved to visit cemeteries because of their pastoral atmosphere, to sit in cafés and tea shops, watching Parisians in their attempts to recapture their prewar élan. Tracing on a map of Paris the place names mentioned most frequently by Jünger reveals the trajectories of a man clearly enthralled with architectural beauty and cosmopolitan culture. Yet he, like his most sensitive brothers, remained anxious about how Paris received him. As much as he tried to remind his readers, himself, and Paris in general that he had appreciated the city before the Nazis came, he is incapable of imposing a completely anodyne image of his assignment there. Reading his journals, we get more than a glimpse of what it must have been like to move through an urban environment you love (he spoke excellent French) knowing that you are despised.
Married, with a family living in Kirchhorst, between Hannover and Hamburg, Jünger adored women and enjoyed the way Parisiennes succeeded in maintaining the elegance for which the city was renowned. He noticed that foreign women—Spaniards, Italians, and Germans—had assimilated themselves to Paris’s myth of fashion and style. It was easier for them, for they had resources that the Parisian woman did not have; yet it was to the latter that they still looked for hints about elegance and fashionable savoir faire. For the most part, Jünger stays in the most chic quarters, the richest ones. He ventures rarely into more modest neighborhoods to witness and comment on the uneventful lives of the average Parisian. He frequents the cafés of the Champs-Élysées neighborhood, the Jardin des Tuileries, the Trocadéro, the gardens of the Château de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne. He might venture into Montmartre from time to time, but only at night and only to those places most frequented by Germans. Or he might go south from his hotel to Montparnasse, mainly to visit the massive cemetery there but also to revisit the cafés and restaurants made famous in the 1930s by the Lost Generation. His domicile was in the elegant Raphael hotel on the Avenue Kléber, only two hundred meters from the Arc de Triomphe and still one of the most beautiful and elite hostelries in Paris; his nearby workplace was the even more prestigious Majestic Hôtel on Avenue des Portugais. It was from the rooftop bar of the latter that he so often watched the Allied bombing of the Parisian suburbs. Some of his most energetic descriptions concern the squadrons of Allied bombers flying over Paris as they crossed the city to attack its near suburbs. Firing at the Allied bombers resulted in tons of German shrapnel falling onto the streets, roofs, and gardens and cemeteries of the city; there are many stories of casualties among the civilians whose bad luck put them in the line of this “friendly” fire. Sometimes Paris itself was inadvertently hit: an RAF Lancaster bomber crashed onto the roof of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, a department store across the street from the Louvre museum. One of the store’s two buildings was burned to the ground, and the bodies of the pilot and his crew were found on the roof of the Louvre itself.
Despite every effort to describe a mythical, timeless Paris, one he wants to enjoy, one that allows him to contemplate the human condition, Jünger cannot ignore that he is on an island protected from the conflagration surrounding it. This is especially true, and affecting, when he goes home on leave to Kirchhorst to find that the nearby cities of Hannover and Hamburg have been hellishly bombed, while Paris remains strangely untouched.
One of the most articulate and astute German occupiers, Jünger wanted to present himself as having been at odds, both in his musings as well as in his activities, with the gray plague that was sullying his beloved Paris. Just two days after one of the Occupation’s most thorough roundups of Jews, in July of 1942, he wrote in his journal:
Yesterday some Jews were arrested here in order to be deported—first they separated parents from their children, so firmly that one could hear their distressed cries in the streets. At no moment must I forget that I am surrounded by unhappy people, humans experiencing the most profound suffering. If I forgot, what sort of man or soldier would I be? Our uniform imposes the duty to ensure protection wherever one can. [Yet] one feels that in order to do that one has to battle like Don Quixote with millions of adversaries.* 19
How many Germans—and Nazis—felt the same way? Who knows? The important point is that not enough of them acted on their feelings to change the nature of the Occupation, let alone save any Jews.
Recollected Solitude
An assertive knock brought Madame Heller to her apartment door. It was November of 1940, and the Germans had been in Paris for five months. She had grown used to seeing them in the street, but she was stunned when she saw on her landing a man in the uniform of a Wehrmacht lieutenant. Quickly she called her husband. What could he possibly want with them? The officer politely saluted and asked if this is where a certain younger Heller lived. They answered yes, but told their unnerving visitor that their son was presently a prisoner of war. The German officer introduced himself as Gerhard Heller, who had known their son while he was studying medicine in Germany. Coincidentally, they had the same family name and had bonded because of it. Heller told the couple that he was new to Paris and that their son was the only person whom he knew to call on. The Parisian Hellers were confused; their son had never spoken of another student named Heller. At any rate, he was not there and would not be for a long time. They did not invite Gerhard in or show any interest in his story. The lieutenant turned away, still alone in the Stadt ohne Blick.
Lieutenant Heller recounts the anecdote in his memoirs, published in France in 1981, reminding us, as did Hartlaub and Jünger, of the other side of the Occupation. Of course we have to consider his memoirs with care: we are not reading contemporary documents but the memories of a man who wants to present himself as sympathetic, educated, highly literate, and generous. Nevertheless, his book presents anecdotes that help us to understand further the anxieties that affected many of the Reich’s best officers. Heller was obviously a Francophile and, at least forty years later, an anti-Nazi. An important Wehrmacht bureaucrat, Heller was charged with the unpleasant task of preventing the publication of French literature that could be construed as anti-German or influenced by Jews. The physical result of this responsibility was a huge warehouse in Paris where thousands upon thousands of “unapproved” books were destroyed or left to molder. He found himself trying to keep French literature vibrant and respectable on the one hand while on the other hand using the blunt knife of censorship to chop away at originality and imagination. Soon after arriving in Paris, Heller had to accept that he was an outsider, not a tourist; not an innocent bureaucrat but a stranger, one who made the Parisians uncomfortable. “How relieved I felt each time I could dress in civilian clothes, especially after having to wear a uniform all day,” he recalled.20
Germans spent a good deal of their free time in the bathhouses and swimming pools of Paris for the same reason: “In a swimsuit, no one could tell the difference between a German and a Frenchman.”21 He discovered that even his accent could be construed as Alsatian or Swiss rather than German. Heller and his cadre tried to separate themselves from their fellows, not only in an attempt to “pass” as French but also, perhaps, as a mild form of rejection of the Nazi presence. “One does not conquer Paris, but is conquered by Paris.… I lived then always alone, in a state of disarray and anguish.… How not to carry in one’s mind or within one’s body the marks of such tension when one knows that the Gestapo is spying on you, that your comrades or your superiors suspect you? Your conscience becomes dislocated.”22
At one point Heller learns of a young Parisian bourgeois who offers his services to trusted Germans:
He lived on a street adjacent to the Champs-Élysées, above a bank where his father was a director. He had arranged just under the roof of the building a little apartment completely separated from the lower floors.… It was tastefully furnished (wood paneling and pretty antique furniture). He carried on there, with a little group of French and Germans, a traffic in alcohol and, in particular, whiskey (i.e., Scotch). I went up there several times to taste the legs of lamb he got from the countryside.23
At the very end of the Occupation, this same French friend would offer Heller a secret room near his own isolated apartment where the German could stay until things calmed down; afterward, he naively argued, the German could resume his Parisian life. Heller tells us this story as an illustration of how friendly with each other many upper-class Parisians and Germans were—the Frenchman was not “collaborating” but simply trying to help a friend who just happened to be a key member of the Occupation forces. More interestingly, this anecdote reveals how secretive Paris was during this period. Everyone—Parisian and occupier—thought of a rabbit hole they could use in case things got worse: air raid shelters, the concierge’s loge, basements, attics, outdoor sheds, sewers, Métro stations, relatives’ apartments in Paris, or homes in the country.
At the end of his memoir, Heller leaves us with two similar anecdotes that can serve as apologues for the anxiety of the occupier as he contemplated the loss of the war, the necessity of leaving Paris, and the anticipation of returning to a devastated Germany. At night, as only a German officer could, Heller would often walk through the gardens that line the lower reaches of the Champs-Élysées, between the Place de la Concorde and the Rond-point des Champs-Élysées. During the day, then and now, these are playgrounds for children in the area, sites of stamp markets, kiosks that sell toys and newspapers, public conveniences, and chairs for senior citizens out for fresh air. But at night, under wartime curfew, with few vehicles on the streets, these spaces were empty and silent.
In these gardens, strolling at dusk, Heller had two strange encounters. They speak volumes about the loneliness he felt in Paris as well as about the patronizing attitude that many Germans took toward their French charges. The first concerned a young French girl of about fifteen. Heller had noticed movement in the bushes, and when he approached, he found the girl hiding behind them. “You’d best get home,” he intoned. “The curfew will catch you outside, and you could be picked up.” She explained that she had missed her train at the Gare Saint-Lazare, that she lived in the country, and that she had nowhere to stay in Paris. She was hiding until the curfew was lifted in the morning, when she could catch the first train back home. Heller took her to his hotel and asked the concierge to let the girl sleep in the lobby until the next morning. The girl left early, leaving a note for Heller—she had gotten his name from the concierge—thanking him and promising to call later. She did, and for several months, the two would have “dates”: bicycle rides in the country, walks through Paris, café moments. “What was her name? Who was she? I never knew. Martine, Nadine, Aline, those seemed to be what I heard when she mumbled her name. I gave her the name of Reinette [little queen]. She was for several months my little queen, my Beatrice, accompanying me to the end of the road through a world that, each day, became heavier and darker for me.”24 Heller assures his reader that he never laid a hand on the girl, that they maintained a respectful distance (though they do skinny-dip in a country stream; for him it was an “innocent idyll”), but he describes her in terms that reveal his sexual attraction to her. Then she disappeared, and he never saw her again. A year later, in November of 1943 (a time when it was becoming clear that Germany had lost any initiative it had earlier gained in winning the war), Heller met another teenager in the same garden, this time a boy. A similar sort of attachment evolves. “We showed a lot of tenderness toward each other; he would take my hand [while we walked]; we embraced when we met, nothing more. Our rendezvous lasted until spring 1944; he, too, disappeared, forever.”25
We have seen how the German authorities feared a sexualized Paris but could do little to overcome the image and the reality of that reputation. German journalists, soldiers, and visitors all made reference to what they saw as the overtly sexual demeanor of Parisian women: they wore stylish clothes and makeup; they felt comfortable walking unescorted and being alone in a major metropolis. The Germans were both fascinated and revolted, but there was always an undercurrent that admired the sexual self-confidence of the French. Heller’s two anecdotes, at the very end of his memoir, speak to the loneliness, sexual and psychological, that often enveloped the occupier. Paris had proven, for this German at least, to be the decadent siren so feared by Nazism. By befriending children, perhaps he thought he was sanitizing his sexual loneliness.
Heller used his position—and the competition among the propaganda ministry, the German embassy, and the Gestapo—to his advantage. Not unlike Jünger, he gives his readers an itinerary through intellectual and artistic Paris as if to show that he and many of his fellow Germans (if not the Nazis) were sensitive to and protective of French patrimony. On the other hand, there is an almost pathetic quality to his awe and respect for certain writers, collaborationists or not. He met and frequented the artists Georges Braque, Aristide Maillol, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso as well as writers such as Jean Cocteau and Paul Valéry. Finding few friendly faces among Parisians on the street, he used his salon life as a means of learning about French culture and helping to protect it. Despite his star-studded, name-dropping notations, one senses underneath a deep dissatisfaction with being an occupier. Loneliness, suspicion, and, later, the threat of assassination weighed heavily on those senior officers and bureaucrats stationed in Paris. Heller recognizes, as do similar memoirists, such as Jünger, that no matter its surface, the city underneath was like a hidden wasps’ nest: the sound of a constant, unidentifiable buzzing kept everyone on edge.
Heller would refuse the offered hiding place of his French “friend,” but he would leave a piece of himself in Paris. Under a tree on the great esplanade that leads from the Hôtel des Invalides to the Seine, he buried a tin box filled with notes and a diary. In 1948 he returned, for the first time since the war, to Paris, but he never was able to find his buried treasure. Like so many of his compatriots, a part of his past lay hidden in a resurgent Paris.
During the war, Jean Paulhan, the publisher and poet, wrote a clear-eyed view of the way in which many Parisians saw their occupiers, one that gives us at the same time a view of the way many Germans felt when they were placed amid a group of apparently placid Parisians. He begins by imagining how an occupation of Paris might have been different under the Swedes or the Hungarians or the Javanese or the Hottentots or even the Italians. In those cases, he suggests, there would have been a sort of gay exchange of gestures, expressions, and rhythms that might have hinted at an affectionate indulgence on behalf of the occupied:
But from [these Germans], no one sees what we can gain from them. Not even a tune or a grimace. The kid in the street doesn’t even imitate the goose step. In the Métro, which has become, along with the grocery, our common meeting place, they never push anyone, while we still push or bump into each other! They even pick up our stupidly dropped packages. But we have no interest in picking up theirs. They are not very animated. They will have passed [through Paris] without a mark. As if they were already dead. Except that they are spreading around this death. It’s the only thing they know how to do.26
The image devastates: the mask of death placed on the face of a polite young German bending over to gather the packages dropped by an old man. Perhaps, though, it is the best one we have to illustrate the discrepancy between the way many of the occupiers saw themselves and the fact that Parisians did all they could to ignore them.