And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (47 page)

This second writers’ voyage brought Heller closer to Chardonne, a friendship that proved crucial to the writer a few months later when his son Gérard was arrested for resistance activities in Tunisia and sent to the Sachsenhausen camp, outside Berlin. In his memoir, Heller said that, in lobbying for the man’s release, he stressed that Chardonne had joined the second voyage to Weimar “when so many others pulled out.” After his son was freed, Chardonne thanked Heller in a letter, saying, “I will be thankful to you for the rest of my life.”
³⁶

One highly original writer—and decidedly unorthodox personality—who surfaced during the occupation was Jean Genet. He would make his name as a novelist, essayist and playwright only after the war, but it was a meeting with Cocteau in February 1943 that marked the beginning of his transition from petty criminal to acclaimed writer. By then, at the age of thirty-two, Genet had served no fewer than nine prison terms, in the main for shoplifting books and manuscripts, but at the same time he had been writing poems, plays and semiautobiographical novels dwelling in great detail on his homosexual affairs. It was one of these unpublished novels,
Notre-Dame des Fleurs
(Our Lady of the Flowers), that so impressed Cocteau that he quickly persuaded Robert Denoël to publish it—without German permission and for sale under the counter. Even then, only thirty copies were printed and the author’s name was omitted from the cover. Genet, who cheerfully described himself “as a thug and a poet,”
³⁷
was again jailed in May 1943 for stealing books and, in September, just one month after his release, he was back in prison. Cocteau stood by him, using his contacts to ease Genet’s discomfort. When Genet was released in March 1944, his prison life finally came to an end: during the occupation alone, he had spent twenty-one months behind bars. But from then, his troubles with the law arose from what he wrote—“pornography,” according to a later charge—and not what he did.

In contrast, a more dangerous nonconformist—the doctor known as Louis-Ferdinand Céline—prospered during the occupation. His hatred of Jews probably exceeded that of other leading Fascist writers, but his attitude toward the Germans swung between admiration
and disdain. What gave special weight to his views was that, following
Voyage au bout de la nuit
in 1932, he was considered the most innovative French writer of his generation. He was also stubbornly independent. Although invited to Weimar, for instance, he would never have agreed to be just another collaborationist shepherded by his German masters. Similarly, while many writers received subsidies from the German Institute, Céline never took money from the Nazis. He also refused to sell articles to newspapers, preferring to expound his views in angry letters. In brief, as an outsider in both literary and political circles, he felt free to say and write what he wished. For instance, although he shared many of their views, he dismissed the editors of
Je suis partout
as a “feverish club of ambitious little pederasts.” He also delighted in offering gratuitous advice to the Germans.

In his journal, Jünger recorded a typical conversation with Céline: “He said how surprised he was that, as soldiers, we do not shoot, we do not hang, we do not exterminate the Jews—he is astonished that someone in possession of a bayonet does not make unlimited use of it.”
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On another occasion, Céline visited Heller and wrote “NRF” on his door. “Everybody knows that you’re an agent of Gallimard and the private secretary of Jean Paulhan,” he told the German officer before handing him two pairs of goggles—to be used, he said, “when German cities go up in flames and smoke.”
³⁹

Yet while Céline’s language was often too vulgar to be used in Nazi propaganda, he was held in awe by some German officials, none more than Epting, who admired him as much for his literary style as for his exemplary anti-Semitism.
^*
When Céline claimed he was being threatened by Gaullists, the Germans allowed him to carry a gun. When he attended the opening of the Institut d’Études des Questions Juives in Paris in May 1941, they felt honored. When he criticized the Nazis, they were upset but bit their tongues. In one famous dinner at the German embassy in February 1944, accounts of which vary, Céline supposedly shocked Abetz as well as Drieu La Rochelle and other guests by pronouncing the Germans doomed to defeat and saying that Hitler had been replaced by a Jew. Abetz hurriedly
ordered the servants from the room, while his guests accused Céline of being anti-German. This he denied and, to prove it, he instigated his artist friend Gen Paul to do his much-practiced imitation of Hitler. The Nazis were not amused.

Céline did, in fact, have one reason for resentment toward the Nazis. In the 1930s, he began sending his royalties from
Voyage
to the Netherlands and Denmark in the form of gold coins and bars. But when the Germans seized his stash of 184 ten-florin gold coins in Amsterdam, he was furious. In October 1941, he wrote to Brinon, “That they should act like this against Gaullists and Jews—all the better—but with their few friends, those who have been condemned, hunted, persecuted, defamed for their cause, not just today but between ’36 and ’39, that’s the last straw.”
⁴⁰

Actually, he had one further gripe, albeit one common to all authors who cannot find their books on sale. In October 1941, after visiting the exhibition Le Juif et la France at the Palais Berlitz, Céline was angry to discover that the show’s bookshop was carrying neither of his prewar anti-Semitic best sellers,
Bagatelles pour un massacre
and
L’École des cadavres
. Both were nonetheless reprinted during the occupation,
Bagatelles
in 1941 and 1943 and
L’École
in 1941 and 1942. Céline also completed his anti-Semitic trilogy in 1941 with
Les Beaux draps
(The Fine Mess), which he dedicated to “the hangman’s rope” to be used on Jews and others responsible for France’s humiliation. In this book, there is no hint that the Jews are already being persecuted in France and across Europe; rather, he portrays them as all-powerful, still using their wiles to obtain everything since “they want everything, they want more, they want the moon, they want our bones, they want our guts in hair curlers to present on the Sabbath, to dress with flags at carnival time.”
⁴¹
He also had no time for the Catholic church, since it was “founded by 12 Jews.” He even took an implicit swipe at Vichy’s leaders, noting that they also had no wish to die: “How many went pale when it came to paying the check? Start counting on your little fingers. And no doubt it is still not over. The spectacle is permanent.”
⁴²
Les Beaux draps
, again published by Denoël, sold some forty thousand copies, although it was banned in the unoccupied zone—not for its anti-Semitism but for its rudeness to Vichy.

In December 1941, Céline was among those asked by the daily
L’Appel
to answer the question, Should Jews be exterminated? “I’ve had enough of repeating myself on the Jewish question,” he
responded. “Three definitive books suffice, I believe. But what about the others? All the other writers? For years, I have wanted to know the opinion of Duhamel, de Monzie, Bergery, Montherlant, Colette, Chateaubriant, Mauriac, Bordeaux, Guitry, Déat, Luchaire, Morand. What silence!” His publisher agreed that Céline had said all that could be said in those three books. In
Cahier Jaune
, a new anti-Semitic journal, Denoël wrote, “His three books contain a capital lesson. If we wish to restore France, we can find in them wise counsels, useful reflections, a good method. It’s all there. You have only to take it.”
⁴³

What sparked and what kept alive Céline’s anti-Semitism? His biographers have offered various clues: he was born during the Dreyfus affair to a father who disliked Jews; he came to resent his Jewish boss when he worked at the League of Nations; he was deeply hurt when Elizabeth Craig, an Irish dancer whom he loved, left him for “a Jewish gangster,” as he put it. He traveled to Hollywood hoping to win her back and to sell the movie rights to
Voyage
but was twice rejected, by Craig and by “the Jewish barons of finance.”
⁴⁴
By 1936, when
Mort à crédit
received mixed reviews, he had a ready answer: his critics were Jews. Then, the following year, with the publication of
Bagatelles
, Céline, now forty-two, proclaimed anti-Semitism as his new mission in life. By then, seeing Hitler’s escalating persecution of Jews, he was also persuaded that Jews—French, British, American and even Russian—were intent on waging war against the Reich. After his experience in World War I, this was a nightmare that he refused to relive.

Yet Céline’s anti-Semitism was both paranoid and hysterical. When Desnos criticized
Les Beaux draps
in the weekly
Aujourd’hui
in March 1941, Céline responded with typical excess: “Why doesn’t Mr. Desnos instead yell out, ‘Death to Céline, Long live the Jews!’ Since June, it seems to me, Mr. Desnos (and your newspaper) is untiringly carrying out a philo-yid campaign.”
⁴⁵
Instead, he suggested that
Aujourd’hui
publish Desnos’s photograph, “his face and profile.”

At the same time, throughout the occupation Céline worked as a doctor treating the poor in municipal clinics in the Paris suburbs of Sartrouville and Bezon, traveling most days by motorcycle from the small apartment in Montmartre that he shared with his dancer wife, Lucette Almanzor, and their cat, Bébert. Yet for all his verbal and written bravado, he was terrified by Allied bombing of the outskirts
of Paris in April 1944, and he lobbied the German embassy to give him a visa to leave the country. On June 17, 1944, barely a week and a half after D-Day, Céline, Lucette and Bébert left Paris for Baden-Baden, in western Germany, on their way to exile in Denmark—and, Céline hoped, to recover his hidden gold. In his journal, Jünger observed Céline’s departure with disgust: “Curious to see how people capable of demanding the heads of millions of men in cold blood worry about their dirty little lives. The two facts must be connected.”
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It would be nine years before Céline returned to France.

*
During much of this time, he was in camps reserved for French officers and was not unduly uncomfortable. While a prisoner of war, he wrote his play
Bérénice
.

*
The catalyst for twentieth-century French anti-Semitism was evidently the Dreyfus affair.

*
Bremer was later sent to the Russian Front, where he died in 1942. In an obituary in
Je suis partout
, a heartbroken Brasillach addressed Bremer: “Once peace came, we wanted to go walking together, to go camping, to find twin landscapes, the fraternal cities of our two countries.”

*
Paul Riche was the pseudonym of Jean Mamy, who in 1943 directed
Forces occultes
, a movie attacking Freemasons and Jews, and who in 1949 was executed.

*
A number of French scholars consider this memoir, which Heller wrote with a French author, Jean Grand, thirty-six years after he left Paris, to be self-serving and highly selective. Nonetheless, after the war, Heller devoted himself to translating French literature and in 1980 was awarded the Grand Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française by the Académie Française.

*
For all his collaborationist instincts, however, Fabre-Luce found himself in trouble with the Germans. After publishing the first two volumes of his
Journal de la France
in the unoccupied zone, he decided to publish the third privately. Predictions of a German defeat and the observation that “the Jew has become a symbol of human suffering” earned him four months in prison.

*
There is evidence that the Otto List was drawn up with the participation of some French publishers eager to please the Germans.

*
Before her death in 1962, Beach authorized a new English-language bookstore on the Left Bank to use the name of Shakespeare & Company.

*
Although Calmann-Lévy’s Jewish owners were quickly sidelined, a power struggle to control it ensued, with Bernard Grasset proposing that French publishers pool their resources to acquire it, before it was absorbed into the media empire of the German businessman Gerhard Hibbelen.

*
The commission’s secretary was none other than a young Marguerite Duras.

*
With
Le Mythe de Sisyphe
, Gallimard asked Camus—and he agreed—to cut references to Kafka, who as a Jew could not be mentioned positively in print.

*
In February 1941, after being denounced in
Le Matin
, Cain was arrested. He was held in various French prisons until he was deported to Buchenwald in January 1944. Freed by American forces in April 1945, he returned to his post at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he remained until 1964.

*
Bergson had come close to converting to Catholicism in the 1930s, but in the summer of 1940 he insisted on registering before the French police as a Jew, out of solidarity with other Jews.