And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (28 page)

Lifar was at the center of everything: management, choreography, performance. In fact, as a dancer or a choreographer (or both), his name was listed on the program for 272 of the 837 performances presented at the Paris Opera during the occupation. For his dancing partners, he had a rich choice of prima ballerinas, among them Lycette Darsonval, Solange Schwarz and Yvette Chauviré, as well as younger dancers like Janine Charrat, Ludmilla Tchérina and Renée “Zizi” Jeanmaire. And it was Lifar who named Serge Peretti an
étoile
in 1941. As important was his work as a choreographer: between 1940 and 1944, he created fifteen new ballets, including
Sylvia, Boléro, Istar, Les Mirages, Suite en blanc
and
L’Amour sorcier
, with music by French composers for all but
Joan de Zarissa
by Egk, in which he had the title role. In the spirit of Diaghilev, Lifar also involved other artists in his new ballets. For Poulenc’s
Les Animaux modèles
, he invited the painter Maurice Brianchon to design the sets
and Désormière to conduct the performance in which he danced—to his own choreography—alongside Peretti, Schwarz and Chauviré.

Then as now, one of the secrets of the Paris Opera Ballet’s success was its ballet school, which put its students, long nicknamed
les petits rats
, through the kind of tough regime needed to prepare them for a career on the stage. Some
petits rats
from that time would later become famous: Roland Petit as a choreographer, Juliette Gréco as a singer and Jean Babilée, just twelve when he entered the school in 1935, as one of France’s great postwar dancers, famous above all for his soaring leaps. “I loved the work,” he recalled decades later, “all the girls around me, appearing as an extra in operas. It was marvelous.”
¹⁴
In 1940, as the Wehrmacht approached Paris, he left for a family farm in the south of France, accompanied by his friend Petit. But while Petit soon returned to Paris, Babilée instead joined the Ballet de Cannes, where, now seventeen, he was given lead roles in
Les Sylphides
and
Le Spectre de la rose
. In early 1942, he decided to return to Paris and, too old for the ballet school, he was auditioned by Lifar and accepted into the corps de ballet.

Babilée nonetheless knew he was taking a risk: he had borrowed his stage name from his mother, but the name on his identity papers—Gutman—was that of his Jewish father. Inside the Palais Garnier, he was soon reminded of that. “One day in the dressing room we all shared, someone painted a large yellow star and the word
Juif
on my mirror,” he said. “I purposefully ignored it, but it stayed there for three days. Then one afternoon the school’s dresser saw it and said, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves, boys?’ And he wiped it off.”

More dangerous were the German patrols, not least because the Nazi Kommandantur, or commander’s office, was in the place de l’Opéra. “Once I was stopped and asked for my papers,” Babilée remembered. “The German saw ‘Gutman’ and asked, German? I nodded and he let me go.” He had a narrower escape during the mass roundup of Jews known as the
rafle du Vél’d’Hiv’
in July 1942. He was staying in a cheap hotel on the rue du Sentier when he was awakened at six a.m. on July 16 by someone banging on his door.

“There was a huge Frenchman in a leather overcoat,” Babilée recalled. “He asked for my papers, put them in his pocket and told me to get a blanket and a bag and go downstairs. I looked out of the window and saw a parked bus. I had no way out. I dressed and started going down the stairs slowly. I suddenly heard footsteps. The
same guy was hurrying back up. ‘Are these your papers?’ I nodded. ‘With this name, it’s too dangerous. Go back to bed.’ ”

In early 1943, like hundreds of thousands of other young men, Babilée received a summons to work in Germany. The director of the opera, Marcel Samuel-Rousseau, refused him a certificate stating that he was on contract to the opera house. “He said Germany would do me good,” Babilée related. A German doctor then rejected his claim to be excused on medical grounds. “I decided I would not go and would leave my papers at a friend’s house,” Babilée said. “As I came out of the
métro
, I saw two German soldiers at the exit. I turned and ran, I heard cries as they followed me. I jumped over the gate to the platform and got into a
métro
car as it was leaving. My coat caught in the door.” The next day, he fled Paris and spent the rest of the war with the maquis in the Touraine region. After the liberation, he refused to return to the Opera Ballet and instead joined the new Ballets des Champs-Élysées, which Roland Petit had just created. “I was disgusted with the Opera,” he said.

Lifar, in contrast, sought out the Germans. He missed Hitler’s dawn visit to the Palais Garnier, but eight days later he gave a guided tour of the opera house to Goebbels, who was presumably eager to share the Führer’s delight in the building. And for the opening of the ballet’s 1940–41 season on August 28, the audience was packed with Germans. On September 3, the first anniversary of the declaration of war, Lifar accepted an invitation from the German embassy to perform with some of his dancers at a reception given for the German army commander in chief, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch. Two years later in Berlin, Lifar had a chance to meet Hitler, who—at least according to Lifar—invited him to participate in celebrations planned for the Nazi conquest of Moscow: certainly, as a Ukrainian, Lifar would have welcomed the breakup of the Soviet Union.

With such expressions of German approval, Lifar’s position at the Paris Opera was unchallenged. This translated into a tripling of his salary during the war years, as well as total artistic freedom. Yet even he was not safe from vicious attacks by the collaborationist press, with the anti-Semitic weekly
Au Pilori
accusing him of being a Jew whose real name was “Rilaf,” an anagram of “Lifar.” The terms of his denial were not to his credit. He noted that he had studied at the Imperial Lycée in Kiev, which excluded Jews; that he had belonged to an anti-Jewish youth movement during the Russian Revolution; that his origins excluded all possibility of Jewish blood; and that he was
of pure Aryan blood. He added: “As for my ideas about Jews, they are well known.”
¹⁵

After the war, the complaint against Lifar was not that German officers flocked to the opera house to see him dance; it was that he could not resist being flattered and fêted by the occupier offstage. He would be seen dining among Wehrmacht uniforms at Maxim’s and drinking with Nazi officials at receptions at the German embassy or the German Institute. Along with many other cultural figures, he attended the splashy opening of the exhibition of Arno Breker’s sculptures at the Orangerie in 1942, which included a short piano concert by Cortot and the German virtuoso Wilhelm Kempff and a song by Lubin. Lifar also traveled to Vichy to perform with Schwarz, and he dedicated one of his Paris premieres to Marshal Pétain. In his memoir,
Ma vie
, published two decades after the war, it is apparent that the passage of time had not tempered his vanity. He boasts, “My authority among the Germans enabled me to come to the assistance of a large number of artists. I gave special importance to ensuring that nothing unpleasant happen to my friend Pablo Picasso.”
¹⁶
Recalling the compulsory work program in Germany, he also claimed to have protected his dancers: “It was in this way that I saved Serge Peretti, Jean Babilée and many others,” he recalled.
¹⁷
This was not how the moment was remembered by Babilée, who saved himself by joining the maquis. “He says absolutely anything that comes into his head,” Babilée said of Lifar. “He was a mythomaniac. I admired him enormously as an artist, he was amazing, but he was rather an ordinary human being. He didn’t save me at all.”

At the liberation of Paris, Lifar was condemned not as an artist but, as Poulenc put it in a letter to Milhaud, for acting with “an infantile imprudence because of his taste for publicity.”
¹⁸
Further, his strong anti-Communism hardly endeared him to Communist-run purge committees charged with punishing collaborationist artists. Yet such was his talent that he was quickly recruited by the Nouveau Ballet de Monte-Carlo, which had been founded in 1942 by Paris Opera dancers who had refused to return to Paris.
^*
In late 1944, Lifar was banned from working in ballet in France for life, but the following
year the sentence was reduced to a one-year suspension. This did little to disrupt his career. In 1945, he was already dancing in Monte Carlo. In 1946, he performed in London, although there he was received with boos. In 1947, he was rehired by the Paris Opera Ballet; he remained its director of dance until 1958. By then, his rubbing shoulders with the Nazis had been reduced to a footnote in the history of the company.

*
Here, “German” music embraces the pre-1871 German principalities and imperial Vienna as well as modern Germany and Austria.

*
Previously known as the Orchestre Colonne, it took the name of the composer Gabriel Pierné in 1940 because its founder, Édouard Colonne, was Jewish.

*
These wages, which were twice as high as those paid to musicians at the Paris Opera, served to woo some instrumentalists from the Orchestre National.

*
It was later variously called Comité des Musiciens du Front National, Front National des Musiciens and, finally, Front National de la Musique.

*
“La Marseillaise” was frequently performed in the unoccupied zone but was banned in the German-run area.

*
Although subject to German censorship,
Comoedia
provided ample and objective coverage of the arts and included Sartre, Valéry, Claudel and Cocteau among its occasional contributors.

*
After the war, through his revolutionary work in electroacoustic research, Schaefer became known as the “father” of
musique concrète
.

*
Michel Tagrine, a Jewish violinist, who won year-end prizes at the
conservatoire
in 1941 and 1942, would become one of the music world’s few martyrs: only twenty-two at the time, he died fighting in the Paris insurrection on August 25, 1944.

*
Joachim, who sang the title role, subsequently refused to perform excerpts on Radio-Paris.

*
Fürtwangler was the only leading German conductor not to perform in occupied France.

*
Beethoven proved useful to both sides in the war: while the BBC opened its French news bulletins with the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, also the letter
V
in Morse code, the Berlin Philharmonic frequently performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its rousing “Ode to Joy” vocal finale.

*
The pianist Lucienne Delforges, a close friend of Céline’s, was an infamous Nazi sympathizer who fled France in 1944 and performed for Vichy officials “exiled” in Germany.

*
They were relatively safe in Monte Carlo, although Léon Blum’s brother, René, who had created the Ballet de l’Opéra de Monte-Carlo in 1931, was arrested in Paris during a roundup of prominent Jews in December 1941; he was held in various French camps before being deported to Auschwitz, where he died in April 1943.

_·
CHAPTER 9
_·
A Ripped Canvas

BY 1941
, the Nazis had turned their art-looting operation into a smooth-running machine, one all too often oiled by French informers offering tips on where Jewish-owned art could be found. Mandated to run this crime ring was the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, which set up its Paris headquarters in the former library of the Universal Israelite Alliance in Pigalle. Once a Jewish collection was identified in an urban mansion or a remote château, the ERR moved in. Its agents, many of them art historians and young curators, would then spend days, even weeks, photographing and preparing an inventory of art objects to be dispatched to the Jeu de Paume, the museum-turned-depot in central Paris. Of primary importance were northern European—and, above all, Germanic—paintings and statues from before the nineteenth century, the kind of “pure” art that Hitler wanted for his future museum in Linz and Göring for his private collection at Carinhall. The final choice was usually made by Göring, who personally visited the Jeu de Paume to
inspect this veritable Ali Baba’s cave on twenty-one occasions during twelve different trips to Paris.

On each visit, Göring singled out works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Cranach the Elder, Van Dyck and other Old Masters that he considered merited a place in Linz or Carinhall. He had little affection for Impressionism and none for “degenerate” modern paintings, but he recognized that they had a market value, so they, too, were kept and stored separately in the Jeu de Paume, pending their exchange for classical art. Neutral Switzerland, which had sold “degenerate” art removed from German museums before the war, was open to all kinds of business. Large numbers of looted paintings were sold there. Similarly, it proved a good place to negotiate exchanges. In July 1941, twenty-two Impressionist paintings stolen in Paris were bartered for six northern Renaissance works through the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne; twenty-seven similar deals followed over the next three years.

Unsurprisingly, no objection to this ransacking was heard from the Vichy government. Not only had it institutionalized anti-Semitism through its Statute on Jews in October 1940; even earlier, it had stripped French Jews who had fled France of their nationality, creating the convenient legal fiction that their possessions—in this case, their art—had been abandoned. The principal opposition to this was voiced by Jacques Jaujard, a dapper
fonctionnaire
who at least had the support of Count Metternich’s Kunstshutz, the German army unit responsible for protecting artworks in times of war. After a career as a senior curator at the Louvre Museum, Jaujard was now the director of National Museums. Backed by the Consultative Committee of National Museums, he tried hard to protect Jewish-owned art that had been given to the Directorate of National Museums either as a gift or for safekeeping. But the Germans had already ruled that any transfer of ownership of art to the French government after September 1939 was invalid. Further, this battle interested neither of Pétain’s deputies, Laval or Darlan.