When Paris Went Dark (18 page)

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:

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)

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.
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He reconciles his memory of having been in Paris as a student with his present assignment, noting in 1942:

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:

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.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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:

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.
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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!”
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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.

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.