When Paris Went Dark (13 page)

Visiting a famous tomb.
(Musée de la Résistance nationale)

Breker reiterates that Hitler entertained his companions with an almost continuous architectural patter; he mused openly about each building and monument they slowed down to see. Yet this was partly—if not predominantly—why Hitler left the city without seeing or understanding what made it an exceptional expression of urban energy. Monuments alone do not define a city. They crossed the Pont d’Arcole to return to the Right Bank, passing by the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall. Then, surprisingly, the group turned into the Marais, a decrepit neighborhood chockablock with crammed tenements housing eastern European immigrants, mostly Jews.
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A sad irony of this particular
detour is that the future victims of Hitler’s pathology were asleep while he was within meters of what they had thought was a haven. In two short years, one of the largest roundups of these “undesirables” would bring terror to the same narrow streets.

The limousines then paraded up the mansion-laden Rue des Francs-Bourgeois to the Place des Vosges, a perfectly landscaped square bordered by one of Paris’s first and most coveted apartment complexes. They turned west onto the Rue de Rivoli, the wide artery that serves as the major east-west axis of the city, taking them to the neighborhood of Les Halles, the famous food marketplace known as the “belly of Paris.” Like the rest of the city, the vast market was almost empty; but the cortege did pass some fishwives waiting for their delivery. The women stared at the shiny automobiles as they slowly passed by; according to Breker, a young man setting up his newspaper kiosk suddenly recognized whom he was seeing, and yelled: “It’s him. Oh, it’s him!” before running off to hide from the devil himself. Here the entourage began their climb to Montmartre, the highest hill in Paris, site of the Place de Clichy and the Place Pigalle—the latter infamous before, during, and after the war for its plethora of streetwalkers and garish cafés. (Allied soldiers would call it Pig Alley.) Overlooking the city from the Butte Montmartre is the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, “a surprising choice,” wrote Albert Speer later, “even given Hitler’s taste.”
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Speer (like almost every Parisian I know) held in unconcealed distaste the quasi-Byzantine, quasiclassical, brilliantly white “wedding cake” at the top of hill, one of the two or three most photographed and thus most representative Paris landmarks.
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Consecrated in 1919 it was only about two decades old when Hitler saw it. One of the most compelling reasons for the Führer’s visit to this bizarre temple is that the basilica’s large parvis offers a spectacular natural view of the city. Here
he stood and congratulated himself on having saved this magnificent metropolis for Western civilization.

Église du Sacré-Coeur.
(Creative Commons)

Again, Hitler alternated between the gaze of the tourist—who seeks to make as banal and nonthreatening as possible the object contemplated—and the gaze of the conqueror, who seeks to command what he sees before him. The tourist is curious, adventurous, and yet anxious before an unfamiliar phenomenon. His intellectual interest combines with his pride at having arrived at a new site. But this exhilaration is tempered by timidity, partially prompted by a fear of the unknown city and its unfamiliar inhabitants, and an anxiety about
appearing ignorant. On the other hand, the conqueror seeks to control with a glance, to impose order by virtue of his will rather than his imagination. He temporarily represses thoughts of insurrection, of provisioning, and of governance in order to assume spiritual ownership of a heterogeneous, labyrinthine urban center. The exhilaration Hitler must have felt made him “generously” offer the city back—at least metaphorically—to its citizens, from whom he expected to receive kudos. Speer later wrote about how startled he was that Hitler seemed to treat the glorious city as though it were a plaything: “Maybe I’ll protect it; maybe I won’t. It’s up to me.” This is, of course, the attitude of any megalomaniac.

Assuming Hitler’s first-person point of view, Breker reported the chancellor’s musings as he contemplated Paris from Sacré-Coeur:

In these observations, there is a tone of envy, an almost palpable recognition that Germany was a new country, jerry-built into a nation by Bismarck and others less than a century earlier. Berlin had only been a national capital since then; its history could not begin to compare to that of Paris, even though much attention had been paid to it during the
Second Reich (1871–1918) and thereafter. But Hitler was planning that Berlin would become a major capital soon, after the victories of 1939–41; what had been a barely disguised wish would become a certainty.

Many of the German observers of Paris during the Occupation glowed with satisfaction that this old, respectable, and beautiful capital would be overshadowed by the majestic example of a resurgent Berlin. Tobin Siebers has argued that “Hitler’s Germany was a dictatorship of the aesthetic… [but one where] beauty was a thing of the blood.”
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A fascination with decadence (which extended to racial and ethnic qualities), with the decline of a civilization remembered nostalgically, informed Nazi ideology; this obsession was transferred to those who, they thought, represented the decline of that Western civilization. On the other hand, the attraction of Paris was so powerful that some sort of ethical and aesthetic compromise had to be made by the arrogant, though impressed, Occupiers. To admire Paris was fine, but to admire the French ingenuity that had created it was not. This contradiction subtends not only Hitler’s short tour but also German conduct during the city’s fifty-month Occupation. Part of Goebbels’s general cultural project for the “new Europe” was to reduce the influence of French culture, which had led, he believed, to the weaknesses that had allowed France to be overrun by the purer Nazis in less than a month. Nazi ideology demanded an unbreakable link between racial purity, ethical certainty, and cultural expression. Yet Paris represented, as it had for more than a century, a site of impurity, moral relativism, and cultural radicalism.
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Though the French may have fielded ineffectual armies, they had succeeded through their “decadent” arts, including jazz and cubism, in colonizing the European imagination. Goebbels spent a considerable amount of time devising propaganda and a machinery for artistic appropriation that would make Berlin, not Paris, the art, film, and fashion center of the “new Europe.” He would in the end fail, to the world’s relief.

After fewer than three hours, the Führer’s cavalcade sped back to the airport at Le Bourget to fly to its Belgian headquarters. As his plane
rose from the field, Hitler asked his pilot to make a slow turn over Paris so that he could see it again. Once more, the German leader captured in his glance the panorama of a mythical city, lying below him in a bright sunlight, cut in two by the silver meandering of a strong river. It would be the last time he would gaze upon Paris, though the city never left his imagination. Until the final days in his bunker, Hitler would still dream of the city he thought he had conquered, unaware to his death how the City of Light would vanquish him.

The memoranda of Hitler’s private (recorded) conversations are replete with offhand and direct references to Paris. Sometimes he implies that Paris is simply an architectural congeries of beautiful buildings and monuments; at other moments, he muses that it is the model for all cities, or he might compare it unfavorably to Rome. He never mentions its vibrancy or the exhilarating confusion of daily life; instead, he reduces the image of Paris to that of an open-air museum, the result of centuries of good taste.

The First World War had given a new dimension to the fascination Germany and France have historically had for each other: Were they now to be brothers in peace, standing in opposition to Bolshevik Russia and imperial Great Britain, or were they forever to be locked in an embrace of scorpions, at any moment ready to sting the fraternal other? After that devastating war, books and essays had been published in Germany, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s, that had a great effect on how the Germans would consider and treat France once they had her in their thrall. For the most part, these works depicted France as a once-great country that had lost its way. It had degenerated, had become an empty plaster cast of its former greatness. By far the most widely read of these books, including by Hitler, was the journalist Friedrich Sieburg’s
Gott in Frankreich?
(To Live Like God in France; 1929).
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Written
from the perspective of someone who purportedly loves France, it is patronizing and vigorously pro-German. The Vichy government republished it, for it outlined their own conviction that France had lost much of its former claim to glory through moral decay, leftist politics, and unfounded arrogance. A typical description of the Parisian cityscape follows:

The passage not only outlines the tour itinerary that the future Führer would take a decade later, during his only visit to the city, but also insinuates that the glory that was Paris was passing. It was time for a new capital of Europe.

Great urban sites attracted Hitler but intimidated him as well; many of his recorded conversations about cities reveal a need to criticize as well as to exalt the human achievement that cities represent. In
Mein Kampf,
he describes them as sites of teeming apartment buildings and restive populations. When he remarks favorably about them, he analyzes their structures and their built environments. For him, the most
interesting metropolis would be empty of its innumerable, often churlish citizens. Coincidentally, the Paris he visited that early Friday morning, while most of its inhabitants were either asleep or fleeing southward, would come close to that ideal.
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Mein Kampf
sparingly mentions the massive urban resurgence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but a close reading shows a general distrust of cities and of the masses that congregated in them. It is common knowledge that the early National Socialist electoral successes came from the rural areas and small towns of Germany. Hitler always appeared a bit befuddled by large cities, including the German capital.

Hitler had not spent much time in Berlin before his appointment as chancellor; the two major Germanic cities he knew best were Munich and Vienna. The latter held a complexly nostalgic place in the Führer’s mind. He had spent his formative years there as an aspiring artist, but poverty and rejection had left less pleasant memories. His fraught relationship with the capital city of his native Austria can give us another window into his general attitude toward cities. On March 18, 1938, two years before he would sneak into Paris, Hitler arrived in a motorcade before rapturous Viennese: “Many hundreds of thousands were on their way to hear him. Streets are dipped in a frenzy of color. The Heldenplatz could not hold the masses.… Sieg Heil shouts storm across the square, many thousands of arms are raised in the German salute.”
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Vienna was the best-known metropolis swallowed by the Third Reich before Paris, to which it was often compared, and in his oration to the crowd, Hitler referred to it as the Reich’s second city. The Austrians, for the most part and at first, were ecstatic, and showed their enthusiasm about the Anschluss (the political union of Germany and Austria in 1938, forming the greater Reich) through many violent acts against Jews, Socialists, and Communists both preceding and during
the union. However, what followed after the annexation was a transparent, brutal Aryanization (the ejection of Jewish business owners and their removal from teaching and other professions) of Hitler’s “pearl” city, an attempt to make it into a cultural beacon for the entire Third Reich. Not long after, these two goals—making Vienna a free-spirited sister to Paris as well as a stepsister of the Reich’s capital—came into conflict, and, sooner rather than later, Vienna increasingly became a problem for the Berlin government, a site of tough and tenacious resistance to the Nazi regime. It began to promote itself as the “first” cultural city of the Reich, and the previously delirious Viennese Nazis were soon impatient with rule from Berlin. “I can’t afford to have a mutinous large city at the southeast corner of the Reich,” Hitler supposedly told Baldur von Schirach, his choice for
gauleiter
and
reichsstatthalter
(boss) of Vienna.
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The Austrian capital would remain a problem, so Hitler’s attention focused on the much smaller Linz, his Austrian birthplace, as a “counter-Vienna,” one he would rebuild along the lines of Berlin and Paris. Indeed, Hitler’s reaction to the Occupation of Paris, both his joy and his anxiety, may well have been influenced by his frustrations with a persistently querulous Vienna.

In general, the Germans sought to appropriate and then to fix Paris in a time that was embedded in the collective memory of the cosmopolitan world. In so doing, they hoped to slow down the unpredictable energy that defines metropolises and thus to provide more security for themselves and their motives. Cities were too porous, too difficult to control. The author of
Mein Kampf
wrote in the mid-1920s that “the meaning and purpose of revolutions is not to tear down the whole building, but to remove what is bad or unsuitable and to continue building on the same spot that has been laid bare.”
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Using an architectural metaphor, he is speaking of ideas; but the Nazi anxiety would translate into a desire to “cleanse” cities as well as minds, just as they were “cleansing” through ethnic removal. Continued Hitler:

Cities, according to Hitler, are filled with citizens who frequently change addresses and, thus, in his mind, identities. (Throughout occupied Europe, Jews were forbidden to sell, rent, or move from their apartments.) This undermines the authority of the state that must protect itself against the anonymity of its citizens. Immigration threatens the state’s promise to provide its urban citizens a secure, consistently recognizable, and “nonsinister” environment. City life can weaken the bonds that are essential to a well-managed and predictable political and cultural entity. Urban centers should be spaces of cultural greatness, as long as the culture is imposed by tradition and the state and not by the city’s unpredictable population. Without the dominant hand of a confident ideology, they risk becoming only “human settlements,” sites of rootlessness and passing through. Nazism sought to reconstruct the urban environment through application of a nationalistic culture that would bind citizens more securely than did such human needs.

So with Paris, Hitler found himself confronted by a “monumental” urban center, recognized across the world as a carefully planned conglomeration of private and public buildings modernized (by Baron Haussmann and Napoleon III) according to the very principles of an imperial monument-city. Yet it was as well a haven for a massive influx of immigrants from eastern Europe and elsewhere; it was teeming with all he hated and feared: anti-Nazis, Jews, homosexuals, mixed-race degenerates, and “modern” artists. As a consequence, the newly arrived Germans set about mediating those aspects of Parisian life that most threatened their presence as well as those that could be manipulated to strengthen their defenses: movement through the city, nourishment and bodily comfort, personal identity, signs and symbols, pastimes, entertainment, even time itself. These restrictive regulations demanded
of the Parisian a constant, fatiguing, and stressful reorientation vis-à-vis their own city. The German occupiers wanted to unmake dynamic Paris, to create a static simulacrum, preserving its most banal characteristics for their own enjoyment. They thought they could persuade the world that they, too, were culturally and aesthetically sensitive while keeping Parisians literally in line. For a time, the strategy seemed to work.