When Paris Went Dark (19 page)

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:

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.

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:

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:

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.