This Anguish, Like a Kind of Intimate Song: Resistance in Women's Literature of World War II (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

'This Anguish, Like a Kind of Intimate Song'

74

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena) - Guillaume van Gemert (Universiteit Nijmegen) - Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen) - Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) - John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) - Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin) - Sven H. Rossel (University of Washington) - Azade Seyhan (Bryn Mawr College) - Horst Thomé (Universität Kiel) herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redakteure: Norbert Bachleitner & Alfred Noe Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

'This Anguish, Like a Kind of Intimate Song' Resistance in Women's Literature of World War II

L. Leigh Westerfield

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Front cover: –A Nazi banner is draped over the entrance to the city hall in Berlin Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum –"Marktstand" ("Was koch ich" in Babelsberg, um 1939) Copyright: Orgel-Köhne/DHM –"Femme et sa fillette," France 1943 Copyright: collection Roger-Viollet Back cover: –"Vieille femme française parlant a un soldat allemand," France, juillet 1940 Copyright: collection Roger-Viollet –One-year-old Evelyn Goldstein is taken for a walk in a Berlin park by her Aunt Ruth Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1148-3 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004 Printed in The Netherlands

For Bernie Morris

Contents

Introduction

8

Chapter One A Resistance Discourse Fashioned from War’s Chaos

19

Chapter Two Chipping Away at the State: German Women and Resistance

35

Chapter Three A Legacy of Activism: French Women and Resistance

56

Chapter Four NEIN: Ordinary Actions, Everyday Settings

77

Chapter Five Conventional Women and Revolutionary Movements

99

Chapter Six ‘They Stood Like a Wall’: Resistance As Collective Protest

119

Chapter Seven The Tender Liaison Agent: Femininity As Disguise

138

Chapter Eight Clandestine Activity at Home: Resistance and Relationship

159

Chapter Nine Bonds of Communion: The Emotional Context of Resistance

181

Conclusion

206

Bibliography

209

Index

225

Preface

Even when this book was just a vague idea for a PhD dissertation, I was drawn to the question of what it was inside an individual that motivated her to take daunting risks to resist Nazism. A year I had spent in Berlin, in 1973, had set the stage for this project without my actually being aware of it at the time. Later, during my graduate studies in Comparative Literature at Indiana University, I kept returning to the subject of the European writers and intellectuals of the 1920s and ‘30s who for a time gave themselves and their art over to Communism and other political movements that held the promise of sweeping social change. My dissertation on French and German women’s resistance literature evolved out of this academic interest and also out of the mystique of Berlin. Writing this book presented me with the opportunity to re-examine my original question. As compelling as the intertwined issues of gender and war are and as much as I wanted to give these authors a voice and an identity as resistance writers and to validate the forms of women’s anti-Nazi opposition, I also wanted to unearth what was within the core of a resister’s being that enabled her to take some kind of action when so many other people did not. I hope this book, if only between the lines, begins to answer that question. These writers and resisters still speak to us and to the times in which we live today. I am indebted, above all, to Bernie Morris, of the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, who saw a book in me even when I could not see it and who continued to believe in this project over a number of years. I also wish to thank Wolfgang Wippermann, of the Friedrich Meinecke Institut at the Freie Universität Berlin. He generously read and commented on drafts of the dissertation as well as a final draft of this book, and he reminded me more than once that a comparative study like this was needed. I express my gratitude to others as well who read and commented on drafts, especially the late Mike Downs. Advice and encouragement came to me from many others to whom I am grateful. Among those whom I wish to thank are Ines Kraft, Téa Malloizel, Beate Gilliar, Janine Moore, and Melissa Lowe. There are others, too, whose words and work inspired me, though they may not realize it. To my editors, Marieke Schilling and Norbert Bachleitner, at Editions Rodopi, I extend a special thanks for the help they provided in pulling this project together. Finally, I owe a great deal to my family for their love and support—and for that trip to Berlin.

Introduction

I do not want to think of the past because it has lost its meaning. The world has learned nothing from it—neither slaughterers nor victims nor onlookers. Our time is like a dance of death whose uncanny rhythm is understood by few. Everyone whirls confusedly without seeing the abyss. [Lagi Countess Ballestrem-Solf, in We Survived1] Il est temps qu’on sache que la Résistance doit autant à la prise de conscience des femmes qu’à l’héroïsme des hommes.2 [Clara Malraux]

The alluring female resistance agent and the daring partisane bearing a machine gun slung over her shoulder may have existed only in the public imagination—as valorous figures fleshing out the myths and legends that define the cultural landscape. Even at that, the power of these feminine images has begun to loosen its hold. The popular representations of female resisters of the Second World War have done justice neither to the depth of women’s participation in the German and French anti-Nazi movements nor to the actual shape of women’s experience as resisters. Nor have the actions of a few ‘exceptional’ heroines who gained notoriety after the war afforded a realistic view of the nature of the average woman’s opposition to Nazism. The topic of anti-Nazi activity by women has only gradually come to the attention of historians during the last several decades, and literary treatments of the topic have rarely made their way into critical discussion. Yet women’s resistance literature holds the potential to illuminate the subjects of gender in particular and of war and resistance in general. This body of writing not only leads readers to a better sense of what women actually contributed to the resistance movements in Germany and France and how their roles were defined by gender standards, but it also suggests that women authors were subject to similar standards in narrating the war and resistance. German and French women’s literature of the resistance offers an avenue for reflecting on issues related to World War II that have stubbornly refused to remain confined to the pages of history books. Even as anniversaries are celebrated periodically in commemoration of battles and the end of World War II, reminders of the conflict still persist uneasily beneath the surface of the social consciousness in Europe and the United States. In France, 1 2

We Survived: The Stories of Fourteen of the Hidden and the Hunted of Nazi Germany, ed. by Eric H. Boehm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949). (It is time one realizes that the Resistance owed as much to the consciousness of women as to the heroism of men) Jérôme Garcin, ‘Clara Malraux: “La guerre m’a liberé”’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 23 July 1981, 37.

Paul Touvier, the head of Vichy’s fascist-inspired milice (militia) in Lyons, was tried and convicted in 1994 for having ordered the execution of seven Jews, while the eighty-sevenyear-old Maurice Papon, who as a senior Vichy official in Bordeaux signed orders for the deportation of some sixteen hundred Jews to death camps, was found guilty of crimes against humanity in 1998 and handed a ten-year prison sentence.3 That same year, Swiss banks reached a 1.2 billion-dollar settlement with Holocaust survivors and heirs who lost their assets when their money was deposited in these banks during the Nazi era. More recently, in May 2001, the German government and major firms in German banking and industry agreed to begin payments to several hundred thousand slave labourers and forced labourers from a jointly established 4.5 billion-dollar fund. A year earlier, subsidiaries of American companies based in Germany, including Exxon-Mobil, Ford, General Motors, and Kodak, promised five billion dollars as reparations to these victims. Each revelation opens old wounds and renews old controversies. In women’s resistance narratives it is possible to read the impact of the Nazi and Vichy ideologies on the lives of ordinary people and to discern how women, customarily excluded from politics, resistance, and combat, ultimately chose to respond to the inhumanity of these dictatorships. Women’s resistance literature prods readers to remember what actually lies behind the dispassionate treatment of war that is a part of contemporary American culture of late. Over fifty years after the end of the Second World War, the language and images of war have become increasingly sanitized, as seen, for instance, in the first Persian Gulf war when television networks primarily broadcast images of jet radar screens and smart bombs striking non-human targets. Even when reporters were ‘embedded’ with the troops during the recent United States-Iraq conflict, there was much discussion and controversy about whether the media was actually providing a true picture of the war or, rather, a narrow perspective more suitable for general consumption. Today, more than ever, the American public fails to grasp the horror of war. The remarks of the German novelist Günter Grass encapsulate the threat of war that no individual can ever truly escape, in spite of a media-induced sense of detachment. In his 1984 essay ‘Resistance’, concerning the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Europe, Grass writes about being sent to the Eastern front as a seventeen-year-old soldier in the Second World War. He witnessed half of his company, mostly boys his age, being killed or wounded in a three-minute Soviet barrage. ‘Ever since’, he reflects, ‘I’ve known what fear is. Ever since, I’ve known that it’s only by chance that I am alive. Ever since, any war has appeared conceivable to me.’4 As women’s resistance texts demonstrate, no one can avoid the effects of war as they ripple out over a society. This literature has the power to restore some of the fundamental elements—the moral uncertainties, the conflicting emotions, the value of home life and of human relationships amidst chaos and violence—that have been bleached from today’s sterile vocabulary of war. This literary history establishes a niche for women’s writings about war and resistance and thus acknowledges women as legitimate narrators of these subjects. These texts bring to light the responses of European women who witnessed the oppression of fascism first-hand and came face-to-face with the destructiveness of war. The principal figures I discuss are Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Irmgard Keun, Elisabeth Langgässer, and Anna Seghers in Germany; and Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Clara Malraux, Edith Thomas, and Elsa 3 4

In February 2003, France’s highest appeals court upheld a decision to free Papon due to his age and ill health. Günter Grass, ‘Resistance’, Granta, 12 (1984), 198-201 (pp.199-200).

9

Triolet in France. These writers were roughly the same age in 1939: between thirty and forty-three years old (Duras was twenty-five years old). The majority of them received public recognition at some point in their careers for their literary achievements, yet critics have paid scant attention to them or to their resistance narratives, with just a few exceptions. Only Triolet, Thomas, Beauvoir, and Duras receive occasional (and brief) mention in criticism concerning war or resistance literature. The primary sources that comprise this investigation are short stories and novels written during the war and published at that time or shortly after war’s end. I have also included a diary and a memoir, both of which skilfully blend literary elements with the narration of actual events. The texts I discuss are: Andreas-Friedrich’s diary Der Schattenmann; Keun’s novella Nach Mitternacht; Langgässer’s short stories ‘An der Nähmaschine’ and ‘Untergetaucht’; Seghers’s novel Das siebte Kreuz; Beauvoir’s novel Le Sang des autres; Duras’s fiction-memoir La Douleur; Malraux’s short story ‘La Fausse épreuve’; Thomas’s short stories ‘FTP’ and ‘L’Arrestation’; and Triolet’s novella Les Amants d’Avignon. As the main focus of this book is literary, I generally refer to the primary material as ‘women’s resistance literature’. I occasionally use the broader term ‘resistance narratives’ in reference to the fictional sources as well as the memoirs and journals. Additionally, I cite some relevant historical materials such as interviews, personal journals, autobiographical memoirs, oral histories, and eyewitness accounts by former resisters published since World War II in order to give perspective to and bring into sharper relief the nature of women’s activism and their ways of characterizing their participation. I contrast the narratives of women with selected examples of men’s resistance texts as a way to emphasize the distinguishing features of women’s narrative choices and strategies. (I have attempted to match the women’s writings with those of the men in terms of genre, subject matter, and background of the writer.) Unless otherwise indicated, translations from all sources are my own. Literary critics have begun to situate women authors in the context of war as they analyse the intersections of gender and war.5 New biographical material about some of the lesser-known writers of this period, such as Triolet, Malraux, and Thomas, has also come to light, and critics have re-evaluated the fiction of others, including Seghers and Keun. In general, however, the voices of women writing about war and resistance have long been effectively stilled because what women have had to say about these subjects has not corresponded to the classic novels by men that constitute the canon of war literature. The present study breaks new ground in exploring women’s resistance literature as a commentary on a segment of women’s history for which historical materials are scant. Scholars have gleaned fragments of information about women’s anti-Nazism mainly from memoirs and oral testimony. There are very few hard facts at hand, and even those that are available may leave unanswered questions. Margaret Collins Weitz points out some of the pitfalls of historical sources concerning this period, noting that oral testimony, which is subject to the vagaries of the interviewee’s memory, may contain inaccuracies and even errors. Written materials may be equally unreliable and have contradictions.6 Women’s 5 6

10

See, for example, Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. by Margaret R. Higonnet and others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Christl Wickert, ‘Women between Dissent and Resistance’, in Encyclopedia of German Resistance to the Nazi Movement, ed. by Wolfgang Benz and Walter H. Pehle, trans. by Lance W. Garmer (New York: Continuum: 1997), pp. 101-13 (p.101); Margaret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940-1945 (New York: Wiley, 1995), p.14.

literary treatments of resistance fill in some of these gaps. In his book of short stories, The Things They Carried, the writer Tim O’Brien, whose stories and novels often deliberately erase the distinction between fact and fiction to suggest the impossibility of pinning down the elusive truth about the Vietnam War, speaks to the ways in which fiction can point the way toward fact or truth. As the character-narrator (also named Tim O’Brien) explains: ‘By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start with an incident that truly happened [. . .] and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.’7 Women’s resistance stories and novels have an eyewitness quality; they consist of more than a web of fictions or the subjective responses found in oral testimony. The majority of these resistance narratives combine autobiographical elements with actual historical events. They convey the mood and ambience of the period and thus lead one to a clearer understanding of individuals’ reactions to the Nazi and the Vichy repression. The noted German historian Detlev Peukert, among others, acknowledges the importance of ‘convey[ing] an impression of the language and styles of thought of the time, which is essential if we are to gain a deeper understanding of as subjective a dimension of history as the quality of personal experience’. Historian Sarah Fishman, in her study of wives of French prisoners of war, likewise asserts it is possible to reconstruct ‘intangibles such as popular attitudes and social definitions’ by examining ‘popular cultural representations of prisoners’ wives such as books, movies, women’s magazines, and pamphlets’.8 The narratives that make up this study have the power to deepen the context of women’s historical experience. This examination of women’s resistance literature is based on the now accepted understanding of resistance that encompasses less visible dissenting actions carried out by average citizens in everyday contexts. Since the late 1970s and early ‘80s, historians investigating the social context of the Nazi and Vichy regimes have expanded the conventional definition of resistance as organized, armed sabotage waged through the military or political parties with the goal of overthrowing the state to include more varied forms of activity and a broader scope of actors. The French scholars Roger Bourderon and Germaine Willard urged that the collective actions of certain groups be taken into account as part of the French resistance: demands of the unemployed for increased allocations, women’s demonstrations, and strikes by workers. Major studies of the French resistance by the British historian H.R. Kedward and the American John F. Sweets, both of whom focused on nonmilitary acts of opposition, also led to a more inclusive notion of resistance.9 Research on the German resistance moved in a similar direction as historians such as Peukert, Ger Van Roon, Hans Mommsen, and Martin Broszat studied the individual citizen and analysed anti7 8

9

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1990), p.158. Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism In Everyday Life, trans. by Richard Deveson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p.12; Sarah Fishman, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p.123. Roger Bourderon and Germaine Willard, La France dans la tourmente, 1939-1944 (France in turmoil, 19391944) (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1982); H.R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) and Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France: The French Under Nazi Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

11

Nazi activity in the Third Reich as a social process.10 While researchers in both countries continue to investigate the links between collaboration and resistance and to debate what it means to resist, there is a willingness to consider the various gradations of resistance. By filtering the actions of French and German citizens through the lens of daily life in occupied France and the Third Reich, scholars have enlarged the range of resisters and their activities and shifted the terms of resistance from guns and bullets and bombs to a variety of other actions: giving safe quarter to Jews and political refugees, demonstrating for increased food supplies or staging strikes in factories, transmitting messages, running escape lines, performing social service work, producing false identification, refusing to support Nazimandated programs in Germany or displaying national pride in France, and transporting illegal materials. The current study of women’s resistance literature continues the process of broadening the concept of resistance by creating a space for female resisters who, while not on the battlefield, did experience war and participate in the underground. As researchers began to explore more forms of resistance at the grass-roots level, scholars of women’s history in France and Germany, driven by a growing number of diaries, memoirs, and oral interviews by former resisters, turned their attention to the condition of women in wartime and attempted to identify and legitimize their anti-Nazi work. Rayna Kline’s 1977 article ‘Partisans, Godmothers, Bicyclists, and Other Terrorists: Women in the French Resistance and under Vichy’, reported on various forms of popular resistance that developed out of French women’s everyday lives.11 Important collections of interviews and personal testimony by ‘ordinary’ women appeared in France in the 1970s12, while some of the most notable heroines of the French resistance started publishing their autobiographies and memoirs in the late ‘70s and ‘80s.13 The Union des Femmes Françaises (Union of French Women) examined the motivations and forms of French women’s resistance, publishing a collection of papers from its 1975 colloquium.14 The situation differed in the Federal Republic of Ger10

11

12

13

14

12

Detlev Peukert, Ruhrarbeiter gegen den Faschismus: Dokumentationen (Ruhr Valley workers against fascism: documentation) (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1977) and Inside; Ger Van Roon, Widerstand im Dritten Reich (Resistance in the Third Reich) (Munich: Beck, 1979); Hans Mommsen, ‘The German Resistance against Hitler and the Restoration of Politics’, Journal of Modern History, 64, suppl. (1992), S112-27; Martin Broszat, ‘A Social and Historical Typology of the German Opposition to Hitler’, in Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, ed. by David Clay Large (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute: 1991), pp.25-33. Rayna Kline, ‘Partisans, Godmothers, Bicyclists, and Other Terrorists: Women in the French Resistance and under Vichy’, Proceedings of the 5th Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, Las Cruces, NM, 10-12 November 1977, ed. by Joyce Duncan Falk (Santa Barbara, CA: Western Society for French History, 1978), pp.375-83. Marianne Monestier, Elles étaient cent et mille (They were a hundred, they were a thousand) (Paris: Fayard, 1972); Des femmes dans la résistance (On women in the resistance), ed. by Nicole Chatel (Paris: Julliard, 1972); Ania Francos, Il était des femmes dans la résistance (There were women in the resistance) (Paris: Stock, 1978). See Florence Hervé, ‘Wir fühlten uns frei’: Deutsche und französische Frauen im Widerstand (‘We felt free’: German and French women in the resistance) (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1997), who singles out these and other studies because they give consideration to women’s motivation as resisters (pp.109-10). Lucie Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo, trans. by Konrad Bieber (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Cécile Ouzoulias-Romagon, J’étais agent de liaison des F.T.P.F. (I was a liaison agent of the F.T.P.F.) (Paris: Messidor, 1988); Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, L’Arche de Noé: Réseau Alliance, 1940-1945 (Paris: Fayard, 1968) (1973; Eng. tr. Noah’s Ark); Mireille Albrecht, Berty (Paris: Laffont, 1986). Les Femmes dans la résistance française (Women in the French resistance), ed. by Union des Femmes Françaises, Actes du colloque, Paris, La Sorbonne, 22 and 23 November 1975 (Paris: Rocher, 1977).

many, where little attention was paid to German women’s resistance during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Two studies, one by Gerda Zorn and Gertrud Meyer and the other by Hanna Elling, essentially presented brief overviews of women’s resistance activities without investigating the impulses for their actions. Gerda Szepansky’s collection of interviews began to research the subject of women’s anti-Nazism in more depth. The first major works on German women and fascism appeared during the mid-’70s.15 A variety of publications, ranging from scholarly to biographical to personal memoir, appeared in both countries during the 1980s and ‘90s. Noteworthy studies included Célia Bertin’s Femmes sous l’Occupation, which looked at the lives of everyday resisters as well as heroines in France. With the publication of Christl Wickert’s Frauen gegen die Diktatur, the focus on women’s resistance shifted from strictly recording resisters’ experiences to analysing their anti-Nazism in light of gender relations.16 This study of women’s resistance literature furthers the general investigation of the interconnections between gender and war and resistance by analysing the ways in which gender norms determined both women’s roles as opponents of Nazism and their approaches to narrating the resistance. Wickert, a scholar of German women’s resistance, stresses the need to consider the anti-Nazi movements in terms of gender when she comments that despite the efforts to ‘finally tak[e] into account the social context of people who were opponents of the National Socialist regime or who were seen as such [. . .] the influence of gender on attitudes and actions continues to remain at the periphery of consideration’.17 The purpose of this study is not to establish a separate category for women’s resistance, one set apart from men’s. Rather, it is necessary to consider the anti-Nazism of women as well as that of men, for these movements in their own way replicated the gender system of peacetime. One of the main concerns of this study is the forms of women’s resistance; therefore, I analyse the ways in which gender standards, as filtered through women’s roles and functions, the settings of their everyday lives, and their connections to other people, influenced the paths women would take to resistance. This literature mirrors the norms that prescribed a traditional identity for women and sheds light on how women perceived themselves in relation to resistance and how, accordingly, they made choices about illegal work. These 15

Gerda Zorn and Gertrud Meyer, Frauen gegen Hitler (Women against Hitler) (Frankfurt am Main: RöderbergVerlag, 1974); Hanna Elling, Frauen im deutschen Widerstand (Women in the German resistance) (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1979); Gerda Szepansky, Frauen leisten Widerstand 1933-1945 (Women carry out resistance, 1933-1945) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983); Tim Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975); Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, Jungfrauen, Mütter und ein Führer: Frauen im Faschismus (Virgins, mothers and a führer: women under fascism), trans. by Eva Moldenhauer (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1976). 16 Celia Bertin, Femmes sous l’Occupation (Women under the occupation) (Paris: Stock, 1993); Christl Wickert, Frauen gegen die Diktatur—Widerstand und Verfolgung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Women against the dictatorship—resistance and persecution in National Socialist Germany) (Berlin: Hentrich, 1995). See also these historical studies of French women’s resistance: Margaret L. Rossiter, Women in the Resistance (New York: Praeger, 1986); Weitz, Sisters; and Paula Schwartz, ‘Partisanes and Gender Politics in Vichy France’, French Historical Studies, 16 (1989), 126-51, as well as this collection of essays about German women’s resistance: Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch (Mother cross and labour book), ed. by Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981). See Hervé, pp.95-97, 109-11. 17 Wickert, ‘Women’, p.101. Hervé expresses much the same viewpoint about gender roles and the relations between women and men in both the French and the German movements (p.12).

13

texts also make more visible how men viewed women’s participation in these movements. Women’s resistance narratives illustrate with a surprising consistency various forms of antiNazi activity that were integrated with the daily routine and that could not be disentangled from the personal concerns, feelings, and relationships intrinsic to private life. I also consider how these narratives illuminate the female condition in wartime, that is, how they display a tension within the woman resister as she attempts to balance a conventional femininity with the empowering effect of resistance and its demands for ‘masculine’ qualities. Such internal conflict is not merely a fictive construct. The issue was genuine for women who lived through the war, and it emerges in the short stories and novels as well as the diaries and memoirs discussed here. Historical research in fact validates the sort of inner disparities evidenced by the women resisters in this literature. The German sociologist Annemarie Tröger, writing about German women’s memories of the bombings, and the American Fishman, investigating the problems faced by wives of French prisoners of war, both draw the same conclusion: women did what was necessary to survive and meet the demands of their situation, acting in ‘unfeminine’ ways, if necessary. Yet in relating their stories, women follow the outlines of what is socially acceptable, and thus the recognizable models of femininity remain plainly evident. According to Tröger, when German women narrate their memories of bombing attacks, they stress that they summoned their strength and resolve to cope under horrible circumstances. These same women speak simultaneously about their weaknesses and tendencies to revert to childlike behaviours under stress, perhaps as a way of framing their narratives within social prescriptions about what it means to be feminine.18 Fishman has likewise found that the wives of French prisoners of war sought to accommodate unfamiliar roles and behaviours within a conventional understanding of what a woman should be: The increased independence these women gained from taking on new responsibilities ran counter to their own acceptance of a traditional family structure and resulted in an uncomfortable ambiguity which emerges in their writings about themselves and their new roles. They describe themselves contradictorily both as weak and emotional and as strengthened by this experience, as needing their husbands but gaining new, so-called masculine qualities. (p.143).

The literary texts that are the centrepiece of the present volume reflect a complex reality for many women who on the one hand had been socialized to be passive, weak, subordinate to men, and nurturing of family and other relationships, but who on the other hand had to demonstrate strength, fearlessness, and assertiveness as resisters. Another focal point of this critical study is the social environment in which these authors lived and wrote as women in a male-dominated literary world. Gender norms that influenced the writers’ own lives can be linked to the choices they made in constructing their female resistance figures. I also examine the various narrative approaches and strategies the authors employ to present the female resister in socially acceptable terms, however much her illegal activity may set her apart from the conventional image of the gentle, submissive, and emotional woman. Finally, I investigate the ways in which the writers use language and literary techniques to recast the terms of resistance in ways that challenge the standard rhetoric with its familiar connotations of heroism and guns and bullets. For one, they assert the importance of the home and human connections as stabilizing forces in a chaotic, often threatening environment. The immediacy of many of these texts forces open conventional notions of resistance to plunge the reader directly into the maelstrom of emo18

14

Annemarie Tröger, ‘German Women’s Memories of World War II’, in Behind the Lines (see Higonnet and others, above), pp.285-99 (p.293).

tions and conflicts that constituted the personal and moral landscape of a resister’s inner world. Here the darker elements behind the glowing resistance legend are revealed: the pain and sorrow and fear, the overwhelming uncertainty, the shame, the lack of heroism. Women’s truth is centred in a more realistic, if less glamorous, perspective of underground movements that have been long romanticized and portrayed in black and white terms that would admit no ambiguity. Women’s literature of the resistance cannot be separated from the political-historical context in which women opposed Nazism and in which the authors wrote; therefore, this subject lends itself to an interdisciplinary approach that draws from the fields of women’s history and feminist literary criticism. Literature and history are both subject to interpretation. The process of constructing past events is an incoherent one, as illustrated in the fiction of E.L. Doctorow, for one, whose novels consistently blur the boundaries between history and fiction as he manipulates historical materials. Doctorow observes that, ‘history shares with fiction a mode of mediating the world for the purpose of introducing meaning, and it is the cultural authority from which they both derive that illuminates those facts so that they can be perceived. Facts are the images of history, just as images are the data of fiction’.19 The aim of this study is to discover what the literature suggests about the history and what the history says about the literature. My approach, then, is similar to that which the literary critic Jane Marcus advocates in her essay ‘The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War, and Madness—Is There a Feminist Fetishism?’, in which she contends that rather than one discipline supporting the other, ‘history and literature deserve equal narrative force in a cultural text.’20 A comparative perspective underscores the extensive power of gender to define both the common course of German and French women’s resistance and the shared ways in which women authors would write about their subject. (Due to the relatively small number of literary works about women’s resistance, it is not possible to match similar German and French texts for comparison in every chapter; however, a basic comparative framework underlies the study and links the texts as a whole.) Historians widely acknowledge that the European resistance movements were so varied and diverse that they do not readily invite comparison. National differences admittedly left a mark on the identities of the anti-Nazi movements in Germany and France, as will be discussed in chapters 2 and 3. Although there was much to separate women along national lines, and these distinctions might at first glance seem to preclude the possibility of finding common points in their resistance, there was, in truth, more that united them. German and French women shared a great deal of common ground in terms of the social pressures that demanded a traditional femininity, the impact that war and dictatorship made on their lives, and the ways in which they responded as resisters. Women in both countries had inherited the full weight of Western patriarchal tradition. In the early twentieth century, females found their way barred to full participation in political, economic, and some areas of social life. German and French women also encountered similar treatment at the hands of the Nazi and Vichy regimes, both of which implemented a barrage of propaganda, economic and social measures, and legislation intended to reinforce the boundaries between males and females. The lives of women in the two countries ran parallel in other ways as the hardships 19 20

E.L. Doctorow, ‘False Documents’, American Review, 26 (1977), 215-32 (p.229). Jane Marcus, ‘The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War, and Madness—Is There a Feminist Fetishism?’, in The New Historicism, ed. by H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp.132-51 (p.134).

15

of war bore down on them in the form of bombing raids, blackouts, and ration and fuel shortages. Women faced additional problems, such as holding down jobs to make ends meet, acting as the heads of households, and finding rudimentary supplies of food and necessities to sustain their families. The war exacted a toll as well in the emotional suffering women experienced when husbands, sons, and brothers were killed or imprisoned. What is more, there were many commonalities in women’s motivations to resist and in the forms of their illegal activity as they found their way into the anti-Nazi movements in Germany and France. This examination of women’s resistance literature finds that while the social flux generated by the war and the unorthodox activities of the resistance movements may appear to have called traditional social mores into question, accepted notions about appropriate functions and behaviours for males and females remained in place. To be sure, resisters in both countries were forced to bend customary moral and ethical standards, sometimes lying, stealing, or killing to accomplish their aims for the greater good. These were movements that, as Weitz asserts in discussing the French resistance, broke radically with convention by overcoming class distinctions to unite various social groups and by upsetting the usual moral standards.21 The current study assumes, however, that while the war may have altered women’s material circumstances by drawing them into the military, the resistance, manufacturing jobs, and new responsibilities at home, women actually achieved little in terms of gaining more equal stature because their political, economic, and social status remained subordinated to men’s.22 By the same token, female resisters did expand their horizons as they tried on new identities, assumed unfamiliar roles and responsibilities, travelled to cities they had never visited before, met new people, and tested themselves in unusual situations (Weitz, Sisters, pp.291-93). Yet they did not break free of traditional definitions of womanhood. Many of the changes in women’s lives were relatively fleeting and lasted only for the duration of the war. One might expect the authors of this resistance literature to exercise a discerning eye as observers of the cultural landscape, to force a re-examination of social prescriptions through their portrayals of the female opponent of Nazism. Yet in the final analysis, how critical of gender could these writers actually be? Margaret R. Higonnet and others assert that while women authors lack the direct battlefield experience that would legitimate them as narrators of war, they are nevertheless willing to relate their opinions about the unequal relations between men and women during wartime because the authors themselves witnessed this first-hand.23 An investigation of women’s literature of the resistance, however, turns up only a muted criticism of the cultural norms that defined female and male roles. Surely the authors brought their own conventional attitudes to their writing about the resistance; they could hardly have been immune to prevailing social expectations. Most of 21

Margaret Collins Weitz, Introduction, Outwitting the Gestapo (see Aubrac, above), pp.vii-xxii (p.xvii). Historians have taken note of the power of the resistance to unite diverse individuals, particularly in France. See John F. Sweets, The Politics of Resistance in France, 1940-1944 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976), p.13; Edith Thomas, Le Témoin compromis (The compromised witness) (Paris: Hamy, 1995), p.120; and Hervé, p.122. In Germany, there had historically been a split between the middle class and the working classes, and as a result less unity existed within the German resistance. 22 See Joan W. Scott, ‘Rewriting History’, in Behind the Lines (see Higonnet and others, above), pp.19-30 (pp.23-25). 23 Margaret R. Higonnet and others, Introduction, Behind the Lines (see Higonnet and others, above), pp.1-17 (p.15).

16

these women came from prosperous middle-class or upper-middle-class families in which bourgeois values of proper conduct and materialism prevailed. Very much a product of their conservative social class and its values, these were traditional women, not feminists, although a few of them, most notably Beauvoir, would later come to support the cause of feminism in the late 1960s. Several women were mothers who were raising their children during the period 1933-1945. While some of the women personally faced the challenge of combining family and career, even those who did not lived and worked within the fine mesh of social and cultural mores that identified woman with motherhood and domesticity. In other respects, the lives of these writers bore little resemblance to that of the average female. A number of them received university degrees, still a relatively rare phenomenon for women in the early twentieth century and in itself indicative of their privileged status. These women’s intellectual and cultural opportunities, freedom to travel and to pursue careers (many supported themselves as writers), and associations with male colleagues permitted them to test the limits of social standards. Many of the authors demonstrated an independent spirit that led them in unconventional directions as artists, as intellectuals, as political activists. They were fortunate enough to embark on literary careers, sometimes with the support and encouragement of well-established male mentors or companions. Most of them came of age during the political and intellectual tumult of the interwar years, and thus a number of them, notably Thomas, Duras, Triolet, Malraux, and Seghers, became politically active and embraced Communism to varying degrees. Involvement in the resistance became another way in which some of these women defied convention. Duras, Malraux, Thomas, Triolet, and Andreas-Friedrich all participated extensively in the anti-Nazi underground in their respective countries. Others, specifically Keun and Seghers, went into exile, while Langgässer and Beauvoir chose not to take any action (though for quite different reasons). Despite some obvious differences in religion (Malraux, Triolet, Seghers, and Langgässer were Jewish), politics, and commitment to the resistance, these writers portray the identity of the woman resister in strikingly similar ways in their resistance narratives. Ironically, their own personal autonomy does not translate into a similar independence in their female resistance figures. An obvious cultural rationale for why this literature conforms so closely to gender prescriptions may well be that consideration of their readership influenced the authors’ choices in depicting women’s anti-Nazi work. For all of the risks the female resisters take, the authors never permit them to push too far beyond the boundaries of a socially prescribed identity. Radically transforming the feminine role would have alienated readers. It is unlikely that in wartime the public would have accepted females as figures of heroic action who wielded political authority and pulled the trigger in a battle against the enemy. Analysing French men’s and women’s resistance memoirs, Dominique Veillon, historian at the Institut de l’Histoire du Temps Présent, lends credence to the idea that women writing about the resistance worked within a given set of assumptions about proper behaviour and appropriate spheres of activity for women and men. Citing a passage in the memoir of Lucie Aubrac, one of the rare female leaders in the French resistance, in which Aubrac describes her careful preparations, including choosing a particular dress, for a meeting with the famed resistance chief Jean Moulin, Veillon points out that it would be difficult to imagine a male resister revealing to the reader that he had fretted over the colour of his tie.24 By the same 24

Dominique Veillon, ‘Résister au féminin’, Pénelope, 12 (1985), 87-92 (p.91).

17

token, the public’s acceptance of taboos associated with women and violence would have made it equally difficult for readers to come to terms with the image of a female wielding a gun or leading a terrorist raid. Such mental pictures would run counter to the customary ideal of the gentle, nurturing woman. As much as these writers in their own lives might have challenged expectations of what a woman should be, they nevertheless would have been isolated within what was still largely a man’s literary world. These authors no doubt strived for professional validation from their male colleagues. Thus, their resistance narratives do not overturn customary understandings of what it meant to be a woman. A resister’s activism might lead to broader experience; however, her new role does not in and of itself result in a new understanding of who she is. Women authors did not move to overturn social convention in their writing, even when the opportunity to redraw markedly the feminine identity so obviously presented itself in the subject matter of the resistance.

18

Chapter One A Resistance Discourse Fashioned from War’s Chaos

La Résistance a prouvé que les femmes étaient aussi audacieuses que les hommes, et les hommes aussi intuitifs que les femmes.1 [Germaine Tillion]

Females have historically been denied a literal as well as a figurative presence on the battlefield. Social and cultural prohibitions have not only banned them from combat and many military-related activities, but the weight of such messages has silenced them, too, as narrators of war and resistance. The virtual absence of women authors from the canon of war literature attests to the extent to which they have gone unrecognized as commentators on war. An examination of the ways in which gender expectations have influenced public perceptions of women as resisters and as narrators of the resistance will render more visible what has until now been neglected in official, male-centred resistance commentaries. So strong have been the social and cultural sanctions against women’s involvement in combat that any efforts by women to challenge the restrictions denying them fighting roles have generally met with vigorous opposition.2 In her book Women and War, the political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain examines the ways in which the myths of war have functioned to define women as non-combatants and men as warriors in the public consciousness. Traditional attitudes and prejudice blocked the way of females who would enter the field of battle. Historian and feminist theorist Sheila Rowbotham considers some of the historical antecedents of females’ exclusion from soldiering during episodes of political turmoil and revolution in her Women, Resistance and Revolution, and she suggests that the proscription against women taking up arms constitutes a way to preserve the gender status quo, leaving women subordinate to men. French women who played a part in the French Revolution or the 1871 Commune uprising usually did so in ways that did not test customary womanly roles. Attacking food shops and marching in the streets to protest high bread prices did not threaten but rather became a logical extension of the feminine identity. This issue struck at the heart of women’s situation, as wives and mothers who were trying to feed their families.3 During the seventy-two-day events of the Paris Commune, women’s duties as providers of food or as ambulance attendants or nurses likewise fit neatly into the accepted roles of nurturing and tending to others. Yet when women took their participation as revolutionaries a step further and sought to demonstrate their patriotism in the same way as their male 1 2 3

(The resistance proved that women were as courageous as men and men as intuitive as women) (Francos, p.459). Antonia Fraser brings out the exceptional status of the female combatant in her book Warrior Queens (New York: Knopf, 1989). Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p.212; Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution (London: Lane, 1972), pp.104-05.

counterparts by forming armed battalions, they ran up against substantial opposition by men, as they had in 1792 when attempting to organize female units during the French Revolution.4 French women frequently complained that they were not used as they wanted to be. Even as ‘revolutionaries’, they remained confined to feminine roles such as preparing food and caring for the wounded.5 The dominant cultural norm held that women were to be daughters, mothers, and wives, while men were to be the revolutionaries whose heroism earned them honour and esteem in the public eye (Rowbotham, pp.104-05). German women similarly found themselves confined to caregiving functions during Germany’s revolutionary turmoil of 1848. Even though the Frauenvereine (women’s organizations) shifted their orientation from traditional charity work for the poor to a more political identity, their main purpose remained to administer to those in need. In the context of the 1848 Revolution this meant organizing care for the men injured on the barricades.6 Restrictions against women and combat were relaxed over time in some countries, although hostility and disapproval of women’s involvement in military service lingered. Men, and most women as well, regarded war as a place for men only. Florence Hervé observes that in France combat was viewed as masculine and not as part of the feminine identity (p.38). In her article entitled ‘Women’s Military Services in First World War Britain’, Jenny Gould has demonstrated that during World War I, when British women sought to break out of auxiliary roles, including nursing, ambulance driving, and clerking, and to join the armed forces, they received discouragement all around.7 By World War Two, the Soviet Union mobilized women for combat-related functions in the military, as did certain European resistance movements (for example, France and Yugoslavia). Females nevertheless still met with antagonism if they tried to circumvent the established mores that distanced them from actual fighting. The mandates against women in combat held for violent paramilitary work in the underground as well as on the battlefield. Weitz takes note of the entrenched prejudice in France against women being armed, in contrast to countries like Italy and Greece. ‘In every resistance group’, she remarks, ‘women had to combat stereotypes of their presumed weaknesses and shortcomings’ (Sisters, p.147). Margaret L. Rossiter, whose Women in the Resistance details French women’s participation in General Charles de Gaulle’s London-based Forces Françaises Libres (Free French Forces) and the British Special Operations Executive, observes that women who served as chiefs or sub-chiefs of partisan groups were unusual. The hostile attitudes of men shut women out of combatant positions. Most women had no prior administrative experience, and they had to deal with men who were unsympathetic toward women taking roles as leaders and married women having professions or

4 5

6

7

20

Rowbotham, pp.104-05; Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries, trans. by James and Starr Atkinson (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966), pp.42-44. For a discussion of some of the negative attitudes toward women bearing arms in revolutionary France, see Maïte Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français (A history of French feminism), 2 vols (Paris: Des Femmes, 1977), II, 328-31. See ‘Dem Reich der Freiheit werb’ ich Burgerinnen’: Die Frauen-Zeitung von Louise Otto (‘I solicit citizens for the land of freedom’: the women's newspaper by Louise Otto), ed. by Ute Gerhard, Elisabeth HannoverDrück, and Romina Schmitter (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat Verlag, 1979). Jenny Gould, ‘Women’s Military Services in First World War Britain’, in Behind the Lines (see Higonnet and others, above), pp.114-25.

working outside the home (p.220). The gender bias of male leaders in some cases led to their simply denying women a place in sabotage or terrorist operations.8 Conventional wisdom has held that women’s lack of a direct presence on the field of battle precludes them from writing legitimately about war. Situated at the home front, women presumably could not write about combat in a realistic way; if they were not combatants, then neither were they the rightful narrators of war. One has only to note the relatively few women authors whose poems, short stories, or novels have been accepted into the canon of twentieth-century war literature in order to recognize the far-reaching effects of the social taboos against women and combat that extend even to the written word. The starting point for some of the analysis of war literature by women has been the assumption that women’s exclusion from the front lines shapes their telling of war. Both Elshtain and Higonnet and others have noted certain distinctions between women’s and men’s war literature, and they attribute these differences to the author’s location in relation to the actual fighting. As Higonnet and others remark, ‘since the definition of war poetry privileges actual battlefront experience, women who are barred from combat can only participate in this literary mode at second hand’ (Introduction, p.14). In Elshtain’s view, it is similarly a given that women’s absence from the trenches translates into an inability to write accurately about war: ‘Because women are exterior to war, men interior, men have long been the great warstory tellers, legitimated in that role because they have “been there” or because they have greater entrée into what it “must be like.”’9 The present investigation of women’s resistance narratives is based on another premise, one that asserts that women resisters experienced some of war’s cruellest aspects, and that women’s writings open up telling perspectives on war and the underground that have typically been omitted from accounts of the resistance as interpreted by men. The presumption that women are not credible narrators of war has extended to their commentary on the resistance. Their experiences in the French and German anti-Nazi movements were never taken up in official resistance discourses. The term ‘resistance’ has been used unabashedly to serve well-defined political purposes since the end of the Second World War. The legends of the underground disseminated publicly at war’s end were predicated on the idea of resistance as organized political violence, and were intended to legitimate the two fledgling states of the German Democratic Republic in the East and the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and to shore up support for de Gaulle and his supporters in France. These governments wove mythic elements around the most visible episodes of the clandestine movements, dramatizing the courageous actions of a few notable resisters as a way to strike patriotic chords and generate national unity among their citizens. The French and the East and West German leadership glorified elite groups of armed men fighting to save their country and attributed ideological motives to these heroes, whose military and paramilitary ventures were portrayed as clandestine and organized. The national pride suffusing these legends of the underground cemented the elements of resistance discourse and gave the people in these countries a rallying point as they looked back on 8

9

See Schwartz for an analysis of French women’s difficulties in making their way into combat roles in communist paramilitary groups (pp.143-45). See also Rossiter on the case of Jeanne Bohec, who was denied the opportunity by the Forces Françaises Libres to participate in sabotage missions (pp.177-78), and Weitz, Sisters, p.66, as well as Bohec’s memoir, La Plastiqueuse à la bicyclette (The bomb thrower on a bicycle) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1975). Elshtain, p.212. Emphasis in original.

21

events of the recent past. Postwar memory in France and the two Germanys nevertheless proved remarkably short-sighted when it came to toting up the contributions of resisters of various stripes. Ideology counted for more than individual actions in this instance; therefore, examples of opposition by groups on the political and social margins, including women, seldom made their way into official accounts of the resistance movements. Scholars of women’s history would agree that despite German and French women’s participation in many facets of resistance, evidence of their contributions faded rapidly into obscurity after World War II. How does one explain women’s retreat into silence? For one, women’s illegal duties and activities were frequently intermingled with domestic or other traditionally feminine functions and as such were not perceived as resistance either by the resisters themselves or, later, by formal channels. The necessary tasks of providing food and shelter for Jews and political refugees, or performing other behind-the-scenes work did not match the narrow concept of resistance as organized political violence. Moreover, such activities lacked the drama that surrounded sabotage and terrorism, and thus fell outside the mythical parameters that defined resistance in inspiring, warlike terms as a battle with enemy forces. The postwar governments in France and the two Germanys had set themselves the challenge of capturing the popular imagination. Recounting ‘mundane’ actions would not accomplish this. The nature of illegal activity itself was another factor that accounted for women’s invisibility. Many acts of resistance held out few possibilities for concrete analysis due to their necessarily clandestine character. In order to assure secrecy, resisters seldom knew the names or backgrounds of more than a handful of people in their circle, and no one kept written accounts of their actions due to the threat of reprisals. Successful resistance remained an anonymous act. Furthermore, much official documentation on underground operations simply vanished or was destroyed during the war. In the case of French women, even when records are available, the names of many women do not appear there because they often did not register or were not included on official membership lists (Rossiter, pp.122, 138). Finally, women’s own attitudes toward telling their stories have contributed to their lack of a presence in the recounting of the resistance. Unlike their male colleagues, observes Veillon, French women left few written traces of their illegal work (p.87). They frequently did not perceive their actions as opposition against the state or as conventionally heroic, and thus did not attempt to enter into the public discussion of resistance or seek official recognition of their contributions.10 Rossiter looks to social norms to explain the failure of French women to come forward: ‘Some were discouraged by the registration requirements [to apply for cards indicating their status as former resisters], but an equally important deterrent was that many had been taught modesty as a feminine virtue, and did not seek recognition and medals’ (p.222). Sensitive to society’s expectations of what a female should be, women appear to have written themselves out of the resistance as a way of acceding to the proscriptions against women and combat-related activity. Supplementing the historical record with a handful of notable heroines or peopling it with numerous women who were active at the grass-roots level has not necessarily led to a ‘truer’ picture of the resistance. Only by unravelling the intertwined issues of gender and war is it possible to recognize the extent to which the gender system carried over to these 10

22

See Margaret Collins Weitz, ‘As I Was Then: Women in the French Resistance’, Contemporary French Civilization, 10 (1986), 1-19 (p.2).

movements and thereby to understand the character of women’s resistance. Behind the glossy ideals of patriotism and equality and individual freedom to which the German and French resistance organizations laid claim in their rhetoric was something other than an egalitarian relationship between females and males. The idealistic and moral language that has cloaked official resistance discourses, as well as the drama and mystique surrounding these movements in the popular imagination have eclipsed the degree to which traditional patriarchal attitudes and gender roles influenced the division of responsibilities in resistance operations. A fundamental assumption behind many historical studies of these movements has been that since all resisters were united in the service of noble ideals, with everyone in effect contributing equally to a common and necessary cause, distinctions between female and male roles are immaterial. A sense that the anti-Nazi struggle was urgent, that every moment counted, has led those speaking and writing about the resistance, from former resisters to historians, to play down the marked differences between the activities of women and men. Historian Claudia Koonz expresses such a viewpoint when she says that, ‘emergency mandated that both women and men perform the traditional tasks to which they were accustomed.’11 It is commonly noted that resistance duties were not assigned according to gender but typically fell out that way, the reason being that in a critical situation there was little time to waste quibbling over who did what. Nor do former resisters tend to perceive obvious divisions between the sexes when recalling their own participation in these movements. Women activists describe a time that provided them with an increased freedom by presenting opportunities they had not had before, and they assert that these new experiences put them on more equal footing with men. As the French resister Madeleine Braun remarks: ‘Nous étions clandestines, donc libres comme l’air, et nous voulions rester libres’ (We were clandestine and therefore free as air, and we wanted to remain free) (UFF, p.33). Paula Schwartz, who has taken note of this tendency to view the resistance world as more ideal than it actually was in terms of offering women greater equality, comments that despite what the historical record might indicate, one-time resisters ‘deny any significant gender division of labor in their groups and claim to have been well received by their male colleagues’.12 Indeed, Aubrac, who co-founded the French movement Libération-Sud (Liberation South) and also worked for Groupes Francs (Irregular Groups), illustrates the lack of awareness of gender divisions that Schwartz describes above when she comments on the way in which underground duties were assigned: ‘Quand les mouvements de Résistance ont commencé à se structurer, les responsabilités étaient réparties sans qu’il y eût la moindre discrimination de sexe, mais selon ce qui paraissait la meilleure utilisation des compétences et des aptitudes’ (When the resistance movements began to become structured, the responsibilities were divided up without the least sexual discrimination; rather, they were distributed according to who could best use their skills and abilities) (UFF, p.20). Jacqueline Bernard, who worked on the journal Combat and other French resistance publications, echoes 11

Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p.338. See also Michael R.D. Foot, Resistance: European Resistance to Nazism, 1940-1945 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), p.13; Weitz, Introduction, p.xx; and Renate Wiggershaus, Frauen unterm Nationalsozialismus (Women under National Socialism) (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1984), p.115. 12 Schwartz, p.129. Hervé makes similar observations about both French and German women’s sense of equality in the two movements (pp.45, 79).

23

the idea that this was an idyllic period of gender equity when she claims in an interview that she ‘battue comme un homme, et même comme beaucoup d’hommes ne l’ont pas fait. Et les hommes me respectaient’ (fought like a man and even fought harder than many, and that the men respected me). But the conclusion that Bernard goes on to draw, that, ‘c’est la contraception, non la Résistance qui a changé la condition des femmes’ (it was contraception and not the resistance that altered the female condition), suggests just how transient and slight the shift in male-female relations actually was in these movements.13 The division of responsibilities within organized resistance networks and less formal circles articulated long-held patriarchal attitudes about appropriate behaviours for women and men. Women did not necessarily find widespread opportunities to act in resistance capacities (as leaders of paramilitary groups, for example) that would allow them to break out of the socially dictated feminine identity. Assumptions about who would take charge or do the most critical work in anti-Nazi circles were rooted in understandings of who owned power in such social institutions as marriage, for example, where men customarily held authority and economic control over the household. Among the middle classes in both France and Germany, conservative values of material security, privilege, and proper behaviour reinforced traditional family structures. The husband was revered as the head of the house, and his wife accepted her lesser status without question. Women had internalized conventional roles (Hervé, pp.47, 81-82). Within the French and German resistance movements, then, women had little cause to question their subordination to men or to challenge male power.14 In fact, married women in both countries frequently entered into illegal work through the earlier involvement of their husbands, and this, too, would have led women to regard their own participation as ‘secondary’ to men’s. A male resister might ask his wife to take over duties for him in his absence or perform tasks that would lend support for his own activities. Although much of the work women did was critical to the success of larger resistance operations, they have often described their contributions as supportive, as essentially paving the way for their husbands’ actions. The research of Carolsue Holland and G.R. Garett would support the conclusion that many women expected to play less prominent parts as resisters. The authors assert that German women, accustomed to seeing the husband’s role as that of ‘a provider and protector’ within a marriage, also regarded him as the active participant in the resistance.15 The content and language of printed resistance materials helped transmit and perpetuate traditional social mores within the anti-Nazi movements. These forms of written communication, often produced by women for other women, made no suggestion that resistance had the power to alter women’s customary roles. Such fliers and newspapers entreated women to engage in the struggle against Nazism, while at the same time reminding them of their domestic and maternal functions. French women’s clandestine newspapers and bulletins addressed women directly as housewives and mothers. The titles of some of these publications indicate this gender-specific appeal, without, it might be added, broaching the subject of resistance: Les Mères de France (Mothers of France), La Ménagère de Paris (The Paris housewife), La Ménagère de Bordeaux (The Bordeaux housewife), Le Carnet de la ména13

Francos, pp.458-59. See also Germaine Tillion, who echoes the same sentiments as Bernard (Francos, p.459). See Hervé, pp.42, 83, and Weitz, Sisters, pp.292-93. 15 Carolsue Holland and G.R. Garett, ‘The “Skirt” of Nessus: Women and the German Opposition to Hitler’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, 6 (1983), 363-81 (p.375). 14

24

gère (The housewife’s notebook). Alongside accounts of anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy incidents ran wartime recipes (for meals that could be prepared without milk or butter or meat) and household information.16 Exhortations to take further resistance action were cast in terms of familiar nurturing responsibilities as women were urged to demand increased bread, milk, and meat rations and clothing allotments to save the children from hunger and poverty. They were told to request more coal not only for the children but also the sick and the aged, and encouraged to try to prevent husbands, sons, and brothers from going to Germany as forced labourers. The papers even exploited ‘feminine’ vanity by prompting women to demand starch for their headdresses (UFF, n.pg.). There is evidence as well that calls for German women to oppose the Nazi regime were similarly based on assumptions about the proper place for females. Historians have turned up written appeals to women in their roles as wives and mothers that encouraged them to oppose Nazism in order to save their husbands and sons from being sent off to war, for example. Karl Schabrod’s Widerstand gegen Flick und Florian, a compilation of resistance materials, contains a facsimile of a handwritten note that reads: ‘Deutsche Mutter gib Deinen Ernährer und Deinen Sohn nicht her für imperialistischen Raubzüge’ (German mother, don’t give up your provider and your son for imperialistic raids). Margot Pikarski and Günter Uebel present a copy of a flier, written by hand, warning German mothers that Adolf Hitler wanted soldiers for cannon fodder in Spain. Hervé cites a typed anti-war leaflet, signed ‘Women and girls of the Rhine area’ and dated 20 April 1939, that calls for resistance and asks women to recall how many of their sons died in the Spanish Civil War and how much women suffered during the First World War. An appeal (dated September 1936) written by female political prisoners and addressed to ‘Frauen und Mütter in der Welt!’ (wives and mothers in the world) enumerates the tortures, describes the suffering of women in prison, and calls for solidarity among women in the cause of peace, freedom, and the liberation of political prisoners.17 Such examples suggest parallels between the experiences of French and German women and the ways in which they were addressed—as potential resisters—in terms of specifically feminine roles.18 The social roles and functions of peacetime were overlaid on the day-to-day operations of the resistance, thereby ensuring that the particular parts men and women played as opponents of Nazism would more or less coincide with the usual norms. Fishman concurs, stating, ‘although these social norms [and cultural assumptions about women and men and their respective natures and roles] predated the war, Vichy propaganda and the official press promoted and reinforced them throughout the period. Social norms also survived intact the upheavals of war, occupation, and liberation in France’ (p.125). Men generally acted as organizers and strategists, while women performed clerical duties or other tasks that were 16

Helmut Kopetzky, Die andere Front: Europäische Frauen in Krieg und Widerstand, 1939-1945 (The other front: European women in war and resistance, 1939-1945) (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1983), p.35. 17 Widerstand gegen Flick und Florian: Düsseldorfer Antifaschisten über ihren Widerstand, 1933-1945 (Resistance against Flick and Florian: Düsseldorf antifascists on their resistance, 1933-1945), ed. by Karl Schabrod (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1978), p.92; Margot Pikarski and Günter Übel, Die KPD lebt! Flugblätter aus dem antifaschistischen Widerstandskampf der KPD, 1933-1945 (The KPD lives! fliers from the antifascist resistance struggle of the KPD, 1933-1945) (Berlin: Dietz, 1980), p.160; Herve, p.115; Deutsche Frauenschicksale (Life stories of German women), ed. by Union für Recht und Freiheit (Prague and London: Malik, 1937), pp.189-92. 18 For another perspective, see Koonz, who maintains that, ‘few people thought of women as a special category at all’ (p.339).

25

considered ‘feminine’. When, in his memoir, The Night Will End, Henri Frenay recalls his and Berty Albrecht’s early efforts to lay the groundwork for the French resistance network Combat, it is he who selects and classifies intelligence for the first information bulletin and she who types. A similar breakdown of responsibilities by gender is evident within the Berlin circle Onkel Emil (Uncle Emil) (whose activities Andreas-Friedrich relates in Der Schattenmann). The men typically divide up the necessary tasks for the various members.19 When one of the men asks who will type the leaflets of the recently crushed Munich student resistance group the Weiße Rose (White Rose), having concluded they should be duplicated and further circulated, Andreas-Friedrich’s teenage daughter, Karin, begins typing, while the man dictates to her (Schattenmann, p.108; 10 March 1943). Gender standards, not chance circumstances, silently determined who did what in the underground. Traditional roles for women and men held true in other ways within the resistance inasmuch as the private realm of home, family, and personal relationships remained the province of females, even as they ventured into anti-Nazi activity. Although many men who belonged to these movements were husbands and fathers, responsibilities for children and other family members largely fell to women. Such commitments invariably determined the nature of some women’s subversive work, for household and family obligations usually limited the extent to which they could participate in organized groups and networks. In contrast to women with families, young, single women had fewer obligations and were therefore freer to take part in the more dangerous operations. Their illegal activity assumed a more public face as they moved beyond the confines of the household, travelling long distances on missions, acting as liaison agents, or guiding persons to freedom across the border. Yet despite their increased autonomy, these women, too, often remained in the shadow of customary roles, obligated to take responsibility for looking after family members while at the same time working for the resistance. If private-personal spaces defined resistance for many women, then public-political spaces provided the outlines for men’s activism. The social authority and power men cultivated through their professional and political associations were determining factors in the parts they would play as resisters. Men took charge of planning, organizing, and defining goals and strategy in the anti-Nazi organizations. Political connections, access to military information, and the ability to exploit important contacts lent stature to men working for the French and German resistance. In characterizing the development of the French movements, Sweets identifies primarily male-dominated fields from which the networks drew to build their ranks. The talents of writers, journalists, editors, and publishers were tapped early on so that various illegal groups could put together their clandestine newspapers, and public school teachers and instructors at lycées and universities were also recruited. As these circles grew, organizers usually held administrative jobs in the fields of banking, finance, public health, or education, because such occupations permitted them to move without suspicion from one area of the country to another (Politics, p.14). Frenay’s account of the origins of the organization Combat illustrates the ways in which power and authority in the underground were defined by pre-existing social roles. As a young career officer in the French army, Frenay began his initial organizational efforts for his network by quietly broaching the subject of resistance to select friends soon after the 19

26

Henri Frenay, The Night Will End, trans. by Dan Hofstadter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), p.32; Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Der Schattenmann: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1938-1945 (The shadowman: diaries, 19381945) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp.205, 231.

defeat of France. A fellow officer put Frenay in touch with a sympathetic general, a ‘onetime delegate-general of the Paris government’, whose high standing and professional ties enabled him to channel funds and other aid to Frenay (p.36). Although Frenay would eventually resign his military post, his connections as a former officer continued to stand him in good stead and put him in a position to establish a flow of money and intelligence to the nascent Combat and develop further contacts. Given the deep-seated patriarchal attitudes in French and German society, few women had made their way into politics or prominent occupations, and thus they were unprepared to draw on such resources in a similar way.20 A closer look at the interconnections between gender and resistance begins the process of undoing some of the assumptions about femaleness and maleness and war that have long dominated many people’s perceptions about the resistance. One has essentially been permitted to see only what one expected to see: male heroes waging violence in the name of a political cause. As much as the anti-Nazi opposition of men and women was determined by prevailing social norms, the gender markers applied to resisters’ tasks, both during the war and later in official interpretations of the resistance, tended to enunciate the supposed distinctions between men’s and women’s resistance, rather than indicate who actually did what. Responsibilities such as providing hiding places for Jews and political refugees, gathering food and basic necessities for these people, and collecting money and supplies for families of prisoners of war came to be designated as feminine because they evoked images of caretaking, while sabotage or political networking were labelled masculine, as these functions related to men’s public-political and military roles. In her article ‘The Liberation and New Rights for French Women’, Jane Jenson comments that, ‘these symbolic ideas of difference’ have diminished the significance of women’s actions by aligning their acts with traditional feminine functions such as nurturing or giving support. As Jenson asserts: While the Resistance may have allowed women to show themselves as capable as men in wartime, reference to their activity also contained notions of specificity. The heroic exploits recited were often actions of women in support of their male compagnes or against the occupier who had diverted to his own use bread that was 21 rightfully due to French children.

Her words serve to highlight one of the ways in which resistance language would devalue and hide the experience of females, that is, by accentuating the difference between women’s actions and what would come to be designated officially as resistance. The rhetoric of resistance has also obscured some aspects of men’s participation, such as their acts of care for those in need. Andreas-Friedrich relates that several men in her circle helped collect the leftover points on clothing cards from friends of group members so that Onkel Emil could secure clothing for fourteen Jewish men and twenty-two women whom the group was sheltering underground (Schattenmann, p.77). Men played similar parts as resisters in France. Sweets reports that men as well as women provided food, housing, and work for the maquis (French partisan units) and others who had to go into hiding.22 Rossiter cites an example of role-reversal when she describes the work of Flore Marie Spiquel, who ran an extensive escape line for allied soldiers in the north of France under the 20

See Hervé, who substantiates the view that women resisters faced more obstacles than men due to women’s subordinate social and political status, their relative lack of education and fewer professional contacts, the prevailing image of the traditional woman, and traditional values (p.38). 21 Jane Jenson, ‘The Liberation and New Rights for French Women’, in Behind the Lines (see Higonnet and others, above), pp.272-84 (p.279). 22 John F. Sweets, ‘Hold That Pendulum! Redefining Fascism, Collaborationism and Resistance in France’, French Historical Studies, 15 (1988), 731-58 (p.754).

27

sponsorship of the London-based Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (Central Bureau of Intelligence and Action). While Flore Marie was the primary organizer, her husband assumed the support tasks customarily assigned to women. He gave orders to the resisters who guided individuals to safety, and distributed food supplies to the allied soldiers who had escaped from German prisoner-of-war camps (p.47). In men’s and women’s narratives as well as official accounts of the resistance, men are largely identified with political strategy, organization, and doing battle. Their caretaking actions are overshadowed by the dominant images of what a man should be: a warrior, not a caregiver. Such labels have clearly been put in service of upholding myths about who fights and who cares for others in time of war, but they actually tell little about who in fact accomplished what. In actuality, women and men shared the terror of the war and resistance. The Second World War drove home the unsettling realization that no one, not even women and children, escapes war’s horrific power. The phenomenon of total war, or the unleashing of destruction on a massive scale through advanced military technology, changed the face of armed conflict, thereby altering forever the world’s perceptions of who is directly involved in war. The once well-defined boundaries between battlefield and home front were instantaneously blurred under the impact of superior weaponry. Hitler’s waging of war was total not only in the extraordinary combination of weapons and soldiering, but also in the brutal impact on the civilians enveloped in its destructiveness. The effects of the war reverberated among the populations at large, engaging every individual regardless of her or his proximity to the fighting. Women and children, while not on the front lines, nevertheless experienced air raids, blackouts, bombings, rationing, and other hardships. Moreover, through technology some of the terrors of combat were visited directly on private citizens who, say, during the First World War would likely have remained more sheltered from such brutality. Tröger makes a useful and critical distinction between the two world wars when she points out that while civilian peoples did suffer in earlier conflicts, the First World War included, during the Second World War civilian populations were deliberately targeted, as evidenced in the bombings of major European cities and Hiroshima (p.285). No longer is war exclusively a means of settling political conflict that men act out on the field of battle; nor is the home front a secure place where women can remain for their protection while they preserve a haven to which their men can return. Instead, within an expanded arena of war, one that encompasses the battlefield and the home, everyone becomes a participant. The suffering and the nightmarish quality of the front lines might have strained the fighting man’s imagination, possibly to the point of madness, but one of the hallmarks of the Second World War is that its horror seeped into the lives of civilians, too. The public was obviously not subject to the same degree of cumulative physical and psychological pressures as the combat soldier. What finally distinguishes the combatant’s experience from that of the civilian is the paramount concern for one’s own survival and the revulsion toward killing others. The terror and the constant tension of combat leave the man in battle with an overwhelming sense of helplessness. Fatigue, filth, and disease take a physical toll on the body and compound the psychic stresses on the soldier. As the literary critic Paul Fussell, who himself fought in Europe as a young Second Lieutenant, comments in Wartime, ‘in the face of such horror, the distinction between friend and enemy vanishes, and the

28

violent dismemberment of any human being becomes equally traumatic.’23 Faced with the gruesome destruction of human bodies in battle, the soldier’s world transforms into a macabre setting of grotesque sights and sounds and stomach-turning odours. Though physically removed from the scene of battle, many civilians did experience an intensity of fear that they would under practically no circumstances have faced in peaceful times, and they were forced to confront situations and view scenes so terrible or so inconceivable that the human mind struggled to make sense of what it was witnessing. Once the insanity and the brutality of this war overtook the home front, women found themselves drawn inexorably into the vortex of war, not as combatants but not merely as passive bystanders, either. Women could not remain secluded from war’s cruelty when on a daily basis they attempted to preserve a modicum of normalcy in the grim face of mass destruction, or worked diligently as resisters in situations so terrifying or bizarre that they defied rational understanding, or, like the soldier in battle, simply tried to cope psychologically with a reality so painful that it bore scant resemblance to their former peacetime world.24 Fussell’s Wartime, a cultural critique of World War II that investigates the emotional and psychological repercussions of the war in Britain and the United States, lends credence to the view that civilians no longer existed in safety away from the conflict. The author cites the heavy pounding of bombs on cities like London and Berlin, noting the ugly reality created by this violence. People’s senses were literally assaulted by the disturbing sights and smells of mutilated bodies and burned flesh; normal ways of life were entirely upended. In bombed-out London, corpse robbers raided the bodies of those killed in the attacks, while in Berlin, the lengthy assault by bombs and Soviet troops led to some fifty thousand orphans ‘living in holes like animals’ by war’s end.25 Women’s resistance narratives illustrate with even more immediacy than Fussell’s remarks how little protection and safety the home front now actually offered. Theirs is not the fear and the helplessness of the combat soldier, yet the emotion these women describe had the power to alter their perceptions of their surrounding world. Some of the entries in Andreas-Friedrich’s diary evoke the ghastly sights and sounds and odours that lingered after bombing raids. She writes that during the bombing of Berlin (on 21 March 1945) a house has been razed, killing two young Jewish women, Eva Gerichter and Ursel Reuber, fellow anti-Nazis who lie buried beneath the rubble. The author at first presents her own whirling and confused thoughts before narrowing the focus to the grisly details of the bodies that have been recovered. She moves unflinchingly from her own shock and fear for her friends’ well-being, to an eerie picture of the collapsed structure where soldiers sift through chunks of stone looking for victims, to a brutal and vivid description of the women’s corpses once they are found several days later. Relying on little more than a factual rendering of what she saw, Andreas-Friedrich’s words overtake the reader’s senses. When she turns back the piece of corrugated cardboard covering this ‘armseliges Häuflein’ (miserable little heap) to identify the first body, she sees ‘ein Gewirr dun23

Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.271. 24 Poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz movingly describes the destabilizing effects of war on domestic and social life in his book The Captive Mind, trans. by Jane Zielonko (New York: Knopf, 1951, 1953; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.), pp.25-29. 25 Fussell, pp.290, 273. See also W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. by Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003).

29

kler Haare, zwei Hände wie im Schreck vor das Gesicht geschlagen. Das Gesicht selber— eine unkenntliche Masse von Blut, Staub, Dreck und Matsch’ (Schattenmann, p.213) (a tangle of dark hair, two hands over the face as if in fright. The face itself is an unrecognizable mass of blood, dust, silt, and mud).26 What remains of the second body, which Andreas-Friedrich identifies two days later, is nothing more than ‘fünf Klumpen verkohltes Fleisch, fünf Klumpen von irgend etwas. Sonst nichts. Im ganzen Raum verbreitet sich ein unerträglicher Geruch’ (Schattenmann, pp.216-17) (five lumps of charred flesh, five nondescript masses. Nothing more. An intolerable odor spreads all through the room) (Berlin, p.222). In the honest, unembellished rendering of these scenes, it is possible to see again how closely the awfulness of certain moments in civilian life could mimic the dehumanizing experience of combat, in the sickening sights and smells and the gruesome dismemberment of the human body. Wartime conditions could radically alter the rhythm and pace of ordinary life in such a way that certain experiences that would be considered virtually incomprehensible in normal times came to be accepted as a matter of course by the soldier or the resister. Indeed, one had to find a way to comprehend such frightening moments at the risk of going mad. For front-line troops, the grotesque might be an everyday reality. In his war diary, Will We See Tomorrow?, Max Kuhnert, a German cavalryman who fought in the campaign against Russia, recorded the daily sights and sounds as his unit marched toward Kiev: We saw so many corpses lying there at the roadside. And pieces of bodies, some of them scorched or charred from the heat of guns or exploding shells. Pain, hunger and thirst took second place now, with the ice-cold breath of death brushing our cheeks and sending shivers down our spines. [. . .] The punching of bullets into 27 flesh, the screams, however short, of agony from man and beast. Truckfuls of young corpses.

The domestic scene offered its own brand of the macabre. Civilians could not escape the sight of mutilated dead bodies that were the result of bombing raids and other circumstances. In an interview with Jochen Köhler, Hanna Sohst, a one-time member of the German resistance, recounts her single-minded efforts to find false identification for the individuals she was hiding underground. One day after a bombing attack on Berlin, she began searching the bodies of the people lying dead in the street for their identification papers. While Sohst admits her reluctance to turn over the mangled bodies of people who had died in such a horrible way (she compares her actions to ‘corpse robbing’), she asserts that the need to help those who were still alive overcame her doubts. Even the rational concern that it would later be difficult to identify the bodies if they bore no personal papers was unimportant to her at the time, she claims, because she was so committed to saving other people from the Nazis.28 Ordinarily sensible concerns might suddenly have no relevance at a moment when literally stealing from a corpse might ultimately help spare another person’s life. Andreas-Friedrich similarly relates a situation so strange that it does not seem at all grounded in reality. She describes the efforts of some acquaintances to hide the body of a person they had been sheltering in their apartment. The man had died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and the couple feared what might happen to them if they did not report the death to the police. The pair, solid middle-class citizens for over forty years, resorted to 26

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground, 1938-1945, trans. by Barrows Mussey (New York: Holt, 1947), p.217. 27 Max Kuhnert, Will We See Tomorrow? A German Cavalryman at War, 1939-1942 (London: Cooper, 1993), p.97. 28 Jochen Köhler, Klettern in der Großstadt: Geschichten vom Überleben, 1933 bis 1945 (Climbing in the big city: stories of survival, 1933-1945) (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1981), pp.131-33.

30

loading the corpse into a clothes basket, covering it with linen sheets, and smuggling it out of the apartment between three and four o’clock in the morning. They removed the body from the basket and set it on a park bench in Berlin’s Tiergarten (Schattenmann, p.129; 4 February 1944). This incident, which in retrospect appears incongruous, was actually a part of everyday experience for those involved. The sight of mounting dead bodies was a terrifying and disturbing fact of life for a combat soldier, but such horror was something many civilians faced, too, and it had the power to restructure their customary way of viewing daily life. If women’s centrality to war and resistance is acknowledged, then it is possible to include them as active participants; they are no longer marginalized for lack of political knowledge or combat experience. Their contributions as opponents of Nazism thus acquire validity, and they are no longer relegated to bit parts that can only be acted out in the shadows of male warriors. Such a repositioning of women in relation to war and resistance likewise provides a much-needed framework for investigating the ways in which women have fashioned their spoken and written narratives about the anti-Nazi underground. Practicing political expediency, postwar France, the German Democratic Republic, and the Federal Republic of Germany fashioned the war’s meaning around state, not individual, issues. References to private life were assigned no particular significance, and in fact did not become part of government statements about the war and the resistance. The feminist historian Joan Scott points up just how sharply the private has been distinguished from the public in standard discourses when she contrasts the content of domestic, private history and official, national history: ‘Families as compared to the nation, mothers’ needs versus the needs of the state, individual death as opposed to national survival’ (p.28). Nor did personal elements find a place in state pronouncements about the resistance. The end result has been two very different discourses, the dominant version cast in terms of politics and war, guns, and bullets, and the hidden, less familiar version couched in emotion, aspects of private life, and personal connections. Men’s inflated and coolly detached rhetoric of war, politics, and patriotism appears to have little in common with women’s understated and apolitical allusions to victims of Nazism, everyday routines, and emotional tumult. That men have historically been assigned the roles of warriors and soldiers, and that women have been given the roles of keepers of the hearth only suggests in part the source of these distinctions in language. To put a finer point on this, men are permitted, if not expected, to learn about war and combat, as evidenced in boyhood games and the military style of certain youth organizations. Males have access to the language of war in a way that females do not; yet, ironically, many of the images and terms men employ in their resistance narratives essentially idealize war, bleaching it of the insanity, the dirt, the complexity of emotion that constitute actual combat.29 Forging their discussions of resistance out of such language, male authors have created cleanedup renditions of the underground. The underlying premise of many men’s narratives, that the resistance represented a vibrant moment in history, that it was a period pulsating with electric energy, fraternal bonding, and life-altering power—in other words, that it so obviously transcended the mundane realities of daily existence—represents what some men might have wished this experience to have been. These myths cannot hold up as realistic records of what the underground was 29

Men’s resistance narratives appear to have much in common with the rhetorical conventions of military history that John Keegan describes in his The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin, 1976).

31

actually like, however. The authors of these texts frequently rely on clichés, onedimensional characterizations, and the lure of emotionally charged words rather than honestly admit to the humdrum realities of the essential but ordinary tasks that had to be done, or offer up the possibly unsettling emotions that textured war and resistance. Although the majority of these accounts are framed in the language and concepts of war, they ultimately ring false because the male resistance figures and the rarefied atmosphere they inhabit appear so idealized and romanticized as to be unreal. Fussell emphasizes how difficult it is for novels to convey the realism of war honestly and convincingly. Neither the sickening and terrifying sights of combat nor the relentless boredom of a soldier’s life necessarily lends itself to sustaining a fictional story. At the same time, the writer must avoid the temptation to resort to triteness or trivializing as a way to shape such potentially overpowering material (pp.290-91). Nevertheless, the authors of what have come to be regarded as the classics of war literature, notably Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and Henri Barbusse, have found approaches to depicting the combat experience that convey a more genuine sense of what war is like: the fear and guilt, the irony of the soldier’s situation, the cynicism and disillusionment, an awareness of the grotesque. The typical resistance narrative has few (or none) of these characteristics. In their overly zealous promotion of unattainable values and ideals and heroism, their elevated moral tone, and their lack of ironic perspective, these texts are far removed from the best war literature. Moreover, these writings have even less in common with the filth and decay, the feelings of shame and disgust, the face-to-face confrontation with the macabre, and the resounding silence generally surrounding the whole notion of ‘heroism’ that is displayed in the finest examples of non-fiction writing on war, such as the personal memoir.30 The stuff of myth and legend found in men’s resistance literature: patriotism, playing at war, and a boyish spirit of comradeship, are not enough to bring the reader any closer to a genuine understanding of what it was like to belong to the anti-Nazi movements or what the resister experienced on a daily basis. The resistance narratives of women, in contrast, are not based upon a common vocabulary and understanding of what war is, although women’s texts share similar elements and themes with each other. The rhetoric of war, battle, politics, patriotism, and high-minded values did not speak to the situation of those who were left to preserve some shred of normal life while also finding ways to resist. This is, instead, the world of fifteen tarred wooden caskets that Andreas-Friedrich observes when she goes to the cemetery office to identify the bodies of her two friends. And from an emotional standpoint this is a world in which one comes abruptly to the realization that it does not matter whether fellow resisters locate a bombing victim’s purse (so that police will not find incriminating evidence), for that person has been verkohlte (Schattenmann, p.217) (charred to a cinder) (Berlin, p.222), as Andreas-Friedrich puts it. Women were willing to point out, with a kind of fierce honesty, the psychic and emotional and physical dislocation that war imposes on the individual. Lacking any stake in upholding the image of the resister as a fighter, women were free to impart to resistance shades of meaning that do not ordinarily appear in standard accounts, to suggest that behind the usual portrayals of courage, lofty ideals, and clear-cut choices of good and evil there existed paralysing fear, pain, shame, and grief; uncertainty about one’s 30

32

See Fussell, Wartime, on the war memoir.

role as a resister; sometimes horrifying scenarios; worry about the well-being of loved ones; and disturbing moral and ethical conflicts. Such ambiguities and horrors could not be neatly distilled into pat forms or a ready-made vocabulary and set of concepts. For women, the resistance, either as they directly experienced it or as they retold it, was not about playing at war or giving themselves over to a transforming moment of pitched excitement. It was, rather, about trying to survive a harsh existence that oftentimes made little sense. In these interpretations of resistance it quickly becomes apparent how war can utterly shatter the social order that women in their way try to maintain. Casting their eyes to the often disconcerting truth behind the ‘safe’ home front, women fashioned their narratives out of the tumult of war and resistance. As chroniclers of these movements, women have turned to the sources most familiar to them: not youthful games of war but rather their homes, their surroundings, and the family members and friends found there. There was more to resistance than ideological belief, the defence of cultural values and national honour, and the devising and carrying out of terrorist actions. Merging the features of both public and private resistance discourses would lead to a more nuanced and realistic account of the war and the resistance. A look behind the dominant public-political interpretations of resistance to the private-personal issues suggests that these movements consisted of a variety of tasks accomplished by a wide spectrum of individuals and groups. The everyday character of much illegal work also comes into sharper focus. But a single discourse that integrates both the public and private elements of resistance would do even more than simply acknowledge these forms of activity, which scholars have increasingly found a place for within the framework of resistance. Such a discourse would also open up other dimensions of the resister’s experience that have been noticeably absent from discussions of this period. The centrality of connections with other people, sometimes as a motivating force and other times as personal concern radiating out to the resister’s every action and thought, becomes apparent. Moreover, a striking tableau of emotions is revealed that is not otherwise evident in the standard rhetoric. Feelings of doubt, revulsion, shock, grief, pain, disappointment, and fear, as well as love and affection were intrinsic to the underground experience of women and men alike. Maintaining their centredness amid social upheaval, women were able to identify and bring to their writing and their testimony the cares, the emotions, and the details of the everyday reality that constituted resistance. The content of women’s resistance narratives is indicative of the concerns that were interwoven with their anti-Nazi activity. There were powerful forces that kept women grounded in the everyday, even as they joined the anti-Nazi movements. The tumultuous currents of social and political change fanning across Europe during the decades leading up to the Second World War did little to alter the dominant cultural messages that had long defined the functions and behaviours of females and males. Generally speaking, most women in Germany and France remained true to the conventional life choices of marriage and family, and, at least initially, they welcomed the overtures of the Nazi and Vichy regimes, both of which sought to win women’s loyalty by ostensibly honouring and glorifying traditional roles for women and men. Those women who resisted would perceive themselves and their subversive actions through the filters of dominant social norms. While the experiences of German and French women differed in terms of the resistance opportunities afforded them by the large, formal networks in their respective countries, women were in other ways joined in opposition, particularly in their motivations for resisting, in the types

33

of activities they considered suitable for themselves as females, and in the means by which they carried out their assignments.

34

Chapter Two Chipping Away at the State: German Women and Resistance

Angst habe ich dabei nicht gehabt, sondern nur das Gefühl: Schießen sie dich tot, stirbst du für eine gute Sache; schießen sie dich nicht tot, kannst du noch weiteren Menschen helfen.1 [Maria Countess von Maltzan, Schlage die Trommel und fürchte dich nicht]

Women in Germany of the 1920s displayed an increased freedom as they discovered bobbed hairstyles, wore shorter and looser clothing, and smoked cigarettes in public. Indeed, women did make some strides toward greater independence as they moved into the public arena, going out unchaperoned, working with men, and earning their own living; however, these would prove to be largely superficial changes. Despite outward appearances that suggested greater opportunities and equality for women, cultural and social expectations that women should fulfil roles as wives and mothers had not become more liberal. The fact that the Nazi regime went to such lengths to reinforce the traditional idea of womanhood and found so much popular support for its efforts indicates the extent to which the public consciousness in Germany was defined by centuries-old expectations of proper behaviour for females and males. While German women’s resistance would inevitably take its character from the broader movement as a whole, women’s activism would also remain very much subject to the customary notions of what a female should be. Resistance, particularly in Germany, did not necessarily present women with opportunities to break free of social norms, nor did most women, for their part, consider themselves as rebels against gender prescriptions. As the Nazi movement gathered force in the late 1920s and early ‘30s, Hitler exploited the prevailing currents of thought about the feminine identity that were already in circulation during the Weimar years.2 The democratic Weimar government had instituted reforms that favoured women, extending the vote to them in November 1918 and in its constitution calling for the same civil rights and obligations for females and males, for marriage based on equality between the sexes, and for the right of women to equal opportunity in public life and public service (Stephenson, pp.16-17). Traditional values were nevertheless still 1

2

(I wasn’t afraid in doing this but rather had only the feeling: If they shoot you dead, then you’ll die for a good cause; if they don’t shoot you dead, then you can still help additional people) Maria Gräfin von Maltzan, Schlage die Trommel und fürchte dich nicht: Erinnerungen (Beat the drum and be not afraid: memories) (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1986), p.165. See Stephenson, p.196. See also Sybil Oldfield, ‘German Women in the Resistance to Hitler’, in Women, State, and Revolution, ed. by Siân Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp.81-101. Oldfield offers another viewpoint when she asserts that Hitler took advantage of the Prussian ‘tradition that women qua women were unfit to take part in matters of state, but he could also rely on a gut assumption that always resurfaces in times of economic depression, and which is far from peculiar to Germany, that a woman’s rightful place is in the home’ (p.85).

institutionalized in the Lutheran Church, which sought not only to preserve the rights of patriarchy but also to safeguard the conservative values of the Junkers, the authoritarian, aristocratic ruling class in Germany.3 Moreover, the Imperial Civil Code, which had come into effect in 1900 and which formed the basis of German civil and family law, reinforced patriarchal norms as it put numerous restrictions on women who married and essentially placed them under the control of their husbands in most aspects of family life. Prior to Hitler’s takeover in January 1933, the Nazis had already attracted to their ranks large numbers of middle-class women who responded to the movement’s ideology, which unequivocally denounced women’s equality and pledged to remove them from politics and return them to the home. Nazism appealed particularly to middle-class women who despised feminists and their message of emancipation.4 Politicians left, right, and centre had not evinced much genuine concern for women’s issues or for their emancipation. Furthermore, women themselves generally accepted the social mores that excluded them from politics. In the opinion of historian Helen L. Boak, ‘female suffrage was not wholeheartedly welcomed by all German women, and many remained unconvinced throughout the life of the Republic that politics was not solely a male concern.’5 Nor had women’s entrance into the workplace necessarily led to more liberal attitudes in the public mind. Those women who did improve their professional status, writes Tim Mason, ‘do not seem to have gained easy acceptance’ (p.140). So powerful and so popular was the notion that woman’s real ‘profession’ was to become a wife and mother that women frequently regarded work as merely a step on the way to marriage.6 A possible explanation for the intransigence of such conservative views may be that, as Hervé observes, loyalty to the notion of the traditional family and the ideal of motherhood was particularly strong in Germany, where there was a stricter separation between the roles of females and males than in other cultures (pp.133-34). In spite of the forces of modernity sweeping across Europe, for many German women, marriage, not the vote or financial independence, would remain their heartfelt goal. The family and domestic life, as crystallized in Nazi thought, came to represent a symbolic haven where they might retrieve the status and respect as wives and mothers that in their minds the social and cultural decadence of Weimar had jeopardized. Not even the blatant male chauvinism of the Nazi Party, manifested in its almost total disregard for women, daunted its early female supporters. Nazi leaders did not encourage or recruit women into the party as they had pro-Nazi men, and women were excluded from official party organizations and leadership positions (Koonz, ‘Mothers’, pp.454-55). German middle-class women, Nazi and non-Nazi, mistakenly believed they could cooperate with the party, just as feminists had earlier tried to work within male-dominated power structures for years. Female backers of Nazism anticipated that once the sexes had returned 3 4

5

6

36

Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany (London: Sage Publications, 1976), p.5. See Mason, pp.151, 154; Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p.28; and Claudia Koonz, ‘Mothers in the Fatherland: Women in Nazi Germany’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2nd edn, ed. by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 445-73 (pp.449-50). Helen L. Boak, ‘Women in Weimar Germany: The “Frauenfrage” and the Female Vote’, in Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany, ed. by Richard Bessell and E.J. Feuchtwanger (London: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981), pp.155-73 (p.156). H. Boak, pp.162, 166. See also the remarks of Mason, who shares H. Boak’s view (pp.135-36).

to their ‘proper’ roles in the Third Reich, women would be free to exercise control over ‘areas they deemed feminine, such as social welfare, education, culture, health care, and community organization’.7 However, pro-Nazi women would come to discover that they had misled themselves about their future place within the party. Financial support and independence never materialized in spite of their enthusiastic backing of the movement. This strategy of cooperation was doomed to failure, and it subsequently weakened women’s potential for opposing the Hitler dictatorship. As the Nazi dictatorship moved to consolidate its power and bring the majority of the population under state control through Gleichschaltung, or the ‘coordination’ of economic, political and social organizations under the banner of Nazism, women’s groups and the social, religious, and charity circles with which they had long been associated were inevitably ensnared in this process. The ruthlessness of nazification contributed to the complete demise of the already fractured women’s movement. Neither mainstream nor radical feminists had succeeded in launching an effective challenge to the status quo in the decades leading up to the 1930s. The movement as a whole was clearly in decline at the end of the ‘20s. The middle-class feminists, under the direction of the reformist Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (League of German Women’s Associations), which was founded in 1894 to coordinate the numerous local groups and professional and educational organizations for middle-class women, had begun to grow increasingly chauvinistic by accepting members of a decidedly non-feminist or anti-feminist character. On the political left were working-class or socialist women, led by Clara Zetkin in the years prior to 1914, who constituted the radical wing of the women’s movement. The radicals had already found themselves losing support as the political mood became more reactionary among the German middle classes after 1908 (Evans, p.92; Wiggershaus, pp.11-12). These feminists had long displayed timidity about the methods they used to promote social change. They were reluctant to identify themselves with extremist tactics, such as marches and street demonstrations, with which the German left was generally associated and which some members, including the Socialist Rosa Luxemburg, considered as rehearsals for the coming revolution (Evans, pp.89-90, 97). Women’s organizations linked to the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD; German Communist Party) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD; German Social Democratic Party) disappeared first, when the Nazis banned these parties and their trade unions within months after coming to power. The radical feminists were now silenced. The already weakened Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine resolved to disband rather than submit to Gleichschaltung. Conservative groups, including Protestant and Catholic women’s organizations, welcomed the Nazi state, and many offered their membership into its service (Koonz, ‘Competition’, pp.221-22; Stephenson, p.28). The strong popular support that women’s groups on the extreme right had received earlier, coupled now with the collapse of the German women’s movement, resulted in the absence of any kind of solid base from which women could effectively wage resistance against the Nazis. These historical divisions within the movement would ultimately contribute to a lack of unity among middle- and working-class women who became resisters in the Third Reich. Nazi officials eventually established a women’s organization with a woman in charge; however, the real authority issued from the men at the head of the regime who shaped pol7

Claudia Koonz, ‘The Competition for a Women’s Lebensraum 1928-1934’, in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. by Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), pp.199-236 (p.213).

37

icy. In February 1934, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was named leader of the NS-Frauenschaft (National Socialist Women’s Organization), an elite arm of the party, and the Deutsches Frauenwerk (German Women’s Union), an independent union of women’s organizations open to everyone. Scholtz-Klink’s primary job, as more or less a mouthpiece of the Nazi Party, was to encourage women in their duties and responsibilities as wives and mothers. The NS-Frauenschaft and the Deutsches Frauenwerk, as well as the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) held great appeal for many women and girls from middle-class backgrounds who enjoyed the newfound prominence for females as proclaimed in the Nazi ideal of womanhood. These organizations transmitted Nazi ideology and values and brought large numbers of females into the Nazi fold, effectively dimming possibilities for resistance. The explicit division between male and female spheres formed the core of Nazi family ideology. Since the family was considered the ‘basic cell’ of the Nazi state (Rupp, p.32), woman’s ‘natural’ call to motherhood was elevated to patriotic duty. If man’s duty was to serve the state on the battlefield, woman’s was to preserve and extend the ‘Aryan’ race by giving birth to Germany’s future soldiers and mothers. The Hitler dictatorship issued a wave of propaganda that ostensibly honoured women in their roles as wives and mothers, and these efforts were undergirded with instruction in motherhood for girls and women, improvements in maternity and child welfare services, and financial incentives. Mother’s Day, around 10 May, became an occasion of national celebration, and prolific mothers were awarded the Mutterkreuz (Mother’s Cross) for bearing large numbers of children.8 Women went to maternity school to receive training in motherhood and home economics, in addition to instruction on race and Nazi goals and principles.9 The regime offered marriage loans and child allowances to young couples in need of the economic support to start a home and family. Employers extended incentives and targeted the working married woman in an attempt to lure her away from the labour market. The Nazi leadership also enacted legislation liberalizing divorce, banning birth control, and outlawing abortion with the goal of promoting childbirth and, consequently, binding women more closely to maternal and domestic functions. The intention behind these measures was not only to enlist women’s support in building a stronger, racially pure Germany by bearing its children, but also to further the process of bringing women under state control. Susanna Dammer observes that even seemingly apolitical measures aimed to secure woman’s integration into the fascist state.10 The Nazi ideal of womanhood was more than an expression of conservative values inasmuch as it furthered the interests of the state by discouraging social and political resistance. The Nazi leadership did not abandon its ideal of woman as wife and mother when the country began rearming and developing a war economy in the mid-1930s and subsequently turned to women in support of the national struggle. While the Third Reich now needed women to assist in its military build-up as labourers in the weapons industry and, eventually, to assume the industrial jobs of men being conscripted into the armed forces, Ger8

Mothers of five children received a bronze medal; those with six children were awarded a silver medal; and those who had seven children received a gold medal (Koonz, Mothers, p.186). 9 Dorothee Klinksiek, Die Frau im NS-Staat (Woman in the National Socialist state) (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1982), p.90; Koonz, Mothers, p.180. 10 Susanna Dammer, ‘Kinder, Küche, Kriegsarbeit—die Schulung der Frauen durch die NS-Frauenschaft’, in Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch (see Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung, above), pp.215-45 (p.244).

38

many’s leaders fully expected that once the country had successfully realized its quest for world domination, women would presumably return to their ‘natural’ domain, the home.11 Initial legislation dictated that the Frauenarbeitsdienst (Women’s Labour Service) was voluntary and the law went unenforced, but by 1938-1939 the labour shortage had grown so acute in all sectors of the economy that on 4 September 1939 the service was made binding on all women.12 Although wary of alienating women (and men) by conscripting women to work, Nazi leaders, as part of the Total War decree on January 1943, began requiring females between the ages of seventeen and forty-five to register and potentially be drafted as workers (Mason, p.201). The Nazi regime offered female labourers dismal prospects and oppressive working conditions; little incentive existed for them to support the national military struggle. This issue would in fact become one of the catalysts for women’s resistance. From the day Hitler took power on 30 January 1933, opposition began to surface in the Third Reich, and it lasted in various forms until the final months of the war and Germany’s surrender in 1945. The resistance never acquired a firm foothold among the people or a well-defined identity, but rather existed as a splintered movement confined to individuals or small groups generally acting independently or working in loose collaboration with one another. The matter of anti-Nazi resistance was riddled with ambiguities and complexities, so that choices were anything but clear-cut for those who chose to stand against the dictatorship. Virtually any form of dissent was considered traitorous among a population that generally recognized Hitler’s authority as legitimate. Many opponents of Nazism felt torn between feelings of loyalty to their government and nation on the one hand, and what amounted to a betrayal of their country for the greater good on the other hand. The all-pervasive nature of the Nazi terror system deflected any direct challenge to the regime’s authority and made a course of action that much more difficult for resisters. The constant threat of devastating reprisals, punishment, torture, or death fostered fear and dread among the population, thereby assuring the state’s domination. Hitler’s dictatorship made its presence felt through numerous individuals and organizations that acted as its agents and operated at many levels, from the province to the neighbourhood block. German society became increasingly atomized as citizens were encouraged to inform on one another; children turned in their parents and students their teachers. The slightest offhand remark or joke could bring an interrogation or a prison term.13 The arbitrariness of Hitler’s terror apparatus paralysed opponents of the dictatorship, who had no idea who might be sympathetic to their cause, or when or where the Geheimestaatspolizei (Gestapo; State Secret Police) might strike. The regime’s improvements in the material quality of life had brought satisfaction to many citizens, particularly the middle classes, those hardest hit by Germany’s economic

11

‘Frauenarbeit’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 June 1940, Wiener Library Dossier, cited in Stephenson, p.110. Institut für Zeitgeschichte, MA468, Frame 5719,’Arbeitseinsatz im Kriege’, 2 February 1937, cited in Stephenson, pp.98, 103. 13 Peter Hoffmann, German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p.72. Klare Bloch, a former resister, recalls that members of Berliner Rundfunk (Berlin Radio) were executed for telling a political joke (Szepansky, p.204). See also Szepansky, p.42; Koonz, Mothers, p.313; and Wolfgang See and Rudolf Weckerling, Frauen im Kirchenkampf: Beispiele aus der Bekennenden Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg, 1933-1945 (Women in the church struggle: examples from the Confessing Church, Berlin-Brandenburg, 19331945) (Berlin: Wichern-Verlag, 1984), pp.83, 128-29. 12

39

and social crises, and they were disinclined to take up the cause of anti-Nazism.14 By 19351936, especially, Hitler’s conservative social policies had not only restored order to a society that had experienced uncertainty and disarray during the short-lived Weimar Republic, but he had also reduced unemployment and stabilized the economy. Moreover, the dictator’s strong hand abroad and his willingness to address the inequities of the Treaty of Versailles appealed to members of the middle and the upper class that had earlier been distressed by Weimar’s political chaos but that now saw Germany’s international status rising. The potential for resistance was further diluted as many people succumbed to the allure of Nazism’s mass organizations, the dramatic propaganda and torchlight parades, the energy and excitement of party rallies, and Hitler’s charisma as a powerful, authoritarian leader. Finally, Germany as a nation could not offer resisters any ties to a liberal and democratic tradition that might have solidified potential opposition to Nazism. Whereas France’s republican heritage would become a source of support for many French resisters who perceived themselves as part of the historical movement for individual freedom and civil rights dating back to the 1789 Revolution, Germany looked upon its own revolutionary periods, as in 1848, with ambivalence (Hervé, pp.130-31). Germans not only had little or no experience with popular protest, but traditional German ‘virtues’, such as loyalty, discipline, a sense of duty, and a desire for order, took precedence over democratic ideals and reinforced people’s allegiance to the Third Reich (Van Roon, p.13). Within months of coming to power, Hitler began to suppress overt signs of dissent, such as public discussion and debate among political parties, religious organizations, and other groups (P. Hoffmann, pp.52-53). The labour movement, including the trade unions, the SPD, and the KPD, was hardest hit. In contrast to the middle and upper classes, who identified with Hitler’s nationalism and conservative social agenda, the working class was from the outset ideologically opposed to the dictatorship. Nazi leaders used terror to consolidate their power during the month following the 5 March 1933 elections, arresting, murdering, and jailing thousands of people who had important roles in the parties of the centre and the left, shutting down the communist and the socialist presses, and effectively outlawing the KPD. The trade unions were broken up on 2 May, and the SPD was formally banned on 22 June. The harshness of the Nazi repression drove the working-class resistance underground. Communists, social democrats, and trade unionists attempted to maintain some remnants of their organizations and to offer resistance through clandestine channels. Movement leaders went into hiding in working-class districts in urban and industrial areas because the anonymity of large cities offered more possibilities for hiding, maintaining secret contacts, and furthering their political work in secrecy. As Hitler intensified efforts to decimate the ranks of the organized resistance, the left, faced with arbitrary arrests, threats, beatings, systematic raids in working-class areas, and the Gestapo’s ever-growing powers of surveillance, was rendered ineffective. Before 1933, the KPD and SPD organizations had comprised at least forty percent of the voting public in Germany (Broszat, p.27). It took only six months for the Nazis to destroy ‘the largest and best-organised workers’ movement in the world’, in the words of Peukert (Inside, pp.103, 118-19). The KPD and the SPD, which had long been at odds with each other, now lost the chance to join forces against Nazism. Underestimating the ruthlessness and the staying 14

40

See Broszat, who asserts, ‘conditions for opposition were more favorable in agrarian, provincial, proletarian and aristocratic sectors, where economic hardship had not substantially undermined traditional forms of social behavior’ (pp.25-26).

power of the Hitler regime, each organization concentrated on its own particular agenda for the future in the belief that it would be there to pick up the pieces and lead Germany once the dictatorship collapsed. The divergent identities of the two movements led to different approaches to resistance. The more radical communists were mainly young men and women who had experienced unemployment and other forms of social dislocation. They took their cue from Communist International (Comintern) directives issued in the Soviet Union and maintained a revolutionary stance in hopes of building a base of mass support for the KPD. With little hope of actually bringing down their government from outside, the communists instead concentrated on eroding the foundation of German society from within by mass producing and circulating anti-government documents such as fliers, newspapers (for example, Die Rote Fahne (The red banner)), factory papers, and leaflets that discussed current events, decried Nazi anti-Semitism, and exposed the regime’s lies and atrocities. According to Peukert, between 1933 and 1935, when the distribution of leaflets increased, tens of thousands made their way into the hands of German citizens (Inside, p.54). Due to the difficulties of producing such fliers and the grave risks for those involved in leaflet campaigns, the mass circulation of printed propaganda did not have the intended effect of expanding the KPD resistance movement, however (P. Hoffmann, p.55). In contrast, the SPD, whose membership was dominated by skilled workers and artisans, adopted a more careful and reasoned approach to resistance. Whereas the communists took spontaneous action and favoured public agitation, the socialists showed more restraint, opting to provide support for those already engaged in their cause rather than to expand the party’s ranks and refusing to stir up social unrest or engage in risky acts against the Nazis (Broszat, pp.28-29). Like the communists, the socialists also disseminated information about conditions inside the Third Reich. Both movements occasionally employed sabotage and terrorism in factories as a means of interfering with the production of weapons, but violence played a limited role overall in the German resistance (Van Roon, p.22; Koonz, Mothers, p.310). The KPD and the SPD established border bases in German-speaking countries outside the Third Reich, where activists could produce and distribute printed resistance materials and also provide safe hiding places for resisters, Jews, and other political refugees.15 The KPD and SPD continued a piecemeal resistance after the regime’s initial onslaught, something that was possible only because at the outset of Hitler’s rule the Nazi Party had not yet brought entire sectors of the population completely under its authority and control (Broszat, p.26). More arrests of communists and socialists followed between 1934 and 1936, and the majority of the larger underground labour organizations were destroyed during this time.16 Many party functionaries, who were not killed or given long terms in jail or concentration camps, lived underground in Germany or else fled into exile. Extensive police surveillance prevented party leaders from making contact with other members of the left. The regime continued mopping up resistance more vigorously during the war. In 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, small communist groups attempted to re-establish 15

On the work of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands im Exil (German Social Democratic Party in Exile), see Mommsen; Peukert, Inside, pp.49, 52; and Encyclopedia of German Resistance to the Nazi Movement, ed. by Wolfgang Benz and Walter H. Pehle, trans. by Lance W. Garmer (New York: Continuum, 1997, pp.16-18, 29-31. 16 See P. Hoffmann’s analysis of the numbers of socialist and communist groups that were active in 1935 and 1936 (pp.53-54).

41

contact with one another, but the authorities shattered the working-class opposition again in the summer of 1944 through mass arrests. Two notable resistance organizations on the left, Neu-Beginnen (New Beginnings) and Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), deserve mention because some of the resisters discussed in this study had an association with them. With an eye to leading the future revolution of the masses, the Marxist-Leninist Neu-Beginnen, which originated in the late 1920s in Berlin, advocated an organized and systematic approach to resistance and educated its members in socialist principles instead of distributing underground propaganda. Approximately five hundred members belonged to the group when it began, and it eventually spread beyond Berlin to other German cities (Benz and Pehle, pp.213-16). Relying on couriers from various anti-fascist circles within Germany who submitted reports about their groups’ resistance activities to Neu-Beginnen’s centre of operations (on the Czech side of the German border), the network built an effective apparatus to distribute this information (on microfilm) about conditions inside the Third Reich. When the Gestapo eventually infiltrated NeuBeginnen in 1944, after ten years of clandestine operations, most of the leaders of the individual groups were executed and the organization was destroyed.17 Rote Kapelle, an early underground network with Soviet ties, originated from a group of individuals of diverse political and philosophical views, social classes, occupations, and of different generations during the later Weimar years. This circle eventually united more than 150 people, including communists, social activists, intellectuals, artists, and students. The organization had its roots in discussion groups that developed, first, around Arvid and Mildred Harnack in 1933, and, later, in the mid-1930s, around Lieutenant Harro SchulzeBoysen of the Reich Aviation Ministry. The two different circles often loosely overlapped until they joined forces in 1940 to create an umbrella organization. Rote Kapelle established connections to other anti-Nazi groups in Heidelberg and Berlin during the early ‘40s, and later forged contacts with members of the Kreisau Kreis. Rote Kapelle was smashed when the Gestapo arrested 126 members between 31 August 1942 and March 1943. Of the fortyeight members arrested and eventually executed by the regime, eighteen were women, including one of the founders, Mildred Harnack (Benz and Pehle, pp.225-26; Hervé, p.61). The Church as an institution offered little substantive resistance to Nazism, and its refusal to take the part of the Jews has been attributed to church authorities’ long-held antiSemitic belief, their respect for the traditional authority of the state, and their deep sense of nationalism.18 The Protestant and Catholic Churches took no action when the Nuremberg Laws went into effect on 15 September 1935, reducing Jews to second-class citizens by depriving them of political and civil rights and forbidding them from marrying or having extra-marital relationships with non-Jews. Nor did the Church respond to the events of the Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) pogrom of 9 and 10 November 1938, when the Schutzstaffel (SS; Safety Squad) and other Nazi security forces ransacked Jewish homes and shops and vandalized and burned synagogues. Protest by Church leaders of both denominations came most often not as a challenge to party ideology or the political system, but rather in reaction 17

See Der lautlose Aufstand: Bericht über die Widerstandsbewegung des deutschen Volkes, 1933-1945 (The silent rebellion: report on the resistance movement of the German people, 1933-1945), 4th edn, ed. by Günther Weisenborn (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1974), pp.197-99. 18 See Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York: Norton, 1996), p.273, and Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1997-), I, 44.

42

to governmental measures that infringed upon what the Church saw as its integrity, or its right to exist independently of the state. Protestant leaders, who believed that Germany’s centuries-long Protestant tradition had lost the support of the state during the Weimar era, backed Hitler in the hope of restoring this connection. The Roman Catholic Church did not possess the same close historical ties to the state that the Protestant Church did, yet the Catholic leadership, maintaining a nationalist-authoritarian perspective, also favoured Nazi rule. For the larger institution of the Catholic Church, opposition would be confined almost exclusively to the subject of euthanasia.19 The Church acted unanimously in opposing the state-sponsored killing of the physically and mentally handicapped that had begun in the winter of 1938-1939. The Catholic prelates continued voicing opposition to euthanasia, until Hitler halted the program on 24 August 1941.20 The Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church), of the Lutheran and the Reformed faiths, was formed in protest of Nazism, when Hitler attempted to bring the Protestant Church under state control as part of the Gleichschaltung. Led by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Pastor Martin Niemöller, the Bekennende Kirche, a loose grouping of ministers, individual congregations, and churches, started in May 1934 with some thirteen hundred supporters and a few months later claimed six thousand members. The Bekennende Kirche rejected Hitler’s plan to align the Evangelical Church’s organizations and theology with the regime in order to establish the official church of the Nazi Party, known as the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (German Evangelical Church) (its members were called the Deutsche Christen (German Christians)). Instead, the Bekennende Kirche staked its own claim as the true Evangelical Church (Friedländer, p.44-45). The Bekennende Kirche had no political aims, such as seeking the overthrow of the regime, and in fact the Church consistently voiced its support of Nazism’s political objectives (Benz and Pehle, pp.141-42). The Church did not take action as a unified resistance organization but rather as individuals and committees; therefore, a broad range of dissent against the regime existed within the Church body. The larger ‘moderate’ branch of the Church was willing to compromise and work under certain conditions with representatives of the regime, while the smaller ‘radical’ branch assumed a tougher position and refused to cooperate in any way with the Deutsche Christen. In 1936, the radicals sent a secret memorandum to Hitler in which they spoke out against concentration camps, the Gestapo’s terrorist tactics, and the regime’s anti-Semitic measures. Approximately eighteen thousand ministers belonged to the Bekennende Kirche, and an estimated nine hundred ministers and laypersons of the Church faced various degrees of punishment for their resistance activity (p.142). With the relatively late emergence of the national-conservative resistance in 1941-1942, the ‘partial’, less ideologically driven opposition of individuals and smaller groups that had arisen out of dissatisfaction with the regime’s encroachments on its citizens’ private lives gave way to a more ‘fundamental’ resistance that was politically motivated. The Nazi system had by this point begun to weaken in its ability to control all of its citizens, and its appeal was diminishing (Broszat, pp.30-31). Conservatives, who had initially been drawn to Hitler’s nationalistic and authoritarian message and later been impressed by his diplomatic and military successes, now found themselves disenchanted with the regime’s excessive use 19

See Stoltzfus, p.273; Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 19331945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Peter Steinbach, ‘The Conservative Resistance’, in Contending with Hitler (see Large, above), pp.89-97 (p.90). 20 Hitler continued the practice of euthanasia behind the scenes in concentration camps.

43

of violence and terror, as well as Germany’s fading chances for a final military victory. Many of these resisters had not felt the effects of the regime’s oppression themselves because they came largely from the university-educated upper class, the diplomatic and the civil service, and the military, or they worked in the fields of law, politics, and economics. Broszat explains that through their professional roles in the government and the military, these resisters could avail themselves of information about the progress of the war and were therefore less susceptible to Nazi propaganda than the average citizen (p.31). These organizations confined themselves primarily to laying the groundwork for Germany’s social and political renewal, not establishing a clandestine movement to overthrow the dictator. The most prominent groups within the national-conservative resistance were the Goerdeler Gruppe (Goerdeler Group) and the Kreisau Kreis (Kreisau Circle). The two networks shared members and activities at times, and although they had different philosophical orientations, both were involved to varying degrees in the 20 July 1944 conspiracy against Hitler. The Goerdeler Gruppe, headed by the civilian Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig between 1930 and 1937, and General Ludwig Beck, was responsible for organizing the assassination attempt. Goerdeler himself had stood against Nazism as early as 1933. He reached out to Beck and other military officers in 1938, after the General resigned as Army Chief of Staff in protest against Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. The individuals around Goerdeler favoured the strong leadership of an elite, such as a monarchy or an oligarchy, contending that only through these forms of government would Germany regain political stability and become a leading European power again. The Goerdeler Gruppe devoted its attention to planning a Christian-oriented domestic political program that could be implemented immediately after the overthrow of the Nazi regime. The Kreisau Kreis, relatively more liberal than Goerdeler’s organization, was centred around the Berlin attorney Helmuth Count von Moltke, and took its name from Moltke’s estate in Kreisau. The Kreisau Kreis was born when a group associated with Moltke and a group linked to his long-time friend, Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, joined together in 1940. Many of the circle’s original members belonged to the high nobility. The organization promoted a Christian-Socialist ideology as the basis for political and social reform, sought a spiritual renewal of Germany, and aimed to strengthen the ties between church and state (Van Roon, p.169). Due to the circle’s Christian orientation, certain members, such as Moltke, had misgivings about assassinating Hitler. Moltke was reluctant to employ the methods of the Nazis, and he also considered such a strategy impractical, as it would necessitate keeping the circle of conspirators extremely small.21 In August 1943, the Kreisau Kreis struck an alliance with other civilian and military resistance groups that were seeking to oust Hitler and prepare for a takeover of the government. When the conspiracy failed, the Gestapo arrested half of the members of the original group, among them, Moltke and Yorck. The men were tortured, summarily tried by the infamous Volksgericht (People’s Court), and executed. Both Goerdeler and Hassell were arrested as well and executed for their roles in the plot. Another element of this phase of the resistance, the military opposition, was slow to develop because officers hesitated to break with the German military tradition of loyalty and obedience and to let themselves be branded as traitors for their disloyalty to Hitler (P. Hoffmann, p.73). Senior military officers did gradually move toward a position of resis21

44

Dokumente zur Bonhoeffer-Forschung, 1928-1945 (Documents related to Bonhoeffer research, 1928-1945), ed. by Jørgen Glenthøj (Munich: Kaiser, 1969), p.264.

tance by 1938, but several coup attempts as well as secret contacts with foreign governments ultimately foundered.22 With Hitler’s chances of a morale-boosting victory clearly waning after the Battle of Stalingrad in January 1943, his generals and other members of the conservative resistance came around to the view that he had to be assassinated in order to prevent social and political turmoil. Thus the 20 July movement came into existence. While Moltke and Goerdeler maintained their reservations against assassination, others at the heart of the conspiracy considered the dictator’s murder a justifiable means to a better end.23 The conspirators placed their trust for bringing down the regime in Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who attempted to assassinate Hitler at the leader’s headquarters in East Prussia on 20 July. The plan failed and Hitler lived. Police combed Germany in search of the numerous conspirators who had planned and carried out the plot. Many of those taken into custody were tortured, and there was a flood of ‘phoney’ trials before the Volksgericht. Thousands of individuals were executed (Van Roon, p.193). The resistance waged by the national-conservative elements in Germany differed enormously from that of other European movements because the Germans received no allied support. Before the war broke out, resisters set up clandestine meetings between French and British diplomats and sympathetic German channels; however, the appeals of the anti-Nazis proved fruitless and attempts to reach out to foreign governments were abandoned when the war began. Once Hitler’s military fortunes began to decline in mid-1942 and an allied victory appeared in sight, the Western powers grew still more reluctant to prop up the German opposition, and they continued to rebuff the overtures of these resisters (P. Hoffmann, pp.89-90). Unable to recognize any distinction between the Nazis and other Germans, the Allies were suspicious of Germans who opposed their own government.24 Having no clear sense of who these behind-the-scene plotters were or where they stood politically, the Allies repeatedly told the resistance that Germany had to surrender unconditionally. The fractured German resistance established a singular presence within the Third Reich despite facing enormous odds. The movement lacked the cohesiveness and the power to overthrow the Hitler dictatorship; yet, in the view of historians studying the social dimensions of resistance, Hitler’s opponents did exert their will in ways that had an impact upon the mechanisms of the state. Koonz asserts that incidents of open rebellion eroded the regime’s control over particular areas of German society (Mothers, p.340). Peukert’s examination of party and police department reports on morale and the country’s internal situation indicate that Nazi leaders were extremely sensitive to the popular mood and went to great lengths to monitor instances of criticism and dissatisfaction among its citizens (Inside, pp.50, 52). Peter Hoffmann cites the situation reports of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service) of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Central Security Department), under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and SS Generals Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Müller and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, noting the anxiety and concern about ‘ordinary’ opposition among the general public (p.57). As scholars turned their attention in the early postwar years to the implications of the German resistance, they focused on military officers and aristocratic elites in the Federal 22

See Benz and Pehle, pp.120-22, and P. Hoffmann, p.96. Klemens von Klemperer, ‘”What Is the Law That Lies Behind These Words?” Antigone’s Question and the German Resistance Against Hitler’, Journal of Modern History, 64, suppl. (1992), S102-11 (p.S109). 24 See Thomas Powers, ‘The Conspiracy That Failed’, The New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997, 49-54 (p.52). 23

45

Republic of Germany, and anti-fascists (again, men) committed to resistance as a stage in the class struggle in the German Democratic Republic. The East Germans were as onesided in retelling these events as their counterparts in the West, assuming the orthodox Marxist position that the communist underground had waged the fiercest struggle against the Third Reich, to the exclusion of middle- and upper-class resistance. Only a few examples of non-communist opposition to Hitler, such as the 20 July plot, received attention in East Germany. In West Germany, a portrait of the German anti-Nazi movement that ignored the working-class resistance suited the anti-communist purposes of the Allies and conservative German politicians as lines were drawn between East and West in the Cold War.25 Historians thus looked almost exclusively to the 20 July conspiracy and the programs of the conservative elites as a way of establishing a historical continuum between the democratic impulses said to be embodied in these movements and the newly formed West German government. This was a resistance defined as clandestine, organized, and motivated by ideological belief. The outlines for Germany’s future that had been proposed by the Goerdeler Gruppe and the Kreisau Kreis were held up as models ‘prefiguring’ German liberal democracy, while the contributions of communists and left-wing activists went unmentioned. One of the earliest historical studies of the German movement, Hans Rothfels’s Die Deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler26, asserted that the premier act of resistance was the 20 July conspiracy because it targeted the state, a view that led West German scholars throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s to concentrate on the conservative and upper-class elements of the anti-Nazi forces. They examined institutions: political parties, churches, and the army, for instances of anti-Nazi opposition. Resistance was seen largely in terms of its moral and ethical dimensions. In accordance with the scholarship of the time that sought to cast Nazism as a singular phenomenon in German history, existing apart from what had come before and what came afterwards, resisters too were portrayed as rare and exceptional individuals driven to take noble actions in order to save their country at a special moment in history. By the late 1960s and early ‘70s, a number of factors converged in the Federal Republic of Germany to challenge the official myths and legends of a select resistance, as the generation born after the war began to raise questions about the spectre of Nazism and the behaviour of their parents during this era. The rising student movement spurred young people’s confrontation with the past. Additionally, the emergence of the academic fields of social history and oral history contributed to a broader vision of what constituted resistance. Historian Geoff Eley cites additional factors that contributed to this shift in perspective: A number of political, cultural and more specifically historiographical developments were now running in the same direction, to produce a powerful unity of commitments—an anti-fascist critique of the Federal Repub-

25

Günther Weisenborn’s Der lautlose Aufstand, which describes a wide array of clandestine activity that spanned all sectors and economic classes of German society, did not become well known because the writer’s political and cultural ties with East Germany as well as his broad view of the German resistance, which included the communist movement, made him unpopular with the allied powers when the Cold War began. See Jean-Paul Bier, ‘The Holocaust and West German Strategies of Oblivion, 1947-1979’, trans. by Michael Allinder, New German Critique, 19 (1980), 9-29 (p.12). 26 Hans Rothfels, Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler (Krefeld: Scherpe, 1949) (1948; Eng. tr. The German Opposition to Hitler).

46

lic’s political culture, the demand that Germany acknowledge its responsibility for the crimes of Nazism at 27 home and abroad, a democratic critique of the university, and the demand for new types of history.

As the strains of the Cold War began to subside, possibilities eventually opened up for investigating resistance beyond the narrow prescriptions defined by postwar East-West politics. Revisionist historians now acknowledged Nazism as an inescapable part of Germany’s history and its social structures, and they traded resistance myths for examples of anti-Nazi activity within everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte) between 1933 and 1945. The Historikerstreit (historians’ debate) that emerged in West Germany in the mid-1980’s discussed the place of Nazism and the Holocaust in German history and the question of German guilt.28 Studies by Tröger and Peukert, and the oral histories of Lutz Niethammer investigated how ordinary people lived in the Third Reich.29 This work formed the basis for a new approach that identified the ways in which people adapted to Nazism and the forms resistance took. Using regional and local studies and departmental archives as their sources, researchers studied various social milieux and subcultures, including left-wing political parties, students, youth gangs, and religious figures, for evidence of anti-Nazi activity at the grassroots level. Women’s resistance now began to come to light as well. Resistance historians such as Broszat and Mommsen emphasized the social conditions (as opposed to the motives) that produced or fostered resistance. Klemens von Klemperer defined resistance in terms of individual actors and small groups, not large organizations. While recognizing that resistance expressed itself most powerfully in the early and later stages of Nazism (when the regime did not yet exercise full control over the German population, or when its control had begun to diminish), Broszat and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich were instrumental in identifying Resistenz, or ‘partial’ resistance. These were small acts of nonconformity and dissidence by ordinary citizens that were most evident during the period 1935-1941, when the dictatorship had a firm grip on its authority and relied less on violence and terror.30 As scholars studied the social context of resistance, the lines between resistance and Nazism began to appear less distinct.31 While certain historians maintain that genuine resistance must aim to overthrow the state32, there has been movement toward ac-

27 28 29

30

31 32

Geoff Eley, ‘Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit 19861987’, Past and Present, 121 (1988), 171-208 (p.187). See Eley, and Mary Nolan, ‘The Historikerstreit and Social History’, New German Critique, 44 (1988), 51-80. Tröger, ‘German’, and ‘Creation of a Female Assembly-Line Proletariat’, in When Biology Became Destiny (see Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan, above), pp.237-70; Peukert, Inside, and Ruhrarbeiter; Lutz Niethammer, ‘Die Jahre weiß man nicht, wo man die hinsetzen soll’: Faschismus-Erfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (‘It’s hard to know what to do with those years’: experiences with fascism in the Ruhr Valley) (Berlin: Dietz, 1983). Klemperer, ‘What’, p.S108; Martin Broszat, ‘Resistenz und Widerstand’, in Bayern in der NS-Zeit (Bavaria during the National Socialist period), ed. by Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich, and Falk Wiesemann, 6 vols (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1977-83), IV, 691-709. Whereas Broszat uses the term Resistenz to denote ‘partial’ resistance, Löwenthal prefers the term gesellschaftliche Verweigerung (social refusal). See Richard Löwenthal, ‘Widerstand im totalen Staat’, in Widerstand und Verweigerung in Deutschland, 1933-1945 (Resistance and refusal in Germany, 1933-1945), ed. by Richard Löwenthal and Patrick von zur Mühlen (Berlin and Bonn: Dietz, 1982), pp.11-24. See Mommsen, who alludes to the ‘political ambivalence’ of the resistance (p.S113), and Broszat, who notes the ‘interdependence between it [the resistance] and the Nazi regime’ (‘Social’, p.25). See Kershaw, pp.2-3, and P. Hoffmann, pp.59, 60.

47

knowledging a range of forms of resistance, from non-conforming behaviour to organized efforts to destroy the regime.33 New controversies followed on the heels of the Historikerstreit, which had not considered gender issues at all. In 1987, the German historian Gisela Bock and the American Koonz (as well as others) began a debate about whether German women were victims or perpetrators of the Nazi system. Bock, expressing the viewpoint of a cultural feminist, contended that women’s experience was separate from men’s in the Third Reich. Racism and sexism were interconnected in Nazi policy, and women were victimized by the patriarchal ideology of Nazism. In her view, women had no part in perpetrating the crimes of Nazism.34 Koonz, on the other hand, spoke as a gender historian, arguing that women as well as men play a part in sustaining the system of patriarchy. She therefore contended that women, far from being untainted by Nazism, actually had a share in the operations of the Nazi machine and should bear some of the burden of guilt (Mothers).35 The resistance of women has been largely omitted from this entire discussion. But the tension between victim-perpetrator that was highlighted in this debate points up the ambiguities surrounding anti-Nazi activity in general. The decision to act, to any degree, was never made within a vacuum. A host of factors influenced resisters’ views on how they might participate in resistance. The Historikerstreit as well as the ensuing victim-perpetrator debate36 suggest that, as scholars in Germany and France have increasingly come to realize, the distance between collaboration and resistance may not have been as far as was once imagined. Female opponents of Nazism essentially looked for spur-of-the-moment opportunities to take action against the regime. Women in Germany could not unify as a single force for several reasons. As noted, there were neither women’s groups to organize female resisters nor a women’s press to rally them to the cause of anti-Nazism. Stricter class division in Germany also led to less cooperation among resisters there than in other countries (Hervé, p.123). Furthermore, the German resistance as a whole simply did not possess the political, economic, or moral backing of its own citizens or of other countries that similar European movements enjoyed; therefore, it could not provide its female participants with much support at all. German women’s dissent had to be cobbled together out of isolated and spontaneous acts of rebellion. Women assumed an important place as opponents of the Hitler regime during the early stages of the working-class resistance. They found many more opportunities to make their way into the ranks of the workers’ movement rather than the networks of the conservative elites that formed later. Female members of the Kreisau Kreis and the Goerdeler Gruppe 33

For example, see Peukert’s scale of resistance activity that moves from ‘non-conformist behaviour’, to ‘refusal’, to ‘protest’, to Widerstand, or ‘resistance’ (Inside, pp.83-84). 34 See Gisela Bock, ‘Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization and the State’ in When Biology Became Destiny (see Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan, above), pp.271-96, and Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Compulsory sterilization under National Socialism: studies on racial policy and women’s policy) (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986). 35 For a discussion of the theoretical positions in this debate, see Ralph M. Leck, ‘Conservative Empowerment and the Gender of Nazism: Paradigms of Power and Complicity in German Women’s History’, Journal of Women’s History, 12 (2000), 147-69. 36 The victim-perpetrator discussion largely concluded with Bock’s suggestion that Nazi women’s policy was primarily motivated by racism, not gender. See Gisela Bock, ‘Women’s History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate’, Gender and History, 1 (1989), 7-30.

48

did not actively contribute to planning or defining the aims and goals for these organizations. Hervé labels the wives of the men in the 20 July conspiracy and the Kreisau Kreis as stille Zuhörerinnen (silent listeners), who remained passive and mainly gave their husbands emotional support (p.120). In the words of Freya von Moltke, wife of Helmuth von Moltke: Ich würde mich gern aktiver machen, aber wir alle waren doch mehr die Frauen unserer Männer. Ich habe zwar alles mitgetragen, aber das war doch eine andere Rolle, als sie die Männer hatten. Ich will das mal so formulieren: wenn die Männer geplant haben, haben wir zugehört. (I would have gladly been more active, but all of us really were more the wives of our husbands. I certainly shared in everything, but that was really just a frill compared to the men’s burden. I’d like to formulate it this way: when the men planned, we listened.)37

Nor did the German resistance associated with the military, the government bureaucracy, or the Foreign Office offer women positions of responsibility. Females in those settings were limited to courier or secretarial functions (Holland and Garett, pp.364-65). In contrast, working-class women, who were less vulnerable to the regime’s persecution against the labour movement because they did not hold key leadership positions in the KPD and SPD, were of necessity drawn into party and clandestine activity when the two parties were banned. Wickert, writing about the KPD and the role of women, says women were ‘no doubt of central importance for the party’s underground work’ (‘Women’, p.111). The wellorganized administrative structures of the KPD and SPD offered a solid base for resistance that women could join. Moreover, the KPD thought women less likely to be exposed to danger in the event of war, and therefore assigned them underground roles to help the party ready itself for its future resurgence in Germany (Benz and Pehle, p.20). Klaus-Michael Mallmann asserts that during the period 1933-1934, female communists were relatively certain of being set free after a court hearing, whereas the testimony of men pleading their innocence was not as likely to be believed.38 The Rote Kapelle claimed females as members of its inner circle (Holland and Garett, p.371). Some anti-fascist women took over the duties and positions left vacant by men who emigrated, were arrested, or went into hiding when the labour movement was outlawed, and they did men’s work that they would not ordinarily have been assigned (Wickert, ‘Women’, pp.111-12). Historians Gitte Schefer and Sybil Milton both observe that women assumed considerable responsibilities, including running resistance operations and devising political plans.39 As the KPD and the SPD struggled to maintain their viability underground during the intense repression of the mid-1930s, women shared news and aided sympathetic groups of friends, offered hiding places, typed and duplicated party literature, and provided clandestine meeting places that enabled party members to renew connections. German women resisted in other ways, too, as when they spoke out against the regime’s official view of womanhood. The ideal of motherhood did not become the focus of outright scorn and attack (as in France, where women publicly demonstrated against Vichy’s policy of ‘returning the woman to the home’). Hervé’s research supports the claim that German 37

Dorothee von Meding, Mit dem Mut des Herzens: Die Frauen des 20. Juli (With the courage of the heart: the women of July 20) (Berlin: Siedler, 1992), p.131. 38 Klaus-Michael Mallmann, ‘Zwischen Denunziation und Roter Hilfe: Geschlechterbeziehungen und kommunistischer Widerstand, 1933-1945’, in Frauen gegen die Diktatur—Widerstand und Verfolgung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (see Wickert, above), pp.82-97 (p.88). 39 Gitte Schefer, ‘Wo Unterdruckung ist, da ist auch Widerstand—Frauen gegen Faschismus und Krieg’, in Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch (see Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung, above), pp.273-91 (p.276); Sybil Milton, ‘Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and Jewish-German Women’, in When Biology Became Destiny (see Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan, above), pp.297-333 (p.317).

49

women did not stand up against Nazi policies that discriminated against them (p.72). Yet evidence suggests that in the Third Reich, on plainly ideological ground, Nazism lost its credibility for some women. Some families celebrated Mother’s Day on the Catholic holiday instead of the Nazi Mother’s Day, and women on an individual basis refused to accept the Mutterkreuz (See and Weckerling, p.120). Koonz cites examples in which women made use of these medals as a symbol of resistance. In one town, fifty Catholic women banded together in 1934 to demonstrate against the imprisonment of a priest. Threatening to discard their medals, the women eventually won the man’s release.40 Women also carried out humanitarian actions. Acting through the communist welfare organization Rote Hilfe (Red Help), for instance, women gathered money for the wives and families of prisoners of war, organized special days for the children of communist resisters who had been arrested or murdered, and arranged transportation for women who wanted to visit their husbands in concentration camps.41 As the Hitler regime made inroads into areas that typically concerned women in their family, social, and religious lives, some women chose avenues of resistance associated with the Church. Many Protestant women welcomed the Nazi movement early on, believing they could reconcile its ideology and glorification of motherhood with their personal faith without much difficulty. Michael Phayer, in his book Protestant and Catholic Women in Nazi Germany, concludes that Protestant women ‘envisioned a spiritual role for themselves in fulfilling the biological function of motherhood’.42 Their first blush of enthusiasm shortly turned to disenchantment, however, as the Protestant women’s auxiliaries, which had typically provided mothers-to-be with medical care and training in the practical tasks and the spiritual dimensions of motherhood, found themselves eliminated from this function and from other community welfare work by the NS-Frauenschaft and the NS-Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist Social Welfare), which aggressively took over these roles during the mid-1930s (pp.186-88). Some Protestant women chose resistance in conjunction with the Bekennende Kirche, which made extensive use of women behind the scenes. The Church was dominated by men, who held the most visible administrative and leadership posts as its official representatives. Since the men occupied such sensitive positions and their busy schedules left them with little time, women took over the bulk of the illegal Church’s routine work (See and Weckerling, pp.41-42, 71). Female curates were permitted to assume ministerial functions for men who had been drafted into military service during the war. Women also acted as assistants for congregations and as secretaries, and they kept the Church in operation by doing such routine tasks as duplicating politically dangerous liturgies or lists of intercession (p.108). Senta Maria Klatt, a former member of the Bekennende Kirche, recalls working through an entire night to falsify the records of the collection money for the previous twelve months because the Church was trying to prevent the Gestapo from seizing the funds it used to finance its work and pay its pastors (pp.14-15). Phayer portrays Catholic women as more sceptical than the Protestants of the Nazi ideology of womanhood. The Roman Catholic tradition of the Virgin Mary stood in direct con40

Dingolfing, Regensburg, 26 July 1934, BZR OA 613, cited in Koonz, Mothers, p.290. Barbara Beuys, Vergeßt uns nicht: Menschen im Widerstand, 1933-1945 (Do not forget us: people in the resistance, 1933-1945) (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1987), pp.205-06. 42 Michael Phayer, Protestant and Catholic Women in Nazi Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), p.61. 41

50

trast to the regime’s portrayal of woman as the biological provider of children who would strengthen the race. According to Phayer’s analysis, Catholic women found themselves unable to honour the Church’s ideal of virginity and at the same time to fulfil their duty to the nation and the ‘Aryan’ race as child bearers (pp.60-61). Already reluctant to embrace the dictatorship’s image of womanhood, Catholic women were further alienated by the Third Reich’s interference in the private, Catholic-run schools, which were staffed by clergy and which provided religious education to school children. Women cooperated with Catholic bishops who requested that they instruct their children in religious doctrines in order to bypass the regime’s non-denominational ‘community’ schools (Kershaw, pp.20917). Catholic women have been credited with helping to bring an end to Hitler’s euthanasia program, discussed earlier. The issue that became a lightning rod for Catholic women’s anger and dissent, though, was the regime’s demand for the removal of crucifixes from schools in 1936. Opposition to the crucifix decrees was particularly strong in the Münsterland, Bavaria, and the Saarland. Led by the Catholic Church, families and individuals clashed publicly with local party officials over this issue in the town of Oldenburg, in heavily Protestant northern Germany, and in the nearby Catholic town of Cloppenburg. The decree was rescinded on 25 November (Stoltzfus, pp.145-46). Several years later, in April 1941, the subject arose again in predominantly Catholic Bavaria. Unrest was widespread there as well, extending even to local Nazi Party leaders and party women’s organizations. There was much vocal discord, and numerous public protests and school strikes erupted. Mothers of school-age children expressed their discontent to head teachers and officials, suggesting they would withdraw their children from school if authorities did not return the crucifixes to the schools. Collective acts of protest resulted when officials did not at first comply. Significant numbers of women participated in these demonstrations (Kershaw, pp.340-57). Eventually, authorities acceded to the public’s demands, revoked the decree, and replaced the crucifixes.43 Public demonstrations by women in the Third Reich typically occurred by chance or arose out of specific situations that provoked unrest and dissension (Hervé, p.120), and these actions revolved around political issues, economic matters, and concern for the wellbeing of the family. There were no mass actions by the German people against the treatment of the Jews. Early protests in the Third Reich, inspired and organized by communist and socialist forces, were centred among the working classes. In the days immediately following the Nazi takeover, anti-fascist rallies, strikes, and demonstrations by thousands of men and women broke out spontaneously in many parts of Germany (Schefer, pp.281-82). Historians have begun to turn up other examples of German women’s collective opposition. In its book Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch, Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung briefly notes two such incidents that focused on political issues. On 24 and 25 June 1933, after members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA; Storm Troopers) had taken action against members of the KPD and the SPD in Hohenstein-Ernstthal, women protested to try to force the release of those who had been arrested. A few weeks later, on 1 August 1933, women participated in a demonstration in Hamburg, vocalizing their dissent against a judgment that had been handed down against Hamburg anti-fascists (p.325).

43

The Third Reich and the Christian Churches, ed. by Peter Matheson (Edinburgh: Clark, 1981), pp.93-96.

51

Women also publicly expressed dissatisfaction with their impoverished economic state. In examining the records of various large German cities, Bock discovered that when the Nazi government applied stricter racial criteria to financial allowances in 1940, women and children gathered together to bring demands to city authorities, asking for what they believed in all fairness belonged to them (‘Racism’, p.285). Milton describes another incident related to a food riot that occurred in November 1943. In the town of Witten, three hundred predominantly Catholic women and their children, who had been evacuated from bombedout mining towns in the Ruhr and the Rhineland, publicly demonstrated (without intervention by the police). The women voiced concern about the scarcity of food ration cards and their new living quarters. They feared that the relocation would separate family members and did not wish to expose their children to Nazi propaganda that attacked Christian belief in the schools they were slated to attend. The police summoned to put down the riot sided with the women and would not intercede (p.319). Similar demonstrations erupted in Hamm, Lünen, and Bochum.44 German women’s collective protest did not occur on the same scale as that instigated by the comités des femmes (women’s popular committees) under communist sponsorship in France. Not only did the resistance of German women lack the backing of well-organized women’s groups and the structures that would have united them, but there were few female historical figures symbolic of freedom and revolutionary dissent with whom women could identify. Women like Zetkin and Luxemburg had risen to prominence as politicians and social rebels in Germany, yet women in general did not perceive them as role models for resistance (Hervé, p.135). Whereas French women would look back to a long republican tradition of revolutionary fervour and draw inspiration from notable female activists involved in social unrest, German women were limited to examples from the more recent past. Analysing the motives of the wives who sparked the Rosenstrasse protest in Berlin, historian Nathan Stoltzfus asserts that some of the women would likely have been aware of or taken part in the public protests staged by the communists and socialists in the Weimar period, or would have been familiar with women’s demonstrations against the First World War or in support of women’s suffrage.45 Hervé’s research also supports the notion that German women found at least some historical basis for their anti-Nazism in past examples of women’s activism. In the resistance flier circulated by women and girls of the Rhein area (discussed in chapter 1), women were reminded of German women’s anti-war demonstrations in 1916, 1917, and 1918 (p.115).46 44

Meldungen aus dem Reich: Auswahl aus den geheimen Lageberichten des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, 1934-44 (Reports from the Reich: selections from the secret situation reports of the Security Service of the SS, 193444), ed. by Heinz Boberach (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1965), Report of 13 November 1943, pp.44555. 45 Stoltzfus, p.223. See also Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-class Women in the First World War, trans. by Margaret Ries (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997). Daniel discusses the spontaneous food riots and strikes in the streets or at factories, mainly by housewives and female workers, that started at the end of 1915 and continued into 1916 (pp. 246-49). 46 This particular section of the flier reads: ‘Denkt daran und macht es ebenso wie die Frauen 1916, 1917, und 1918 gegen den Krieg demonstrierten. Wie sie ihre Männer aus dem Kriege zurückverlangten und sie halfen das Regime zu stürzen. So wie die Frauen im Weltkrieg durch ihre mutige Haltung mithalfen, das Weltgemetzel zu verkürzen, müssen die Frauen heute wieder mithelfen (Reflect and do as the women did in 1916, 1917 and 1918, who demonstrated against the war. Do as they did when they demanded that their men be brought back from the war, and when they helped overthrow the regime. Just as women during the First World War

52

The most widespread collective actions by German women appear to have hinged on the issue of labour. Although records are sketchy because they do not denote, by gender, who did what in factory strikes, women did have a presence there. They responded to Hitler’s demand for their increased labour power by widely refusing to contribute to war work in the factories. Large numbers of women declared that they were unable to work or that they could only do the easiest office tasks, while others claimed to be sick or simply did not show up for their jobs.47 Women objected to the poor wages, long hours, and heavy manual labour that were their lot as female workers, and they complained about the difficulty of meeting family obligations after working an eight- or ten-hour shift (Stephenson, p.107). The pressures of the war only multiplied the difficulties for women. They cited the blackouts, shortages of food and basic necessities, rationing, and long lines for provisions as reasons why they failed to appear for work (Mason, p.199). The suffering that women endured by the winter of 1942-1943, as food, coal, rations, and many services were reduced further and as they were subjected to increased bombing attacks and evacuation measures, added to their unwillingness to work (Mason, p.151; Stoltzfus, p.196). The first strikes and work slowdowns by women, with the goal of improving their wages, occurred as early as 1933. By the end of 1936, when women faced conscription into the armaments industry, conditions began to ripen for more extensive resistance beyond feigning illness, fabricating excuses, or failing to report to their jobs. Signs of unrest quickly surfaced within the ranks of female labourers, who responded by staging strikes. Hervé cites, among other actions, a 1938 protest in Chemnitz against a longer work day; a call in 1939 to armaments workers in a Berlin factory to denounce the hectic work pace, the bad meals, and the war and those who profited from it; and a work slowdown at the company Osram in Berlin (pp.71-2). Protesters attempted to decrease factory production by damaging tools and machines, producing faulty goods, and slowing down their pace of work, and they circulated pamphlets that called for sabotage (Wiggershaus, p.130). The Nazi leadership on the whole approached the matter of women and work with notable ambivalence, displaying a peculiar reticence and an unsystematic approach to enforcing its compulsory labour policies. Women who stayed away from their jobs were generally not punished at all (Wiggershaus, p.107), in part because their non-compliance was so widespread that officials could not track down and penalize all of the individuals involved. Since the conscription of female workers ran counter to the ideal of womanhood that the regime had promoted since its inception, leaders perhaps did not want to create the possibility of women acting autonomously in the public domain, suggests Stoltzfus.48 Finally, women represented a constituency whose support Hitler badly wanted.49 As Jill Stephenson points out in her major historical study, Women in Nazi Society, Nazi leaders needed the cooperation of the German people, and they took care ‘not to antagonise those who were “politically reliable”, “racially desirable”, and who were broadly content under Nazi rule as long as it made few demands on them’ (p.188). Women, as the mothers of their nation and the

helped to shorten carnage in the world through their courageous behaviour, so must women today help again) (Hervé, p.115). 47 Institut für Zeitgeschichte, MA#441/1, frames 2-750094-95, ‘Berichte zur Innenpolitischelage’, 16 October 1939, cited in Stephenson, p.107. 48 Stoltzfus, p.201. See also Wiggershaus, p.107, and Koonz, Mothers, p.397. 49 See Stoltzfus, p.262, and Mason, p.149.

53

guardians of its youth, fell into the category of people whom officials were at pains not to provoke. Germany’s military build-up and the war became targets of women’s dissension as well. Women rebelled on moral grounds as they expressed their rage over the victimization of family members killed because of the country’s warmongering. Some strikes and work slowdowns issued from women’s refusal to contribute to the nation’s war machine and, by extension, to the war itself through their work in the armaments factories. Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung makes a reference to women gathering together in 1936-1937 to protest the deaths of husbands and sons in the Spanish Civil War (p.328).50 Another incident, in November 1938, involved approximately three hundred women and children in Backnang/Württemberg who blocked the arrival of trains at stations designated for military transport (similar actions were taken in other cities). The women wanted to stop the evacuation, make the public aware of the possibility of war, and undermine the morale of the soldiers (Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung, p.332). Several years later, in spring 1942, Dresden witnessed one of the largest women’s rallies for Brot und Frieden (bread and peace), which was broken up only when the SS fired their weapons (pp.332, 335). Schefer observes that the tradition of collectively speaking out for Brot und Frieden prompted other actions in various parts of Germany (p.290). Milton speculates that such open displays of dissatisfaction with the war were likely not exceptions to the rule, though she notes that the nature of public protest in Germany has not yet been systematically examined (p.319). Although research is inconclusive, evidence suggests that German women’s public displays of discontent yielded some successes. Women’s collective acts of resistance registered an impact in the Third Reich that can be described as political, although the participants did not necessarily aim to advance a political agenda. For one, women’s dissatisfaction did not go unnoticed by Nazi leaders, who were in fact quite sensitive to their reactions and feared losing their support. Women’s defiance of the regime also reflected the ability to exert a measure of power within a state that sought to control its citizens’ every action. The practical effects of such public acts as obstructing transport operations and deportations are noteworthy because the police and the Gestapo sometimes acceded to women’s demands. Milton points out that the police who were ordered to break up the Witten demonstration sided with the protesters, believing that the women were in the right because local officials had failed to issue ration cards for the women and children who had been evacuated (p.319). There were broader implications, as well, for such protests contributed to undermining the morale of the regime. Koonz contends that resisters made headway against the dictatorship inasmuch as work slowdowns in factories interfered with production, and women’s unwillingness to work in the arms industry after 1939 exacerbated the shortage of labour (Mothers, p.340). Milton likewise acknowledges the state’s lack of firm control over its citizens when she says that, ‘empathy, war weariness, and police hesitancy to arrest German women must be explored as possible explanations for the success of [. . .] two larger female

50

54

Hervé also reports on this incident, saying that in 1936-1937 women in mourning dress assembled in front of the Defence District Headquarters to protest their sons’ and husbands’ participation in the Legion Condor (Condor Legion), the volunteer Wehrmacht (army) units that fought on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War (p.71).

demonstrations in February and November 1943.’51 The collective actions of women in Germany worked in a small, though not insignificant, way to chip away at the regime’s authority. German women’s resistance was necessarily more limited in scope than that of French women. Germany’s lack of a democratic and republican tradition that encouraged revolutionary and social protest, and the Hitler regime’s ruthlessness in bringing its citizens under its control through nazification and terror effectively circumscribed women’s resistance. The types of illegal work available to women were limited, they participated in fewer numbers, and their resistance lacked organizational structures to support it. For all of the outward differences between the anti-Nazism of women in Germany and that of women in France, however, women shared ways of perceiving who they could be as resisters, and their perceptions were filtered through the lens of powerful cultural messages.

51

Milton, pp.319-20. These were a protest at an old-age home for Jews and the Rosenstrasse protest, which will be discussed in chapter 6.

55

Chapter Three A Legacy of Activism: French Women and Resistance

La résistance était devenue pour nous une chose quotidienne, familière [. . .]. Il y avait sans doute plus de danger à vivre. Mais vivre est toujours dangereux.1 [Edith Thomas, Le Témoin compromis]

French women shared with German women many of the same experiences of social change generated by modernist trends in Europe, experiences that outwardly seemed to hold out the promise of broader freedom and greater equality. The generation of young French women in the 1930s had more opportunities to participate in public life, to take part in physical and recreational activity, and to wear less inhibited fashions.2 Yet women remained subject to cultural and social pressures that assigned them to home and family. Vichy ideology essentially represented a throwback to the conservative values and gender roles already well established in French society throughout the interwar years. The emergence of the resistance movements did little to disturb women’s (and men’s) acceptance of the traditional family structure. While French women found more extensive and varied opportunities to oppose Nazism than did German women, the majority of women in France continued to identify strongly with norms that prescribed what a woman should be, and women’s loyalty to these standards would, in turn, influence their perceptions of what were acceptable behaviours and roles for them as resisters. The Vichy regime came into existence when Paris surrendered to the Germans on 14 June 1940 and Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain took over the reins of power, moving the government to the resort town of Vichy in the south of France on 2 July. The National Assembly granted Pétain full powers and dissolved itself by 10 July. The Armistice called for France to be divided into two zones by a Demarcation Line, with three-fifths of the country’s territory located in the occupied northern zone, and the rest making up the unoccupied southern zone. The Pétain government, which can be characterized as more conservative and reactionary than fascist, found its identity mainly in French experience and history rather than the totalitarian Italian and German models.3 Vichy leaders spoke of renewing a spiritually demoralized France through the Révolution Nationale (National Revolution) that would enable the country to recover long-held traditions rooted in French Catholicism and a Christian morality and create an authoritarian social and political order. Pétain’s firm hand at first appealed to many people, including women, for the leader held out the promise of 1 2

3

(Resistance had become for us something that was everyday and familiar [. . .]. There was, without doubt, no more danger in living. But living is always dangerous) (Thomas, Témoin, p.112). Hélène Eck, ‘French Women under Vichy’, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, in A History of Women in the West, ed. by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, 5 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992-94), V, ed. by Françoise Thébaud, 194-225 (p.203). Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972), p.145.

stabilizing a society that had seemed on the brink of political and economic chaos and in the midst of a social and moral breakdown during the Third Republic.4 The status of French women inevitably became linked to the Vichy regime’s drive to strengthen the family and effect a return to traditional values. The family represented the most important organic social unit in Vichy’s plan to revitalize the nation by recovering French roots, as illustrated in its attempt to replace the values inherited from 1789: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, with a new credo: Travaille, Famille, Patrie (work, family, country). In the context of Vichy ideology, the family stood as a ‘source de vie, de valeurs morales’ (source of life, of moral values)5, and more importance was placed on it than on the individual or the state itself (Paxton, p.166). Seeking to coax women into returning to their ‘separate sphere’ in order to fulfil their ‘natural’ functions as wife and mother, Vichy defined even more sharply the already conservative gender roles in place before the war. Both the Church’s support of the patriarchal order and French civil law had long represented obstacles to women’s achieving greater equality in France. The Napoleonic Code, the legal foundation of French society, had stood in the way of women’s quest for rights, including the vote, since its framing in 1804. Backed by Church authority, the Code combined feudal concerns about birth and inheritance with the conservative values of the bourgeoisie, stressed respect for property, reinforced the importance of the family as a legitimate institution and provided for its protection, and underscored the man’s authority as head of the household. The Code literally assured woman’s inferior status by legally equating her with a minor. A wife was expected to obey her husband, while he in turn was duty bound to protect her. Women’s subordination was institutionalized (Albistur and Armogathe, II, 361-62). As in Germany, women in France had made little headway on either the political or the economic front. Traditional attitudes about the roles of females and males still prevailed in these arenas. The Senate voted down the issue of women’s suffrage time and again during the 1920s and ‘30s. The vote would elude females until 1944. Denied the right to vote, French women were effectively locked out of the male-controlled political system. Conservative social attitudes, particularly on the part of the peasantry, the largest single class in France, partly accounted for the lack of support for this cause. Politicians, moreover, generally deemed the suffrage issue too insignificant for serious attention.6 Women, for their part, shared the notion that politics was not a feminine endeavour. As historian Michelle Perrot observes, ‘the idea that politics was not for women, that they were not at home in the political world, remained until very recently embedded in the minds of both sexes. Women themselves have tended to accord higher value to social or informal than to political activity, thus internalising traditional norms.’7 The situation of working women in France mirrored that of German women insofar as job opportunities were limited to positions of the least skill and responsibility (Fishman, p.9). James F. McMillan argues in 4

5 6

7

René Rémond, Conclusion, La Gouvernement de Vichy, 1940-1942: Institutions et politiques (The government of Vichy, 1940-1942: institutions and politics), ed. by Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, (Paris: Colin, 1972), pp.291-309 (p.301); Kedward, Occupied, p.23. Aline Coutrot, ‘La Politique familiale’, in La Gouvernement de Vichy, 1940-1942 (see Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, above), pp.245-63 (p.262). Michelle Perrot, ‘The New Eve and the Old Adam: French Women’s Condition at the Turn of the Century’, in Behind the Lines (see Higonnet and others, above), pp.51-60 (p.54); James F. McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870-1940 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p.184. Michelle Perrot, ‘Women, Power and History: The Case of Nineteenth-century France’, in Women, State, and Revolution (see Reynolds, above), pp.44-59 (pp.58-59).

57

fact that the First World War, rather than creating employment opportunities for women, actually polarized gender roles more clearly because French society grew increasingly concerned about the vast loss of manpower and a declining birth-rate, and the mobilization of female workers emphasized the dichotomy between home and work (p.189). These issues still influenced people’s outlook in the years leading up to the Second World War. French feminism faced many of the same difficulties as German feminism in that the French movement found itself split between moderates and radicals, and its efforts to initiate social change finally foundered due in part to feminists’ trepidation in boldly confronting mainstream society. Moderate feminists had since the early 1870s steered a cautious course, committing themselves to working within established political structures and pursuing primarily institutional change. They refused to join cause with the radicals or socialists, and they disassociated themselves from women’s participation in past radical episodes, such as the Commune uprising, in which les pétroleuses (the women incendiaries) were said to have set fire to Paris. The radical feminists, in contrast, advocated women’s suffrage, promoted the cause of the working class, and adhered to a militant strategy, all of which set them at odds with the middle-class wing of the movement. The efforts of the radicals were hindered not only by the lack of support from the mainstream activists, who rejected extremism, but also by the government’s harsh put-down of political activity and its intolerance of open dissent.8 Fearful and timid, and confined mainly to reformist activities related to charitable and social causes, French feminism as a whole remained true to its middle-class origins, and consequently found itself unable to extend a meaningful challenge to deeply ingrained social systems that assigned females a subordinate status to men (McMillan, p.185). Although feminists did not succeed in their original purpose of achieving more equality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their early organizational efforts would have notable implications for women’s later anti-Nazi resistance by laying the crucial groundwork that would help solidify women’s resistance in France. For all practical purposes, the experiences of French women in the northern and southern zones did not differ substantially, either in terms of the daily problems they encountered, such as finding food and basic necessities, working, and dealing with the separation from family members, or in terms of the social measures and controls the Vichy leadership targeted at them. The German authorities in Paris and Berlin displayed little interest in Pétain’s Révolution Nationale; therefore, Vichy was relatively free to enact social legislation and apply it to both territories.9 The Commissariat Géneral à la Famille (General Office for the Family) not only had central offices in both Paris and Vichy, but it was able to extend its influence throughout the country by installing regional delegates (Coutrot, p.248). Vichy family policies reflected a continuation of concerns and initiatives that had developed in France after the First World War, although the Révolution Nationale actually surpassed its predecessors in terms of the reactionary content of its ideology and social legislation related to family issues. The work of the pro-natalist and familialist movements, which had emerged in the 1920s, culminated in the Code de la Famille (Family Code), a series of financial and legal programs implemented by the government on 29 September 1939 to stem the decreasing number of births (p.247). Pétain’s administration injected these 8 9

58

See Theodore Zeldin, France: 1848-1945, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973-77), I, chapter 13. Henri Michel, ‘La Révolution nationale: Latitude d’action du gouvernement de Vichy’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, 81 (1971), 3-22 (pp.5-6); Kedward, Occupied, p.26.

same issues of fertility and reproduction and patriarchal rights within the family with ideological values as a way of galvanizing national strength and pride.10 French women were assigned to the separate sphere of the home just as German women had been. The historian Miranda Pollard sums up the regime’s stance on the question of woman’s role when she comments, ‘the common good relied on the maintenance of a strict sexual division of labour’ (p.40). The image of the ideal French woman, that is, the nurturing peasant wife tending the land and caring for the home, embodied the virtues of the soil and the family, both of which were to be the source of France’s salvation (Kedward, Occupied, p.25). The country would regain an awareness of its national heritage through the land. Women would produce the future citizens of a strong nation. The Hitler and Pétain regimes, while relatively similar in their conservative visions of womanhood and in the substance of their family policies, differed in the means they employed to achieve social goals. Certainly the two dictatorships resembled one another in their fundamental approaches to the status of women, inasmuch as both transformed motherhood into ideology based on concerns for racial purity, exalted women’s roles of giving birth and mothering, and proposed separate spheres for the two sexes (Pollard, p.40). The Vichy concept of la femme au foyer (the woman at the hearth) evoked images and themes of motherhood and domesticity, as did the Nazi Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) ethos. French and German women alike were to contribute to their societies by bearing children and raising these future citizens for the benefit of their nations. Yet Vichy was not simply imitating Nazi policy or conforming to the orders of the German occupier in returning woman to the home, as Pollard makes clear (p.40). The overall tone of the Vichy propaganda was less vehement and the social measures less extreme than similar Nazi undertakings. Vichy did not deliberately exclude women from certain areas of public life, nor did it attempt to bring them under the direct control of the state through government-sponsored organizations for girls and women or through the enactment of measures to require women’s compulsory labour (Eck, p.206; Hervé, p.23). The Vichy family program shied away from an overtly political tone in an effort not to provoke German authorities, and it also rejected the militaristic, racist images and language characteristic of Nazism.11 While the strains of French nationalism did colour the messages to women as leaders sought to revive French values of family, soil, and work, Vichy propaganda was grounded in moral and religious standards that the Third Reich did not hesitate to abandon and to replace with racial concerns (Pollard, p.39; Paxton, p.222). The Pétain regime was interested in race insofar as its efforts to reclaim the past signified a desire to purify France by rejecting alien influences; yet, French leaders did not display the ruthlessness of the Nazis in attempting to enforce racial goals. Vichy leaders, like their Nazi counterparts, embarked on a systematic campaign of social pressure, propaganda, financial inducements, and legal controls to exalt the woman and encourage her return to the home. Many French women, pleased at first with the regime’s support for the institution of the family and with the prospect of financial aid, were sympathetic to the ideology of the Révolution Nationale (Eck, p.202), but they would soon enough 10

Miranda Pollard, ‘Women and the National Revolution’, in Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology, ed. by H.R. Kedward and Roger Austin (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1985), pp.36-47 (p.36). 11 Pollard points out another distinction between the two regimes’ approaches, noting that, ‘though an integral and specific element of Vichy’s political culture [. . .] women were not addressed as directly or explicitly as in fascist discourse’ (p.36).

59

begin to see the contradictions between the regime’s promises and a daily reality of hardship and deprivation. A law passed in March 1942 required girls to take compulsory classes in various aspects of domestic life.12 The regime also ordered educational staff to award fewer passing grades to girls than boys on the baccalauréat examinations that determined graduation from the lycée, or secondary school (Kedward, Occupied, p.26). A widespread propaganda effort in the form of school plays, travelling exhibits, programs on the radio, and discussions in the collaborationist press aimed to raise public awareness of motherhood and the family (Kline, p.375; Coutrot, p.257). The state revived the practice (begun in 1920) of awarding the medaille de la Famille Française (Medal of the French Family) to mothers of at least five children, and encouraged the celebration of la fête des mères (Mother’s Day) on 31 May. Efforts to encourage women to have more children took other forms, as Vichy officials continued the practice, begun during the interwar period, of providing family allowances that would encourage working couples to have more children. The husband of the mater nationalis (mother of the nation), a woman with three or more children, received a better job or won the right to work overtime (Paxton, p.167). Additionally, the government availed itself of measures to discourage women’s employment, for example, by distributing cash grants to women (with or without a family) who stayed home and by paying women lower wages for work that was equal to men’s. Vichy social legislation related to divorce, birth control, and abortion was intended to reinforce the institution of the family, but it actually erased the social, economic, and political advances women had made over recent decades. The Pétain administration improved pre- and post-natal care and singled out mothers with large families for special benefits (pregnant women and mothers with three or more children received greater food allowances), all with the goal of restoring France’s national strength by increasing its population. In contrast to the Nazis’ easing of divorce laws, the Vichy regime made divorce more difficult to obtain as a way of restoring conservative social values (Coutrot, pp.251-52). Abortion was now considered a crime against the state and was punishable by death. The Pétain regime did not attempt to coerce women into working in French factories, as the Nazis had required German women to do during the Third Reich’s military build-up. However, French women did become ensnared in the forced labour initiative that sent French workers to Germany as part of an exchange for French prisoners of war. Whether women worked out of necessity at home in France or as draftees in Germany, their labour exposed the basic manipulation behind Vichy’s pledges to honour womanhood. Since Vichy placed such an emphasis on the woman as wife and mother, observes Kedward, women who had young children were reluctant to work, and those who did so were stigmatized (Occupied, p.6). The government offered financial allowances with the intention of enabling women to stay at home; yet, the usually insufficient sums of money often necessitated that women take jobs, particularly if their husbands were prisoners of war. Working outside the home doubled a woman’s responsibilities if she also had a family to look out for. The issue of work contributed to French women’s sense of oppression and, eventually, to the motivation to resist the Vichy regime and the Germans. French resisters had significantly more latitude for action than did German anti-Nazis. The underground movement in France, while hardly an example of seamless unity, was nevertheless more cohesive than the German resistance. Resisters could count on public 12

60

Loi du 18 mars 1942, cited in Pollard, p.41.

support rooted in a strong national pride and French tradition. Opposition to foreign troops in occupied European countries counted as evidence of one’s patriotism; therefore, loyalty to their country demanded that French citizens help remove the German invader from their soil.13 The nation’s republican heritage and its history of a liberal, democratic tradition provided both inspiration and a historical basis for resisters’ activity. The public could identify with the symbolic figures of French revolutionary movements who had waged successful struggles for freedom over centuries. In contrast to the German values of loyalty, duty, and obedience, which effectively inhibited anti-Nazi opposition in the Third Reich, the French prized tolerance, equality, freedom, and individuality, ideals that in turn drove them to resist Nazism. The clandestine press invoked historical examples of collective protest (the 1789 Revolution, the Commune uprising, the Dreyfus Affair, and the Popular Front) and republican values as a means of encouraging opposition against the Germans.14 The entire country was plagued with social and economic problems that lingered after the defeat and the ensuing exode (flight of refugees). These difficulties at first impeded resistance but would eventually become a mainspring in driving the French to rebel against the Germans in the north and the Vichy leadership in the south. The war had dispersed many people, making it impossible for them to unify against the foreign occupier. During the invasion, approximately ten percent of the population, mainly women, children, and the elderly, had fled to southern France. Thousands of people remained dislocated, and the Demarcation Line separated many family members. Some ninety thousand French soldiers had been killed, and two million French men were in prisoner-of-war camps. In addition to the displacement of large numbers of people, the nation faced grave economic difficulties because it was impossible to conduct trade and distribute goods via the usual transportation routes, which were now blocked. The industrial north was more heavily populated and contained more resources than the agricultural south, and France suffered from the division, which separated the two mutually dependent territories. The exorbitant costs of the German occupation exacerbated these problems. The British blockade prevented supplies of fuel, rubber, and tropical foods from reaching France. Industrial production slowed, and the use of automobiles was hindered by fuel shortages.15 Shortages of food, supplies, and coal grew increasingly acute in both zones. At the end of September 1940, bread and meat had to be rationed, and by 1941 millions of people felt the effects of malnutrition.16 The German invasion and the division of France proved unsettling for many people, and the sense of social chaos would last throughout most of 1941 (Kedward, Resistance, p.229). France had not anticipated the war and the swift defeat, followed by the occupation, which had led to the presence of German soldiers in the northern half of the country. The public mood everywhere was one of shock. Certainly, in the aftermath of France’s surrender, 13

Karl Hildebrand, Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich) (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1980), pp.105-06. Kedward, Resistance, pp.150, 185. Kedward reports that during demonstrations in France on 14 July 1942 (for which the resistance and the BBC had prepared the public), 100,000 people participated in Lyons, 100,000 in Marseilles, 15,000 in Toulouse, and 5,000 in many smaller towns. Le Populaire, no. 3, 15 July 1942, cited in Resistance, p.217n. 15 Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.15. 16 John A. Lukacs, The Last European War, September 1939-December 1941 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976), pp.193-94. See also Sweets, who expresses the opinion that the occupation brought more hunger and deprivation to people in urban centres than to residents of rural areas, who still had fairly good supplies of food (Politics, pp.26-27). 14

61

many citizens viewed any type of anti-Nazi or anti-Vichy activism with apathy or ambivalence. Having lived through the Great War some twenty years earlier, the majority of people were now interested mainly in their own physical survival and in providing for their families in whatever way they could. Any impetus for resistance was weakened by the fact that initially there was no reason to reject the legal authority of Pétain and his regime at Vichy, which was operating at the behest of the Germans on French soil and under the auspices of French leaders (Weitz, Sisters, p.26). Pétain, a hero of World War I, enjoyed broad respect from an admiring French public. With his promises to bring back the French soldiers held in prisoner-of-war camps, the elderly General in fact embodied hope for many people. Moreover, popular sentiment held that behind the scenes Pétain was playing a ‘double game’: standing firm against the Germans and actually biding his time until he could rescue France. There was, at the same time, no other option at hand for governing the country because all of the political parties had crumbled, their leaders choosing to remain silent or else to express support for the Vichy regime. Sweets sums up the general mood when he writes, ‘to choose resistance in 1940 seemed neither logical nor prudent’ (Politics, p.10). Initial resistance efforts within France had no connection to the initiatives or the leadership of de Gaulle, who had broadcast a speech from London on 18 June 1940 (typically regarded as the start of the French resistance), in which he appealed to the French people to continue to resist and pledged to lead France against the German occupier. Winston Churchill’s government formally recognized de Gaulle as head of the Forces Françaises Libres on 28 June, and began providing financial backing not only for the General’s organization but for other underground movements in France as well.17 The aim of the Forces Françaises Libres was to undermine the Nazi war effort by gathering intelligence about Germany’s military plans for invading England and then transmitting this information to Britain. A month later, Churchill established the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to promote guerrilla activity and help the partisan groups that would foment rebellion against the Nazis in the occupied countries and ‘set Europe ablaze’, in the British leader’s famous phrase. SOE made thousands of parachute drops of weapons, ammunition, and explosives for partisan units in the French countryside. Although de Gaulle had anointed himself head of the French movement, he was actually quite cut off from resistance developments within France itself. None of the emerging organizations backed the General at first. Preoccupied with the practical necessities of finding resources and individuals with the skill and expertise to carry out their own spontaneous initiatives, these groups viewed de Gaulle as primarily a source for funds, weapons, and propaganda. The heads of the developing organizations carefully guarded their own autonomy and were wary of submitting to the General’s authority. De Gaulle, for his part, could not conceive of a non-military resistance movement, and therefore remained relatively uninformed about the rise of these clandestine groups in France. The earliest instances of resistance arose spontaneously out of the disarray of French life after the defeat, as individuals and small circles of friends or relatives throughout both territories responded in anger to the circumstances created by the German invasion. By the beginning of 1941, restrictions by the Nazis in the occupied zone and by the Vichy authorities 17

62

See Rossiter for a discussion of the escape lines Alliance and Comet that were established by the British Secret Intelligence Service to help prevent British prisoners of war from being captured in occupied France and to bring them safely back to England (pp.24-31, 113-14). See also Fourcade’s memoir, L’Arche de Noé, above.

in the free zone, as well as the degrading living conditions throughout the country had begun to spark isolated acts of opposition all over France. The resistance movements initially attracted those individuals who had been the first to feel the effects of Vichy’s repression, including public schoolteachers, university professors, and journalists. Career military men did not join the resistance in great numbers as their profession led them to remain loyal to Pétain and his regime (Sweets, Politics, p.15). Subversive activity within both zones focused on collecting weapons, providing food and hiding places for political refugees, and producing false identity papers. Since no coordination existed among these hastily formed organizations, many of them wrote and distributed their own propaganda and leaflets. The production of clandestine newspapers quickly became the most effective way for an organization to assert its existence and claim an identity, to counter Nazi and Vichy propaganda, and to recruit members (p.43). Resistance groups in the north also concentrated on gathering information about the German military and making arrangements to help downed British pilots, French prisoners of war, and Jews escape across the Demarcation Line to the southern territory. Although many of these early circles lacked staying power, they played a significant role in building solidarity and sustaining morale among like-minded individuals. Numerous groups quickly fell prey to the Gestapo and the Vichy police because the resisters, not realizing the hazards involved, too easily placed their trust in their fellow French citizens. Entire organizations were wiped out as the result of having been infiltrated and turned over to authorities by French collaborators. Each of the two zones faced unique social, political, and economic conditions that would influence the course of resistance within its boundaries. In the northern urban areas, opposition arose at the very outset of the occupation, since French citizens there had a visible target for their rage in the figures of the German soldiers who patrolled the streets and occupied public buildings and factories that were requisitioned to supply the Nazi war machine. The Germans ran the press and the radio, both of which disseminated propaganda, and they controlled the written correspondence of people trying to stay in touch with family members across the Demarcation Line. Newspapers and books were subjected to strict censorship, and paper and printing supplies were rationed. Resistance circles were smaller and less firmly established in the northern zone, where opposition was extremely risky from the very beginning due to the unrelenting presence of the German police and the occupying troops. Paris, the intellectual heart of France, became the centre of resistance in the north. As early as October 1940, numerous groups had already established themselves in Paris, and underground newspapers were proliferating.18 These organizations engendered a good deal of public sympathy and support early on. Activists in the occupied territory conceived of resistance entirely in military terms since their task was to drive out the foreign invader (Sweets, Politics, pp.19, 22). In addition to building ties with other opposition circles, groups in the north published clandestine tracts and newspapers, collected weapons, and made plans for future sabotage operations (Kedward, Resistance, p.49). The five major resistance organizations that emerged in this zone were: Organisation Civile et Militaire (Civil and Military Organization), Libération-Nord (Liberation-North), Ceux de la Libération (Those of the Liberation), Ceux de la Résistance (Those of the Resistance), and Défense de la France (Defence of France). 18

Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir (New York: Summit Books, 1990), p.253.

63

While political and social conditions in the southern zone were less repressive on the whole, resisters faced a more complex set of circumstances than their counterparts in the north who directed their opposition at a clearly defined foreign enemy. Resistance in the unoccupied territory assumed a political rather than a military cast as individuals reacted against the policies of the Vichy collaborationists rather than the Germans alone (Sweets, Politics, pp.21-22). The clandestine movements in the south had to come to terms with ambiguous issues as they challenged not only the legitimate French government at Vichy but also a popular leader in the figure of Pétain. The web of clandestine activity in the unoccupied territory was broader and underground circles were more resilient than in the north because Vichy authorities were less likely to stage devastating raids. Kedward notes that between 1940 and 1941 resistance groups held their meetings in schools, libraries, and cafés without any repercussions, though such discussions tapered off by 1942 and by 1944 did not take place at all (Occupied, p.49). Repression existed in the form of the government’s issuance of official guidelines for the press and its censorship of radio broadcasts. As the country’s economic and social woes mounted, people responded to Vichy’s anti-Semitic actions, the banning of trade unions, the scarcity of food, and the suppression of social and political rights by increasingly turning against the regime. The city of Lyons established itself as the centre of resistance operations in the south, and early groups emerged in university towns such as Clermont-Ferrand, Toulouse, and Montpellier (Sweets, Politics, p.14). Three major movements came into existence in the southern zone: Franc-Tireur (Irregular), Combat, and Libération-Sud. The smallest of these organizations, the leftist, Catholic Franc-Tireur was dominated by former radicals and ex-communists, and its underground journal, Le Franc-Tireur, which first appeared in December 1941, espoused democratic and republican values. With the goal of assembling a clandestine paramilitary organization that would help liberate France, Frenay had formed Combat in November 1941 by merging his organization, Vérités (Truths), with the circles Liberté and Groupes Francs. Combat, which quickly outgrew the other movements in the unoccupied zone, was defined by its political and military aims. Libération-Sud, under the direction of the journalist and intellectual Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, served a primarily propaganda function by circulating its clandestine journal. Libération-Sud’s membership, consisting of radical socialists and trade unionists, devoted much of its attention to recruiting members of the working-class (pp.3639, 42-46). The Parti Communiste Française (PCF; French Communist Party) remained on the sidelines as the French resistance gathered momentum during the latter half of 1940 and early 1941. Not until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941, did the French communists move into action. Suspicious of the Soviet Union after its signing of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact on 24 August 1939, Premier Édouard Daladier had outlawed the PCF in late September 1939 and dissolved its organizations. The French government arrested party functionaries, communist supporters and sympathizers, and labour leaders by the thousands. Other repressive measures followed as communist newspapers, such as L’Humanité (Humanity) and Ce soir (This evening), were banned. The party, crippled by the official crackdown, was forced underground where it secretly reconstituted itself. Its clandestine political activities were at first limited to publishing mimeographed editions of L’Humanité. Milton Dank observes that during the first year of the occupation, communists in the northern zone were able to find ways of continuing their underground work because

64

the German authorities deliberately overlooked their actions, even protecting the party occasionally.19 The situation was quite different for communists operating in the south as French authorities continued to keep them under surveillance and to arrest and jail them. The PCF was in many ways better prepared for subversive activity than its neophyte underground counterparts on the left and the right. Communist Party members and sympathizers had fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, had experience in operating covertly, and already had an operational structure in place. Party leaders organized the Front National (National Front) in May 1941, with the aim of building a network that would span both the occupied and the unoccupied territories, and embrace other (noncommunist) political parties as well as resistance groups of various religious and philosophical orientations. The Front National formulated plans for paramilitary action against the Germans, including sabotage of military installations and the assassination of German officers. In the opinion of Sweets, the ‘Communist doctrine of guerrilla warfare, calling for widespread immediate action, spectacular sabotage, and attacks on the occupation troops, was particularly attractive to most resisters who desired above all to fight the Germans’ (Politics, p.123). The communists perceived London’s role as one of collecting and disseminating intelligence to the Front National (p.124). The Roman Catholic Church took only a minimal role in opposing the Vichy regime and the Germans. Much as the Protestant and Catholic Churches had earlier welcomed the Nazis in Germany, church leaders in largely Catholic France saw an ally in the conservative Vichy regime. They believed that Pétain, with his message of moral order, would help restore the Church’s authority and the traditional values that had been undermined in the early decades of the century by secularist anti-clerical forces. Church officials therefore used their position to encourage public support for Pétain. Church leaders as a body failed to respond to the plight of the French Jews, something that Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton attribute not only to Pétainist sympathy but also to anti-Semitic attitudes. They note as well that while the Church did not address the issue of Vichy’s racial laws, neither did the communists, the socialists, nor the Gaullists (pp.198-99, 207). Between 1940 and 1941, before the Germans had even issued their demands for actions against the Jews, Vichy began to initiate more than 160 anti-Jewish laws and decrees of its own. Vichy laws frequently exceeded German orders, and were applied in both the occupied and the unoccupied territories. Jews were required to wear the yellow Star of David badge, were banned from public office and work in the press, film, and radio, and many lost their property when it was taken over by the state. Beginning in March 1942, the first Jews were deported from France to concentration camps. During the period of the occupation, over 75,000 Jews were deported. Only when the round-ups of Jews began on a massive scale in the summer of 1942 did clergy members speak out, and even then the protesting voices were those of Protestants and left-wing Catholics (pp.203-06), not official representatives of the institution of the Catholic Church. From the time that the French resistance began to gather strength in late 1941, it was beset with divisions between the left and the right, between communists and noncommunists, and between those operating in the occupied and unoccupied zones. French underground organizations differed over the most effective ways to resist and the goals they wanted to achieve. They also disagreed on the aim of propaganda and continually competed 19

Milton Dank, The French Against the French (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1974), pp.106-07.

65

with one another for a limited amount of money and materials. Ties continued to be strained as well between the networks within France and the Forces Françaises Libres under de Gaulle’s command in London. In late December 1941, having convinced de Gaulle of the need to unite these diverse organizations under the General’s leadership, Jean Moulin began meeting with groups throughout France. He established links among groups in the north, and also met with the heads of the major movements in the south. Moulin finally offered the local organizations a share of the movement’s inadequate financial and material resources as well as communication with the Forces Françaises Libres in exchange for their support of de Gaulle. The portrait of the French resistance that began to develop in mid-1942 was very different from that of 1940-1941. People joined the movement in greater numbers. Acts of opposition were now inspired by an increasing sense of dissatisfaction with the grinding difficulties of living under the occupation and discontent with oppressive Vichy measures (Sweets, Politics, p.18). Thousands of people remained uprooted from their homes, and shortages of food and basic necessities had grown more severe. When Prime Minister Pierre Laval instituted the relève (relief) program in May 1942, many people experienced the effects of political repression even more directly. For every three French labourers who volunteered to work in Germany, one French prisoner of war would be sent home. Initially, the recruitment of French workers was entirely voluntary; however, when the number of volunteers began to fall off, the Pétain government imposed more stringent measures, passing legislation that required men between the ages of eighteen and fifty, and single women between twenty-one and thirty-five to be available to work (Kedward, Resistance, p.224). The Service du Travail Obligatoire (Compulsory Labour Service) was then established on 16 February 1943, at which time men were ordered to register to work. In order to meet German demands for workers, Vichy began to draft entire male age groups; workers and peasants were the most vulnerable to these policies.20 The general public responded to the forced labour initiative with vocal public protests and demonstrations throughout both zones.21 Resistance organizations had grown more powerful as they shed their initial naïveté for a more realistic and long-term perspective. They could now rely on a base of experience and knowledge in order to build organizational structures and find ways to increase their strength by broadening their networks (Kedward, Occupied, p.50). Communist combat groups, which had started to form in August 1941, initially in Paris, began efforts to establish the maquis, the paramilitary units of young peasants and workers who had fled into the hilly countryside to escape the forced labour initiative.22 The clandestine Communist Central Committee had recruited youth to carry out terrorist actions and derail trains as a way of demonstrating resistance against the Germans and the Vichy dictatorship. These groups, later known as Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP; Irregulars and Guerrillas), became the military branch of the Front National, and they spread to the south to organize the maquis.23 20

Sweets, Politics, p.27. Although men were drafted by entire age groups and women were not, women were compelled to serve the Germans by working in other capacities in France (Rossiter, p.165). 21 Marie-Louise Coudert and Paul Helene, Elles, la résistance (They, the resistance) (Paris: Messidor/Temps Actuels, 1983), pp.15-16; UFF, p.49. 22 The term maquis denotes the scrubby underbrush native to the hills of Corsica; this was the traditional hiding place of outlaws. 23 Officers of the French Armistice Army (which had been dissolved by the Germans) later refused to join the maquis after the German occupation of the entire country (Sweets, Politics, p.15).

66

The maquis, armed with weapons supplied by England or stolen from the French police, launched attacks against German soldiers, blew up railroad lines, bridges, and viaducts, and bombed German-occupied factories. The forested and mountainous terrain of the south, dotted with villages, lent itself to this form of guerrilla action. The maquis camps were therefore more prevalent in the southern regions, such as Haute Savoie and the Auvergne, than in towns and urban settings of the north, where units played a support role for those in the south (Thomas, Témoin, p.145). Once Germany invaded the south on 11 November 1942 and occupied all of France, underground organizations in both the northern and southern regions forged links as the Demarcation Line was subsequently abolished. The French resistance at this point consisted of a wide array of activities, including printing and distributing of clandestine newspapers and journals, gathering intelligence, providing social services for families of prisoners of war, organizing strikes and protests at factories, running escape networks, and maintaining safe houses that sheltered Jews, political refugees, and members of the underground. The three major movements had groups operating in all areas of the south (Sweets, Politics, p.49). At the beginning of 1943, with the war at a turning point and Vichy repression escalating, the resistance became more coordinated (Hervé, p.25). The underground began retaliating against the milice (militia), a paramilitary force aimed at wiping out resistance that was modelled on the German SS and was made up of French supporters on the right and far right who professed anti-communist and anti-Semitic views. Resisters targeted leaders and members of this police force for assassination. A web of resistance organizations now spanned France. Three Gaullist networks: Combat, Libération, and Franc-Tireur, joined together to form the Mouvements Unis de Résistance (MUR; United Resistance Movements) in January 1943.24 A month later, de Gaulle directed Moulin to establish the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR; National Council of the Resistance), which would unite groups in the north and the south. The first meeting of the CNR was held on 27 May, with Moulin as president. The majority of non-communist underground groups throughout the whole of France had come to recognize de Gaulle as head of the resistance movement. On 21 June 1943, the Gestapo arrested Moulin and other resistance chiefs and tortured them. Moulin died as a result of his injuries, but the CNR continued its work under the leadership of Georges Bidault. The strength of the partisan groups continued to grow, and in February 1944 these paramilitary organizations officially united under the banner of Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (French Interior Forces).25 That same month, MUR became the Mouvement de la Libération Nationale (Movement for National Liberation), as several organizations in the north joined those in the south. From a military perspective, the flamboyant acts of sabotage and guerrilla fighting that were for so long the centrepiece of historical accounts of the French resistance—and that have long signified resistance in the popular imagination—actually posed no serious military threat and amounted to little more than an irritation for the Germans. The noted military historian John Keegan contends that these underground movements did not contribute materially to Germany’s defeat as they lacked the expertise or the training to take on skilled 24

Within a year, at the end of 1943, ‘the MUR was unquestionably the best structured, most highly diversified resistance movement in France’, observes Sweets (Politics, p.68). 25 The military organizations of the resistance that united under the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur banner included the Armée Sécrète (Secret Army), individuals from the former French Armistice Army, the Groupes Francs, the maquis, and the FTP.

67

German troops that had no qualms about summarily destroying these organizations.26 The rough terrain of southern France further hindered guerrillas from operating effectively and also made it more difficult for allied forces to provide them with much-needed matériel. Moreover, in its army and security forces, as well as France’s domestic police force, Germany had the resources to efficiently manage the French citizens under its control at little cost to itself. Resisters, on the other hand, frequently paid for their actions with their lives (pp.484-90). The power of the French resistance resided, instead, in its ability to provide the public with symbolic and psychological support. The clandestine press, mass protests and strikes, escape lines, and social work for families of prisoners of war boosted public morale and generated solidarity among the French people. Sweets has found evidence in government files of the effectiveness of resistance propaganda in manipulating the public mood against the Vichy regime and the Germans and slowing the Nazi repression (Choices, p.202). These movements overcame the public’s initial apathy and detachment, reminding people that a foreign invader now occupied French soil and underlining the blatant contradictions between Vichy’s promises and its actions. For several decades after the war, the many seams and cracks in the French resistance were papered over by a highly romanticized myth that the entire French nation, led by de Gaulle’s Forces Françaises Libres, had taken up arms in a valorous struggle against Nazism. The General himself initiated this myth with his speech on 25 August 1944 about the liberation of Paris.27 Official political channels claimed that this legend had a healing effect: the nation would find strength and renewal by looking back at its people’s noble actions and forgetting the shame of defeat by the Germans. In his study of history and memory in France, The Vichy Syndrome, Henry Rousso asserts that, ‘at the time of the Liberation the General laid two main cornerstones: the obliteration of Vichy and the redefinition of the Resistance as an abstraction, an achievement not of the résistants but of “the nation as a whole”’ (p.71). The media and public ceremonies sanctioned the Gaullist myth, which would become the standardized version of the past for the next twenty years or so. Ironically, the myth did not focus attention on the partisan fighters or the resistance as a movement. Yet not only Gaullists but also other conservatives and those on the left were satisfied with this interpretation of the war years because it enabled them to cast themselves as part of the collective movement that had freed the nation. Reluctant to challenge its veracity and to raise the unseemly issue of collaboration, people across the political spectrum contributed to the myth’s staying power, with the result that Vichy’s complicity in Nazi war crimes was not discussed or investigated. The aura surrounding the revered Pétain was maintained, and he was portrayed as having stood up to the Germans as best he could. Blame for France’s anti-Semitic policies was assigned to a small group of collaborators in the upper echelons of power, such as Laval, who were said to have pushed Pétain to accede to the severe measures proposed by the Germans. Vichy was regarded as somehow separate from the ‘true’ France. Finally, the image of the French people was that of a unified resistance that existed in the shadows, actively opposed to the

26 27

68

John Keegan, The Second World War (New York: Viking, 1989), p.490. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p.16.

Vichy regime and eager for liberation.28 The initial studies of the French resistance were begun in the 1950s and ‘60s under the direction of Henri Michel, head of the Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (CHDGM) and a specialist on the resistance.29 The historical research of Michel and the CHDGM focused on the major non-communist organizations that had engaged in paramilitary activity, and their work gave credence to the Gaullist myth. It was not until the mid-‘60s that the communist resistance came into the spotlight.30 With the impetus of the 1968 student movement and the rise of a new generation of historians, evidence of an unflattering and decidedly unglamorous reality began to come to light and the painful process of demystifying the French resistance began. Marcel Ophuls’s classic 1971 documentary film, Le Chagrin et la pitié (The sorrow and the pity), revealed deep anti-Semitic feeling among French people in southern France, which suggested that Vichy’s actions were as much due to factors intrinsic to France itself as to demands by the Nazis. The publication of Paxton’s groundbreaking study, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, in 1972, further contributed to the erosion of the myth. Paxton’s careful research underlined Vichy’s willingness to collaborate with the Germans as early as the summer of 1940 and revealed the extent to which Vichy policies against the Jews issued not from Nazi pressure but rather from the French regime’s own goals. Paxton’s work set the stage for the next twenty-five years of scholarship on collaboration and resistance in France. One effect of the subsequent re-evaluation of these issues is that historians have rendered the lines between collaboration and resistance less distinct. Veillon, for instance, demonstrates that some resistance leaders had no qualms about placing their trust in Pétain and also fighting the Germans. François Mitterrand and Frenay are just two examples of individuals who, at least for a time, were sympathetic to Pétain and also strongly antiNazi.31 Other historians have taken a comparative approach, examining the French experience alongside that of other European countries that collaborated with the Germans.32 Rousso makes the point that scholars associated with the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (which assumed the work of the CHDGM in the late 1970s) ‘tended to see World War II as part of a larger context, a “history of the late twentieth century” extending from 1939 to the present’ (p.258). The picture of wartime France has changed, too, as social and cultural historians have examined various facets of everyday life in Vichy and under the German occupation: the experience of youth, the status of women, the role of the Protestant and the Catholic Church, and economic forces, popular attitudes and cultural trends.33 28 29

30 31 32 33

Sarah Fishman and Leonard V. Smith, Introduction, France at War: Vichy and the Historians, ed. by Sarah Fishman and others, trans. by David Lake (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), pp.1-9 (pp.2-3). Henri Michel, Les Mouvements clandestins en Europe (1938-1945) (The clandestine movements in Europe (1938-1945)), 2nd edn (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), and Les Courants de pensée de la Résistance (The currents of thought of the resistance) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962). Rousso, p.249. See Rousso’s discussion of the historiography of the occupation in his Vichy Syndrome, chapter 6, ‘Vectors of Memory’. Dominique Veillon, ‘The Resistance and Vichy’, in France at War (see Fishman and others, above), pp.16177. See France at War: Vichy and the Historians, ed. by Sarah Fishman and others, trans. by David Lake (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000). See Fishman and others, and Rousso, pp.259-60.

69

Scholars of the French resistance have not yet offered their thoughts on a typology of resistance, although Veillon has suggested the need for such a discussion (‘Resistance’). Nevertheless, research into rural areas and into regional and local studies has led to a shift away from the heroic ideal of organized resistance. Kedward, whose scholarship has been instrumental in bringing attention to the popular resistance of groups and individuals, speaks of resistance not as ‘just a small pressure group or an élite military corps’, but ‘an alternative way of life in Vichy France’ (Resistance, p.247). Likewise, Sweets, who investigated resistance in Clermont-Ferrand and the Auvergne, argues for an appreciation of the ‘phenomenon of resistance’ rather than a limited definition.34 Both Veillon and Rousso have suggested that perhaps the time has arrived for a more accurate assessment of the French resistance.35 Revisionists have challenged conventional thinking about the movement in France by drawing attention to an array of participants, including nuns and priests, physicians (who helped young men evade the labour draft by signing false certificates of physical disability), leftist and communist organizations, and women. The task remains for scholars to acknowledge formally the contributions of women and others to the French movement. The less repressive social and political atmosphere in occupied and unoccupied France generated possibilities for French resisters that German anti-Nazis within the totalitarian Third Reich could only hope for in vain. The relative freedom to engage in a variety of forms of opposition and the French people’s, as well as the Allies’, support for these movements established a solid foundation for the anti-German and anti-Vichy actions of French women. Not only was the PCF instrumental in creating venues for females through its strenuous efforts to organize women’s resistance, but the extensive array of noncommunist networks that eventually covered the two zones offered a solid base for women’s activism as well. Women in France had historically enjoyed greater independence and autonomy than German women, something that would be reflected in French women’s more wide-ranging activities. The French feminist movement additionally provided a unifying point for women’s involvement and a kind of infrastructure around which to organize resistance groups and a clandestine press (Hervé, pp.123, 134). French women engaged in ‘masculine’ forms of resistance: as combatants, messengers, partisans, and makers of explosives. Although they did not rise to leadership positions in the French resistance on an equal basis with men, more women held positions of responsibility and authority than did women in Germany (p.120). When the PCF went underground in 1939, women took advantage of the opportunity to play significant roles in this clandestine movement before the party began to regroup and gender labels were applied to many resistance functions. The communists favoured unconventional types of combat, and therefore women found more possibilities for participating in paramilitary activity in these organizations than in non-communist networks. Some female party members became the first liaison agents, maintaining lines of communication with the party leadership in hiding, while others participated in paramilitary operations (Schwartz, p.128). The heads of the communist networks FTP and Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur ‘[promoted] women who had seniority in the movement or in the party demonstrated capacities for clandestine work, and moral and physical endurance [. . .] to the very top of the underground partisan organi34 35

70

Sweets, Choices, p.224. Emphasis in original. Veillon, ‘Resistance’, p.174; Rousso, p.260.

zations’ (p.146). Female liaison agents working for the PCF transported weapons and hid them in certain locations in preparation for terrorist assaults. Although guerrilla activity and sabotage remained for the most part the responsibility of men, some French women did assume primary roles as organizers and leaders of male teams of maquisards; others instructed groups of saboteurs and partisan fighters in the use of weapons and explosives. Women also planned the reception of supply and arms drops by parachute and oversaw the doling out of supplies and money, and they occasionally took part in combat operations.36 As the liberation approached and paramilitary units prepared for the anticipated street battles, women were offered fewer roles as combatants, although they did make their way into high-level administrative and liaison positions at the national and regional levels (Schwartz, p.146). According to Weitz, communist resistance leaders ordered women to be phased out of the FTP maquis beginning in late 1943 because they wanted to unite these various groups into a ‘single professional national military organization, with an all-male force’ (Sisters, p.149). Other military-related organizations afforded French women resistance opportunities as well. The underground networks supported by the Allies and the Forces Françaises Libres afforded women critical responsibilities in the areas of intelligence gathering and sabotage. In Rossiter’s view, Special Operations Executive (SOE) administrators welcomed women’s contributions to its mission because there were so few men available to fill the necessary roles. Furthermore, SOE regarded women as especially suited to certain functions, such as running the intricate web of escape lines that sprang into existence to aid allied fliers in escaping to Britain once their planes had been downed. SOE trained women in other capacities, too, as field agents who gathered intelligence and coded and transmitted messages, as couriers who picked up information and then passed it on, as radio operators, and, occasionally, as saboteurs, parachutists, and members of paramilitary groups. Rossiter attributes women’s prominent place in SOE’s activities to the organization’s newness and its unconventional approach, which did not involve structuring tasks along traditional gender lines (p.13). French women came to the resistance in various ways. Unlike in Germany, where the wives of leading resisters did not themselves hold prominent positions in anti-Nazi organizations, certain French women whose husbands or companions were deeply involved in clandestine activity had important resistance roles in their own right.37 The movements culled members from student groups and social and professional organizations, and female resisters came from here, too, although they did not have a significant presence in these circles (Weitz, Sisters, p.64). French women occupied many positions within the civil service and administrative sectors, and their jobs in post offices, ministries, and governmental offices gave them ready access to information, ration tickets, and resources to produce false papers. From their offices women were able to glean information about German troop movements, the arrival of supply trains, and other key strategic details (Rossiter, pp.114-15; 36

See Rossiter, for examples of particular women involved in combat activity (chapter 7), and see also Schwartz for an analysis of how women made their way into combat roles despite social codes disassociating women from violence (pp.129-30). 37 Hervé cites some well-known female resisters who were involved in the resistance along with their husbands or partners: Cécile Ouzoulias-Romagon, the wife of Colonel André, a director of communist youth battalions; Aubrac, whose husband, Raymond, was head of the Armée Sécrète of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance; and Berty Albrecht, the companion of a leader of Combat (p.120).

71

Weitz, Sisters, p.64). Secretaries took advantage of the materials available to them in office settings, making use of scarce paper supplies and vital printing equipment to produce written materials for the French underground. Clerks in administrative jobs were sometimes able to acquire ration tickets and false papers bearing official seals at their workplace, which could then be passed on to the resistance for use by individuals who were being protected underground.38 The opposition of French women was distinguished by the highly visible comités des femmes (women’s popular committees) that were organized throughout the two territories and that broadly united women in acts of collective public resistance. The PCF built upon its women’s groups that were already in place before the war to establish these committees, which began to appear in January 1942. The party leadership designated representatives to mobilize women around economic issues affecting their families. Among the most notable leaders was Danièle Casanova, who was active in women’s issues before the war and then became a leader of communist women once the war began.39 She also organized partisan fighters to attack German soldiers (Rossiter, pp.167-68). Casanova was arrested in February 1942 and deported to Auschwitz a year later, where she died of typhus in May 1943. Yvonne Dumont, another prominent figure, was assigned to organize women in the northern zone from the end of 1941 to November 1943. The Union des Femmes Françaises, set up by the Front National in 1943, was instrumental in organizing and leading women’s mass protests against the meagre food supplies and impoverished living conditions under the occupation. To this end, the Union des Femmes Françaises produced resistance tracts for housewives and published the clandestine journal Femmes françaises (French women) (Thomas, Témoin, p.120). The smaller women’s popular committees originated out of efforts to address the problems of wives and families of prisoners of war (UFF, p.150). Left alone as the heads of families, with children to support on slim resources, wives of prisoners of war faced severe hardship. Committee members were involved in practical social service tasks that included collecting money, provisions, medicine, and clothing for the families of prisoners and deportees.40 The committees aimed to improve the lot of prisoners’ wives by winning the return of prisoners, gaining an increase in the military allowance and additional ration tickets for children, and being granted the right to send packages to prisoners (Coudert and Helene, p.14). The women’s committees also promoted national solidarity by distributing anti-Nazi tracts and spoke out against the forced labour initiative. Mass protests by French women revealed the participants’ growing consciousness, organizational ability, and political understanding. Hunger demonstrations began to take place as early as 1940 in the cities of Nîmes, Montpellier, and Arles in southern France, and in some areas women staged strikes and protests to demand the return of their husbands who had been mobilized (Hervé, p.26). Collective actions sprang up throughout the two territo38

Paula Schwartz, ‘Redefining Resistance: Women’s Activism in Wartime France’, in Behind the Lines (see Higonnet and others, above), pp.141-53 (pp.144-45). Andreas-Friedrich demonstrates just how valuable such official seals and stamps were in furthering the work of the German resistance when she records her personal efforts to steal some of these devices (Schattenmann, pp.221-26). 39 Danièle Casanova was the Secretary General of the Union des Jeunes Filles de France (Union of the Girls of France) until 1939 (Eck, p.217). 40 See Schwartz, who discusses the roles of the women’s popular committees in the countryside where they also provided various kinds of support for the maquis (‘Partisanes’, p.133).

72

ries at the beginning of 1941, and these protests initially represented an expression of women’s frustration and rage at the impossibility of finding sufficient food and supplies for their families.41 Hundreds of housewives in small towns demonstrated before town halls to call for increases in allocations. Groups of women marched to town halls and prefects’ offices to urge German or French authorities to turn over shipments of milk, coal, and potatoes, and protesters wrote up petitions calling for increased allocations (UFF, p.150). Madeleine Marzin recounts a communist-inspired protest that was carried out by ten women at the rue de Buci market in Paris on 31 May 1942, the anniversary of the Paris Commune. As a colleague began singing ‘La Marseillaise’, the women (accompanied by several armed men from the FTP) entered a well-stocked grocery store reserved for the Germans and broke open cases of canned goods. Taking whatever was available, they distributed the food to the housewives standing in line, while other participants passed out tracts (Chatel, pp.4344). Such expressions of discontent were a ‘regular event in the big towns throughout the early part of 1942’, comments Kedward (Resistance, p.221). The Forces Françaises Libres reported on these incidents in their radio newscasts (Eck, p.218).42 The problem of shortages became more than just a women’s issue, and it created serious repercussions for Vichy authorities once French women began to tap into the discontent of workers and the two groups began to coordinate their protests. In both zones of France, women sometimes joined workers in demonstrations and protests at factories. Kline relates an incident in which the bread ration was cut in Marseilles and an ensuing women’s demonstration instigated by the communists sparked a general strike during May 1944. Women marched to the prefect to voice their complaints on 25 May. The women’s delegates entered factories and stores and encouraged workers to stop their machines and join the march. The resulting work stoppages by metal workers and dock workers were so widespread by the following day that no trains left the city.43 The drafting of young French people as forced labourers for Germany shifted women’s attention away from largely economic aims as they tried to provide for the well-being of their families to more political goals that directly challenged German and Vichy policies. Demonstrations consequently became more daring with this change in perception. In January 1943, women in Montluçon lay across the railroad tracks to prevent the departure of trains taking French workers to Germany. All but thirty of the three hundred workers on the trains escaped while the railway cars were stalled. This action was also repeated in other towns (Kline, p.377). By January 1944, as the Germans applied increasing pressure for female workers, the Vichy leadership would go only as far as assigning women who were conscripted to work in France (Eck, p.210). Three women’s resistance groups issued an appeal to women to refuse the call to join the labour service and not to get the necessary medical examination.44 Women were also urged not to take over men’s jobs in weapons 41

According to Kopetzky, dockworkers and women in Sète divided goods to be shipped to Germany as they were being loaded onto trains, and in Onnaing, on the Belgian border, townspeople held up a train destined for Germany and took food (p.51). 42 For other examples of such demonstrations, see also: Kedward, Resistance, pp.221-22; UFF, pp.150-51; and Coudert and Helene, pp.14-15. 43 Kline, p.378. See also UFF, p.49; Coudert and Helene, p.15-16; and Weitz, Sisters, p.72. 44 The three organizations were the Comité d’Action Féminine du MLN (MLN Committee for Women’s Action), Union des Femmes Françaises, and Comités locaux d’aide aux réfractaires (local committees for aid to evaders of the Service du Travail Obligatoire) (Rossiter, p.165).

73

factories because this would only facilitate the drafting of men for work in Germany. The three organizations called for women to resist, and their tracts stated: ‘Not one French woman for the Reich.’45 The women’s press urged women to oppose the deportation of workers. Kedward perceives the Vichy dictatorship’s drafting of women into the labour service as exploitative, an act he describes as ‘a final sign that women were essentially to be manipulated’ (Occupied, p.26). The work issue contributed greatly to women’s sense of oppression and to their motivation to resist the Vichy regime and the Germans. French women’s resistance was notable for its vocal press in particular, something that was non-existent for German women resisters. The vigorous underground press exercised a key role in the French resistance generally, but there were also many newspapers addressed specifically to women that unified them around issues directly affecting their lives. These papers rallied women against German and Vichy policies and encouraged further resistance, offered accounts of recent acts of anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy opposition, disseminated information about the availability of food, supplies, and provisions for children, and sustained morale, especially for those in prison. The reading audiences ranged from women in smaller local areas (titles included Femmes d’Ivry (Women of Ivry), Femmes de Belleville (Women of Belleville), Femmes d’Orly (Women of Orly)), to women imprisoned in a particular jail (La Patriote enchaînée (The Enchained patriot)), to the female members of the major movements (MUR’s Les Femmes patriotes (The patriotic women) and FTP’s Les Mariannes).46 Other titles included La Voix des femmes (Women’s voice), Les Mères de France (Mothers of France), Les Femmes à l’action (Women in action), La Patriote parisienne (The Parisian patriot), Le Cri des femmes (Women’s cry), Le Carnet de la ménagère (The housewife’s notebook), and La Ménagère de Paris (The Paris housewife). Weitz estimates there were between seventy and one hundred publications targeted at women.47 These were crudely produced publications; some were handwritten and some printed with children’s toy presses.48 The majority of papers were limited to regions or specific locales because wider distribution invited too many dangers.49 Bertin notes that many women who either founded or contributed to these publications were tortured, deported, murdered, or jailed (p.240). One of the most critical functions of the women’s press was to establish a link between resistance and the historical legacy of women’s involvement in social unrest. These newspapers were instrumental in drawing a connection between the women who had demonstrated in 1789, 1848, and 1871, and those would resist the German occupation. Women’s activism of the past reverberated in the present and served as a model for anti-Vichy and anti-German resistance. The words of the historian and resister Edith Thomas illustrate just how aware women were of this relationship between acts of historical protest and their current opposition against the German occupier. As she declares in her study of the Commune uprising, The Women Incendiaries: ‘The barricades of 1944 replied to the barricades of 45 46 47 48 49

74

Rossiter, p.165. According to Eck, 44, 835 French women were working in Germany by June 1944. That number made up two percent of the total number of foreign female workers (p.211). Marianne is the female figure that symbolizes the French Republic. Weitz, ‘As’, p.3. See also Weitz, Sisters, p.72; Hervé, p.36; and Françoise D’Eaubonne, Histoire et actualité du féminisme (The history and current state of feminism) (Paris: Moreau, 1972), p.166. Kopetzky, p.35. See also Bertin, who notes that La Patriote enchaînée, first circulated in July 1943, was written entirely by hand, the lettering done so skilfully and so regularly that it appeared to be printed (p.240). See Evelyne Sullerot, La Presse féminine (The women's press) (Paris: Colin, 1963), p.64.

1871.’50 The press urged women to unite against oppression as their sisters before them had done. In May 1942, Femmes de Provence (Women of Provence) called on the women of Marseilles and its region to demonstrate on 14 July, and cited the actions of earlier female protesters as inspiration: ‘Women were in the forefront of the 1789 Revolution and contributed to the formation of the Volontaires marseillais who left to defend France. This group distinguished itself in the capture of the Tuileries in August 1792 [. . .] Women of Provence, show yourselves worthy of them.’51 Such recollections of female activism also provided a historical continuum for women’s participation in the resistance. If such demonstrations were acceptable in 1789 and 1871, then they were now, in 1944, not only acceptable but there was precedent for them. The significance of this ‘conscious historical memory’, as Rowbotham terms it, cannot be underestimated. By invoking these images of female revolutionary activity, the women’s underground press offered resisters not only a source of inspiration and support but, more notably, a solid basis for continued action. For French women who took to the streets to speak out about their arduous living conditions, public opposition to the Pétain government’s ideal of domesticity and motherhood was but a step away. Unlike in Nazi Germany, where individual women refused the Mutterkreuz and this action appeared to imply a rejection of official Nazi policy toward women, French women scorned Vichy’s woman ideology outright by linking it to their deteriorating economic and material circumstances. As early as 1940, women gathered in the courtyard of the Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand to protest ‘la loi Pétain de “retour de la femme au foyer”’ (Pétain’s law to ‘return woman to the hearth’) (Coudert and Helene, pp.15-16). The women’s press took up the call and groups of women responded by demonstrating. L’Humanité de la femme (Woman’s humanity), which started up in December 1940, was the first publication to hold Vichy responsible for the shortages and hunger overtaking the country. The paper criticized Pétain’s crusade to keep women at home when so many women’s husbands were prisoners of war, were unemployed, wounded, or had been killed in the war, and when their older children were unable to find work (Kedward, Resistance, p.92). In May 1942, Femmes de Provence delivered the first attack against Vichy’s emphasis on the family and the celebration of Mother’s Day, and exhorted women to stage a protest on that holiday (p.222). Some of the actions of the women’s committees, such as gathering basic necessities for families of prisoners of war, are reminiscent of traditional nurturing and caretaking functions that have typically fallen to women during times of war and unrest. Such forms of resistance conform to social norms and closely match Rowbotham’s descriptions of women’s earlier attempts during the French Revolution and the Commune to act the part of revolutionaries without questioning the boundaries of gender. Yet the value of these women’s committees as a vehicle for the public resistance of French women becomes apparent when contrasted with the near total isolation of female resisters in the Third Reich. 50

Thomas, p.xiv. Former resister Georgette Haas reinforces the notion that French women’s resistance against the Nazis was founded on the tradition of past revolutionary activity, when she says, ‘je voudrais, avec mon exemple personnel, montrer combien les événements antérieurs ont préparé cet engagement. [. . .] j’étais naturellement “l’héritière” de deux traditions: 1.) celle de la résistance à l’occupant [1871, 1914-1918]. [. . .] 2.) La deuxième tradition est celle du mouvement populaire’ (I would like to show through my own personal example how past events prepared me for this engagement. [. . .] I was naturally the ‘inheritor’ of two traditions: 1.) that of resistance against the occupier [1871, 1914-1918]. [. . .] 2.) The second tradition is that of the Popular [Front] movement) (UFF, pp.110-11). 51 Quoted in Kedward, Resistance, p.222.

75

Although the demonstrations by French women outwardly appear motivated by personal concerns and were not tagged with explicit political aims, they did serve a political purpose. The successes of these committees underscore women’s very real power to exert influence in the public realm. In terms of organizing, identifying a clear objective, and effectively carrying out acts that would obstruct the plans of the Germans or their Vichy collaborators, the protests against the Service du Travail Obligatoire signalled a new and more powerful direction in the resistance of French women. Kedward asserts that the food demonstrations also had political ramifications. He concedes that the issue of hunger did not necessarily lead to opposition against the Germans or the Vichy leaders; however, he does suggest that the overall impact of these acts challenged Vichy’s credibility, raised the political awareness of large numbers of people, highlighted France’s status as a defeated and occupied nation, and encouraged further protest (p.223). The outcries of French women underscored the inescapable contradictions between the Vichy regime’s official images of gentle, contented motherhood and woman’s reality of suffering and need as she tried singlehandedly to support and care for her family. These demonstrations also had the effect of undercutting Vichy authority by revealing the regime’s collaboration with the Germans. Finally, the committees’ activities provided backing for the work of the larger organized networks. The unity generated locally among the female activists and the general public had the potential to reinforce the broader currents of resistance on a national level. The French resistance opened up a variety of new paths for women. Female resisters possessed a deep heritage of collective protest that included strong women role models. Furthermore, due to less intense social and political repression in France, women took advantage of the resistance movement’s ability to organize at many levels, and they found opportunities to stand against Nazism as well as Vichy policies. A specifically ‘women’s resistance’ emerged in France in the form of demonstrations and an underground press. Their illegal activity took many women beyond the boundaries of the home. To a great extent, however, popular attitudes and prejudices remained defined by tradition, and they represented the filter through which women (and men) understood resistance. Despite the obvious national differences in the German and French movements, women’s anti-Nazi (or anti-Vichy) opposition was tempered by concern for family and other people, was often located within the home and other private-personal spaces, and was cast in the guise of familiar feminine roles. One common experience that women resisters in Germany and France shared was tending to routine responsibilities and obligations in everyday public settings, and, as the next chapter demonstrates, it was here that many spontaneous acts of dissent took place.

76

Chapter Four NEIN: Ordinary Actions, Everyday Settings

Aber wie kann eine Frau so leben in heutiger Zeit. Sie muß Zeitungen lesen und über Politik nachdenken. Sie muß wählen und Reden im Radio hören. Sie muß zu Gasschutzübungen gehen und sich auf den Krieg vorbereiten. Sie muß etwas lernen, um arbeiten und Geld verdienen zu können.1 [Sanna Moder, in Irmgard Keun, Nach Mitternacht]

If the formally organized resistance groups and networks connoted a political orientation and were, therefore, dominated by men to a great extent, then the spontaneous gestures of opposition that often arose in the context of daily life were the vehicles of resistance for many women. Such forms of anti-Nazism were by no means limited exclusively to women. The public sphere did, however, become a setting for certain types of women’s dissenting actions if for no other reason than because women’s existence was frequently centred here as they went about conducting the details of their lives: going to work, running errands, shopping, socializing with friends. Women continually ran up against the boundaries that Nazism sought to impose upon personal choice and action as they followed their ordinary routines. Such expressions of defiance as refusing to contribute to Nazi campaigns to collect money in the Third Reich, or antagonizing German forces by chalking slogans or symbols on walls or traffic signs in occupied France obviously did not lead to the overthrow of the Hitler regime or the expulsion of foreign troops. Yet these types of acts assumed more than a merely symbolic meaning. Within dictatorships that aimed to bring their citizens under the state’s absolute authority, such outbursts of protest were judged as resistance by those in power, who recognized and feared the popular discontent that these actions could potentially stir up. Many of these signs of opposition, which appeared devoid of an express political intent, quickly assumed a political dimension within regimes that did not tolerate the smallest forms of dissent, or that, in the case of Germany, controlled citizens through terror. The spontaneity surrounding these forms of resistance added to their effectiveness. ‘Opposition within the totalitarian state’, remarks Peukert, ‘found its best expression in informal activities which were hard for the Gestapo and the law to get to grips with’ (Inside, p.55). Finally, there was as much risk involved in these small-scale actions as there 1

Irmgard Keun, Nach Mitternacht (After midnight) (Amsterdam: Querido, 1937; repr. Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1980), pp.108-09. (But how can a woman live like that, these days? She has to read the papers and think about politics. She has to vote, and listen to speeches on the radio. She has to go to poison gas drill, and prepare for the war. She has to learn to do something, so that she can work and earn money) Irmgard Keun, After Midnight, trans. by Anthea Bell (London: Gollancz, 1985), p.97.

was in the carefully planned operations of larger groups and networks. Wickert observes that once the Hitler regime had obliterated the resistance by political parties, in 1936, the Gestapo began to operate according to a broader understanding of who its opponents were: not just ‘enemies of the state’ but ‘antisocial parasites’. Political and social persecution by the police now reached into citizens’ everyday lives (‘Women’, pp.102-03). The dangers were equally great in France, where, according to historian Hélène Eck, ‘one of the distinctive features of the Occupation was the doctrine of collective responsibility: a suspect’s entire family was liable to punishment, regardless of the actual responsibilities of each individual.’ This practice ignored the fundamental legal concept that the punishment an individual receives should accord with the criminal act (p.219). State officials did not distinguish between degrees of resistance; almost any sign of opposition was punishable in Nazi Germany or occupied or Vichy France. Two narratives that delve into the grass-roots resistance in Germany are Irmgard Keun’s novella Nach Mitternacht and Ruth Andreas-Friedrich’s diary Der Schattenmann. Both authors examine the rhythms of daily life to show dissenting actions by women that are not defined by organizational structures or politics or national interest, but rather consist of unflamboyant, seemingly ‘ordinary’ acts, as the average citizen expresses dissatisfaction with social and political repression. Opposition arises when ideology politicizes personal life at so many levels that flashes of dissent are bound to be sparked. Despite the fact that Keun and Andreas-Friedrich are working in different genres, they share a vision of everyday life within the Third Reich and of the possibilities for resistance as they examine the social and psychological responses of the masses to the regime’s manipulation and control, and demonstrate the extent to which German resisters’ hands were tied in striking out against the regime. Other parallels between the two narratives exist as well. Keun’s novella bears obvious autobiographical traces of the writer’s experiences under Nazism, while AndreasFriedrich’s diary goes beyond a factual rendering of day-to-day living to employ literary devices that capture the author’s emotions or recreate bonds of friendship that held particular meaning for her. These documents of life in Nazi Germany take as their context a broad panorama of humanity as the authors record the effects of Nazism within various social settings. Moreover, the ways in which the two writers construct the female resister’s perspective as an outsider in relation to the masses are strikingly similar. In both books an immobilized German public has fallen under the mesmerizing spell of Nazi ideology, and the lines between public and private life have grown indistinct as the watchful eye of the totalitarian system filters into the individual’s personal world. Only those few individuals, like the women resistance figures portrayed here, who have a heightened awareness and a willingness to live out their truth, distinguish themselves from the blinded throngs. These texts mirror the German people’s state of mind and draw psychological connections that might not otherwise be available from other sources. The novellas of Irmgard Keun (1905-1982) have been described as examples of Neue Sachlichkeit, or ‘new objectivity’, the literary trend that succeeded Expressionism and marked a shift away from the earlier movement’s extreme ideological concerns. Practitioners of Neue Sachlichkeit, among them the German writers Franz Werfel, Hermann Kesten, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Wiechert, and Alfred Döblin, depicted a concrete representation of the surrounding world through the use of exacting and precise detail, objectively recording the minutest aspects of the ordinary person’s rough and unpolished

78

everyday existence. Keun, despite early acclaim for her novella Nach Mitternacht, never achieved a secure place in the literary canon during the decades following the war, in part because she does not fit easily within customary political or feminist categories. For all of her personal freedom and her portrayal of resourceful and independent female protagonists, Keun prized her individuality and refused to define herself as a feminist or to support the women’s movement, with the result that she was ignored in early feminist criticism. Nor did her anti-fascist political credentials lend themselves to easy classification. Her politics were not sufficiently radical to win favour with leftists, and as cold-war tensions developed and anti-communist sentiment grew more pronounced, interest in left-wing literature of the Weimar period and anti-fascist exile literature fell off in West Germany. The author’s emotional problems and her struggle with alcoholism also contributed to her difficulties in attracting critical notice.2 Keun was born into a liberal, middle-class family in Berlin. She did not study at a university, but instead attended drama school and tried her hand at acting in Cologne before embarking on her path as a writer in 1931. Encouraged by the support of Döblin, whom she had met by chance in Cologne, Keun produced her first novella, Gilgi, eine von uns (Gilgi, one of us), which was published in 1931 (Ritchie, p.65). A second novella, Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The synthetic silk girl), followed the next year. Both books, which won the praise of such respected authors as Hans Fallada and Kurt Tucholsky, focused on the love affairs and the experiences of poverty and unemployment of young, independent career women during the waning years of Weimar. The literary style of the two novellas had much in common with the Trivialliteratur (light fiction) popular in 1920s Germany and widely circulated in the form of cheap paperbacks. In 1932, Keun married Johannes Tralow, a novelist, playwright, and theatre and film director who was twenty-seven years her senior. The young author’s career had just taken off and her reputation was growing when Hitler came to power in 1933. She soon began to feel the brunt of Nazi cultural policies. Not only Keun’s writings but also her brash and idiosyncratic personal style jeopardized her in the Third Reich, for she made no secret about her opinions of the regime. When the Nazis took over, she was blacklisted in the spring of 1933 on account of her first two novels, both of which reflected a frankness and a liberal attitude toward women’s sexual and social roles that the conservative leadership deemed harmful (Horsley, ‘Witness’, p.71). Nor did Keun herself submit to the demands the government made of writers. In September 1933, the Hitler regime passed the Reichskulturkammergesetz (Reich Culture Chamber Law), which required anyone working in the arts to belong to the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Culture Chamber). The cultural department intended for writers was the Reichsschriftumskammer (Reich Literature Chamber), and membership in it permitted authors to write as long as they adhered to Nazi dictates. By some accounts, Keun was 2

See Wolfgang Pasche, Interpretationshilfen Exilromane: Klaus Mann, Mephisto; Irmgard Keun, Nach Mitternacht; Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz (Guides to the interpretation of the novels of exile: Klaus Mann, Mephisto; Irmgard Keun, After Midnight; Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross) (Stuttgart: Klett, 1993), pp.111, 129; J.M. Ritchie, ‘Irmgard Keun’s Weimar Girls’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 60 (19891990), 63-79 (pp.63-64); and Ritta Jo Horsley, ‘Witness, Critic, Victim: Irmgard Keun and the Years of National Socialism’, in Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers, ed. by Elaine Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), pp.65-117 (pp.101-02). Ritchie offers another possible explanation for Keun’s obscurity when he observes that she was a woman writer and that her protagonists were female (pp.63-64).

79

denied admission to the Reichsschriftumskammer in 1934; however, according to the literary critic Ritta Jo Horsley, there is also evidence that Keun rejected offers to become a member. The author openly expressed her condemnation of the government, and although her outspokenness brought no direct reprisals from authorities, she soon began to realize the impossibility of continuing to write in Germany.3 Her often-told story about her arrest and torture by the Gestapo has now been determined to be untrue, Horsley reports (p.72), but Keun must have been well aware of the precariousness of her status as a banned writer who stood no chance of publishing her most important works in her own country.4 In 1935, the thirty-year-old author went into exile, first to Ostende, on the Belgium seacoast, and then to Holland, where she made contact in Amsterdam with the two major Dutch publishing houses of German emigré literature, Querido and Allert de Lange. Keun came under the influence of a circle of emigré writers in Ostende that included Kesten, Ernst Toller, Egon Erwin Kisch, Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth. The members of the group spent their days writing, reading each other’s manuscripts, and talking over politics, and Keun developed sympathy for the ideas of Kisch and Willi Münzenberg, who headed propaganda operations in Western Europe for the Soviet-directed Comintern.5 Keun was working on Nach Mitternacht at the time, and she found support for her writing among these emigrés. She then became the lover and companion of Roth, the Austrian novelist, who urged her to write. (Keun and Tralow lived apart throughout much of their marriage, and they would divorce in 1937.) She and Roth lived together for several years, travelling throughout Europe and working on their writing, before breaking up in 1938. When the Germans occupied Holland in 1940, Keun obtained a false passport and returned to Germany. She was able to live there undisturbed for the duration of the war due to a false report picked up by the world press in mid-1940, which stated that Keun and the playwright Walter Hasenclever had both committed suicide in a French internment camp. While the story about Hasenclever was true, Keun herself had never been in the camp. Back in Germany, she lived a dangerous underground existence that necessitated relying on friends and anti-Nazis for protection, concealing her identity under the pseudonym Charlotte Tralow and moving frequently from place to place.6 When the war ended, Keun dropped out of sight for a number of years as she struggled with emotional problems, and she wrote mainly texts for radio shows and political cabarets. Her daughter, Martina (KeunGeburtig) , was born in 1951. Not until the mid-1970s, with a resurgence of public interest in both exile writers and women writers, did Keun again attract attention in West Germany. In November 1981, she was named the first recipient of the Marieluise-Fleißer Preis (Marieluise Fleisser Prize) of the city of Ingolstadt for her literary achievements (Pasche, p.129; Horsley, pp.100-02). Keun died on 5 May 1982. Keun’s third book, Nach Mitternacht, considered by critics as her best work, examines Nazism’s influence on the average person’s state of mind as she or he comes to terms with 3 4

5 6

80

Jürgen Serke, Die verbrannten Dichter (The burned writers) (Weinheim: Beltz & Gelberg, 1977), p.163. See Irmgard Keun, Ich lebe in einem wilden Wirbel: Briefe an Arnold Strauß, 1933 bis 1947 (I live in a wild maelstrom: letters to Arnold Strauss, 1933 to 1947), ed. by Gabriele Kreis and Marjory S. Strauß (Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1988), p.117. See Horsley, p.76, and Ursula Krechel, ‘Irmgard Keun: Die Zerstörung der kalten Ordnung’, Literaturmagazin, 10 (1979), 103-28 (p.119). Irmgard Keun, ‘”Woanders hin! Mich hält nichts fest”: Irmgard Keun im Gespräch mit Klaus Antes’, Die Hören, 27 (1982), 61-75 (pp.69-70).

the totalitarian system, either as a proponent or a foe. The main action of Nach Mitternacht takes place within a twenty-four-hour period, primarily in a bar, as the protagonist, nineteen-year-old Susanne (Sanna) Moder, tells the story of her final two days in Frankfurt before she and her fiancé vanish into exile. The perspective shifts back and forth between past and present. Sanna lives in Cologne with her mother’s sister, Tant Adelheid, a fervent Nazi, who eventually denounces her niece for her critical remarks about Hitler and Hermann Göring. The young woman is then arrested and questioned by the Gestapo. After she is released by her interrogators, Sanna immediately leaves for Frankfurt, where she believes she can live in safety with her prosperous older stepbrother, Algin, who was once a well-known novelist, and his wife, Liska. Sanna loves Tant Adelheid’s son, the quiet, gentle Franz. A Nazi businessman who is a competitor of Franz and his business partner denounces the two young men as communists, and when the Gestapo kills his partner, Franz retaliates by murdering the competitor. In the final dreamlike scene that plays itself out with a disconcerting slowness, the reader witnesses the devastating outcomes for those who stand apart from the loyal German masses. At a party given by Liska, the lovers, Gerti and the Jew Dieter Aaron, are forbidden from seeing one another; Algin, who has been contemplating suicide, decides to write a historical novel for the Nazis; the journalist Heini kills himself; and Franz and Sanna arrange to go immediately into exile in Holland. While Keun remained in Germany as late as 1935 and travelled throughout the country that summer, witnessing first-hand the social and political changes inside the Third Reich and making notes, other writers, such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Ernst Toller, Johannes Becher, Hasenclever, and Seghers had long since gone into exile.7 Once these authors left, their knowledge of conditions within Germany usually came to them secondhand from other emigrants or political escapees, or from published materials. Some of the most striking scenes in Keun’s novella, such as Hitler’s visit to Frankfurt, are drawn from her personal experience (Keun, ‘Woanders’, p.65). Elements of the author’s own life surface in other ways in her book. As a banished writer, Keun was well aware of the pressures upon artists of all types to conform to Nazi cultural policies. In Nach Mitternacht, this is brought out in the professional dilemmas facing the novelist Algin and the journalist Heini, both of whom must decide whether to submit to the regime and meet its requirements for writers or to reject its demands. Moreover, the question of race that hangs over the romance between Gerti and Dieter echoes Keun’s own liaison with her Jewish lover, the physician Arnold Strauß, that began in the summer of 1933. Finally, there is an obvious link between the protagonist Sanna’s decision to go into exile and Keun’s emigration.8 Andreas-Friedrich’s personal experience with Nazism differed markedly from Keun’s, for Andreas-Friedrich remained in Germany and worked with the German resistance. A journalist at the large Ullstein publishing house, Andreas-Friedrich (1901-1977) began writing a secret diary because, as she later said, she believed it was necessary to demonstrate to the outside world that not everyone in Germany had capitulated to the

7 8

Gabriele Kreis, ‘Was man glaubt, gibt es’: Das Leben der Irmgard Keun (‘What you believe is real’: the life of Irmgard Keun) (Zurich: Arche, 1991), p.154. For further discussion of the autobiographical elements in Keun’s Nach Mitternacht, see Kreis, p.137; Ritchie, p.64; and Horsley, p.66.

81

Nazis.9 Her diary Der Schattenmann chronicles the underground activity of the Berlin resistance circle Onkel Emil during the years 1938 to 1945. Recognizing the dangers of keeping such a record, she disguised each figure in the book with a pseudonym. Onkel Emil consisted mainly of middle-class professional people, all of whom could have emigrated before the Nazi takeover, or even later, if they had so chosen.10 Among the members were: the musical conductor Leo Borchard (pseud. Andrik Krassnow); Walter Seitz (pseud. Frank Matthis), a physician; Dr. Harald Poelchau (pseud. Tegel), the chaplain at Tegel prison and a former assistant to Paul Tillich; and Hans Peters (pseud. Hinrichs), an attorney.11 The group had access to the Nazi upper echelons through another member, Dr. Erich Kordt (pseud. Erich Tuch), who was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s assistant in Berlin. The female members were the journalist Susanne Simonis (pseud. Karla Simson), who was a cousin of Kordt, and Karin Friedrich (-Hess) (pseud. Heike Burghoff), the author’s daughter (Drews, p.281; Holland and Garett, p.366). Karin was a teenager at the time the group became active and was fully involved in its work. Two other participants, Ursel Reuber and Eva Gerichter, who later joined the circle in June 1944, were half-Jewish. (They were killed in the March 1945 bombing raid described in chapter 1.) In the late summer of 1938, Andreas-Friedrich started making notes and collecting information and newspaper articles. When the events of Kristallnacht transpired, she began recording what she was witnessing in Berlin society. Onkel Emil, which had ties to a communist group named Onkel Ernst (Uncle Ernst), did not adopt a particular political orientation (Sayre, p.viii). Initially, members concentrated on trying to rescue Jewish friends from deportation, helping them prepare to flee Germany by storing valuables and personal belongings and making travel arrangements. As anti-Semitic measures grew more severe and the Nazi repression intensified, these resisters cast their net more widely to aid other Jews and political refugees. The members sheltered and hid those who had to go underground, procured ration cards and coupons so that they could obtain food and supplies for their charges, acquired false identity papers, and printed fake Nazi passes. A book printer’s talents were put to use forging various types of official documents (passes, military exemption certificates, strips of food tickets) (Sayre, p.viii). Seitz signed medical certificates attesting to illness as a way of keeping anti-Nazis out of the army and the Volkssturmdienst (Home Guard). The circle also disseminated political information and reports abroad, such as the fliers of the resistance group Weiße Rose that they duplicated and arranged to have transported to Switzerland and other countries (Andreas-Friedrich, Schattenmann, pp.104-10). Members engaged in subversive action that demonstrated their rejection of Hitler and further pursuit of the war when they spent two nights chalking NEIN (no) in public spaces in six districts of Berlin and distributing fliers denouncing the war. 9

According to Jörg Drews, Andreas-Friedrich completed a typed manuscript of the diary between June and September 1945 in Berlin. She foresaw the title of the book as ‘Wir anderen’ (We others), and then, later, ‘Nein’ (No). Her notes over the seven years during which she kept the diary contained more material than could be published in Der Schattenmann; therefore, Andreas-Friedrich cut sections related to private and professional matters that did not seem to her to be of general interest. Jörg Drews, Nachwort, Schauplatz Berlin: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1945 bis 1948 (Battleground Berlin: diaries, 1945-1948), by Ruth AndreasFriedrich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp.275-86 (p.278). 10 Joel Sayre, Introduction, Berlin Underground, 1938-1945 (see Andreas-Friedrich, above), pp.vii-xii. (p.viii). 11 Other members included Günther Brandt (pseud. Flamm), an attorney; Gottfried von Einem (pseud. Zweidorf), a composer; and Fred Denger (pseud. Fabian Trooth), an actor and writer. Onkel Emil also relied on the skills of some tradesmen, for example, Ludwig Lichtwitz (pseud. Ludwig Wald), a book printer.

82

Keun’s novella and Andreas-Friedrich’s diary dovetail in their appraisal of how the fear and terror of Nazism had influenced the behaviour and the attitude of the masses. As each narrative opens, the respective author depicts crowded public gatherings of those who have come to hear Hitler speak. These crucial scenes demonstrate the far-reaching and numbing effects of the regime’s control, and the severe constraints within which German resisters were forced to operate. The crowd scenes also serve to establish Keun’s protagonist and Andreas-Friedrich herself as independent figures, outsiders-resisters who can read the effects that the Nazi terror has etched on the consciousness of the masses. The extent of each woman’s opposition may vary by degree, but as opponents of the regime, their apparent distance from what they observe in German society allows them to express scepticism about Nazism, and through their writing to challenge their leaders’ credibility as the Nazis strive to keep the German public in their thrall. In Keun’s Nach Mitternacht, the people are so mesmerized by the government’s pageantry and ceremonial displays that they passively accept what is dealt to them by the regime. Sanna, the naïve yet discerning narrator, describes people’s reactions as she stands in a crowd that has congregated to see Hitler’s entourage pass by on the way to the Opernplatz (opera house square) in Frankfurt, where the Führer will speak. A line of SA men holds back the multitudes who press in closer in hopes of getting a view of their leader. When a ‘dünner grauer Mann’ (thin, grey man), eager to cross the line on the way to his job, mutters a negative reply to the SA man who has told him to be grateful to the Führer, the onlookers are ‘stumm vor Schreck’ (struck dumb with alarm), as they realize the potential danger in his remarks. The full impact of his words quickly dawns on the man himself, and he looks ‘wie mit einem Schlage ausgelöscht und in sich zerbrochen aus’ (utterly broken, extinguished). Even after three SA men have led the thin man away, his defiance has an effect on the onlookers, not because his words inspire them to take similar action but because they, too, gradually sense the surrounding terror. Those in the crowd can only stand dumbstruck in a circle around the man’s fallen bicycle, ‘guckten es stumm und aufgeregt an’ (Nach, p.27) (staring in nervous silence) (After, p.26). The public’s mute reaction here betrays the same silent tension seen in the Berliners that Andreas-Friedrich watches. In an entry dated 27 September 1938, Andreas-Friedrich records her observations of a gathering of some two hundred people as they listen to Hitler forecast the impending war. This event was an attempt by the dictator to gauge public support for a war (Drews, p.279). The atmosphere is heightened, but the people’s sense of expectancy and excitement at seeing Germany’s Führer is tempered by nervousness and dread. Zeroing in on revealing details, Andreas-Friedrich reads apprehension in the strained faces surrounding her. She notes the pinched lips and furrowed foreheads. The people, worried and cowed, stand ‘wie geprügelte Hunde’ (Schattenmann, p.10) (with their tails between their legs) (Berlin, p.2). This metaphor of mistreated animals captures the psychic brutalization of Germany’s citizens and suggests how little popular will there is to resist. What meagre support opponents of the regime receive from others can only be measured in quiet gestures and hesitant glances. When a young worker does blurt out under his breath criticism of a possible war, a fifty-year-old postman looks around carefully before nodding in agreement and whispering support (Schattenmann, pp.9-11). The Nazi system has dehumanized its people, closing out not only any opportunity but also, and more important, the determination to oppose the dictatorship.

83

Whereas Andreas-Friedrich brings out the complacency of the German populace, Keun shows the absurdity of a people simultaneously terrorized and manipulated by their leaders. Sanna’s ironic commentary exposes the vanity and petty ambitions of average citizens, like the bystanders on the street, who loyally support the system because it enhances their own sense of power and status. Although these individuals are motivated primarily by fear, they gain a sense of self-importance from aligning themselves with the Nazis. In a brilliant touch that brings out the crowd’s sheep-like mentality, Keun personifies the bicycle; like its owner, it too is ‘traitorous’. The cluster of people in the square views the man’s bicycle as ‘staatsfeindlich [. . .] keiner wagte es anzufassen’ ([having] a subversive look about it; yet nobody dared touch it). But as soon as a lone, fat woman, making ‘ein wildes Gesicht’ (an angry face) summons the nerve to throw her arm into the air in a salute to the Führer and then to kick the bicycle disgustedly, others around her quickly follow suit (Nach, pp.27-28; After, p.26). The pressure to fit in defines people’s every action. The silence and dread that grip the individuals in Andreas-Friedrich’s narrative also reign in Keun’s novella. But whereas Andreas-Friedrich empathizes with her fellow citizens as they unthinkingly submit to the demands of the regime, Keun satirizes them, mocking the people’s horror of the bicycle and their self-important attitudes as they try to demonstrate that they, in contrast to the thin, grey man, are ‘good’ Germans. The two writers’ markedly different approaches both underline the breadth and depth of a social and political repression that has immobilized the German public. In illustrating each crowd’s inability to rouse itself from its torpor, Andreas-Friedrich and Keun also suggest just how difficult it would be for any kind of substantive resistance to take hold among individuals who appear to have lost the capacity for autonomous action. Those who stand apart from this collective sense of resignation necessarily assume the label of resister. Keun’s protagonist is not a resister in the conventional sense because she does not take any kind of direct action against the Nazi state. The outlines of Sanna’s anti-Nazism become evident primarily in her watchful remarks. Once she arrives in Frankfurt, Sanna is the quintessential outsider. Her small-town, lower-class background and lack of education separate her from the crowd with whom she socializes, including Algin and Liska, with their bourgeois pretensions, and the cynical, intellectual Heini. The disingenuousness of her remarks, which ironically combine the honesty of direct observation with a piercing intelligence, adds to the impression of Sanna’s alienation from her society in general. For all of the simplicity of her language, the short, direct sentences, and the colourful colloquialisms, her comments betray a wit that has the power to lay bare a complex truth behind the Nazis’ exploitation of the public and also behind the public’s willing acceptance of the regime’s conning of them. When Sanna follows up an impulsive, negative comment about Göring with an irreverent remark about Hitler, her aunt, whose motives are unrelentingly self-serving, denounces her, and the young woman lands in Gestapo headquarters for questioning. Although Sanna consistently assumes the persona of the uncomprehending, innocent female, there are suggestions that she is wiser in her assessment of the Nazi regime than she lets on. Sanna can understand that authorities may take her remarks as provocation. She seems to recognize, however vaguely, that her behaviour does not conform to what is expected, for she realizes she could be punished with jail if it is determined she is a criminal, or with sterilization if she is labelled mentally ill (Nach, pp.74-75).

84

While Andreas-Friedrich obviously wears the mantle of resister because she is active in Onkel Emil, her ability to scan her society and interpret its meaningful signs further defines her as an outsider who opposes her government. Having noted the mute, passive reaction of a people who she is certain opposes war, she reflects: ‘Begreifen die Menschen überhaupt, wozu man sie vergewaltigt’ (Schattenmann, p.12) (Why does almost everyone do what he loathes deep down in his heart?) (Berlin, p.3). In an odd yet revealing juxtaposition of placards over the bar in a tavern, she seemingly finds the answer to the question she has just asked. She observes an admonition to the German people to use Heil Hitler as a greeting, a fading religious motto, and a liquor advertisement.12 Andreas-Friedrich draws out of this mélange of colliding messages a people’s complacency as they sit every night in cafés and drink beer and brandy, paying little heed to distinctions among ideology, religion, and advertising. Hers is the rare perspective of the outsider-resister. The status of the resister as critic of her society is brought into sharper relief by the two authors’ use of elements of Nazi rhetoric to demythologize some of the concepts and words of the ideology. The shared focus on language as ideological tool binds these narratives together in a common perspective that pierces the dazzling array of symbol and ceremony and propaganda to which the majority of Germans succumb because it makes many of them feel, though falsely, as if they own a share of power. Keun’s social criticism consists of cuttingly satirizing and parodying Nazi figures and their loyal followers, in this way demystifying Nazism and its hold over language. When terms like Führer, Weltanschauung (world view), and das Volk (the people) are examined through the lens of Sanna’s ‘naïve’ gaze, their mythic proportions are suddenly reduced. In a telling moment, Sanna, waiting with others in the crowd for a view of Hitler, watches as his car slowly passes by. She does not hesitate to equate the Führer with ‘der Prinz Karneval im Karnevalszug’ (Prince Carnival in the carnival parade). Yet she quickly notices a difference between the leader of the carnival parade and the leader of the Nazi spectacle, for there is only emptiness behind the pageantry and charisma of a Hitler, who ‘hob nur eine leere Hand’ (Nach, p.32) (just rais[ed] an empty hand) (After, p.29), whereas Prince Carnival brings happiness and throws candy and flowers to the people in the crowd. The German leader and his ideology are hollow. Keun continues to expand her attack on Nazism, specifically the lack of substance behind the regime’s dramatic and ostentatious displays of self-praise, when she compares prominent officials such as Göring or Hitler to film stars (Nach, p.33).13 Keun’s sharp satire extends from the Nazi ‘actors’ at the pinnacle of the state’s hierarchy to the citizen ‘audience’ below as she pokes fun at the anonymous masses for their unthinking attraction to the drama of Nazism. Sanna recognizes that the crowds who turn out to see their Führer do so primarily as a form of cheap entertainment (Nach, p.26). If, as the critic Michael Ackermann says in describing Keun’s approach, ‘Faschismus ist gesellschaftlicher Bluff’14 (fascism is societal bluff), then for Sanna’s fellow Germans the 12

The author describes this grouping of signs: ‘”Der Deutsche grüßt mit Heil Hitler!” Daneben vergilbt ein Spruch: “An Gottes Segen ist alles gelegen.” Und ein grellfarbenes Reklameplakat: “Dornberg-Liköre sind die besten”’(Schattenmann, p.12) (‘The German’s greeting is Heil Hitler!’ Next to it a motto is fading: ‘God bless us all, both great and small’ (Berlin, p.3). And a crudely coloured advertisement: ‘Dornberg liqueurs are the best’). This last sentence is my translation; the sentence does not appear in Berlin Underground. 13 Horsley further develops the metaphor of the ‘Nazi theater spectacle’ (pp.79-80). 14 Michael Ackermann, Schreiben über Deutschland im Exil: Irmgard Keun, Nach Mitternacht, Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz (Writings about Germany in exile: Irmgard Keun, After Midnight, Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross) (Stuttgart: Klett, 1986), p.30.

85

party’s outlandish displays are but an inexpensive way to pass the time. Keun specifically singles out for her scorn those of the lower-middle class who believe they have benefited from the regime, in however small a way. For the uneducated and vicious Tant Adelheid, Nazism is not about political belief but rather a way to enhance her own status or add some spice to her dull life; she grasps for the petty rewards Nazism can bring her. The Führer’s speeches make her feel good in much the same emotionally superficial way that an actor’s stage performance might. For her, there is little difference between the two, as seen in an actor’s and the Führer’s photograph hanging side by side in her bedroom (Nach, p.76). She does not hesitate to inform on Schauwecker, the man competing with her to be the Blockwalter (block warden) of their building, because she wants the position, and she later denounces her niece.15 Others seek similarly insignificant pay-offs in an effort to brighten their limited existence. For the waiter Herr Kulmbach, the thrill of Nazism is in the uniform and the jackboots he had made at his own expense to wear at the Nuremberg party rally and in the fireworks display he saw there. Keun’s insight and, by extension, Sanna’s perceptiveness reveal hidden truths about this world in which the authoritarian personality thrills at such negligible dividends, believing that these ‘privileges’ somehow enhance her or his place in German society. In a different approach, one that is part analysis, part inverted imagery, AndreasFriedrich reflects on how the Nazis have transformed values and, in turn, influenced people’s thinking through the manipulation of the language. She points up the effect on the population, commenting matter-of-factly: Hitler hat das Volk an Ekstasen gewöhnt. [. . .] Nichts heißt bei uns mehr einfach ‘schön,’ weil es schön ist, einfach ‘groß,’ weil es groß ist. Was sich nicht als ‘ungeheuer groß,’ ‘überirdisch schön,’ ‘einmalig wundervoll’ präsentiert, schmeckt uns saft- und kraftlos wie ungewürzte Speise. (Schattenmann, p.67) (Hitler has accustomed the people to ecstasies. [. . .] We don’t call anything simply ‘beautiful’ because it is beautiful anymore, simply ‘great’ because it is great. Anything that doesn’t strike us as ‘tremendously great,’ ‘divinely beautiful,’ or ‘uniquely wonderful’ has as little savour in our mouths as unseasoned food.) (Berlin, p.55; 24 January 1940)

In this passage, she undercuts the Nazi glorification of the people by underscoring the shallowness of a public that succumbs without thinking to the superficial feelings of excitement that Nazi leaders whip up through inflated language and propaganda. In contrast, and here again she reinforces her position as a resister, she asserts that she and most other like-minded members of her clandestine circle had known since 1933 what was to come: ‘Freiheitsberaubung, Massenhypnose, Gewalt, Sadismus, unentwegtes Strammsehen und grenzenlose Selbstbeweihräucherung’ (The robbing of freedom, mass hypnosis, violence, sadism, standing motionless at attention, and boundless self-praise) (Schattenmann, p.21; 27 October 1938). Andreas-Friedrich voices a still more powerful criticism of Nazism when she fixes a series of jarring images that encapsulate the suffering and persecution of the Jews. Some of these images, for example, the yellow Star of David badge or the crematorium ovens, have become so imbued with the racial hatred of Nazism that it is difficult to think of them outside of this context. But the author prods the reader to reach further into these symbols in order to discover another meaning as she attempts to convey what was actually happening to actual Jewish people whom Onkel Emil was working to rescue. Thus, after the events of Kristallnacht, she likens the broken-out glass in store windows to ‘ausgestochene 15

86

The Nazi regime established the Blockwartsystem (block warden system) as a way of spying on residents within a neighbourhood.

Augen in einem geschundenen Gesicht’ (Schattenmann, p.38) (blind eyes in a flayed face) (Berlin, p.28; 11 November 1938). The author here steps unafraid into the midst of chaos and pain to capture the reality of a people’s persecution. This metaphor compels the reader to look beyond the regime’s brutality and the shards of glass to the suffering of individual persons. Andreas-Friedrich assigns an alternate meaning to the Star of David when she writes about the implementation of the law requiring Jews to wear the badge, saying that it ‘leuchtet voran, auf dem Weg in die Finsternis. Getto nennt sich diese Finsternis’ (Schattenmann, p.83) (lights the way into the darkness—the darkness called the ghetto) (Berlin, p.70; 19 September 1941). The image of the yellow Star recurs in the scene in which Eva Gerichter’s mother comes with the author to the cemetery office to identify her daughter’s body after it has been recovered from the rubble of the bombing raid. The yellow coltsfoot the mother is holding shines ‘wie gelbe Sterne’ (like yellow stars) in the darkness of the office, just as it shines a few days later on the black coffins at the funeral (Schattenmann, pp.216, 220; 26 and 28 March 1945). Andreas-Friedrich transforms the well-known image of the badge into a symbol that speaks to the isolation of the Jewish people in Nazi Germany. In noting the Star’s power to radiate its yellow ‘light’, she also suffuses this image with hope. The author’s effort to counter the ‘logic’ of Nazi rhetoric emerges most disconcertingly when she wonders to herself what else the couple could have done who had to dispose of the corpse of the man whom they had been concealing in their apartment (discussed in chapter 1): ‘Was tut man, wenn ein Mensch, den man in seiner Wohnung verbirgt, eines Tages unvermutet am Herzschlag stirbt? Soll man ihn im Ofen verbrennen? In Rauch auflösen? Durch den Schornstein hinausblasen’ (Schattenmann, p.129) (What are you to do if a person you are hiding in your apartment dies of heart failure one fine day? Are you to burn him in the stove, send him up in smoke, blow him out the chimney?) (Berlin, p.118; 4 February 1944). These words immediately close the gap of incomprehensibility that ordinarily distances readers or listeners from the phenomenon of the mass burning of bodies in Nazi crematoria. The author does not choose to focus on a faceless, nameless corpse. As a resister, one who lived out and wrote the truth, Andreas-Friedrich can do no less than direct the reader’s attention to a flesh and blood person who died while hiding in the everyday setting of a couple’s apartment. In their examinations of life inside the Third Reich, Keun and Andreas-Friedrich identify forms of anti-Nazism that are almost indistinguishable from the fabric of daily life in various public spaces. In Nazi Germany, boycotting party meetings, refusing to display the swastika flag on official occasions, and declining to greet people with the words Heil Hitler became ways of rejecting the regime’s authority. The refusal to contribute to the Winterhilfswerk (Winter Relief Fund), the Nazi campaign that encouraged citizens to eat an inexpensive stew once a month and then pass on the money saved to a collection for social welfare, was tantamount to sabotage. Other resistance actions included recording anti-Nazi texts onto records of Hitler speeches, dropping coins in the streets that were self-imprinted with inscriptions denouncing Hitler, and smuggling notes (containing resistance slogans or explanatory texts) in books, matchboxes, and food packages (Wiggershaus, p.130). In France, everyday acts of open protest took the form of singing ‘La Marseillaise’ and displaying the French tricolour, either at public demonstrations or at factories when German

87

authorities were visiting.16 People also wore the colours of the French tricolour and posted stickers bearing anti-German slogans.17 Keun and Andreas-Friedrich give weight and attribute meaning to seemingly ‘insignificant’ activities that were deemed resistance within the Third Reich. Since the Hitler regime attached such importance to its own symbols18, acts of resistance that attempted to manipulate this symbolism assumed an even greater significance as an expression of dissent. The fact that both writers describe incidents surrounding the swastika flags and the Winterhilfswerk underlines the importance of these smaller gestures as a rallying point for citizens who opposed the regime. In Keun’s novella, Tant Adelheid denounces her neighbor, Schauwecker, for disparaging the fund and refusing to donate. Andreas-Friedrich likewise records an episode in which a colleague at her paper, an employee of twenty-six years, was fired without notice for failing to give money to the campaign (although he could not afford the monthly payments). Whereas Keun uses this issue as a way to demonstrate how an individual who did not contribute was vulnerable to attack by his fellow citizens and to official reprisals, Andreas-Friedrich further unmasks the subject by indicating that the donations did not go to the unemployed but rather to the country’s armaments program. Her comments also emphasize that the refusal to participate could be construed as resistance, given the continual pressure to donate money ‘auf der Straße, in den Fabriken, in S-Bahn und Omnibus, am Fahrkartenschalter, an der Theaterkasse und an der Wohnungstür’ (Schattenmann, p.73) (on the street, in factories, in metro and bus, at the ticket office, at the box office, at the door of the apartment) (Berlin, p.60; 4 September 1940). The two authors similarly focus on the failure to display the swastika flag as an expression of anti-Nazism. In Nach Mitternacht, during the farcical scene at the Gestapo’s offices, Sanna, awaiting her interrogation, observes an endless procession of people either informing on others or searching for vanished relatives. Her attention is drawn to a landlady’s confused and ridiculous efforts to denounce a communist tenant who, the woman claims, tore down the nice swastika flag she had hung over the balcony. In much the same way that Keun, in another passage, constructs images of bustling people, swastika flags, garlands of fir, and SS men in order to capture the electric energy of people preparing for Hitler’s visit (Nach, p.25), Andreas-Friedrich uses the emblem of the flag as well to convey the pulsating emotion and the flurry of activity that come with celebrating Germany’s succession of military victories: ‘Fahnen heraus—Fahnen herein. Alle Fenster, alle Giebel, alle Türen ein hakenbekreuztes Fahnenmeer’ (Schattenmann, p.69) (Put out the flags; take in the flags. Every window, every gable, every tower, all a sea of swastika’d flags) (Berlin, pp.56-57). Both authors rely here on the power of imagery and brief, clipped phrases to generate a sense of the population’s frenetic actions. Yet these fundamentally different strategies determine just how much each author can reveal. Through her narrator’s wit and humour, 16

See Chatel, p.36, and UFF, pp.150-51. Weitz, Introduction, p.xii. See also Szepansky, p.29; Wiggershaus, p.127; Koonz, Mothers, pp.299, 313; and Schefer, p.281, for further examples of the smaller actions that were considered resistance. 18 See Andreas-Friedrich’s diary entry of 8 June 1944, in which she notes that as the allied invasion progressed and the German leadership began to lose confidence in its military capability, the Nazi Party issued an order making it a matter of honour to wear a swastika pin in one’s lapel. Over the course of several days, the author observes the presence or the absence of these pins on people’s clothing (Schattenmann, pp.141-42). 17

88

Keun plays off the superficial features of daily life in Germany, and by laughing at the absurdities of Nazism the reader re-evaluates the meaning behind the outward appearances she describes. But Keun’s satirical purpose leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. The more reflective diary form, in contrast, allows Andreas-Friedrich to uncover the reality behind the public’s apparent excitement. She delves beyond what first meets the eye and again highlights the manipulative hand of the regime. She continues: ‘Befehl zum Flaggen: “Von heute ab auf die Dauer von acht Tagen.” Läuten der Kirchenglocken: drei Tage’ (Schattenmann, p.69) (Order for the display of flags: ‘As of today, for a period of one week.’ Ringing of church bells: three days) (Berlin, p.57; 19 June 1940). Her words uncover the hidden truth that government pressure, not personal initiative or enthusiasm, drives these preparations. One particular entry in Andreas-Friedrich’s diary is notable as a final reminder that what might otherwise appear as a routine event, something as ‘ordinary’ as a funeral, could be endowed with symbolic meaning in a dictatorship that strived to regulate much of its citizens’ private as well as public behaviour. When the members of Onkel Emil plan a funeral on 28 March 1945 for the two Jewish women killed in a bombing raid, they regard their action as a way to make a forceful declaration against Nazism. The teenage Karin declares it is a matter of honour to gather a large crowd of mourners and cover the entire chapel with flowers. Andreas-Friedrich has the same opinion: ‘Die anderen sind der gleichen Meinung. Hier muß etwas dokumentiert werden’ (Schattenmann, p.217) (The others agree. Our whole view of life is involved here; we have something to prove) (Berlin, p.223). Seitz telephones everyone associated with the resistance group. Over fifty people show up for the brief service, and Andreas-Friedrich notes there are many whom she does not know and who did not know Ursel or Eva. The simple funeral has as much of a psychological as a symbolic meaning because it forges a connection among the participants and also signifies their common stance against Nazism. Local authorities must have interpreted such a gathering as a potential threat because, as Andreas-Friedrich observes, a Kripospitzel (a secret agent of the criminal police) stands nearby during the service (Schattenmann, pp.218-19). Just as anti-Nazis in the Third Reich defied state authorities by attending the funerals of Jewish friends, so too did French women bring their opposition to the cemetery.19 Georgette Wallé, a former resister, recalls placing flowers on the graves of persons shot by the Germans: ‘Après les fusillades, les femmes faisaient porter des fleurs sur les tombes des victimes au cimetière d’Ivry. Les Allemands les enlevaient [. . .]. On y retournait et il y avait d’autres fleurs le lendemain, parfois à l’extérieur du cimetière’ (After the shootings, women put flowers on the victims’ graves at the cemetery in Ivry. The Germans removed them. [. . .] You went back there the next day and there were some more flowers, sometimes outside the cemetery) (Coudert and Helene, p.158). Such forms of protest clearly spanned national boundaries. 19

Phayer reports on the experience of Babette Seitz, President of the Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund (Catholic German Women’s League) in the Palatinate region of Bavaria, who put herself at risk by attending the funeral of a Jewish man in 1936. VKZ Reihe A, vol. 24, 124; report of 8 July 1936, cited in Phayer, p.180. Wickert notes another incident in which a funeral became a focal point of resistance. The death of Clara Bohm-Schuch, in May 1936, was attributed to the treatment she received while in political custody. Her funeral, in which over one hundred people participated in the procession, became a demonstration against Nazism (‘Women’, p.111).

89

The contradictions in Keun’s characterization of Sanna or Andreas-Friedrich’s delineation of her own role as a resister ultimately lead back to the social attitudes about women’s and men’s roles that prevailed during the years prior to the war. These two narratives mirror the subtle disruption of gender norms under the impact of war and resistance. Neither author necessarily employs the context of resistance as an opportunity to redefine customary notions of femininity, however. Keun sketches Sanna in terms of feminine stereotypes, while Andreas-Friedrich shrouds her own resistance in silence. Both writers employ these strategies to the same effect, that is, to clearly outline the female resistance figure’s femininity so that she does not appear ‘masculinized’ as a result of her illegal work. The undercurrent of defiance in some of Sanna’s observations about Nazism and her propensity to express herself regardless of the consequences set her apart from the conventional image of the compliant woman. She is her own person, as her sharp wit and brash tone indicate, and she has the ability to tap powerful inner resources. The critic Irene Loriska points out Sanna’s bravery and resourcefulness in arranging a secret liaison between her girlfriend, Gerti, and Dieter Aaron, whose love for each other is forbidden by Nazi racial laws prohibiting relations between Germans and Jews.20 Sanna’s strong character is borne out as well in her clear-sightedness and skill at organizing, as when she calmly and rationally makes arrangements for herself and Franz to go into exile after the helpless young man informs her that he has committed a murder. She takes charge, thinking quickly to devise a plan to get passports and to take along jewellery they can later exchange for money in Holland. Andreas-Friedrich the resister similarly exhibits so-called masculine qualities that enable her to carry out her illegal work. When she steals official stamps and seals from the bombed-out house of a Nazi official because her group needs ration cards and food coupons for their Jewish charges, it is her bravery and calmness under pressure that enable her to accomplish this task.21 There was risk in stealing, but the punishment for attempting to defraud the food ration card system during the war was a sentence in a concentration camp or possibly a death sentence (Stoltzfus, p.133). The journalist relies upon other personal strengths when she and her daughter assume false identities to apply for food coupons and ration cards at the police station (Andreas-Friedrich, Schattenmann, pp.226-27; 3 April 1945). They must not only retain their composure as they lie to authorities, but also think quickly and be alert to what is going on around them so that they can escape if the situation begins to appear too threatening. Although Sanna, as noted, does not appear to conform to the customary image of the weak or passive female, in other ways she does fit this role. Keun’s reliance on stereotypical feminine behaviours prevents her protagonist from entirely breaking free of socially prescribed roles. Sanna often concerns herself with the trivial. Her preoccupation with her looks, and her limited intellectual curiosity make her appear less powerful than she actually is. Moreover, Sanna, as Keun has drawn her, seems incapable of fully comprehending the political situation before her. Although the young woman obviously has the capacity to reveal the absurdity behind the Nazi order or expose the truth about the petty 20

Irene Loriska, Frauendarstellungen bei Irmgard Keun und Anna Seghers (Representations of women in Irmgard Keun and Anna Seghers) (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1985), p.190. 21 Schattenmann, pp.221-23; 31 March 1945. By mid-1942, the Nazis no longer permitted Jews to purchase basic foodstuffs such as meat, eggs, white flour, and milk with their food coupons. They also denied Jews clothing allowances (Stoltzfus, p.124).

90

motives of individual citizens, she frequently claims ignorance about what is taking place around her. Keun may intend this seeming contradiction as ironic. As Loriska asserts, Sanna’s naïveté actually gives her insight (p.183). Younger, less politically aware, and less educated than those around her, she is able to pierce through the rhetoric and the lies to find the truth. Yet Sanna’s political astuteness is doubtful for other reasons. For instance, Ackermann points out that she is highly subjective, relying not on reason but primarily on how she is personally affected by a given situation in order to assess the political events playing out before her (p.28). Sanna’s most significant defining trait is a concern with romance and love that overrides nearly everything else, including politics and potential opposition to Nazism. While many women’s resistance narratives place a premium on personal relationships in a world of war and resistance, Sanna’s longing for love so dominates her characterization that it becomes a stereotypical feature rather than a way to indicate the relative importance of the personal during wartime. Loriska’s observations support the conclusion that the desire for romance generally defines Sanna and the other women characters in Nach Mitternacht, when she comments that the female figures are more interested in men than politics (p.195). The need for love forms the basis of Sanna’s entire existence. One of the central elements of the plot is in fact her relationship with Franz and its evolution from friendship to romantic love and plans for marriage. The importance of this relationship for her is evident in a remark she makes on the train that will take her and Franz to Holland. Having just made good their escape from, possibly, jail and a death sentence, she remarks: ‘Mein Kopf liegt in Franz’ Schoß. Ich muß mich schwächer zeigen, als ich bin, damit er sich stark fühlen und mich lieben kann’ (Nach, p.172) (My head is in Franz’s lap. I must seem to be weaker than I am, so that he can feel strong, and love me) (After, p.151). As Keun portrays her, Sanna appears willing to hide what she has shown herself to be, that is, a strong and intelligent young woman, so that she may have Franz’s love. For Sanna, love is as much a source of security as it is a fundamental way to make sense of life. When she is involved in a conversation with a hot-headed man at a bar and is unable to comprehend his nonsensical race theories, she invokes love to help her understand. The politics of Nazi anti-Semitism are swept aside as she declares: ‘Nur als ich Franz liebte, habe ich die Welt verstanden und war froh. [. . .] Alles war klar. [. . .] Ich will geliebt werden’ (Nach, p.121) (It was only when I loved Franz I understood the world, and felt happy. [. . .] Everything was quite clear. [. . .] I want to be loved, everybody wants to be loved) (After, p.107). Keun does not develop her protagonist as an integrated, complex figure. Ackermann regards Keun’s characterization of her protagonist as a feature of Trivialliteratur, which employs the ‘female strategy’ of living through a man (p.29). Horsley agrees that the images of women in Nach Mitternacht are almost entirely fashioned around feminine stereotypes, and she contends that, in contrast to the characters Gilgi and Doris, both positive examples of the independent New Woman in Keun’s earlier Weimar novels: ‘In Nach Mitternacht the women’s options appear to have narrowed along the traditional spectrum of “femininity”: the positively presented women conform to traditional feminine virtues of sex-appeal, nurturance, political and intellectual naïveté, and deference to male authority.’22 22

Horsley, pp.84-85. Horsley also explains the limited roles of Keun’s female characters in terms of the rise of Nazism and Nazi ideology’s emphasis on traditional roles (pp.84-85).

91

For all of Andreas-Friedrich’s deep involvement in the German underground and her obvious personal power, a tension likewise surfaces in her diary as she attempts to accommodate resistance and femininity within her own identity as a woman activist. Andreas-Friedrich the journalist interprets her anti-Nazi involvement as something quite apart from that of her male colleagues. Her role does not resonate with authority or political expertise in the way that the men’s roles do. The author emphasizes the significant professional connections of certain men in the group, focusing on two members in particular who bring Onkel Emil crucial information: Kordt, the resistance sympathizer whose official job places him within the Nazi inner circle, and Peters, who is a lawyer and professor. Andreas-Friedrich writes of Kordt: ‘Wenn einer etwas authentisch weiß, dann ist er es, der täglich und stündlich mit beiden Händen in der Weltgeschichte herumrührt’ (Schattenmann, p.15) (If anyone has the authentic dope, it must surely be he, stirring up history every day and every hour with both hands) (Berlin, p.5; 28 September 1938). She names Peters as the group’s most reliable source of information after Kordt (Schattenmann, p.49). Through their professional connections these men and others in Onkel Emil could presumably draw upon a variety of critical resources that might be funnelled into the circle’s underground operations. Yet Andreas-Friedrich who, as a journalist working for a publishing firm (Sayre describes her as ‘a wheelhorse at Ullstein for years’ (p.vii)) might have had some contacts of her own, never mentions a comparably prominent role for herself. Andreas-Friedrich also distances herself (and the other females in the group) from the political aspects of the circle’s work. She portrays only the male members as immersed in the broader politics of the war and the underground as they discuss tactics, organization, and links with other clandestine organizations. In an entry dated 1 August 1942, the journalist describes a scene in which group members sit around the radio and listen to reports about the German army’s successful campaign in the Soviet Union. It is the men (Seitz, Borchard, Peters, and Brandt) who discuss the meaning of patriotism and the need to build a unified resistance movement (Schattenmann, pp.91-93). Andreas-Friedrich does not bring herself or the other women into the picture here. The narrative gaps within this diary render the author less visible within Onkel Emil and implicitly remove her as a woman from politics and from a resistance defined as masculine. A look at some of the features of men’s resistance commentaries serves as a counterpoint to suggest just how much the narratives of Andreas-Friedrich and other women depart from the standard discourses of resistance. The vocabulary of war and combat is the foundation for many of these writings by men. The war forms a focal point for some texts as male resisters weave actual events of the war into their writings. Others employ militant imagery and metaphors of violence; covert action is translated into a battle aimed at driving the occupying forces out of France or bringing down the Nazi regime in Germany. Attention to the general course of the war and strategic battles was crucial for French paramilitary organizations whose existence and possibilities for success rested upon allied military backing, something that might explain the centrality of the war in certain French narratives. Frenay’s extensive underground organization, Combat, depended upon the military contacts of Frenay himself as a former officer, as well as allied support from London and the fortunes of the Forces Françaises Libres. For the German officers involved in the 20 July 1944 coup attempt against Hitler, military considerations had to be taken into account for other reasons. As Fabian von Schlabrendorff, one of the plotters, observes in his

92

memoir, The Secret War against Hitler, so long as Hitler could claim victories on the battlefield this small group of resisters could not hope to succeed in bringing off an attack on the dictator. The German people would not psychologically be able to reconcile the triumphs of the German army with an effort to overthrow a leader who appeared to be a masterful military strategist.23 In predicating resistance on the notion of a violent struggle, male narrators set up the primary actors in the underground to be men, who assume the soldiering role historically designated as theirs. Another feature of men’s narratives is the way in which the writers single out a brave few as resisters, thus again reserving anti-Nazi opposition exclusively for males and also enhancing the legendary aura surrounding these movements. Prominent resisters such as Frenay and Schlabrendorff reinforce their own positions as members of an elite. Frenay implies that his involvement in the French underground is fortuitous, that it is somehow due to forces greater than himself. In the opening paragraph of the introduction to his memoir, he names ‘fate’ as the force that ‘honored’ him with his place in the resistance (p.x), and he lays claim to the privileged role of the resister. As Frenay presents it, the movement was ‘a secret garden’, a space inhabited ‘by only a handful of people’ (p.xii). Schlabrendorff’s memoir similarly rests on the assumption that the conservative resistance to which he belonged had to discriminate carefully in identifying its conspirators. Remarking that the ‘German opposition exercised great care in selecting its confederates’, he goes on to explain that his own circle required individuals of superior character and in positions that could be exploited to help bring down the Nazi regime; therefore, all but a fairly small number of men had to be excluded (pp.180-81). René Char, the French surrealist poet who led a group of maquisards in Provence, contributes to the resister’s mythic status by representing the war and the underground as a time of high energy and excitement, with members of the resistance living on the edge as they pitched in to work for a meaningful common cause. Char glibly observes in his war journal: ‘J’ai vécu aujourd’hui la minute du pouvoir et de l’invulnérabilité absolus’ (Today I lived the moment of absolute power and invulnerability).24 Char asserts that the transformative power of the resistance has made him into a new man, one who is self-aware, fulfilled, skilful, more knowledgeable (pp.156-57). The implication here that he has discovered his true identity since leading the partisans elevates the resistance into a time and a place that is unknowable to the average person, and again underlines the ‘extraordinary’ meaning of resistance. It is not only the singularity of the anti-Nazi opponent but also the attempt to cast resistance activity as a higher cause that lends men’s narratives a larger-than-life feel. The welfare of the nation dominates the foreground of these texts as the resister helps the nation to recover humanitarian values and restore the political legitimacy that has been lost under the Nazi occupation in France or the Hitler dictatorship in Germany. In these renditions of the underground a higher calling than mere personal interest is said to motivate these men; their sense of national pride and the need to defend cultural values moves them to action. Male authors translate these abstract ideals into literal terms. Frenay suggests that the early newsletters of Combat ‘brought a breath of freedom’ to readers (p.32). Schlabrendorff writes: ‘For God—Country—Humanity’ were ‘[inscribed] [. . .] on the banner of the 23

Fabian von Schlabrendorff, The Secret War against Hitler, trans. by Hilda Simon (New York: Pitman, 1965), pp.116-17. 24 René Char, Hypnos Waking: Poems and Prose, trans. by Jackson Mathews (New York: Random House, 1956), pp.158-59.

93

German resistance’ (p.70). Char takes much the same literal approach when he writes that, ‘a tous les repas pris en commun, nous invitons la liberté à s’asseoir. La place demeure vide mais le couvert reste mis’ (p.132) (at every meal that we eat together, freedom is invited to sit down. The chair remains vacant but the place is set) (p.133). These writers establish a direct connection between their own roles and the needs of the country. Frenay implies that he is prepared to rescue his nation when he remarks that, ‘the very soul of France was in mortal danger’ (p.13). Schlabrendorff even more obviously links the 20 July conspirators to Germany’s salvation: ‘We considered the survival of Germany our very special task’ (p.202). Despite the male writers’ efforts to concretize these ideals, as if applying such noble words to the resisters’ actions invests those acts with a deeper meaning, they remain merely ideas or abstractions. In actuality, these terms sound hollow; they fail to come to life for the reader. The overall effect of such high-flown rhetoric and elevated moral concern is to create an idealized, unattainable world that few are worthy of entering. Such language lifts resistance out of the gritty reality of the everyday and endows the actions of the resisters with a mystique. These writers implicitly designate men as the guardians of a culture, and in so doing, they steep the resistance in heroism. According to these versions of the underground, such select defenders of the culture would necessarily be men because it was males who were not only regarded as legitimate combatants but who would also be seen as having access to the public avenues of power that would allow them to wage a defence of society’s ideals and values. In contrast, women, for the most part, do not associate resistance with violence in their accounts of the underground movements. In an obvious example, Andreas-Friedrich deliberately rejects violent methods as a viable choice for her underground group when she describes their desperate search, following a round-up of Jews in Berlin, for Jewish friends whom they have been protecting. Noting the circle’s powerlessness to confront the armed SS men, she chooses to emphasize the resisters’ non-violent impulses. Andreas-Friedrich comments that even if the members of Onkel Emil did have access to weapons, they would not know how to use them. More important, they would choose not to use them: ‘Wir sind nun mal keine “Umbringer.” Wir haben Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben. Das ist unsere Stärke und—unsere Schwäche’ (Schattenmann, p.103) (We just aren’t ‘killers.’ We revere life. That is our strength—and our weakness) (Berlin, p.91; 28 February 1943). On one level, her remarks cut to the heart of the German underground’s inability to confront the Nazi regime’s crushing system of terror and violence, while on another level, her words reflect an alternative way of interpreting resistance as a valid force that administers aid without resorting to sabotage or terrorism. Another characteristic of women’s narratives is that they frequently represent the illegal activity of females not as an organized means to a clearly defined political end or as a defence of social and cultural ideals, but rather as a spontaneous gesture of help for victims of Nazi repression and persecution. Further, an ineffable quality surrounds these descriptions of resistance. Actions are understated, portrayed more as spur-of-the-moment, almost unconscious reactions to circumstances that happen to arise than as deliberate and heroic undertakings. This is not to say that women did not find any motivation at all in the desire to uphold social and cultural ideals. French and German women in fact joined the resistance for a variety of reasons. Hervé cites the desire for freedom, adventure, and selfrealization, a feeling of patriotism, and belief in the values of freedom, hope, trust, human

94

rights, and national sovereignty as providing the impetus for French women’s resistance (pp.124-25). In the Third Reich, where the risks were greater, female resisters were not driven to act out of patriotism or a sense of adventure or to test themselves. German women were motivated by a feeling of Pflicht (duty), and they based their actions on empathy and concern for others and on a vision of a better Germany in the future (Hervé, pp.73-75, 12425). The modest terms in which women have couched descriptions of female resisters’ experiences have more to do with dominant cultural and social expectations that demand a weak and passive demeanour of women than with a realistic assessment of what women actually accomplished as opponents of Nazism. Ania Francos finds in her interviews with French women resisters that, ‘la majorité des femmes qui ont risqué leur vie pour libérer la France [. . .] ont l’impression de “n’avoir rien fait”’ (the majority of women who risked their lives to liberate France [. . .] are under the impression that they did ‘nothing at all’) (p.133). In his interviews with German women who demonstrated to save their Jewish husbands during the Rosenstraße protest in Berlin, Stoltzfus likewise suggests the quiet tone of these narratives when he states: ‘Most of those I have talked with described their decision to protest as an involuntary reaction’ (p.266). Self-effacement replaces claims of heroism in women’s testimonies as they assert again and again that they really did ‘nothing at all’ or were only helping someone. The writer and resister Clara Malraux explicitly rejects any claim to heroism when she remarks: ‘Manger, boire, dormir occupait un bonne partie de notre temps [. . .]. Cette Résistance, je n’en ai pas été une héroïne, je me suis contentée d’accomplir un petit boulot d’allure quotidienne’ (Eating, drinking, sleeping occupied a large part of our time [. . .]. I was never a heroine in this resistance. I was content to accomplish an everyday task in a routine way).25 The German Erna Lugebiel, who sheltered individuals hiding underground and gathered clothing and money for them, similarly minimizes the importance of her actions. Lugebiel claims that she did not regard this activity as resistance but rather as an expression of human sympathy (Szepansky, p.155). The continual need to manage everyday responsibilities and to solve daily problems would have kept women’s opposition (and their narrative treatment of the subject) grounded in the ordinary and removed from abstract and high-flown language. The choices that Keun and Andreas-Friedrich make in fashioning a discourse that places private, personal concerns in the foreground and mutes the women figures’ potential as resisters speaks volumes about the relative freedom women writers actually had to interpret the connections between war and resistance and gender. Both women adopted a bold political stance in choosing to write against Nazism, and their narratives are inherently political; yet, at the same time, the authors shy away from a political identity for themselves. Although Keun did not belong to a formal resistance organization, something she later said she regretted, she had already formed firm opinions about Nazism before she left Germany, as is evident in a letter to Strauß in which she describes her intense dislike for Nazism (Ich, p.26). Moreover, she did participate in discussions about communist politics and took part in anti-fascist activities as an emigrée. As for Keun’s novella, the subtext of the ‘naïve’ Sanna’s insights into her society can be seen as a call to resist Nazism. Ackermann specifically ascribes this intention to the novella, asserting that as a 25

Clara Malraux, Le Bruit de nos pas (The sound of our footsteps), 6 vols (Paris: Grasset, 1963-79), VI, 84-85.

95

representative text of anti-fascist exile literature, one of its aims was to build resistance (p.27). For Andreas-Friedrich, the very act of recording the inner-workings of her resistance circle, as well as noting the terror and brutality in her society signified a stand against Hitler’s dictatorship. Of her decision to keep a secret diary, she writes, ‘daß es sie und mich den Kopf kosten würde, wenn man dieses Tagebuch fand und es zu lesen verstand, war mir klar’ (it was clear to me that it would cost them [her fellow resisters] and me our lives if anyone found this diary and knew how to read it).26 Andreas-Friedrich’s use of pseudonyms to disguise the identity of Onkel Emil’s members and her hiding of the diary also indicate how aware she was of the political significance of her actions. Despite their obvious political awareness, both Keun and Andreas-Friedrich appear to distance themselves from the ‘masculine’ politics of resistance. They describe opposition to the Nazis in humanitarian and moral terms, a strategy that drains this activity of a political meaning. Keun translates her own political belief into a moral stance, telling Jürgen Serke, for instance, that she supported the position held by the emigrant writers in her circle: ‘Ich war für das, was ihre Grundhaltung, ihre Moral ausmachte’ (I was in favour of that which constituted their fundamental position, their morality) (Serke, p.167), and claiming that she was not as political as writers like Toller, Becher, or Heinrich Mann. Andreas-Friedrich’s diary is unusual as a woman’s narrative in that she intermittently alludes to the war and international politics in recording Onkel Emil’s activities. Yet even as she raises political or military-related matters in her writing, she plays down their significance, instead highlighting the emotional repercussions of personal relationships broken apart by the Nazi terror. She casts the work of Onkel Emil in non-ideological terms when she declares: ‘Keinem stand ehedem die Politik im Zentrum seiner Interessen. Niemand von uns hat je einer politischen Partei angehört. Wir wollten immer nur Menschen sein’ (Schattenmann, p.244) (None of us ever used to be much interested in politics; none of us ever belonged to a political party. All we wanted was to be human beings) (Berlin, p.252; 16 April 1945). In contrast to Schlabrendorff and Frenay, who establish a direct connection between their personal involvement in subversive action and the larger national picture, these subjects in Andreas-Friedrich’s hands essentially form a backdrop for a highly personalized treatment of how the individual, whether the Jew living underground or the resister, is affected by conditions of war or clandestine life. In a poignant scene, dated 8 December 1941, Andreas-Friedrich and her companions walk home dispiritedly after learning that Margot Rosenthal, an elderly Jewish woman whom the circle has been hiding, has been deported. The journalist relates that they scarcely hear the newspaper sellers’ cries that Japan is now at war with the United States and England. She writes: ‘Es interessiert uns nicht. Im Augenblick interessiert uns nur eines: Wohin haben sie Margot Rosenthal gebracht’ (Schattenmann, p.86) (It doesn’t interest us. At the moment only one thing interests us: Where did they take Margot Rosenthal?) (Berlin, p.74). Andreas-Friedrich revises the conventional terms of resistance here by replacing the impersonal international political scene with the personal anguish of the resisters. Andreas-Friedrich displaces politics from the focal point of her resistance narrative in other ways, as she focuses on ordinary concerns rather than the political implications of Onkel Emil’s actions. Although hiding Jews was a political act inasmuch as it defied Nazi 26

96

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1945 bis 1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), p.278.

racial laws, the author does not link the circle’s efforts to shelter people with the subject of racial injustice. Writing about the remarks of Rosenthal, who was in hiding but insisted everything was fine as long as she did not stay in her home, Andreas-Friedrich describes the emotional pain caused by living a clandestine existence. Noting the hardship of continually sleeping on the couches of strangers, walking aimlessly through the streets, or sitting in musty movie theatres in order to evade the Gestapo’s surveillance, the journalist asserts the basic human need to be grounded in routine tasks at home: Irgendwann aber muß man mal zu Hause sein. Man kann nicht immer auf fremden Sofas schlafen, planlos durch die Straßen spazieren oder in muffigen Kinos sitzen. Man muß auch mal nach den Blumen sehen—zu Hause—, sich Wäsche holen, man muß . . . Jeder braucht ab und zu das Gefühl, daß er nicht heimatlos ist. (Schattenmann, p.85) (But some time or other you have to be at home. You can’t be forever sleeping on strange sofas, aimlessly walking the streets, or sitting in stuffy movies. Once in a while you have to look after the flowers at home, the laundry, you have to . . . Now and then everyone needs the feeling that he is not homeless.) (Berlin, p.73; 6 December 1941)

Andreas-Friedrich’s focus on the victim’s psychic dislocation and on fundamental human requirements strips resistance of its veneer of glory and excitement. The reader, instead, is reminded that a person’s need for an everyday routine continued on. The end effect of such writing is a more realistic picture of what a clandestine existence was actually like, for the victims and for the resisters. The uneasiness of Keun’s and Andreas-Friedrich’s status as women pushing against the boundaries of gender is equally apparent in other aspects of their lives. Keun was the only female within her circle of emigrant writers. While the often quoted remarks of Kesten, a member of this group, compliment the young writer’s political astuteness that he noticed at their first meeting27, his comments about her looks also go on to highlight the dilemma of the woman writer who, for all of her talent, continued to be seen, first, as a female.28 Horsley concludes that although Keun received encouragement and support from the male emigré writers in her circle, ‘as a token woman [she] would have been subjected to pressure, consciously or unconsciously, to conform to the attitudes and values of her male colleagues, in particular the views of her lover-companion Joseph Roth’ (p.106). AndreasFriedrich, who was a mother as well as a journalist and a resister, faced perhaps even more internal contradictions than Keun. Her concern for her daughter’s welfare surfaces when the author mentions her attempts to console the tearful Karin, who has made a vow for freedom after the execution of the young Weiße Rose members. At the same time, AndreasFriedrich’s professional activities and her resistance would have demanded of her courage and personal strength as she worked side-by-side with men. In their narratives, Keun and Andreas-Friedrich resolve this pull in opposing directions by subduing the voice of the female resister. The stereotypes and expressions of sentimentality that cover over Sanna’s power and strength are scarcely different from the narrative gaps that downplay Andreas27

Kesten, describing his first encounter with Keun at the Hotel Métropole in Amsterdam, found her to be ‘naiv und brillant, witzig und verzweifelt, volkstümlich und feurig [. . .] eine Prophetin, die anklagt, ein Prediger, der schilt, ein politischer Mensch, der eine ganze Zivilisation verschlämmen sah’ (naïve and brilliant, witty and confused, popular and fiery [. . .] a prophet who accuses, a preacher who reproaches, a political person who saw an entire civilization drown in mud) Hermann Kesten, Meine Freunde, die Poeten (My friends, the poets) (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1980), p.237. 28 See Horsley’s article ‘Witness’, in which the author carefully analyses Keun’s letters to Strauß, and see also Kreis’s biography of Keun (Was man glaubt, gibt es, above) for further evidence of the author’s conflict between her roles as a woman and an artist.

97

Friedrich’s own actions as a resister. Both approaches obscure or render less visible the ‘masculine’ traits that the women demonstrate as resisters, while simultaneously reminding readers of the traditional feminine identity. In demonstrating the suffocating sense of confinement and isolation that severely limited possibilities for German resisters, Keun and Andreas-Friedrich underscore the symbolic and psychological power of the small-scale, spur-of-the-moment actions that found an outlet in the Third Reich. Given the ‘ordinary’ contexts in which such resistance occurred, many of these anti-Nazi acts became associated with women as they set about their daily routines. Whether women engaged in this impromptu dissent out of frustration and anger at the regime’s control over their lives, or whether they contributed to the more deliberate activities of the larger opposition groups and networks, resistance could unsettle women’s customary ways of being. If Keun and Andreas-Friedrich suggest the power of war and resistance to upset social norms, they also, finally, uphold these norms in delineating the resistance of women. Females who played a part in the large, well-established resistance movements may well have been even more subject to inner conflict than those who engaged in the spontaneous acts of anti-Nazism described here. As will be seen in chapter 5, the women resisters associated with these broader networks inhabited a clandestine realm that was often defined by political belief, strategy, and, in some cases, violence—areas regarded as the province of men. These women, then, were confronted with a sharper, more dramatic split between the ‘masculine’ nature of their illegal roles and a traditional femininity. For this reason, perhaps, the authors telling these stories distance the female characters from such a ‘masculine’ context to a greater extent than do Keun and Andreas-Friedrich.

98

Chapter Five Conventional Women and Revolutionary Movements

Elle n’était pas faite pour être la femme d’un héros. Elle n’était pas faite pour tendre un bouclier à son mari ou à son fils, en lui disant: ‘Reviens dessus ou dessous.’1 [Anne, in Edith Thomas, ‘FTP’]

Not only the political orientations of the larger, more prominent resistance networks on both the left and the right in France and Germany but also the focus on violence, in the French communist organizations in particular and among the German communist and socialist groups and the 20 July conspirators to a lesser extent, added to the ‘masculine’ character of resistance. Women contributed to the work of some of these networks, more often in support capacities rather than as leaders or combatants, and their actions helped the large-scale movements accomplish their goals. For the most part, women found little cause to question their assigned roles since they perceived their own identities and existence as separate from the realms of combat and politics. Indeed, as their oral testimony and written narratives bear out, even women who had long been active in the communist and socialist movements, and who regarded the resistance as an extension of their prior political commitments, discuss their illegal activities in terms of the personal and private concerns with which females have long been identified. In Edith Thomas’s short story ‘FTP’ and Anna Seghers’s novel Das siebte Kreuz resistance is cut from a political cloth rarely seen in the writings of women authors. These writers fashion a militant metaphor for resistance out of the political discourses of the communist underground organizations in which both women participated. The values of justice, peace, freedom, and class solidarity motivate the resisters in these two narratives. Opposition to Nazism is equated with a battle or a struggle, specifically the class struggle, which draws into its orbit individuals from all levels of society. The aim of resistance is to unite these diverse individuals into a single force that will liberate the country and lay the groundwork for the communist millennium in France, and revive a spiritually defeated people that can strike back collectively against the Hitler regime in Germany. What is the tenor of women’s voices when they narrate the resistance of females within the framework of a discourse informed by politics, revolution, and national concerns? For all of Thomas’s and Seghers’s personal commitment to Communism and their determination to construct these narratives around an understanding of resistance as a militant fight in the service of abstract ideals, they nevertheless do not adopt the standard communist discourse in its entirety. The authors do rely on the bywords of communist ideology and even 1

(She wasn’t made to be a hero’s wife. She wasn’t made to hand a shield to her husband or son, saying to him: ‘Return on it or under it’) Edith Thomas, ‘FTP’, in Contes d’Auxois (Stories by Auxois) (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1943), pp.51-60 (pp.55-56).

a masculine point of view, but at the same time they look beyond the political rhetoric to the effects that resistance had on loved ones at home, to the social connections between the resister and others, and to the details of daily life. The female resisters in this story and novel are located on the sidelines of the French and German movements, although their participation is essential to the smooth functioning of the operations dominated by men. The women generally come into contact with the resistance through their husbands’ earlier involvement, and beyond their subversive tasks that further the men’s efforts, their most notable function is to provide emotional support and give expression to the feelings that underlie the male resisters’ risky and life-threatening actions. These female figures achieve little visibility as characters, and there is scant suggestion that their resistance work empowers them. Their lack of prominence here indeed raises many questions, for, as previously discussed, many women assumed significant roles in the communist resistance movements in France and Germany. The narrative choices of Thomas and Seghers, who themselves led relatively untraditional lives, may be more understandable if one considers that in taking up a discourse in which resistance was predicated on politics and violence, there was a potentially greater need for them to acknowledge the powerful mores and taboos that excluded women from these spheres. Edith Thomas (1909-1970) was a historian by training whose political interests and concern for social justice led her into the fields of journalism, prose fiction, and poetry. She published six novels between 1934 and 1945, wrote articles for various communist and leftist newspapers and reviews during the interwar years, and produced poems and short stories about the resistance that were printed and distributed by the French underground. Thomas’s longer fiction consisted mainly of women’s novels that focused on the lonely existence of independent young women who try to make their own way in the world by pursuing their ambitions, but who cannot find a fulfilling love in their lives.2 Thomas later began working as a journalist, believing that she could serve the cause of the proletariat more directly through her newspaper articles than her books (Thomas, Témoin, p.58). The critic Dorothy Kaufmann, whose recent research has shed much light on the obscure Thomas, perceives an important thread that runs throughout the author’s diverse body of writing: ‘One can readily trace the continuity between Thomas as novelist and Thomas as historian in her choice to explore the social and political history of a period through the life of a particular individual or group of individuals’ (p.64). After the Second World War, Thomas wrote essays and longer historical studies that examined the lives of such writers and social activists as George Sand, Louise Michel, Pauline Roland, and the women who participated in the Commune uprising. Thomas was born into a middle-class, Catholic family, and although her parents were non-practicing, she converted to Protestantism as an act of adolescent rebellion. She joined the PCF in September 1942, thus beginning a steady course of political involvement that would include a variety of roles in the French resistance (Thomas, Témoin, p.113). Thomas was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1931, and began writing a novel, La Morte de Marie (The death of Marie), while recuperating from the disease. The book was awarded the Prix du Premier Roman (Prize of the first novel) in 1933, when Thomas was twenty-four years old. During the years between the two wars, Thomas’s politics shifted further to the left. She joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (Association of Revo2

Dorothy Kaufmann, ‘Uncovering a Woman’s Life: Edith Thomas (novelist, historian, résistante)’, French Review, 67 (1993), 61-72 (p.61).

100

lutionary Writers and Artists) for a brief period in 1934, though she soon quit because the organization was too dominated by communist dogma. At the Bibliothèque nationale she held a position as an archivist, but this type of work left her feeling cut off from the excitement of the political events of the time. Eventually, she began covering such topics as women and work, and the Spanish Civil War for the communist newspapers Ce soir and Commune; Vendredi (Friday), the Popular Front’s cultural and political journal; and the leftist publications Europe and Regards (Looks) (Témoin, pp.58-61). The comments of Claude Morgan, a militant communist and a resistance colleague of Thomas, suggest a close relationship between her wartime fiction and her journalism. He describes one particular article she wrote for the journal Les Lettres françaises (French letters) as ‘une vivante chronique de France, prélude de ses futurs Contes d’Auxois’ (a living chronicle of France, prelude to her future Contes d’Auxois).3 After a two-year stay, between 1939 and 1941, in a sanatorium to recover from tuberculosis, Thomas returned to Paris determined to participate in some form of resistance against the Germans. Her commitment to the French underground movement was forged by the political and social climate in which she had come of age. Thomas would later write that she identified with those less fortunate because she herself had suffered as a disabled person with tuberculosis (Témoin, pp.42-43, 97). She was already sympathetic to Communism as a twenty-year-old, an outlook she described as a reaction against the chauvinistic education of her childhood during the First World War (p.96). Thomas writes in her political memoir, Le Témoin compromis, that her decision to join the PCF represented to her the most promising way to remedy society’s ills and transform the world (pp.114, 116). Resistance against the Germans signified an extension of her thinking about society and politics, for she feared that Vichy policies had the potential to destroy the ideals of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ that were the legacy of the 1789 Revolution, and she believed that the German occupation intensified social injustice and added to the oppression of the working class (pp.9597). She later made contact with Morgan, and together they re-established the Comité National des Écrivains (CNE; National Writers’ Committee), which had originally begun under the impetus of the PCF and the leadership of Jacques Decour. When Decour was executed by the Germans in 1942, the organization was dissolved until Thomas and Morgan contacted Decour’s co-founder, Jean Paulhan, about reconstituting it. This group of some twenty-two writers began secretly convening their meetings at Thomas’s Left Bank Paris apartment in February 1943. CNE members founded Les Lettres françaises, the esteemed underground literary journal that published essays by Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Jean-Paul Sartre, François Mauriac, Albert Camus, Raymond Queneau, and others, and it set up the clandestine press, Éditions de Minuit. Thomas also acted in various capacities in the French women’s resistance, writing and editing political tracts for Union des Femmes Françaises, and as a member of that organization’s coordinating committee helping to plan women’s demonstrations against the Vichy and German authorities. During the winter of 1941-42, Thomas was also involved in gathering money for families of deportees (p.102). Thomas received the médaille de la Résistance (Medal of the Resistance) after the war for her contributions to the French movement. In 1949, she resigned from the PCF because she disagreed with the Soviet Union’s excommunication of Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito as a traitor. Her historical study of the women in the 3

Claude Morgan, ‘Vingt-trois mois de publication clandestine: La vie cachée des ‘Lettres françaises’’, Les Lettres françaises, 16 September 1944, 8.

101

Paris Commune, Les Pétroleuses (The women incendiaries), was awarded the Prix Fémina (Fémina Prize) in 1964, and her novel Rossel was honoured by the Académie française in 1968. Thomas died in 1970. Thomas and other French writers found the short story form particularly suited to their needs during the war and the occupation, when they were forced to deal with German censorship and restrictions on paper and ink. Poetry was initially the most popular mode of literary expression for resistance authors because it required fewer materials to produce and its compressed form made it a valuable resistance tool. A poem could be committed to memory and passed on by word of mouth, and the message of resistance could be communicated through symbolism.4 Resistance writers availed themselves of other brief forms of writing, such as plays and stories, for similar reasons. The story form required less time and attention from the writer, and it had the advantage of allowing her or him to zero in on an episode that might otherwise be ‘too huge and too close to bring into focus. [. . .] Short stories and poetry, with their snapshot immediacy, could capture a single incident in dramatic close-up’.5 The short story was also more accessible to a reading public that lacked the time and the interest to read longer books like novels during the war.6 The brevity of the short story made it easier for writers to bypass German or Vichy censors who refused to let authors publish at all unless they collaborated with the Germancontrolled press. In September 1940, the Germans promulgated a list of banned books by some eight hundred writers that the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, had determined to be unsympathetic to the Third Reich. The Liste Otto (Otto List) contained writings by or about Jews, communists, or prominent anti-fascist figures. Every writer and intellectual was forced to make a decision about the extent to which she or he would compromise with the German demands. In Le Témoin compromis, Thomas explains that she did not publish her novel Étude de femmes (1945; Study of women) during the occupation because she would have had to work through the German censors, and she criticizes writers such as Triolet, who at times published legally (p.100). For Thomas and others, cooperation was out of the question. They attempted to circumvent the German restrictions by publishing their stories, poetry, essays, memoirs, and segments of diaries clandestinely with Éditions de Minuit. Writing under the pseudonym Auxois, Thomas produced a collection of seven short stories, titled Contes d’Auxois (Stories by Auxois), that portray scenes of life during the German occupation.7 The subject matter of these stories, many of which were inspired by actual incidents that Thomas recounts in Le Témoin compromis, ranges from everyday

4 5 6 7

John Flower and Ray Davison, ‘France’, in The Second World War in Fiction, ed. by Holger Klein (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp.47-87 (p.60). Anne Boston, Introduction, Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War, ed. by Anne Boston (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), pp.xi-xx (p.xii). See Max Adereth, ‘French Resistance Literature: The Example of Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon’, in Literature and War, ed. by David Bevan (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990), pp.123-34. In her notes to Le Témoin compromis, Kaufmann reports that Yvonne Paraf had the idea to name the pseudonyms of French resistance authors after the names of regions in France (for example, ‘Vercors’ (pseud. of Jean Bruller), and ‘Auxois’). Thomas also wrote resistance poetry under the pseudonym Anne. L’Honneur des poètes, the first anthology of resistance poetry, was published 14 July 1943 by Éditions de Minuit. Thomas published three poems in this collection that contained the work of twenty-two poets (Thomas, Témoin, p.110n).

102

hardships such as standing in line for food, to evasion of forced labour, to interrogation by the Gestapo, to guerrilla action.8 The episode of railway sabotage by French communists that is depicted in ‘FTP’, the concluding story, resonates with the dominant images of resistance as clandestine and organized political violence. A small band of six men conspire to blow up a train transporting German soldiers. The story opens as the leader of the operation, Paul, is informed that a German train will pass by his small town late that night. Paul goes to meet René, an employee at the station, to confirm the train’s arrival time and discuss their planned sabotage. Under cover of night, the men all arrive at the designated meeting place and then head toward the railroad tracks. The explosives are laid, the attack goes off, and the saboteurs calmly shoot the German soldiers as they try to escape the derailed train. Anna Seghers (1900-1983) shared with Thomas the belief in the need for a radical political and economic transformation of society. Seghers was one of the German Democratic Republic’s most esteemed and respected authors. Like Keun, Seghers also had the experience of writing in exile and of later failing to achieve broad critical acceptance. Seghers was written off by feminists (they rejected the masculine point of view in her fiction), and was caught up in the political crosscurrents of the Cold War just as Keun was.9 The two writers diverge, however, in that Seghers’s entire body of work treated the political questions of her time with a depth and a seriousness not evident in Keun’s lighter fare. When Seghers returned to East Berlin to live in 1947, she was awarded the Georg-Büchner Preis (Georg Büchner Prize) for her resistance novel, Das siebte Kreuz. Her novels as well as those of other leftist and exile writers generally were now hailed by the East German government. The new regime promoted exile literature as a way of creating an ongoing cultural and literary tradition that would support the recently erected political system.10 Seghers’s reception was another subject altogether in the Federal Republic of Germany, where exile and anti-fascist authors were ignored until the early 1960s.11 With the advent of the hardline Ulbricht regime in East Germany in the ‘50s, Seghers came under criticism there for her early writings, which were said not to adhere sufficiently to party doctrine and socialist realist standards. As the author drew closer to the party line, her stature in the West declined, and she was criticized for allowing her writing to conform to the dictates of ideology. As much as Seghers regarded literature as a tool for addressing political and social issues and for transforming modern German society, and considered her writing a valuable weapon in the anti-fascist cause, she did not wholly subscribe to the doctrine of socialist realism. She belonged within the socialist realist tradition insofar as she focused on the class struggle in her novels and stories and employed techniques of realism to portray the everyday existence of the average person. However, Seghers distanced herself from certain socialist realist tenets she considered too rigid and dogmatic. In her famous exchange of 8

Thomas, Témoin, p.110n. See Flower and Davison, who perceive a ‘conscious structural pattern’ in the ordering of the stories, which, they say, move from ‘resignation [. . .] through accounts of resistance, collaboration and increasing atrocities’ (p.64). 9 See Janet Swaffar and Eileen Wilkinson, ‘Aesthetics and Gender: Anna Seghers As a Case Study’, Monatshefte, 87 (1995), 457-72 (pp.462-63). 10 Dorothy Rosenberg, Afterword, The Seventh Cross, by Anna Seghers, trans. by James A. Galston (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), pp.347-75 (p.367). 11 See Rosenberg’s summary of the novel’s publication history in East and West Germany (p.366).

103

letters (1938-1939) with the Marxist literary critic George Lukács, she supported the author’s right to creative freedom and experimentation and argued that socialist realist prescriptions drained literature of meaningful content. Although many of her protagonists are everyday people, as demanded by socialist realism, she strayed from the tradition of creating characters who could represent particular social, political, or moral ideals, as she was more interested in examining the psychological and mythical dimensions of human experience.12 The psychological realism of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy was a fundamental influence on Seghers, who similarly delved into the psychic state of her characters. In Tolstoy’s broad social vision she found a model for her own depiction of fascism at all levels of German society (Bangerter, p.38). Seghers counted such modernists as Bertolt Brecht, Honoré de Balzac, John Dos Passos, Theodor Fontane, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Marcel Proust, and Stendhal as inspiration for her writing style and selection of literary topics, particularly in the beginning of her career, and she also cited the earlier German writers Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Heinrich von Kleist, and Georg Büchner as influences.13 She employed experimental and avant-garde narrative devices like colloquial speech, internal monologue, and stream of consciousness, and drew upon myth, dreams, and legend to create her ‘mosaic-like’ style that, in Das siebte Kreuz, pieces together diverse elements of life into a broad and complex portrait of existence.14 Anna Seghers, born Netty Reiling, was the only child of a well-educated, middle-class Jewish couple in Mainz. She shared her father’s interests in art, eventually going on to study philology, art history, history, and Sinology in Cologne and Heidelberg. She attended Ruprecht-Karls University in 1920, and was one of the first women admitted there. In 1924, she received a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation on Rembrandt (she took her pseudonym, Seghers, from the name of a graphic artist who lived during Rembrandt’s era). In 1925, Seghers married Laszlo Radványi, a Hungarian Jew who was a Marxist revolutionary and sociologist. A son, Peter, was born a year later, and a daughter, Ruth, in 1928. Literary critic Ute Brandes suggests that Radványi, through his deep commitment to Communism, played a role in his wife’s involvement in political issues. He also encouraged her literary pursuits as well as provided criticism about her manuscripts.15 Seghers soon gave up the field of art history for her writing, and she published her novella Der Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara (Revolt of the fishermen of St. Barbara) in 1928. That same year, Seghers received the Kleist Preis (Kleist Prize), the Weimar Republic’s most prestigious literary award, for this work. Much like Thomas, the young Seghers’s sensibility was shaped by the social and political turmoil of the early twentieth century, including World War I, which horrified her, and the Russian Revolution. Seghers subsequently rejected her comfortable middle-class background and found inspiration in Marxist thought, joining the KPD in 1928 (Brandes, pp.1412

See Lowell A. Bangerter, The Bourgeois Proletarian: A Study of Anna Seghers (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980), pp.3334, and Swaffar and Wilkinson, pp.459-60. 13 Anna Seghers, Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit (On artistic production and reality), comp. by Sigrid Bock, 3 vols (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1970-71), II, 37-38. 14 Bangerter observes that Seghers’s literary technique reflected her familiarity with other art forms she studied as a graduate student, such as the techniques used in Mexican frescoes and murals and those in Rembrandt’s paintings (p.40). 15 Ute Brandes, Anna Seghers (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1992), pp.17-18.

104

16). She moved quickly into the public eye as an author and a political activist. She joined the Bund Proletarisch-Revolutionärer Schriftsteller (League of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers), a writers’ organization that was a branch of the International Association of Revolutionary Writers located in Moscow and that advocated literature as a weapon in the class struggle. During the years leading up to the Nazi takeover, Seghers wrote political articles and literary essays for Communist Party newspapers, among them Die Rote Fahne, the official KPD publication; Der Weg der Frau (The woman’s path); and Die Linkskurve (The left-hand curve) (Rosenberg, pp.350-51). She also worked to rally anti-fascist forces by attending international gatherings of like-minded writers and intellectuals, such as the Second International Congress for Proletarian and Revolutionary Literature in the Soviet Union in 1930 and the Anti-War Congress in Amsterdam in 1932. Seghers felt extremely threatened in the Third Reich as a Jew and a Communist. She was arrested briefly by the Nazis in 1933, and her early books were banned by the regime and destroyed in the May 1933 book-burning. She immediately fled via Switzerland to Paris that same year, where she remained until 1940. Throughout her years in Paris exile, Seghers wrote and spoke out against Hitler, organizing readings and lectures, promoting anti-fascist demonstrations, and encouraging writers and thinkers to oppose the threat of fascism. She participated in the First International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture, held in Paris in 1935, and two years later attended the Second International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture in Madrid. She collaborated with Heinrich Mann and other exile writers to establish a ‘German Popular Front’ that would promote a free and democratic Germany, and worked as an editor and publisher of various anti-fascist publications. In addition to organizing readings and lectures and promoting anti-fascist demonstrations, Seghers published newspaper articles as well as the magazine Der Schriftsteller (The writer). She also served as the assistant editor of Neue deutsche Blätter (New German pages), an anti-fascist literary newspaper produced in Prague (Brandes, p.20; Rosenberg, p.352). Seghers began writing Das siebte Kreuz in Paris between 1938 and 1939, crafting her material second-hand from other writers’ accounts of concentration camp experiences and resistance novels with which she was familiar.16 Her personal situation as a writer in exile had given her a distant vantage point on events in Germany since the Nazi seizure of power, and this perspective necessarily influenced her work. Additional sources for her novel included the anti-fascist press, reports of successful escapes, and information about current conditions in Germany that she received from friends and other emigrants who had left the country more recently.17 Seghers lacked direct knowledge of the Nazi terror, such as concentration camps and deportations, and she received criticism in some quarters for not incorporating this type of material into her novel. Greta Kuckhoff, a former member of Rote Kapelle, criticizes Das siebte Kreuz, saying, ‘es fehlt an der Perspektive’ (it lacks perspective), and it fails to convey ‘der barbarischen Wirklichkeit, die überall gespürt, aber nur 16

Frank Wagner, Der Kurs auf die Realität: Das epische Werk von Anna Seghers, 1935-1943 (Towards reality: the epic work of Anna Seghers, 1935-1943), 2nd edn (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978), p.119. Among the novels Seghers drew upon to write Das siebte Kreuz were: Hans Beimler’s Im Mörderlager Dachau (1933; Eng. tr. Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler’s Hell-Hounds, 1933); Gerhart Seger’s Oranienburg (1934; Eng. tr. A Nation Terrorized, 1935); Jan Petersen’s Unsere Straße (1936; Eng. tr. Our Street, 1938); Wolfgang Langhoff’s Die Moorsoldaten (1935; Eng. tr. Rubber Truncheon, 1935); and Willi Bredel’s Die Prüfung (1935 ; The test). 17 F. Wagner, p.12; Seghers, III, 34.

105

selten gewußt wird’ (the barbaric reality that can be felt everywhere, but seldom consciously).18 If Seghers’s novel does not stand up well as an accurate record of life inside the Third Reich, it nevertheless contributes to the overall picture of the social attitudes that informed women’s resistance roles and suggests the outlook with which women authors approached the subject of political resistance. When Germany invaded France in 1940, Seghers changed her location of exile to Mexico City, where she settled with her husband and two children among a community of German communist emigré writers. Seghers’s father died in 1940, and her mother was killed in 1943 in Auschwitz (Brandes, p.19). Seghers continued her anti-fascist engagement in Mexico, co-editing the political and cultural newspaper Freies Deutschland (Free Germany) and writing essays about the role of the German writer in building a democratic Germany (p.22). Das siebte Kreuz brought the author wide international acclaim at the time it appeared. In the last years of her life Seghers was lionized in the East and also honoured in the West. Her health began to decline in the late 1970s, and she died in 1983 at age eightythree. Das siebte Kreuz does not actually depict an organized network of German communists but rather a series of impromptu acts by various people, the sum of which add up to the saving of one person’s life. The novel traces the escape of Georg Heisler from Westhofen concentration camp, where he had been imprisoned for communist activity, to his departure for safety in Holland. The first-person male narrator, a prisoner at Westhofen, opens the novel by recalling the significance of the seven trees near a barracks, their tops clipped and crossboards nailed to the trunks so that they resembled seven crosses. Seven prisoners fled, and six were soon recaptured. Each prisoner, once caught and returned to the camp, was tied to a tree. A single tree remained empty. That prisoner, Georg, is now being spirited to safety across the border. A new camp commander has since ordered the trees to be felled, but the memory of the empty seventh one still lingers in the minds of all the prisoners, suffusing them with hope, courage, and solidarity. The narrator’s outline of the action frames the account of the escapees’ flight and the recapture of the six men. Although Georg is the one man who succeeds in eluding the manhunt, this is not simply his story. As he makes his way through the German countryside to the border, relying on his own instincts, advice he remembers from comrades, and the help of strangers and a few friends, it becomes evident that an entire spectrum of people and a complex network of mutual interactions ultimately effect his escape. There is less emphasis here than in Thomas’s ‘FTP’ on the struggle for freedom or on erecting a classless society as an outcome of fascism’s defeat. Yet it is shared political belief and a collective spirit that unite the German people and help them overcome their anger, fear, and resignation so that they can oppose Nazism. The class struggle, more than the characters themselves, occupies centre stage in ‘FTP’ and Das siebte Kreuz, as both Thomas and Seghers rely on political discourses to depict a resistance aimed at overthrowing the enemy and clearing the way for revolutionary change. Thomas’s short story emphasizes the French (and European) fight for liberation and, at a broader international level, the cause of the working class. The author invokes political aims and humanitarian ideals as the forces driving the partisans into action. A discernible solidarity unites the resisters in a display of strength and intense political belief. The 18

Greta Kuckhoff, ‘Begegnungen mit dem “Siebten Kreuz”’, in Über Anna Seghers: Ein Almanach zum 75. Geburtstag (On Anna Seghers: an almanac for her 75th birthday), ed. by Kurt Batt (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1975), pp.149-58 (pp.151, 155).

106

lengthy passage that leads up to the sabotage in the final scene spells out each man’s motives and reiterates the importance of such resistance for the whole of Europe. The spare, unadorned language, the blunt style, and the simple sentence structure focus the reader’s attention entirely on the imminent attack and reinforce the prominence of the political violence at the heart of the story. Thomas’s unobtrusive approach contributes to the understanding here that resistance is about power. Seghers’s aim is equally didactic, for she imagined her readers as the youth of Germany, who had been so corrupted and numbed by their exposure to fascism that they could see no other possibilities for their lives than blindly obeying their Nazi leaders.19 Ideological conviction provides the impetus for the battle against Nazism in Das siebte Kreuz. Critic Werner Buthge maintains that the novel is not so much about the class struggle, the work of the party, or support for revolutionary movements as it is about demonstrating that a solid front of opposition existed throughout all levels of the population in the Third Reich.20 Yet this unity is clearly grounded in ideology, for what in varying degrees guides the actions of all those who contribute to Georg’s ultimately successful escape is a faith in the ideals of Communism. The male characters function as symbols of the overarching political struggle in these two narratives. While they are the main actors who carry out resistance, and in this they overshadow the female characters, the men remain little more than cardboard figures themselves, figures upon which the authors hang the bywords of an ideology and a movement. Seghers is constrained in part by her decision to depict German society in such breadth, and this strategy confines her to the surface features of her numerous characters (Kuckhoff, p.155). Although she chose to work within a genre that permitted her the freedom to develop her characters in more depth than does the short story, the male figures in her novel, like those in ‘FTP’, appear more as vessels for expressing political ideas than as fully rounded characters. Even as the reader waits for the group of men in ‘FTP’ to put their plan into action, it is not known what any of them look like. The saboteurs in “FTP’ act collectively out of concern for the nation (with the exception of a sixteen-year-old boy who loves fighting). Robert wants to free his country from the Nazi occupiers, and Paul, the bank clerk who sets the plan in motion, sees the paramilitary operation as an opportunity to shape history. The shoe repairer, Paul-le-Grand, has come to learn that one has to fight ‘à la disparition de l’injustice, à l’abondance, à la paix, à la joie’ (in order that injustice disappears, and for plenty, peace, joy), while the leather worker, Louis, seeks to demonstrate solidarity with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union. For René, a railway worker and an orphan raised by the state, this is also a battle for justice (Thomas, ‘FTP’, pp.58-59). Although their motives vary, there is unity in these differences, and it is this unity that lifts each man’s commitment from an individual context and endows it with a larger meaning. In the words of the literary critic Margaret Atack, ‘in nearly every case, each man is placed metyonymically in relation to a larger group’.21 The diverse back19

Erfahrung Exil: Antifaschistische Romane, 1933-1945 (The exile experience: antifascist novels, 1933-1945), ed. by Sigrid Bock and Manfred Hahn (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1981), p.370. 20 Werner Buthge, Anna Seghers: Werk, Wirkungsabsicht, Wirkungsmöglichkeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Work, consequences intended, consequences possible in the Federal Republic of Germany) (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1982), p.162. 21 Margaret Atack, Literature and the French Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p.145.

107

grounds of these men are meant to suggest not only their proletarian origins but also the power of Communism to bind them together into a force for liberation and, ultimately, revolution. Communist ideals also control Seghers’s narrative. Like Thomas, Seghers describes a solidarity that transcends class and political distinctions in German society. Communist belief unites the anti-Nazis so that they can further the escape effort. Critics Peter Roos and Friederike J. Hassauer-Roos suggest the way in which the characters embody these political concepts: ‘Obwohl der Roman darin mit Gedanken der Volksfront-Politik korrespondiert, bleiben zentrale Begriffe wie ‘Solidarität’ oder ‘antifaschistischer Kampf’ ungenannt—sie werden in Handlungen und Verhaltensweisen der Figuren umgesetzt’ (Although the content of the novel relates to ideas of Popular Front politics, central concepts such as ‘solidarity’ or the ‘anti-fascist struggle’ remain unnamed—they are transformed into the actions and behaviours of the characters).22 In Georg’s long history of education and training in communist philosophy, his activism in the party, and his staunch views, he most clearly suggests the novel’s political orientation. Georg stands for all those whose communist loyalties define their resistance. The narrator immediately establishes the tension between the dictatorship and its leftist adversaries by noting the large numbers of communist leaders that were murdered throughout Germany in the first months of the regime.23 The view of the critic Inge Diersen supports the assertion that Georg stands as a symbol of communist resistance to Nazism: ‘Die Flucht [ist] eine Herausforderung des Systems, eine Kraftprobe zwischen dem System und seinen Gegnern’ (the escape is a challenge to the system, a test of strength between the system and its opponents).24 Georg’s flight from Westhofen, then, signifies a political confrontation with the Nazi order as he rebels against the state that has worked to obliterate the movement since Hitler’s takeover. The politics of Communism in fact undergird the entire effort to bring Georg to freedom across the German border, though the network of anti-Nazis expands to encompass others who do not belong to the party. Some men who become part of the chain of resisters are truly committed communists: Franz Marnet, the chemical worker; Ernst Wallau, a party organizer; and Bachmann, among others. Georg’s presence also draws one-time communist sympathizers back into activity for the party, as seen in the contributions of Fiedler, a factory worker, and Kress, a chemist and an intellectual (Roos and Hassauer-Roos, pp.97-98). Many people, from the dedicated communists to others not loyal to the regime but, rather, apathetic or simply afraid to take action, make Georg’s escape possible. Among these people are Paul Röder and his wife, Liesel. Others, such as Doctor Löwenstein, act out of humanitarian concern. The broad brushstrokes of Thomas’s and Seghers’s resistance narratives, ironically, do not encompass women to any great extent. Having defined resistance in political terms, the two authors assign women relatively modest roles as resisters, while it is the men who have access to the political knowledge and professional connections that enable them to stage resistance operations. In his study of the exile novels Nach Mitternacht and Das siebte

22

Anna Seghers Materialienbuch (Anna Seghers: book of materials), ed. by Peter Roos and Friederike J. Hassauer-Roos (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1977), p.89. 23 Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz (The seventh cross) (Mexico City: Editorial El Libro Libre, 1943; repr. Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1973), p.116. 24 Inge Diersen, ‘Anna Seghers: Das siebte Kreuz’, Weimarer Beiträge, 18 (1972): 96-120 (p.107).

108

Kreuz, Ackermann remarks on the general scarcity of female characters in the fiction of Germany’s exile writers, and his comments apply equally well to Thomas’s ‘FTP’: Wer aber sind die Massen? Sind damit nicht in erster Linie die Männer gemeint? Beschreiben nicht auch die antifaschistischen Schriftsteller primär den männlichen Alltag? In ihrem Versuch, eine gesamtgesellschaftliche Repräsentanz zu erlangen, werden alle Schichten der Bevölkerung dargestellt, nur die Frauen werden weitgehend außer acht gelassen. (But who are the masses? Does this not mean primarily men? Do the anti-fascist writers, too, not describe mainly masculine everyday life? In their attempt to represent society in its entirety, all classes of people are portrayed. Only women are largely ignored.) (p.28)

In both narratives there are fewer female than male figures, and the women recede into the background. Although the women’s contributions, such as delivering messages, encouraging their husbands, and offering items of clothing or safe shelter to those in hiding, cement the larger, more visible deeds of the men, the authors do not interpret the women’s actions as ideologically motivated or as part of the larger political picture of resistance. The sum of Alice’s underground involvement in ‘FTP’ consists of performing small tasks for her husband and offering him emotional and moral support. As he awaits his fellow partisans, Paul realizes that without his wife he might not have had the courage and the faith to pursue this work (Thomas, ‘FTP’, p.57). Alice has the responsibility of notifying Paul-le-Grand and Robert of the upcoming attack. She slips a note into a library book and asks one of her students to deliver it to her father, who is Robert. Alice then informs Paulle-Grand of the plan through a coded message. Alice’s duties as messenger smooth the way for the imminent guerrilla action and also reduce any suspicion about her husband as a resistance organizer. Alice’s responsibilities appear minimal in contrast to those of the men who profess uplifting political beliefs and carry out the dramatic sabotage, but her presence is essential. Nevertheless, Thomas highlights her character’s subordinate status as a female associated with a paramilitary group in the scene in which Alice sits worriedly beside her husband during the evening hours before he leaves to meet the other men. The two lines that close out this scene are set off in a single section (the story is divided into six sections) that focuses on Alice alone: ‘Elle a pris son tricot et ses mains vont vite. Puis ses mains retombent sur les genoux et il n’y a plus pour elle que l’attente et l’angoisse de l’attente’ (She took up her knitting, and her hands moved quickly. Then her hands fell into her lap, and for her there was only waiting and the anguish of waiting) (p.56). What follows in the next section is the final passage that describes the men meeting each other, their assorted political commitments, and the blowing up of the train, which is the culmination of the story. The stark contrast between the solitary figure of Alice and the exciting sabotage and high-flown political rhetoric surrounding the men distinctly sets her apart from the guerrilla act taking place and underlines her lack of belonging to a resistance of violence and communist ideology. The female figures in Das siebte Kreuz resemble Alice in that they, too, attend to necessary details of resistance in less obvious ways. The older women, such as Frau Marelli, are furthest removed from the main action. She supplies Georg with much-needed clothing and comforts him as a motherly figure. Two other women, Grete Fiedler and the unnamed waitress, are more instrumental in aiding his escape. The waitress provides a safe haven for Georg the night before he is to board a boat for Holland the next morning. She represents the last stop on the fugitive’s journey out of Germany, and in this way she is one more vital link in this chain of solidarity. Grete conveys messages to Liesel and Dr. Kress at her husband’s bidding, basically following his instructions and not taking any personal initiative. 109

The women in Das siebte Kreuz further the men’s work by passing messages and facilitating their husbands’ efforts in quiet, unobtrusive ways, while leaving it to the men to plot the resisters’ next move. Whereas Andreas-Friedrich in Der Schattenmann frequently minimizes the significance of her own actions by declining to comment on the significance of her resistance role, or Keun hides Sanna’s bravery and intellectual power behind a facade of ‘feminine’ behaviours and concerns in Nach Mitternacht, Thomas and Seghers reduce the potential of their women characters by removing them from the limelight and portraying them as fairly stereotypical figures. The two writers define the personal identities of these characters so narrowly that it is difficult to view them as resisters. The women take their sense of who they are from their homes and their love for husband and family, whom they comfort and care for. As primarily wives and mothers (or mother figures), they are politically unaware, and they concern themselves chiefly with nurturing personal relationships and tending to the everyday routine. Loriska concurs, noting that in Das siebte Kreuz, ‘für die Männer scheint es die Politik, für die Frauen der Mann zu sein, was ihr Leben ausmacht, was ihr Leben positiv verändern kann’ (for the men it seems to be politics, for the women a man that constitutes life, that can change their life in a positive way).25 At issue here are the extremely limited identities of these females, who show no indication that their subversive activity has challenged their traditional ways of being and acting. These characters express their feelings in ways that evoke stereotypes of passivity and weakness. In ‘FTP’, Alice’s life and self-concept revolve around serving and taking care of others in the peaceful rhythm of daily life as she cares for her husband, tends the home, and teaches school. One of the values of women’s resistance narratives as a whole is that many of them assert the importance of home life as a centre of calm amid the upheaval of war and resistance and thus establish crucial connections between private life and resistance. Yet this is not the case here. The author’s clear demarcation of Alice’s and her husband’s roles renders the circumscribed boundaries of Alice’s world and of who she is as a person even more apparent. Alice regards herself as so removed from Paul’s world of politics and resistance that she does not wish to be a ‘hero’s wife’. She thinks to herself: ‘Elle n’était pas faite pour être la femme d’un héros. Elle n’était pas faite pour tendre un bouclier à son mari ou à son fils, en lui disant: “Reviens dessus ou dessous”’ (She wasn’t made to be a hero’s wife. She wasn’t made to hand a shield to her husband or son, saying to him: ‘Return on it or under it’) (Thomas, ‘FTP’, pp.55-56). As the narrator observes, Alice’s function is to give reading and writing lessons and to fix the faucets at school, and to do housework, to prepare dinner, to rock a child, and to love a husband at home (p.56). This allusion to everyday life serves to limit Alice’s identity. Finally, as the one figure in ‘FTP’ who reveals personal feelings about the impending violence, Alice registers the emotions surrounding the dangerous sabotage operations. When Paul asks for her help in contacting the two men, she pales with fear as she silently awaits his instructions (p.54). In the early evening, as the couple sits at home awaiting the assigned hour for the sabotage mission, he is calm while she again displays anxiousness and worry and nervously contemplates the possibility that she might never see her husband again (p.55). This characterization of Alice bears a striking resemblance to a maquisard’s comments about his wife that Thomas recorded on one of her visits to a maquis camp. The 25

Loriska, p.70. Emphasis in original.

110

man remarked that his wife asked him why he had to go out again one night, and questioned why a comrade could not take his place. He added that she suggested spending an evening together and could not understand his involvement with the partisans, because ‘tu as ta maison, ton jardin, tu gagnes bien ta vie, tu auras une retraite. Nous pourrions être heureux. Alors pourquoi toutes ces histoires’ (you have your home, your garden. You earn a good living, you’ll have a pension. We’ll be happy. So why all this fuss?) (Témoin, p.135). Thomas’s inclusion of the man’s comments in her political memoir, and their mirroring in ‘FTP’, suggests that she was sensitive to the social attitudes that determined resistance roles for women and men. The women characters in Das siebte Kreuz conform to many of the same stereotypical feminine patterns seen in the character Alice. Their lives are located mainly in the domestic setting, they form their identities based on their relationships with men or other people, and they respond emotionally to frightening circumstances. Liesel Röder, who has devoted her life to her husband and children, displays many of the same nervous feelings as Alice. She is so consumed with fear for the safety of her husband and children that the task of delivering a message is almost impossible for her. Paul’s words clearly distinguish their roles as husband and wife. He lectures her that, as the head of the house, he will decide how best to help Georg. Her responsibility, he asserts, is to be a housewife and a mother. He goes on to add that Liesel’s display of emotion and her indecisiveness would stand in the way of her taking resolute action (Seghers, Kreuz, pp.215-16). Frau Marelli, whom fellow escapee Belloni recommended to Georg as a source for help, acts as a mother figure, revealing that because she has no children of her own she is all the more aware of those needing protection, like the prisoners (pp.132-33). The waitress is the one female character who has no family obligations; yet, her actions are similarly framed in terms of a traditional femininity. She shows concern for Georg as she lies awake trying to dispel his nightmares so that he can sleep peacefully. The two of them are strangers to one another, yet her care and concern are cast in terms of wifely duties. In the moments before he leaves for the boat, the woman ‘half Georg beim Anziehen und reichte ihm Stück für Stück, wie die Soldatenfrauen, wenn die letzte Urlaubsnacht aus ist’ (p.287) (helped George dress, handing him every piece of clothing as soldiers’ wives do at the end of the last night of furlough26).The final and most vivid images of the women characters that linger in Thomas’s short story and Seghers’s novel are those of female passivity and helplessness: an Alice with her hands in her lap, a distraught and weeping Liesel. If the women characters of ‘FTP’ and Das siebte Kreuz are devised from feminine stereotypes, it must be stressed that the men, for all of their prominence in the foreground of these narratives, are equally defined by stereotypical masculine traits. Thus, in ‘FTP’, Thomas portrays the virtually one-dimensional members of the partisan unit as men of action. They exist in a state of complete freedom, unfettered by family responsibilities. Moreover, they are characterized as utterly rational and emotionally detached, as when they calmly kill the German soldiers escaping from the derailed train ‘sans plus de haine qu’un chirurgien’ (with no more hatred than a surgeon would feel) (Thomas, ‘FTP’, p.60). In Das siebte Kreuz, the accent is likewise on the men’s rational understanding, seen in Paul’s claiming of his role as the decision-maker in the face of Liesel’s ‘irrational’ emotion. Georg, another example, epitomizes the stalwart male opponent of Nazism. Before his arrest and impris26

Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross, trans. by James A. Galston (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), p.336.

111

onment in 1934 for communist activity, his stormy and chaotic life cost him a job and his marriage. His youthful, cavalier behaviour toward others broke up friendships and family ties, an indication of a lack of concern for personal relationships that is a counterpoint to the women, whose very identities are constituted from such connections. More telling than his politics is a stubborn pride bordering on arrogance, which serves him best in the camp, where the guards cannot humble him no matter how they try. In all of these ways, Georg exemplifies ‘masculine’ strength and power as an anti-Nazi. A comparison of the differing ways in which men and women, in oral interviews, establish the link between politics and resistance illuminates the ways in which Thomas and Seghers have modified customary resistance language. Men have appropriated many of the features of the official, romanticized interpretations of resistance as the basis of their own oral testimony, memoirs and diaries, and fictional texts.27 Tröger’s research supports the assertion that men tend to model their discussions of the underground after the political discourses issued by the state (p.286). Men establish political belief as the motivation for their anti-Nazism; their work for these movements contributes to political and national objectives. Walter Seitz, who belonged to Onkel Emil, characterizes his anti-Nazi stance during the early years of the Hitler regime as strictly political. In an interview with Köhler, Seitz describes his efforts to avoid contact with individuals who were Nazis and to seek out anti-Nazis as ‘ein bewußter politischer Akt’ (a conscious political act) (Köhler, p.118). Henri Cordesse, active in the French resistance, likewise translates his understanding of his past activities into national and political terms. He bridges the intimate circle of family (noting that as a resister he was ‘a married man with a family’) with the welfare of his country when he tells Kedward that as a consequence of his family ties he ‘felt more responsible for the future of France and a greater need to keep it free from Nazism’ (Kedward, Resistance, p.280). With the exception of certain writers, like Thomas or Seghers, whose anti-fascist or communist sympathies led them to interpret resistance as a vehicle for class struggle, most women do not define their own or other women’s illegal activity as politically motivated. German and French women had accumulated relatively little actual political experience by the early twentieth century. Those who had belonged to the working-class movements before the war considered the resistance as an extension of their earlier engagement, but many other women came to the resistance with no prior involvement in politics (Eck, p.218). Tröger describes German women’s narratives of the bombings of cities in Germany as ‘apolitical’ (p.286). Such a narrative approach, that is, one that stands apart from politics, resembles the perspective that the literary critic Estelle C. Jelinek describes in her study of the form of women’s autobiographies, which, she observes, ‘rarely mirror the establishment history of their times. They emphasize to a much lesser extent the public aspects of their lives, the affairs of the world, or even their careers, and concentrate instead on their personal lives—domestic details, family difficulties, close friends, and especially people who influenced them’.28 27

Landmark studies such as Keegan’s The Face of Battle (chapter 4), Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), and Eric Leed’s No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) challenge the idea of male aggression in wartime and show the fear and insecurity that for many men lay behind the desire to go to war (See Higonnet and others, Introduction, pp.2-3). 28 Women’s Autobiography, ed. by Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp.7-8.

112

European women of this era were exempted from the political equation because social prescriptions did not characterize females as politically aware or experienced. Resistance connoted political knowledge and military-related activity, both of which were considered masculine. Sweets notes that the French movement developed a political orientation as leftist organizations stood against the right-wing and reactionary Vichy regime and the Germans (Politics, pp.15-16). Perrot writes that for French women, ‘the idea that politics was not for women, that they were not at home in the political world, remained until very recently embedded in the minds of both sexes. Women themselves have tended to accord higher value to social or informal than to political activity, thus internalising traditional norms’ (‘Women’, p.59). The comments of Yvonne Dumont highlight French women’s apoliticism when she observes that women as a whole were not very politicized in 1936, and did not make connections between the condition of their personal lives and the national decisions made by the state.29 German women had long been denied a political identity as well. The political scientist Joni Lovenduski explains German women’s estrangement from politics by noting that they had been active in the Revolution of 1848 and that this led to the passage of ‘the Preussische Vereinsgesetz (Prussian Association Law) in 1851, a combination law which forbade women from belonging to political groups or from organising politically. The law was repealed only in 1908’.30 Women’s lack of practical experience with politics as well as the exclusionary messages directed toward them through legal, religious, and political institutions explain women’s failure to attach a political meaning to their own anti-Nazi opposition. In narrating the resistance, many women simply do not challenge the cultural codes that defined them out of the political picture. Elisabeth Graßmann, who as a citizen living in Nazi Germany hid a childhood friend in her home, remarks outright to the interviewer Köhler that she was not political (‘Politisch war ich nicht’) (Köhler, p.34). Another woman with ties to the German resistance, Betty Giese, also distances herself from a political identity. Describing her husband’s illegal activity with communist resistance organizations during the period leading up to the Third Reich and during the early years of the regime, she stresses that participation was limited to men. During meetings, says Giese, the wives sat in the front room of someone’s house, sewing and keeping an eye open for signs of potential danger, while the men met in the back. Giese goes on to note that all wives contributed to their husbands’ work by sewing and making flags. Referring to the women, she then adds: ‘Vieles hat man zwar nicht begriffen, man war eben nicht aufgeklärt genug’ (There was a lot one certainly didn’t understand; one wasn’t really well enough informed) (p.24). Both Graßman and Giese clearly took extreme risks, and their actions were political in every sense of the word inasmuch as hiding someone or acting as cover for an illegal meeting represented obvious challenges to the state. Yet the two women eliminate any political content from the recounting of their subversive acts.

29

Yvonne Dumont, ‘Activités spécifiques de femmes dans la Résistance’, in Les Femmes dans la résistance française (see UFF, above), pp.123-36 (p.125). 30 Joni Lovenduski, Women and European Politics: Contemporary Feminism and Public Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p.31. See also the remarks of Alice Stertzenbach, a former participant in the German resistance, who takes note of German women’s distance from political life. Interview mit Alice Stertzenbach, teilweise wiedergegeben in der Sendung ‘Frauen im Dritten Reich’ am 11 April 1980 im hessischen Rundfunk, qtd. in Wiggershaus, p.123.

113

A glance beyond the political surfaces of Thomas’s and Seghers’s narratives reveals another side of war and resistance not ordinarily available in the official interpretations of these movements. Thomas’s and Seghers’s appeals for solidarity in the name of the proletariat are not entirely given over to the dispassionate and reasoned tone of the standard resistance commentaries. The writers instead demonstrate the distinct emotional impact that a resister’s subversive activity could have on loved ones. While Alice’s anxiety and worry and Liesel’s tears evoke stereotypes and thus restrict the women’s identities, in a more important sense their emotions serve to remind the reader that resistance had an effect on those not directly involved in these illegal movements. The lonely figure of the waiting Alice underlines the point that the family members and friends of resisters felt the dangerous effects of such work, although they might not have actually put their own lives on the line. Again, the truth of war and resistance is encapsulated not in the invulnerable fighter but rather in the individuals: victims, family members, resisters, who experienced suffering. Like Andreas-Friedrich, Thomas and Seghers also assign significance to some of the mundane aspects of life so that this ‘ordinariness’ becomes almost indistinguishable from resistance. In ‘FTP’, the narrator’s comment that Alice is made for giving school lessons, tending the home, and caring for a husband and child suggests that resistance was not about a mythical heroism, but that, instead, life went on in a fashion for resisters. Someone, usually women, had to attend to ordinary concerns like meals, laundry, and the needs of children. Seghers’s awareness of the importance of the everyday is apparent as her male protagonist begins to turn away from his formerly callous personal behaviour and recognize the preciousness of not only ties to others but also the smallest elements of life: ‘Wie war ihm das Leben lieb gewesen. Er hatte alles daran geliebt, die süßen Klümpchen auf dem Streuselkuchen und selbst die Spreu, die man im Krieg ins Brot buk. Die Städte und die Flüsse und das ganze Land und alle seine Menschen’ (Kreuz, p.68) (How fond he had been of life! He had loved all of it: the sweet little lumps on the seeded cakes and even the chaff they put into the wartime bread; the cities and the rivers and the country and its people) (Seventh, p.80). As illustrated in this passage, Georg’s reconnection with people radiates out from his own personal relationships to his broader community and nation. Finally, although abstractions such as freedom, solidarity, class struggle, and social justice are the focal point of the political discourses in this short story and novel, behind these ideals lies the reality of human attachments, the need to connect with others at a human level. It may not be going too far to conclude that the authors embrace the notion that the class struggle cannot be fought without first establishing real and fundamental ties among people. As noted, in ‘FTP’ Paul realizes that he would not feel brave enough to lead this operation were it not for Alice’s support. In acknowledging his debt to his wife, he as a character represents more than just a symbol of political and economic justice, for he is also a man who is part of an intimate relationship. In Das siebte Kreuz, it is the protagonist Georg who in his need to renew contact with others illustrates that there is more to resistance than sheer political commitment. Only by mending the broken relationships in his past can he succeed in his effort to flee Germany. He essentially learns to value bonds with people whom he once took for granted, and this in turn allows him to rely on those who now offer help as part of the underground network. He resolves feelings of guilt, settles past debts with people (such as Paul), and seeks shelter with them. At other times, the aid he receives is less concrete, though equally critical. Although Franz Marnet is not actually in touch with Georg, he does his best to arrange a support system for his old friend (‘ebenso

114

legte auch Franz ein Netz, das von Stunde zu Stunde dichter wurde, weil aus seinem Gedächtnis alle Menschen auftauchten, von denen er wußte, daß Georg einmal mit ihnen verbunden war’ (Kreuz, p.152)) (so Franz too laid a net that from hour to hour became tighter as his memory conjured up everyone who to his knowledge had at one time been connected with George (Seventh, p.185)). For his part, Georg realizes at this moment that he could rely absolutely on this friend, whom he once hurt, if he could reach him now (Kreuz, p.159). Another significant relationship for Georg, one that clearly shapes his final destiny, is with Wallau, the former communist leader who was Georg’s mentor in prison and his partner in planning the escape. Though Wallau cannot be physically present for Georg (Wallau is later tortured to death in the camp), his constant spiritual presence guides the younger man, and his unconditional respect and affection become part of the innermost core of Georg’s being. Georg sustains his link with his mentor through conversations he remembers and advice he imagines that the more mature Wallau might offer. Above all, the friendship between the two men provides Georg with a sense of self-worth and allows him to see his personal struggle through. Georg’s is more than an individual transformation, though, for he also opens the eyes of those with whom he comes into contact, and they begin to see the possibility of reconnecting with other people. In Seghers’s vision, personal attachments have become fractured under Nazism, but in repairing them lies the potential for solidarity and resistance. Georg’s presence has an effect on all those with whom he comes in contact: their fears of the Nazi machine begin to dissolve. People give the prisoner aid, and in the unity that comes from helping him they now have hope for collectively striking back at the state. The character Grete Fiedler illustrates how people’s relationships to others alter as a result of participating in the plan to save Georg. She sees him outwit the system, and through his indirect influence she now understands that bonds with others can again be life-sustaining: ‘Alles war möglich in dieser soeben angebrochenen Zeit: Umschwung aller Verhältnisse, auch ihrer eignen, rascher als man gehofft hatte, daß man noch jung genug war, gemeinsam das Glück zu nutzen nach so viel Bitternis’ (Kreuz, p.253) (Everything was possible in the time that had just now begun; a sudden change in all relations, her own included, quicker than one had dared to hope, while one was still young enough jointly to partake of some happiness after so much bitter suffering) (Seventh, p.300). Grete is a telling figure because in her own unexpected awakening to the significance of events around her, she represents the possibility of renewing personal and social relations that had been twisted and broken under Nazism. The question that must be posed is why Thomas and Seghers, themselves apparently free to test the boundaries of gender and committed to a revolutionary ideology, constructed such traditional identities for their female characters. The limitations that Thomas and Seghers place upon these women by confining them so closely to the home or assigning them the functions of nurturing or expressing emotion are all the more ironic in light of the actual opportunities open to female resisters in the French and German communist movements and in view of the authors’ own unconventional lives. Both women displayed personal independence and were deeply involved in some of the defining political and social events of their era. Each woman’s belief in Communism as well as her participation in the resistance set her life on an unusual course in many respects and led her away from customary paths as a female. Thomas and Seghers alike considered writing as a tool for addressing society’s ills, and devoted themselves to their profession, which occupied a central place in

115

each of their lives. Thomas travelled with other journalists to Spain to report on the civil war there. During the German occupation she made dangerous journeys to maquis camps and wrote about these experiences for the clandestine press. The uniqueness of her status as a female resister is perhaps best illustrated by her presence as the sole female participant at Comité National des Écrivains meetings and her instrumental role in that organization’s most important undertakings. Loriska notes that Seghers led an untraditional life in choosing to have both a family and a career, and that she travelled abroad extensively and was self-supporting (p.97). By working within the genre of social history and focusing on political subjects, areas typically regarded as masculine, Seghers rejected the constraints that ordinarily circumscribed women writers in Germany, who were limited to such traditional feminine forms as poetry, historical romances, and diaries and letters (Swaffar and Wilkinson, p.458). Critics Janet Swaffar and Eileen Wilkinson describe Seghers as ‘one of the first women writers in Germany to address political issues in major, critically acclaimed, and internationally read novels’ (p.458). Although there is much about both women personally that might suggest a ‘feminist’ outlook, they were nevertheless subject to social norms that would have discouraged such a slant. Swaffar and Wilkinson comment that Seghers ‘conceived of herself as a writer first, and a gendered writer only secondarily’ (p.462). Kaufmann sees an ‘explicitly feminist perspective’ in Thomas’s postwar essays on women because Thomas analyses women’s roles based on the understanding that women have historically been relegated to the margins of society (p.63). Yet in her Le Témoin compromis, written in 1952, Thomas remarked that feminist demands were no longer relevant because women only had to prove themselves alongside men (pp.117-18). Their privileged middle-class backgrounds, their education, and the personal support of their families provided Thomas and Seghers with more opportunities and potential for challenging the social norms of their day than most women of that time received. In many respects, however, the two writers remained captive to these very norms. While the war and resistance did blur the divisions between women and men, there would always remain a point at which women could not acceptably overstep the bounds of certain social and cultural codes, as Thomas’s story and Seghers’s novel acknowledge. Swaffar and Wilkinson, discussing Seghers’s choice of male characters as the primary and females as the secondary figures in her novels, point out that Seghers’s ‘authorial strategies reflect the ways women could be depicted in the middle of the twentieth century’. They go on to add that, in Das siebte Kreuz, a female heroine would necessarily be allowed fewer opportunities for action by virtue of her gender, thus restricting the plot. A male hero was more representative of the political and social situation Seghers was depicting because men held positions as union and party leaders and they were subjected to the harsher elements of terror under Nazism. Furthermore, a female heroine would have undermined the author’s purpose because the novel would be seen more as entertainment than as a serious examination of the workings of the Nazi regime (p.461). Thomas’s and Seghers’s presentations of political resistance grounded in a radical ideology no doubt reflect their assessment of how their audiences understood the cultural mores distancing women from politics and violence. Comments by Thomas in Le Témoin compromis bear out this perception. The author well recognized her own marginal status as a female when it came to participating in the social and political change occurring in

116

Europe at the time. She desired to be given responsibilities that would have put her ‘more directly into the action’ as a resister than did the work for Comité National des Écrivains.31 However, she acknowledges in her memoir that as a disabled woman there was no place for her in the ranks of those fighting Franco in Spain, nor as a woman could she be mobilized when France went to war with Germany. Finally, her statement that she would have preferred to belong to a team of saboteurs that blew up railroad tracks, rather than lead women for Union des Femmes Françaises, vividly illustrates the boundaries that separated women from combat-related activity (Témoin, pp.118-19). Thomas’s band of guerrillas and Seghers’s anti-Nazi network evoke the same social taboos that have historically barred women from combat and politics. Another possible explanation for Thomas’s and Seghers’s masculine point of view is that the literary company they kept was primarily male, and that they therefore had to write according to masculine models in order to succeed in a field dominated by men. Loriska ascribes the passivity of Seghers’s female characters to the author’s need to fit in with her male colleagues (p.98). Additionally, as Swaffar and Wilkinson point out regarding Seghers, there were few ‘serious’ German women writers at the time that could serve as role models for her. Further, Seghers, like most of the other women in this study, took the work of primarily male authors as the major influences on her style and choice of material (p.462). Both women were surrounded by male contemporaries with whom they traded ideas, further circumscribing the possibilities they saw for themselves as women writers: Thomas within the French intellectual resistance, and Seghers within the German exile community in Paris (and, later, Mexico) as well as the anti-fascist movements and the international writers’ congresses she attended. The importance of the political cause to which Thomas and Seghers dedicated themselves cannot be underestimated, either, in considering their interpretations of gender in these resistance narratives. It is not unreasonable to suggest that as communists the two writers championed the cause of the working class in the belief that with the redressing of economic injustice would come the resolution of various other social ills, including greater equality for women. This philosophical outlook played itself out in practical terms in the communist resistance, where, despite its radical philosophy, traditional roles and genderspecific categories remained in place and went unchallenged. The former German communist resister Katharina Jacob remarks: ‘Mit der Beseitigung des faschistischen Systems wären eine Reihe unserer Frauenprobleme gelöst werden’ (A series of women’s problems would be resolved with the elimination of the fascist system).32 Two literary critics have noted that Seghers focused more on class than gender issues. Ackermann claims that the German exile writers, both ‘communist and bourgeois’, moved female characters away from the events and happenings within society and into conventional feminine roles within the ‘private sphere’. He further adds, it is generally thought that Seghers was primarily interested in the emancipation of the proletariat, not the liberation of women (pp.33, 40). 31

In response to Pierre Villon, the PCF representative to all Front National organizations, who told her that she was more useful at Comité National des Écrivains than in another role, because he did not want to increase the risks, Thomas commented: ‘J’aurais souhaité qu’on me confiât des tâches qui m’auraient mêlée plus directement à l’action’ (I would have wished that I would have been charged with tasks that would have put me more directly into the action) (Témoin, p.117). 32 Florence Hervé and Renate Wisbar, Leben, frei und in Frieden: Frauen gegen Faschismus und Krieg (To live, free and in peace: women against fascism and war) (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1982), p.26.

117

Loriska likewise concludes that the author perhaps believed that Communism would provide the impetus for realigning gender relations (p.105). Thomas’s and Seghers’s shared viewpoint in fact mirrors the perspective that had long prevailed in the workers’ movement. Communist and socialist thinkers and leaders had since the late nineteenth century placed their hope and faith in the class struggle with the certainty that other social ills, including women’s inequality, would be righted once economic justice for the working class had been achieved. Lovenduski cites August Bebel’s Women and Socialism (1879) and Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) as indicative of this line of thought, remarking that, ‘their central message was that the socialist movement must be more important to its women members than the movement for women’s rights, a contention which was accepted by socialist women of the time’ (p.13). She also demonstrates that during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries the issue of class differences took precedence over the oppression of women in the socialist movements in France as well as Germany (pp.34, 41-43). According to Mallmann’s assessment of the German communist and socialist resistance, most members had adopted as a sign of ‘respectability’ the middle-class patriarchal structures that located the woman at the centre of the household. They considered the man’s place to be politics and the woman’s to be the kitchen (p.86). Citing the statement of a former KPD instructor, Hermann Prüser, who at first rejected his wife’s requests to let her participate in the communist resistance (before finally acknowledging women’s value to the movement)33, Mallmann concludes: ‘Ebenso wie in der Weimarer Ära Politik oft als Männersache eingeschätzt worden war, galt auch illegale Aktivität vielfach als “Männerarbeit”’ (Just as politics was often valued as a matter for men during the Weimar era, illegal activity was also frequently considered as ‘men’s work’) (p.86). By subordinating the women to the men characters in their resistance narratives, Thomas and Seghers reflected a point of view that had long been expressed in communist and socialist thought and that would be replicated in the resistance movements. The sphere in which the female protagonists in Thomas’s ‘FTP’ and Seghers’s Das siebte Kreuz take action as resisters appears more confined than that of the women who engaged in spontaneous, public actions against Nazi incursions into their everyday lives, as described in the previous chapter. In this short story and novel, men take the lead as resisters while women perform seemingly minimal clandestine duties for the underground. The female figures contribute in small ways to the larger, more visible operations run by the men and also lend moral and emotional support to their husbands. These narratives, like the others under consideration in this study, contribute to displacing the familiar rhetoric and move readers closer to the understanding that behind the facade of glory and honour, patriotism and politics, violence and strategy there existed an everyday reality that was also intrinsic to resistance. Given Thomas’s and Seghers’s radical politics and unconventional lives, the female characters’ lack of prominence speaks to the choices these authors had to make as women writing about politics and violence. As will be discussed in the upcoming chapter, even when some authors place female resisters directly in the foreground, united in vocal and aggressive public protest, the women figures continue to be defined by social norms. 33

Irene Hübner, Unser Widerstand: Deutsche Frauen und Männer berichten über ihren Kampf gegen die Nazis (Our resistance: German women and men report on their struggle against the Nazis) (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1982), p.34.

118

Chapter Six ‘They Stood Like a Wall’: Resistance As Collective Protest

A manger.1 [15,000 Frenchwomen demonstrating in Nice, April 1943] Man hielt es nicht für opportun, mit Maschinengewehren zwischen sechstausend Frauen zu schießen.2 [Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Der Schattenmann]

In contrast to the relatively quiet and surreptitious character of individual women’s spontaneous resistance in public spaces or women’s support activities for the political movements, collective protests and demonstrations by French and German women were often vocal and signalled a direct confrontation with the state. Women speaking out against the Vichy or the Nazi regime directly challenged the dominant cultural notions of what a woman should be. Such images of female resisters undercut not only woman’s socially assigned role but also the very content of the resistance legend. Displays of women’s organized strength defy the popular stereotype of woman as a quiet, meek, obedient being whose function is to nurture and care for others in the privacy of the home, not to step into the public eye and face down the authorities. Further, such examples of women’s collective protest run counter to the official postwar myth that the resistance belonged primarily to select groups of men armed in defence of a patriotic cause. Women openly resisted when they were dissatisfied about economic issues or became outraged about forced labour initiatives or when the hardships of the war pressed in upon them. In the face of such overt acts of defiance it was not unusual for male authorities in France and Nazi Germany finally to give in to women’s demands or for the regime’s machinery to stall temporarily. In both countries, though more so in France than Germany, women established themselves as a united force for resistance in the public realm. Although historians have generally presented the popular resistance of French and German women in the barest outlines, when it has been documented at all, and though the voices of these protesters find little resonance on the pages of literary texts, two particular narratives by German women put a face on this form of anti-Nazism and also bear out the power of these collective actions in the Third Reich. In Andreas-Friedrich’s Der Schattenmann, the journalist records the Berlin demonstration of late February and early March 1943, in which several hundred German women demanded the release of their Jewish husbands who had been rounded up for deportation. The centrepiece of Elisabeth 1 2

(To eat) (Marcelle Barjonet-Huraux, in UFF, p.151). (It was not considered an opportune moment to open up with machine guns upon six thousand women) (Schattenmann, p.104; 7 March 1943).

Langgässer’s short story ‘An der Nähmaschine’ is a brief, spur-of-the-moment uprising by female forced labourers in a factory. Both authors create vivid portraits of groups of assertive, powerful women who confront representatives of the Nazi dictatorship. The demonstrators’ forcefulness and outspokenness erode the conventional image of the weak and subordinate female, while at the same time the authors suggest the inner tension these resisters experience in attempting to juggle vastly different roles as resisters and traditional women. For the German wives, resistance is bound up with concern for their husbands and families; for Andreas-Friedrich herself, resistance in this instance is about sorrow. In the case of Langgässer’s protagonist, resistance has to do with speaking a truth. Neither writer distances the resister figure(s) from the scene by applying abstract language, but rather centres her (or them) in the moment, whether that moment be one of love, or grief, or oppression. As Andreas-Friedrich explores her own feelings about the wives’ protest and recreates the reactions of the demonstrators and as Langgässer depicts a protagonist who shuns the mantle of heroism, both writers move the concept of resistance away from the ideals of valour and glory. Curiously, none of the French writers included in the current study turn their attention to the collective resistance of women, though such protests were actually widespread throughout both the occupied and unoccupied zones of France. The one French writer who approaches the subject of the forced labour initiative, an issue that ignited strong reactions among women in France, is Thomas, and yet she does not connect this political topic to women’s indignation and subsequent activism. In spite of her own role in organizing women’s demonstrations for Union des Femmes Françaises, Thomas’s one piece of writing about the Service du Travail Obligatoire is the understated short story ‘La Relève’ (The relief), in Contes d’Auxois. Thomas translates this highly charged public issue into essentially private terms as the protagonist, Robert Basin, struggles to decide whether or not to evade the labour draft. ‘La Relève’ consists of the young man’s inner reflections about volunteering to work in Germany. In the author’s hands the political question of whether or not to submit to the Germans’ demands for labour power comes to be defined by the love between Robert and his girlfriend. Thomas’s treatment of this volatile subject bypasses the loud public outcry that characterized the forced labour issue in France in favour of the quiet interaction of an intimate relationship. The narratives of Andreas-Friedrich and Langgässer, in which protest boils up, contrast markedly with Thomas’s subdued story. In a single, one-page entry, dated 7 March 1943, Andreas-Friedrich describes the week-long events of an unusual and rare protest by German women on Rosenstrasse, a street located in the heart of the old section of Berlin. In what has been called the Final Round-up of the Jews, armed SS men had a week earlier (on 27 February) begun brutally taking Jewish men, women, and children from their homes and the factories where they worked and interning them at various collection points in preparation for deportation. The round-up was part of the Nazi plan to rid Germany of its Jewish population, as Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels pursued his aim of making Berlin judenfrei (free of Jews). Up to this point, Nazi leaders had tried not to alienate Germans married to Jews. (In 1942, one-half of all couples in mixed marriages lived in Berlin (Stoltzfus, p.246)). In order not to draw public attention to their actions and thereby to hide the persecution of the Jews, authorities hoped to remove Jews from a predetermined area of the city by moving swiftly and directly against those living there (p.232). Of the nearly eight thousand Jews caught in the Berlin Final Round-up, approximately seventeen

120

hundred were Mischlinge (persons of mixed blood) and intermarried Jews (pp.xxiv, 304n). The German wives of some of the men united to press for the release of their Jewish husbands, shouting their demands before the gates of the building where the men were confined to await deportation. When their husbands did not come home after work on the day the round-up began, the wives called the police, the factories, and other wives (through a telephone chain they had set up to notify one another in case of danger). As word spread about the men’s confinement, women began to assemble at the collection centre on Rosenstrasse. In an effort to get more news and to comfort their imprisoned husbands, the women brought them packages of food, toiletries, notes, and shaving equipment (Milton 319; Stoltzfus, p.221). The women came to the Rosenstrasse collection centre alone or in pairs, some of them accompanied by brothers or other male relatives on leave from the army. As darkness gathered and the night turned colder, the women formed a circle. Before leaving on that first night, some women arranged to meet each other in the same place early the following day to continue the demonstration (Stoltzfus, p.xix). The next day, the crowd of women could be heard continuously shouting, ‘Let our husbands go. We want our husbands back! Let our husbands go.’3 The SS men standing guard before the collection centre and the police were unable to disperse the crowd. By Tuesday, 2 March, as the protest grew, the guards tried to scatter the women by drawing their pistols and threatening to shoot if they did not retreat. The women (and some men) left and hid inside doorways and under a nearby bridge, only to reappear a few minutes later. The SS threatened them repeatedly and ordered them to clear the streets, but the ebb and flow of protesters continued despite the guards’ raised guns and their shouted orders (pp.xx, 227). Andreas-Friedrich puts the number of participants at six thousand, which may have been her estimate of the sum total who took part in these events during the entire week. Stoltzfus’s research indicates the gathering began on the first day with between 150 and 200 people, mostly women, and grew (p.215). Over the next several days, after more arrests and the interning of more Jews at another collection centre (on Grossen Hamburgerstrasse), hundreds of men and women gathered at the entrance to protest. The numbers receded as people departed for work or other urgent business, and they increased in the hours after work as people joined in (p.226). The numbers swelled to six hundred or more at times, and by the time the demonstration concluded thousands had taken part.4 Stoltzfus found that many of those arrested came from old and well-respected families and that they regarded the brutal actions of the SS as the work of thugs.5 The wives, asserting their own rights as German citizens, were enraged at this mistreatment of family members by the Nazis, and their tone became angrier as they asked how the SS could separate people from their families and what crime their husbands and children had committed that led to their being locked up.6 3 4

5 6

Annie Radlauer interviews, 12 March, 1985; 29 May 1985, qtd. in Stoltzfus, p.xx. Stoltzfus, p.xx. Milton estimates two to three hundred participants (p.319), while Burleigh and Wippermann estimate 150 to 200 people. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 19331945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.111. See also Stoltzfus’s estimates of the numbers of participants (p.304n). Interview with Gisela Weigert, 21 June 1985, cited in Stoltzfus, p.xix. Nathan Stoltzfus, ‘”Jemand war für mich da”: Der Aufstand der Frauen in der Rosenstraße’, Die Zeit, 21 July 1989, 9-10, 12-13 (p.9).

121

In her portrait of the female protesters at the Berlin demonstration, Andreas-Friedrich boldly underlines their power in a way that creates a decidedly unfeminine picture. There is nothing demure or passive or weak about the behaviour of the women, who are aggressive and loud, whose tone of voice is threatening, and whose will is indomitable. The German wives drängen [sich] (crowd around) the gates of the building where their husbands are detained and raise their voices in a clamour: ‘Sechstausend Frauen riefen nach ihren Männern. Schrien nach ihren Männern. Heulten nach ihren Männern’ (Six thousand women called for their husbands, screamed for their husbands, howled for their husbands). The author interprets the women’s demands for the men’s release as threatening: ‘Fordern drohend die Freilassung ihrer Männer’ (threateningly demanding the release of their husbands), and she captures the wives’ unshakable resolve in a simile that emphasizes their strength. They ‘standen wie eine Mauer. Stunde um Stunde, Nacht und Tag’ (Schattenmann, pp.103-04) (stood like a wall, hour after hour, night and day) (Berlin, p.92). Andreas-Friedrich does not tone down these events in which the women defy social prescriptions of feminine submissiveness; rather, she characterizes the women as ‘masculine’ in their toughness and their unbreakable spirit. The author bluntly names this action ‘rebellion’: ‘In der Rosenstraße rebellieren die Frauen’ (Schattenmann, p.104) (The women are rebelling in the Rosenstrasse) (Berlin, p.92). Large groups kept on gathering for several days at the Rosenstrasse and other collection centres, and then the situation escalated on Thursday, 4 March, when the Gestapo responded with more violence and more arrests of Jews. The Gestapo’s actions generated further protests as women, children, fathers or mothers, relatives, and friends demonstrated to demand the release of their relatives, and as people who did not have missing relatives joined in (Stoltzfus, Resistance, pp.242-43). Charlotte Israel, who was present at the protest, recalls that the tenor of the demonstration now changed, becoming more political and more defiant. She explains that as the SS men aimed machine guns at the crowd and threatened to shoot if the protesters did not leave, the participants backed away before surging forward with more vociferous cries: But then for the first time we really hollered. Now we couldn’t care less. We bellowed, ‘You murderers,’ and everything else that one can holler. Now they’re going to shoot in any case, so now we’ll yell too, we thought. We yelled ‘Murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer.’ We didn’t scream just once but again and again until we lost our breath. (p.243)

Israel’s words echo the same boldness that Andreas-Friedrich describes in her diary. Two days later, on 6 March, the protest came to an end when Goebbels ordered that all Jews in mixed marriages and Mischlinge who were being held should be released (p.243). Approximately seventeen hundred Jews who were scheduled for deportation were let go as a result of the week-long demonstration (p.304n). Those freed from the Rosenstrasse collection centre received release papers and ration cards. Twenty-five Jews who had already been deported to Auschwitz were also freed and returned to Berlin a few days later. (Authorities sent them to a work training camp at Großbeeren, three hours from Berlin, in order to be certain that the men would not reveal what they had seen in the concentration camp.) The entire incident was officially explained away as an attempt by the Berlin Gestapo to act beyond its authority (pp.252-54, 265).7

7

The statement of Johanna Heym, summarized in Anklageschrift, 214, Bovensiepen Trial. Lehfeld, ‘Die Lage der “Mischlinge”’, corroborates this. Cited in Stoltzfus, Resistance, p.248.

122

In Andreas-Friedrich’s account, as the wives brazenly move onto the public stage to confront the authorities, they are not only unmovable until their demands are met, but there is also a sense of momentum building as they continue to apply pressure on the police over a period of hours and then days. This picture of women uniting to exert their will against representatives of the state throws into question the image of the subordinate female. The regime’s hesitant response to this demonstration suggests the power behind women’s acts of public protest. Nazi officials at various levels found themselves stymied by this obvious sign of unrest and unsure of what course of action to take. Andreas-Friedrich imagines the discussions and debate taking place among officials at the SD headquarters, which was located a block away from the Rosenstrasse collection centre, close enough that the voices of the demonstrators could be heard from around the corner (Schattenmann, p.104). Some of the highest-ranking Nazis knew nothing about the events playing out on Rosenstrasse. As late as 2 March, Goebbels, who was in Obersalzburg and not due back in Berlin until 3 March, still had not been made aware of the protests, and he thought the deportations were proceeding as planned (Stoltzfus, Resistance, p.226). SD officials in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, under orders to deport the Jews now in detention, were divided on whether they should use force to put down the disturbance or look for another way to resolve the situation.8 The Nazi leadership, including Goebbels, Hitler, and Himmler, did not want to draw public attention to the deportations by resorting to violence, but officials at the lower levels of power did not share this concern (p.xxii). Despite obvious risks, including jail sentences or assignment to a concentration camp9, the German wives succeeded because they were able to overcome a number of obstacles, and also because the Hitler dictatorship was wary of further demoralizing its already emotionally and psychologically distressed citizens. Such gatherings were illegal in the Third Reich. All demonstrations not organized by the Nazi Party had been outlawed since May 1933 (p.xxiii), but the protesters acted anyway. Public morale was at a low point due in part to Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad, and therefore the people seemed unlikely to unite in a show of dissent. The increased bombing attacks on Berlin by the Royal Air Force had terrorized people as well since the beginning of the year, and Rosenstrasse was located in the centre of the city, where many of the bombs landed (pp.197, 224). Another problem standing in the way of the wives and their supporters was that it was difficult logistically to reach the area where the demonstration was taking place, as authorities had closed the elevated train station near Rosenstrasse and detoured all traffic in the area to prevent Berliners from discovering what was happening there. Yet people did not fear the Gestapo’s threats, and they willingly walked the extra distance of a mile to join the protest (p.223). Nazi officials were clearly worried about undermining public morale and possibly turning the tide of popular opinion against the regime, which desperately needed its citizens’ support for the ‘total war’ it had recently declared. Additionally, the Nazi hierarchy did not want the Final Solution made public. The protests threatened to do just that. Open discussion of the persecution and destruction of the Jews would further damage people’s confidence in the legitimacy and power of the state. Up until this point, deportations had been carried out systematically and without attracting public notice. The longer the Rosenstrasse demonstration went on, however, the greater the chance that the 8 9

Interview with Leopold Gutterer, 19 August 1986, cited in Stoltzfus, Resistance, p.xxi. See the remarks of Leopold Gutterer, who was Goebbels’s assistant. Interview with Leopold Gutterer, 16 July 1987, cited in Stoltzfus, Resistance, p.244.

123

dictatorship’s plan for disposing of the Jews would be revealed. Goebbels rightly concluded that at a certain point people would start to identify not with the regime but with their fellow citizens, who were speaking out in the effort to hold together their families. Demonstrators were also aided by the fact that the incident had erupted in a metropolitan area where the participants’ actions were in full public view and visible to the foreign diplomats and the international press based there. The numbers of demonstrators were, moreover, significant enough to represent a unified front against the authorities (pp.245, 271, 269). Finally, the women who demanded their husbands’ release ‘could not be readily identified as enemies of the state’, asserts Stoltzfus (p.246). The dictatorship could not very well use violence in public against non-violent, middle-class protesters, the majority of whom were German women; they could not be tagged as political enemies and shot.10 As Andreas-Friedrich portrays the German wives, the collective strength of their voices, their unified presence, their persistence, all of these ‘masculine’ qualities coexist with an undercurrent of emotional and personal concern that calls to mind the womanly role. The political implications of the protest go unnoted in Andreas-Friedrich’s retelling of this event, in spite of the fact that the women successfully force officials to bow to the pressure of public opinion. In actuality, the wives’ action is significant not only as an example of female defiance in a male-dominated state, but also as a rare show of support for Jews in Nazi Germany.11 The author interprets the rebellion of the wives, however, as primarily an act of care and concern for their Jewish husbands, not a political denunciation of Nazi antiSemitism. Actual participants have also characterized their actions in personal terms. As Ursula Braun, who took part, observes: ‘Die Frauen, die da waren, waren alle aus ganz persönlichen Gründen da’ (The women who were there, were all there for entirely personal reasons).12 The author personalizes these events in another way, as well, by connecting them to her own feelings of loss as she gradually realizes that a close Jewish friend has been caught up in the raid. With a candour not seen in official resistance commentaries, Andreas-Friedrich admits to concern for others and owns up to the painful feelings behind resistance work. In recording this episode, she takes the opportunity to say goodbye to a friend, Peter Tarnowsky, a gesture that moves the writing further away from a recounting of a politically oriented incident and more toward a highly individualized act of memorializing those whom German resistance groups could not save. As Andreas-Friedrich relates the events that transpired, beginning with the day when police entered factories and private homes to arrest Jews, she also records her circle’s fruitless efforts to establish contact with people whom they had been hiding. Andreas-Friedrich recalls her conversation the day before with Tarnowsky (Schattenmann, p.102). Since he was not in a ‘privileged’ mixed marriage, he could not be saved and was deported.

10

See Stoltzfus’s various remarks on the protesters’ history as dissenters, that is, as intermarried Germans who had, over a number of years, resisted the government’s attempts to destroy their marriages (Resistance, pp.9, 261, 268-69, 272). 11 Milton cites similar demonstrations that erupted at a Jewish old-age home on 6 March 1943. These protests also temporarily halted the deportation of the residents (p.319). 12 Nina Schröder, Hitlers unbeugsame Gegnerinnen: Der Frauenaufstand in der Rosenstraße (Hitler's unbending opponents: the women's rebellion on Rosenstrasse) (Munich: Heyne, 1997), p.50. See also Stoltzfus, Resistance, p.266.

124

Rather than indicting Nazi racial policy or analysing the politics of women’s collective opposition, Andreas-Friedrich repeats a refrain also found in the early sections of the diary. Her words honour this friendship by invoking the name of Tarnowsky and suggesting that his memory will live on: ‘Leb wohl, Peter Tarnowsky, Freund von Kant, Hegel und Schopenhauer’ (Schattenmann, p.104) (Farewell, Peter Tarnowsky, lover of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer!) (Berlin, p.93). The poignant expression of care and grief here presents a striking contrast to the wives’ blunt outspokenness and assertiveness described earlier. Yet if the seemingly contradictory emotions and images do not easily resolve into a single coherent picture, perhaps the point is precisely that resistance was necessarily ambiguous in a multitude of ways. In a fictional account of women’s collective protest, Langgässer’s short story ‘An der Nähmaschine’, the stereotype of the weak and compliant woman is again displaced as Frau Behagel, the reticent and seemingly meek protagonist, leads a small revolt at a factory where she has been assigned to do forced labour. Langgässer (1899-1950), known primarily as a religious writer whose poetry, stories, and novels centred on Christian themes, has never been regarded as a writer of resistance literature. Yet her short story ‘An der Nähmaschine’ discloses a profound criticism of Nazism from a woman who, vocalizing her own persecution, expressed the political oppression dealt to German women both inside the Nazi ranks and out. The Catholic region of Hessen, where Langgässer was born and lived until 1929, established her in a Christian literary tradition of which she never lost sight. Her father was Jewish, but he had his daughter baptized and she was raised Catholic. Langgässer drew inspiration for her poetry and fiction from Greek mythology, biblical imagery, Christian mysticism, and nature. A recurring theme in her lyrical as well as prose work is the individual’s struggle for salvation in the midst of a world of evil. As a writer, Langgässer regarded herself as part of the French Catholic tradition and counted Georges Bernanos and, especially, Paul Claudel among her major influences.13 Langgässer wrote several volumes of religious poetry, three collections of short stories, and four novels. Langgässer attended the University of Darmstadt, where she studied to be a teacher, and she taught school in Hessen during the years 1919-1929. Between 1922 and 1929, the aspiring author wrote theatre criticism, book reviews, and essays, and she belonged to various intellectual circles in Frankfurt and Darmstadt that included theatre people, writers, politicians, and journalists. On 1 January 1929, Langgässer gave birth out of wedlock to her eldest child, Cordelia (Edvardson). The girl’s father, Hermann Heller, was a Jewish law professor at the University of Kiel, who was active in the SPD.14 Shortly after Cordelia’s birth, Langgässer moved to Berlin, where she taught pedagogy at the School of Social Work for Women. Here in Berlin she met her literary contemporaries, including Martin Raschke, Peter Huchel, Günter Eich, Horst Lange, and Oda Schaefer. Politically and artistically conservative, these writers of the younger generation rejected the trend of Neue 13

Elisabeth Langgässer, . . . soviel berauschende Vergänglichkeit: Briefe, 1926-1950 (. . . so much intoxicating impermanence: letters, 1926-1950) (Hamburg: Claassen, 1954), p.212. 14 Heller was sent to the Eastern front during World War I. He participated in the trade unions’ actions in support of the Weimar government during the March 1920 Kapp-Putsch, and was nearly murdered at that time. He fled from the Nazis to Spain, where he died on 5 November 1933. See Karlheinz Müller, Elisabeth Langgässer: Eine biographische Skizze (Elisabeth Langgässer: a biographical sketch) (Darmstadt: Gesellschaft Hessischer Literaturfreunde, 1990), p.40, and Elisabeth Langgässer, Briefe, 1924-1950 (Letters, 1924-1950), 2 vols (Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1990), II, 1256.

125

Sachlichkeit, with its emphasis on the social novel and themes of political conflict, seeking instead to create a new brand of Naturlyrik (nature poetry). By 1930, Langgässer gave up teaching in order to try to support herself exclusively as a writer, and in 1932 she received the Literaturpreis des deutschen Staatsbürgerinnen-Verbandes (Literary Prize from the Association of German Women Citizens) for her short stories ‘Mars’ and ‘Prosperpina’. The award, presented to her by the respected novelist Döblin, was intended to bring attention to the unpublished writings of younger women authors. Langgässer’s literary circle now included such recognized and esteemed writers as Wilhelm Lehmann, Gottfried Benn, Ina Seidel, Walter Von Molo, Oskar Loerke, and Ricarda Huch. These mature authors found the sources of their poetry or fiction in nature, religious tradition, or the historical past, as would the young Langgässer. Langgässer’s marriage in 1935 to the philosopher Wilhelm Hoffmann, with whom she would have three daughters, grounded her more firmly in Catholicism. It appeared at first as if her marriage to the Christian Hoffmann would protect the author from Nazi racial restrictions; however, both husband and wife eventually became ensnared in the regime’s web of control and persecution. According to Anthony W. Riley, Hoffmann lost his position at Berliner Rundfunk in March 1933 because the Nazis considered him politically unreliable due to his decidedly Christian commitment. He eventually found a job at Siemens and gave up his goal of becoming a teacher.15 Langgässer, only a few years after she had established herself publicly as a writer, was dismissed on 20 May 1936 from the Reichsschriftumskammer because she was considered a Halbjüdin (half-Jewish citizen) under Nazi racial law.16 Although a Schreibverbot forbade her from writing or publishing, Langgässer ignored the injunction and secretly worked on her novel Das unauslöschliche Siegel (1947; The indelible seal) and a book of poetry, Der Laubmann und die Rose (1947; The pruner and the rose). The ban on her writing was a devastating psychological blow for Langgässer. She joined the ranks of other writers, like Werner Bergengruen, Adam Kuckhoff, Loerke, and Huch, who remained in Germany in ‘inner exile’ and continued writing secretly. While some of these authors circulated their writings illegally, others managed to publish by disguising their words of protest in ways that escaped the regime’s watchful eyes. Still others, like Langgässer, pursued their writing and did not publish again until the war ended. For Langgässer as well as the other inner emigrants, the prohibition against writing constituted a thorough estrangement from the literary world, for they had neither readers nor contact with other authors. Nor did they any longer have a way to make a living. Langgässer’s short stories ‘An der Nähmaschine’ and ‘Untergetaucht’ recreate the palpable sense of alienation and aloneness that the author experienced as a banned writer, a mother of a Jewish daughter, and a Jew in the Third Reich. Her sense of isolation is evident in a letter she wrote to Lehmann on 22 July 1938, describing ‘die vollkommene Einsamkeit [. . .] die taube Stille, in der ich lebe, soweit ich ein Schaffender bin. Kein Wort von mir, kein Reim, dringt mehr nach außen—darf mehr nach außen dringen’ (the complete loneliness [. . .] the deaf silence in which I live insofar as I am a creative person. Not a word 15

Anthony W. Riley, ‘Alles außen ist innen’, in Christliches Exil und christlicher Widerstand (Christian exile and Christian resistance), ed. by Wolfgang Frühwald and Heinz Hurten (Regensburg: Pustet, 1987), pp.186224 (p.191). 16 Heinrich Schirmbeck says that the ban was also imposed because the regime would not tolerate her mystical religious outlook. Cited in Müller, p.206.

126

from me, not a rhyme pushes forth any longer to the outside world—may any longer push forth to the outside world).17 In addition to the prohibition on her writing, Langgässer lived with constant uncertainty about whether or not her daughter would be deported. Cordelia was considered a Volljüdin (full-Jewish citizen), according to Nazi racial laws, because her father had been Jewish and Langgässer was half-Jewish. From September 1941 on, Cordelia was required to wear the yellow Star of David badge and was forbidden to attend German schools. A Spanish couple ‘adopted’ Cordelia in January 1943, so that she could obtain Spanish citizenship and possibly be protected, but the effort proved futile. In early 1944, the girl accompanied an evacuation to the transit station Theresienstadt, and from there she was deported to Auschwitz. (Freed from Auschwitz when the Russians liberated the camp at the war’s end, Cordelia was brought to Sweden to recover from tuberculosis. She worked there as a journalist.18) Langgässer was sentenced at the end of that year to Heimarbeit, forced labour that involved doing piecework at home for a factory. By now the symptoms of multiple sclerosis that had appeared in 1939 were worsening as a result of this difficult assignment of cutting one thousand pieces of cable daily. The disease was manifesting itself in double vision and paralysis. After a few weeks of work, she was released due to failing health. The years immediately following the war cast as long and as dark a shadow on Langgässer’s life as had the Nazi repression and persecution. She and her family, bombed out as the war ended, had to depend on charity and scrape together the bare necessities to live as they struggled against hunger and the cold. The author’s suffering and frustration were compounded by the remnants of Nazism that still existed in postwar German society (Langgässer, soviel, pp.168-69). She left Berlin with her family in 1948 and moved to the village of Rheinzabern where she lived until her death in 1950. Langgässer failed to attract serious notice as a poet and a novelist after the war, and her period of inner exile during the Nazi era in large part accounts for this. She had barely come into the public eye and found success when she was banned from writing in 1936. With the publication of her novel Das unauslöschliche Siegel in 1947, which she had worked on for ten years, she began to achieve some recognition, but at the time of her death the attention had begun to wane. Some critics suggest that, on the one hand, her frank expression of sexuality offended Catholic readers, and that, on the other hand, those on the political left failed to identify with the mystical elements in her writing.19 Langgässer was awarded the Georg-Büchner Preis posthumously in 1950. Like many other postwar German authors, Langgässer turned to the short story as a way of not only expressing her own sense of loss but also in the hope of restoring the vitality of the German language and the literary forms that had been shattered by the war and encumbered by the dehumanizing elements of Nazi ideology. Many writers who had remained in inner exile felt that the German language was no longer accessible to them because the regime had in effect torn apart Germany’s spiritual tradition and uprooted its 17

Langgässer, soviel, p.86. Emphasis in original. In 1974, after the Yom Kippur war, Cordelia moved to Israel. Langgässer drew upon her daughter’s experiences in Auschwitz for her novel Märkische Argonautenfahrt (1950; Eng. tr. The Quest, 1953; Argonauts of the Mark Brandenburg, 1960). See Cordelia Edvardson’s book of memories and reflections, Die Welt zusammenfügen (To unite the world), trans. by Jörg Scherzer and Anna-Liese Kornitzky (Munich: Hanser, 1989). 19 See Müller, p.191, and Peter Demetz, Postwar German Literature (New York: Pegasus, 1970), p.52. 18

127

cultural values over a twelve-year period. The linguistic precision of the short story form, that is, its compactness and incisiveness, offered authors an instrument with which to clear away the rubble of their language. For Langgässer, whose writing continued to have a Christian focus, the evil of the Nazi regime lay as much in its paralysing effect upon the individual as in its rampant cruelties. Whereas her earlier fiction placed the individual squarely between the two choices of either God or Satan, the human beings in her later postwar stories find themselves in the horrifying predicament of having no choices at all. They are utterly at the whim of the state’s machinations. Aiming to pave the way for healing and hope, Langgässer intended to lay bare such barbarity to her readers and acknowledge its awfulness. In Der Torso, her collection of eighteen short stories that she wrote in a single stroke in 1946, the characters do not reappear from one story to another but the stories are unified by the common theme of war. The title itself signifies the broken human being, a victim of war.20 Yet beneath the grotesque spectre of the fractured human form lies the possibility for mending humanity as well as language, as indicated by J.P.J. Maassen’s description of Langgässer’s purpose: ‘Der torsohafte, der geschundene Mensch aber setzt den heilen Menschen voraus’ (The broken torso, the flayed human being presupposes a healed human being).21 The stories, taken as a whole, reflect a balance between fear and joy. Herein lies the book’s power to redeem the German language and the human spirit. Critics have noted the highly autobiographical nature of many of the stories in Der Torso, for instance, ‘Untergetaucht’, ‘Lydia’, ‘Glück haben’ (To be lucky), and ‘An der Nähmaschine’.22 While Langgässer’s precarious circumstances as a banned writer and a half-Jewish citizen in the Third Reich prevented her from engaging in political resistance, it is possible to detect a protesting stance in her actions and writings. Horst Krüger, a friend of the author, recalls that she and the other members of her family were subject to the Gestapo’s constant scrutiny, so that it would have been impossible for her to belong to an anti-Nazi group. He offers the opinion, however, that Langgässer engaged in a kind of ‘moral resistance’ insofar as she listened illegally to the news broadcasts from Switzerland (p.350). What is more, her secret work on Das unauslöschliche Siegel in defiance of the writing ban, as well as the tenor of stories like ‘Untergetaucht’ and ‘An der Nähmaschine’ testify to her moral opposition to Nazism. The biting satire of ‘An der Nähmaschine’ sets this story off from the other grim and often harsh stories of Der Torso. In its skilful artistry and satirical perspective the story goes beyond the author’s personal circumstances as a mother, a Jew, and an intellectual sentenced to forced labour to highlight more generally the status of women in the Third Reich. ‘An der Nähmaschine’ is about one woman’s act of rebellion, but it is also a trenchant criticism of a society in which the masses unhesitatingly conform and of a misogynistic political order that excludes its own female officials. The plot of ‘An der Nähmaschine’ revolves around Frau Behagel’s job as a forced labourer and her Nazi superiors’ inability to make her adapt to their system. As the story opens, Frau Behagel, thinking about her children, makes her way through the rubble of bombings to an employment office. After receiving her work assignment from the 20

‘An der Nähmaschine’ was removed from Der Torso and published later in the collection Das Labyrinth. J.P.J. Maassen, Die Schrecken der Tiefe: Untersuchungen zu Elisabeth Langgässers Erzählungen (The horror of the abyss: analyses of Elisabeth Langgässer’s stories) (Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden, 1973), p.88. 22 Maassen, pp.117-18; Horst Krüger, Nachwort, Ausgewählte Erzählungen (Selected stories), by Elisabeth Langgässer (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1980), pp.345-56 (p.350). 21

128

authorities, she goes to the factory where she is to learn how to use a sewing machine so that she can do piecework at home. But Frau Behagel refuses to submit to the women in charge of the factory. As an intellectual who works in partnership with her archaeologist husband, she claims that although she is competent in other areas (her specialty is ancient hieroglyphics), she is incapable of sewing. Some of her ordinarily conformist co-workers sense this challenge to the system, and when they band together in support of her, the factory operations are momentarily thrown into disarray. When ordered to return to work, the normally compliant labourers retort that it is their break time. Chaos reigns until those in charge can re-establish order and find an appropriate way to handle the troublesome Frau Behagel, the instigator of the rebellion. Even before Frau Behagel issues a challenge to her Nazi superiors by declaring that she is unable to learn to sew, the author satirizes the female leaders of the factory by exaggerating the images of Nazi ‘womanhood’ that they project. In so doing, Langgässer hints at the women’s fraudulent status and lends support for the resistance to come. Like Keun, Langgässer employs humour to undercut the power of Nazi ideology and the regime’s figures of authority. Despite their well-heeled appearances, these female characters are actually vile and crass. Langgässer targets the misogyny inherent in Nazism: not only does the regime exploit female labourers, it also exploits its own. The women who have bought into the masculine ideology and political system as a way of enhancing their own power in truth receive little or nothing for their efforts. Beneath their highly polished exteriors, the Direktrice (manager) and the Chefin (boss) are as coarse and ugly as their subordinate, the secretary who takes malicious delight in asking Frau Behagel whether she is a Mischling or a German woman with a Jewish husband.23 These female officials present themselves as ‘ideal’ Nazi women; they are large, blond, and, above all, feminine. The author’s caricature-like images of them immediately reduce their authority, rendering them hollow figures who essentially have no power, and who in Langgässer’s moral order represent the crude evil of Nazism. The Direktrice, in charge of instructing the seamstresses, is a ‘patente, liebenswürdige Dame mit hoher Brust und energischen Schultern; das kurze seidene Kleid saß stramm auf der tadellosen Korsettfigur einer guten Vierzigerin’ (competent, charming lady with a high bosom and energetic shoulders; the short silk dress fit tightly on the flawless, corseted figure of a woman a good forty years old) (p.406). If her slick appearance does not suggest an underlying coarseness, then her words to Frau Behagel do. The speech of the Direktrice has nothing of the fineness to which she pretends. Her tone of voice echoes familiarly with the same sharp schadenfroh (gloating over another’s misfortune) quality as the secretary’s words. Playing with her necklace while mercilessly taunting Frau Behagel, the Direktrice comments that the protagonist’s husband is doubly punished because he has a wife who is Jewish and not clever enough to sew (p.408). The Chefin also clumsily attempts to cast herself in the mold of the model ‘Aryan’ woman: ‘eine starke, hellblond Frau, Wasserstoffsuperperoxyd, den offenen Pelzmantel überm Kostum’ (a robust, very fair woman, bleached blond, the fur coat open over the suit) (p.409). Her peroxide-tinted, light blond hair betrays the falseness of her ‘Aryan’ superiority, just as her manner does. While her crocodile purse hangs open at her side, she 23

Elisabeth Langgässer, ‘An der Nähmaschine’ (At the sewing machine), in Das Labyrinth: Fünf Erzählungen (The labyrinth: five stories) (Hamburg: Claassen & Goverts, 1949); repr. in Gesammelte Werke, 4 vols (Hamburg: Claassen, 1959-64), Erzählungen, 405-11 (p.406).

129

momentarily loses control and screams hemmungslos ordinär (in an unrestrained, vulgar way) (p.410) that the women must return to work. Only after threatening the workers with firing and then settling the problem of the troublesome Frau Behagel can she once again resume her pose as ganz feine Dame (very fine lady). Yet even then the Chefin betrays her crass nature when, admonishing the secretary to mind her own business, she calls the woman an alte Trulle (old wench) (p.411). In the light of Langgässer’s mocking gaze, the two Nazi women surrender whatever power and elevated status they might possess. Their authority breaks down under the author’s witty attack, and the reader senses the imminent challenge soon to arise from the outsider, Frau Behagel. Langgässer, a writer more given to symbolism than psychological explanation, in this story distils the evil of Nazism into the single image of the Haifisch (shark), the nickname for the male official in charge of the employment office. Like the irritating and troublesome parrot in Langgässer’s ‘Untergetaucht’, the shark also bites and has a vicious quality. Both the bird and the shark signify the malevolence behind an ideology that has the power to destroy the individual physically as well as psychologically through terror. The story’s narrator describes the man known as the Haifisch as ‘einen geschniegelten, kleinen Kerl mit unbarmherziger Fresse in ihren Gedanken’ (a smartly dressed, small fellow with a ruthless mouth that eats into her [the secretary’s] thoughts) (p.405). The fear he inspires is evident in the reactions of the secretary, who empathizes with Frau Behagel but can only nervously whisper advice to her when the man retreats to the other end of the room. As the only male in the story, he represents the Nazi state (more so than the Nazi women who display only the most superficial trappings of power), particularly when the image of a shark is contrasted with the initial picture of the isolated and vulnerable Frau Behagel picking her way through the rubble to the employment office. There is no mistaking the confrontation about to erupt or the resistance that Frau Behagel ultimately presents to the Nazi system. The first signal of impending opposition surfaces as the Direktrice issues sewing instructions to the female workers assembled around her. While the group discusses the advantages of owning a sewing machine, a lone voice gives a kurz und verräterisch (short and traitorous) laugh, and Frau Behagel looks up to catch the eye of a small, drab-looking woman. Every inch of this nameless figure’s being symbolizes resistance. She will be a perfect foil to Frau Behagel, for the drab woman’s rebellious attitude complements Frau Behagel’s own docile nature. The plain-looking woman, ‘eine hellblonde, farblose kleine Frau mit abgestoßenem Maulwurfsmantel’ (a very fair, pale, small woman wearing a second-hand mole coat) (p.407) is an authentic individual, in contrast to the Nazi women whose flashy appearance and supposed power are merely a facade. This ordinary figure negates every one of the Chefin’s ‘Aryan’ attributes, and thus she symbolizes anti-Nazism. The anonymous woman has an integrity—her light blond hair is natural and her cast-off coat, though unstylish, is unpretentious—that places her in opposition to the peroxide-blond Chefin (pretentiously wearing a fur coat), who is all bluff. Moreover, the plain woman’s political awareness enables her to perceive the significance of Frau Behagel’s non-conformity as rebellion against the order inside the factory. This unidentified character provides the political consciousness and the moral support that will enable the more reticent Frau Behagel to confront the Chefin. As an opponent of the Hitler regime (she listens illegally to Radio Moskau and tells Frau Behagel the Russians are advancing to the Oder river), the drab-looking woman brings the apolitical

130

Frau Behagel into contact with the ideological forces that have secured the oppression of the two women and their fellow workers. Frau Behagel and the small, rebellious woman immediately establish an unspoken alliance. In a single stroke Langgässer unites them in a common understanding of resistance. She emphasizes their shared dissent by juxtaposing the two women’s mutual glance of support with the foolish and empty banter of the other labourers, who are wholly absorbed in talk of sewing machines. When the Direktrice asks the group of workers if they own machines, they nod in unison, some proudly, and they solemnly discuss the need for a sewing machine. At the same moment, Frau Behagel hears a short laugh. Glancing at the plain woman, Frau Behagel ‘streifte sie rasch mit einem jähen, flammenden Blick’ (brushed her swiftly with a quick, flaming glance), and the nameless woman replies in the same way. The knowing exchange between the two women ‘war als ob zwei geschliffene Klingen einander angerührt hätten—blitzend und lautlos und schon vorbei, bevor es ein anderer sah’ (was as if two polished swords had touched each other—instantly and silently and this was already over before anyone else saw it) (p.407). Frau Behagel and her companion are immediately joined by this look that indicates their common opposition to Nazism. The image of the two swords briefly touching further highlights the pair’s sympathies and symbolizes their shared resistance. In setting up Frau Behagel to defy the Nazi bosses, Langgässer permits her protagonist a measure of freedom beyond the traditional feminine role. The Jewish woman’s opposing stance is already suggested early in the story in the symbolic contrast between her dark features and those of the fair Nazi women. Her defiance runs counter to the customary image of the compliant woman, an image that is nowhere in evidence at the moment of the final confrontation. This act of opposition adds another dimension to the general picture of resistance in that it suggests the protagonist’s ability to assert herself simply by standing her ground and saying what is true, all the while maintaining a firm but mild demeanour. Frau Behagel, forthright and self-assured, takes the situation into her own hands and informs the Chefin that she is simply not cut out for this sort of work. Her words signal resistance, for the Jewish woman stands to lose in an encounter like this. She could be punished for her actions or receive a far more difficult work assignment. Resistance, as Frau Behagel demonstrates, could locate its strength and power in the quiet of truth. The Chefin clearly senses the opposition behind Frau Behagel’s statement, for she addresses her subordinate in a drohend (threatening) tone of voice, saying that she has heard Frau Behagel’s work is not going well (p.409). When the Meisterin (mistress) brightly exclaims that Frau Behagel will surely have caught on to how to sew by the next day, events are set in motion as the outsider takes an even firmer stand against learning to sew. The cadence of Frau Behagel’s brief, clipped sentences adds to the firmness and power of her words: ‘”Nein. Auch morgen geht es nicht. Es geht überhaupt nicht.” “So? Und warum nicht?” fragte die Chefin verblüfft. “Weil ich nicht kann. Ich kann andere Dinge. So etwas kann ich nicht”’ (‘No. It isn’t possible tomorrow, either. It isn’t possible at all.’ ‘Indeed? And why not?’ asked the boss, startled. ‘Because I can’t do it. I can do other things. I can’t do this sort of thing’). As Frau Behagel concludes, answering that she is familiar with irregular Greek verbs, the Pythagorean theorem, and analytic Geometry, the encounter reaches a climax: ‘Wenn sie: “Nieder mit Hitler” oder: “Heil Moskau” gerufen hätte, wäre die Wirkung sicher nicht anders gewesen’ (If she had yelled ‘Down with Hitler’ or: ‘Hail Moscow’, the effect surely wouldn’t have been any different) (p.410). The author

131

underlines the seriousness of her protagonist’s dissent by linking Frau Behagel’s assertion with treasonous slogans calling for the overthrow of the state. Just as the German wives in the Rosenstrasse protest exhibit assertive and vocal qualities, so too does Frau Behagel step outside the boundaries of social norms by demonstrating steadfastness and self-assurance when she refuses to submit to her bosses. Frau Behagel’s defiance of the Nazi authorities is significant not only because it demonstrates the potential for women’s resistance to challenge cultural and social assumptions, but also because her action is more than a purely personal response. Her stance radiates out to encompass the other workers. The drab-looking woman has already labelled Frau Behagel’s actions as resistance by asking if her refusal to sew does not amount to ‘sabotage’. Once the heavy silence lifts following Frau Behagel’s explanation to the Chefin, the reverberation of her actions becomes even more apparent. The factory is soon in an uproar. There is now a work stoppage as the labourers stand gawking and listening to the exchange between the protagonist and her superior. This disruption of factory operations quickly deteriorates into mild rebellion as a young worker begins to giggle and her friend immediately joins in. Frau Behagel’s act of dissent does even more than spark a response among her coworkers, for it also confounds and disconcerts those in charge, as seen in the Chefin’s sudden disorderliness. Rattled by the turn of events, she fails to notice her purse hanging open and begins bellowing at the women to return to work. When this fails, because the workers balk, the Chefin can only scream louder that it is a time of war and threaten any slackers with firing (p.410). The Chefin’s phoney authority is further undermined as she begins yelling that the country is in a state of ‘total war’. Insulated within the factory setting and removed from the war as well as the Nazi bureaucracy, the Chefin’s use of this propaganda phrase only serves to point up further her own hysteria and utter powerlessness. Frau Behagel’s refusal to sew brings other results, too. The otherwise smooth operations of the Nazi bureaucracy now break down as those in charge try to account for the uncooperative Jewish woman. Once the Chefin regains her composure as a ‘fine lady’, she handles the problematic Frau Behagel by assigning her to cut cable for the electronics business upstairs. Although the secretary screams that as a Mischling Frau Behagel is only permitted to sew or to sweep streets, the Chefin asserts that in this case an exception will be made (p.411). In a small way, Frau Behagel has forced the system to accommodate her, the outsider. Much as Andreas-Friedrich balances the ‘masculine’ strength of the Rosenstrasse protesters with the more ‘feminine’ quality of her personal sorrow for Peter Tarnowsky, the courage and outspokenness of Frau Behagel and the workers are presented alongside stereotypical images of obedient women with little but sewing, children, and household tasks on their minds. Langgässer’s attack on Nazism spares no actor, not even this group of female labourers, the ‘masses’ within this factory that constitutes a microcosm of German society. Although these women are united as a single body that has the power to stand up to the Nazis, they also display a sheep-like state of conformity that indirectly sustains the repressive order. The women agreeably nod in unison as they receive sewing instructions (p.407). They possess not the slightest trace of individuality and at every turn act as a collective body. The female workers surround the Direktrice like a Schulklasse (school class), and they are also described as [das] Publikum (the public), labels that further rob them of any distinctiveness. Given the opportunity to speak, the women’s words emphasize

132

the unawareness and naïveté that their behaviour has suggested. Sewing, not the war or their own political oppression, absorbs them. In the most telling scene, Langgässer places the empty chatter of the women against the powerful moment in which Frau Behagel and the drab-looking woman unite in their silent and mutual understanding of resistance. The female workers, thoroughly engrossed in the usefulness of a sewing machine, reveal a stereotypical passivity and an absorption in domestic matters that completely excludes politics from their field of vision. Frau Behagel is similarly defined by conflicting behaviours that pull her in opposing directions. Certain traits not only indicate her outsider status but also distinguish her from the conventional feminine image. She is an intellectual and she cannot sew. Otherwise, for all appearances, Frau Behagel is a traditional female. She has meaningful ties to home and family. Her identification with a subordinate feminine identity is apparent in the way she goes to great lengths to please others. Even her name contributes to her agreeable image (behagen: to please, to suit). Frau Behagel appears eager to get along, as when the Direktrice inquires about her husband’s profession. The Jewish woman first answers, ‘”Archäologe”’, but then adds ‘”Das heißt” [verbesserte sich Frau Behagel], “jetzt ist er bei der OT Aktion Mitte”’ (Archaeologist. That is [Frau Behagel corrected herself], now he is with the OT Aktion Mitte) (p.408).24 Ironically, her efforts here to fit in are so extreme (she remarks that her husband has been assigned to a forced labour unit, as if his working for a Nazi organization is more acceptable than his actual profession) that she finds herself in the painful and awkward position of attempting to accommodate her husband and herself to a regime bent on destroying the two of them. Frau Behagel reveals a conventional side in other ways because she displays no political loyalties that might draw her into anti-Nazi activity. In fact, Frau Behagel faces the issue of politics squarely only when she meets the anonymous woman. Not even Frau Behagel herself perceives the dissenting quality of her own actions. ‘”Na? Sabotage?”’ asks the woman. ‘”Nicht einmal das,”’ (‘Well? Sabotage?’ ‘Not even that’, responds Frau Behagel) (Langgässer, ‘Nähmaschine’, p.409). After the confrontation with the Chefin, Frau Behagel practically sinks into the floor with embarrassment and does not speak another word. Although her words and actions have brought the factory operations to a momentary standstill, one wonders whether she even notices the dramatic reaction, that is, the overwhelming stillness and the subsequent protest she has triggered among the other workers. Frau Behagel’s outright denial that her words constitute resistance and also her modest, unassuming demeanour reinforce her identification with the feminine. Her motivation to resist remains an open question. (Does it stem from the humiliation her superiors subject her to as a Jewish woman and an intellectual, or from the knowledge that 24

Organisation Todt (Todt Organization), or OT-Aktion Mitte, was a Nazi paramilitary organization comprised of prisoners of war, foreign workers, and German concentration camp prisoners that worked on military building projects. After the war began, the organization used its manpower to rebuild destroyed railroad lines, streets, and bridges. By the end of 1944, nearly 1.5 million men worked for Organisation Todt, which was watched over by a special branch of the SS. See Peter Altmann and others, Der deutsche antifaschistische Widerstand, 1933-1945: In Bildern und Dokumenten (The German antifascist resistance, 1933-1945: in pictures and documents) (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1975), p.319, and Martin Broszat, The Hitler State, trans. by John W. Hiden (London and New York: Longman, 1981), pp.265-67. According to Müller, Wilhelm Hoffmann was considered unfit for military duty because he was married to the half-Jewish Langgässer. He was supposed to be called up for service in the Organisation Todt after he lost his position at Siemens, but he evaded work through a faked surgery (p.69).

133

the drab-looking woman supports her, or is it essentially a spontaneous reaction to the authorities’ humiliating words?). Yet despite the ambiguities within her as a character, she stands for resistance. Andreas-Friedrich’s and Langgässer’s resistance narratives dramatically revise the content of the standard resistance discourse by casting the main actors as groups of bold, forceful women, rather than the usual bands of men waging political sabotage. Another way in which these authors modify the resistance legend is by challenging its heroic aura. In Andreas-Friedrich’s account of the Rosenstrasse protest, the journalist shifts from the actual demonstration to her own regret and sorrow at Onkel Emil’s failure to rescue a friend. Her only mention of the outcome of these events is that some of the Jewish men fortunate enough to be married to German women were released, while the others were loaded into freight trains and deported (Schattenmann, p.104). She does not equate the wives’ action with a political victory nor does she prize the women’s courage. Her mention of the circle’s efforts is mournful, not victorious. Langgässer’s treatment of Frau Behagel’s actions is equally subdued in that by the end of the story, as the Chefin attempts to restore order in the factory, the protagonist has not only denied that what she has done constitutes resistance but her presence among the group of workers goes unmentioned by the narrator. The instigator of the rebellion has become virtually invisible. In these two portrayals of female resistance, the diffident tone that characterizes so many of these narratives is apparent. Still more important, the resistance figures are not singled out for their heroism, but rather are one with the ‘ordinary’ people, whether they are the victims or the other protesters. It may be said that such realigning of the familiar terms of resistance in effect shows the reader more than might otherwise be seen through the lens of a resister’s bravery and valour or through political analysis. In truth, much resistance was not steeped in heroism. The sobering reality was that, as Andreas-Friedrich frankly acknowledges, the underground could not save the life of everyone it sought to help. Langgässer’s short story likewise drives home another facet of the resister’s world by illustrating the power and efficacy of a protest that arises not from organized and deliberate planning, but rather begins on the spurof-the-moment when the workers’ frustration spills over. A comparison of Andreas-Friedrich’s and Langgässer’s apolitical, relatively understated presentations of German women’s demonstrations with Friedrich Wolf’s novel Zwei an der Grenze, which recreates the strikes and mass protests inspired by the German communist resistance, illustrates still more vividly the ways in which women’s narratives have departed from the standard resistance discourses. Wolf (1888-1953) was a playwright and novelist whose plays dealt with social and economic issues in an effort to uplift the working class. He received a medical degree and served as a surgeon during World War I; he continued to write plays while practicing medicine. Wolf participated in various socialist organizations, and became a member of the Bund Proletarisch-Revolutionärer Schriftsteller and the KPD in 1928. He travelled to the Soviet Union in 1933 in order to evade the Nazis, who were about to arrest him. He spent much of World War II living in internment camps in France, where he was detained until the Soviet Union provided him with a passport in 1941. During his time in France, Wolf wrote Zwei an der Grenze. Following the war, he resided in the German Democratic Republic, and he became that country’s first ambassador to Poland in 1950. Zwei an der Grenze is constructed entirely around political concepts as they are embodied in one man’s actions. Based on the author’s discussions with friends in Paris who

134

had fled Nazi Germany, the novel attempts to portray the actual experiences of a political emigrant who is a resister.25 The action takes place over a nine-month period in a small Czech village located on the border with Bavaria, where a communist worker, Hans Döll, finds shelter after escaping from Germany. Here the young German continues his work to overthrow Nazism and to build a more just society in his own country. Both his clandestine activity and his later involvement in factory politics and a strike are predicated on communist ideals. Hans makes periodic trips to the border at night, where he secretly meets fellow resisters from Germany and carries out various underground duties. He later marries Loni, who eventually commits herself to the revolutionary cause of the working class. Not only Hans’s subversive work but also his outlook on life in general is founded on the ideals of Communism. As he tells his wife, the child that the couple is expecting should come into a world that is bessere, freiere (better, freer). He goes on to explain that he and others join in the cause of the working-class and, in turn, resistance because there ought to be ‘Brot, Freiheit, Gerechtigkeit und Frieden’ (bread, freedom, justice and peace) for all people.26 When this political framework is applied to a factory protest, then, the workers’ burial of a murdered colleague represents not a personal memorial for a lost friend but rather an act of struggle as the casket is carried past the factory and a siren is sounded to signal a strike. Whereas Andreas-Friedrich and Langgässer hint at the internal discord that female resistance figures experience as they attempt to accommodate a conventional femininity with the requirements of resistance, the language of politics frames the discussion of every aspect of Hans’s existence. As with most of the other women writers under discussion here, some of Langgässer’s narrative choices can be attributed to her own personal struggle to fulfil vastly different roles. She embodied traditional and conservative values in her Catholicism, in her intellectual and literary ties to other writers, and in her identity as wife and mother. Her need to write created an inner disharmony that plagued her throughout her career as she sought to combine the conflicting roles of writer-intellectual and wife-mother. For all of her literary achievements and the encouragement and acceptance she received early in her career from such established and well-respected authors as Lehmann, Benn, Seidel, Von Molo, Loerke, and Huch, Langgässer was nevertheless a woman writer in what was still socially and intellectually a man’s world. Karlheinz Müller observes that, as a young author, Langgässer was the only female permitted to attend the Freitagskreis (Friday Circle) at the Café Laumer, a meeting place of artists and intellectuals in Frankfurt during the 1920s. He concludes from statements in some of her letters that she did not always see herself as accepted and understood in this male-dominated circle (p.37). The recurring and seemingly unresolvable tension between the demands of home and family and her writing surfaces as well throughout Langgässer’s letters. In February 1933, with one daughter, the author could already sense the enormous pressures that caring for a child would have upon her work. Writing to a friend and colleague, Langgässer reveals that she feels tired and irritated because she has had to be away from her writing for so long: ‘Eins steht fest: man hat ein Kind—dann ist das ein vollkommen ausgefüllter Tag. Oder einen Beruf—dann muß man das Kind in andere Hände geben’ (One thing is certain: If you have a child—then the day is completely full. Or if you have a career—then you have to 25

Werner Jehser, Friedrich Wolf: Leben und Werk (Friedrich Wolf: life and work) (Berlin: Volk und Wissen Volkseigener Verlag, 1965; repr. 1977), p.131. 26 Friedrich Wolf, Zwei an der Grenze (Two at the border) (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1948; repr. 1951), p.96.

135

have someone else care for the child).27 Six years later (30 July 1939), Langgässer had three more children, and the strife within her has become more apparent as she contrasts the conflicting obligations pulling at her in the form of mundane household chores, such as cooking, baking, dusting, and sweeping, and her writing. Her inability to reconcile these clashing roles can be seen in her further remarks, for she goes on to say: ‘Ich [stand] entweder vor der Alternative, meine Arbeit aufzugeben oder auf das zu verzichten, was man einen “gepflegten Haushalt” nennt [. . .] auf Kosten meiner Arbeit, meiner Seelenruhe und sogar manchmal meiner Ehe’ (I faced the alternative of either giving up my work or foregoing what is called a ‘well-tended household’ [. . .] at the cost of my work, my peace of mind, and perhaps even my marriage) (soviel, pp.88-89). Langgässer’s personal turmoil emerges in other ways besides the feelings of guilt and the endless anxiety, for she was well aware that social attitudes led to her being categorized as a writer by her gender and therefore set apart from male authors. She herself appears willing to discard the labels that society assigned to her. Writing to Dr. Hans Butow of the Frankfurter Freie Presse (Frankfurt Free Press), she comments, ‘man hat mich abgestempelt als “christliche Dichterin”—was ich natürlich bin, aber “christliche Dichter” ohne den leichten Anklang an das literarische Nähkörbchen wäre mir lieber’ (I’ve been stamped as a ‘Christian poetess’—which naturally I am, but I’d prefer ‘Christian poet’, without the superficial reference to the literary sewing basket!) (p.228). Langgässer shuns the feminized designation that, as seen in her image of the sewing basket, suggests her writing issues forth from the female experience. In the author’s desire literally to discard the linguistic sign (the ‘-in’) that identifies her as a woman poet, one perceives the same urge to achieve acceptance in the male-dominated literary world that most women writers have felt. As they engaged in collective protests, French and German women broke out of the roles that confined them to home life and caretaking functions. These acts of opposition against the Vichy and Nazi dictatorships moved women into public spaces where numerous people could witness their defiance and hear their angry cries of confrontation, and possibly join together in support of the women. As numbers of women united to stand up boldly to representatives of the Vichy or Nazi regime, they exemplified daring, power, and assertiveness. Women protesters exerted a collective will that contrasted sharply with the more compliant image they maintained in their private lives. Andreas-Friedrich and Langgässer alike present images of female demonstrators that in many respects run counter to customary models of femininity. These figures are able to come together in order to exert a degree of political force that, in the case of the German wives in the Rosenstrasse protest, wrings some concessions from authorities, or, in Langgässer’s short story, brings the Nazi bureaucracy to a halt for a brief time. In Andreas-Friedrich’s and Langgässer’s depictions of a form of resistance that allows women to take action as bold and forceful individuals, the women resisters move beyond the boundaries of the socially prescribed feminine identity. Nevertheless, there is much about these figures that remains highly conventional as the writers attempt to mesh their narratives of powerful and public resistance actions with gender norms that assigned women to the private-personal realm. As chapter 7 will show, the power of cultural and social attitudes was even more pronounced in the roles women played as liaison agents, 27

soviel, p.50. Emphasis in original.

136

roles usually delegated to them by men on the basis of what were deemed, in the eyes of male and female resisters alike, appropriate functions and duties for women.

137

Chapter Seven The Tender Liaison Agent: Femininity As Disguise

Une mère et son gosse, quoi de plus transparent dans un parc, un dimanche aprèsmidi? Je me réjouis d’être la mini-couverture de cette rencontre entre deux hommes engagés.1 [Lucie Aubrac, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse]

Their gender afforded women resisters a degree of freedom that their male counterparts did not have. Women were less suspect than draft-age men, and they could often disguise their illegal work behind customary feminine roles and behaviours. French resistance organizations therefore made extensive use of women as liaison agents, or go-betweens, who kept lines of communication open and information flowing among networks, among smaller groups, or among individual members. Couriers and agents provided the underground with a relatively safe way to maintain contact between various towns and cities, between regions, and between the northern and southern territories in France (Weitz, Sisters, p.77). German women also transmitted information, but the Nazi terror system severely limited the extent of their activity. Female couriers for French military intelligence organizations gathered information about enemy defences, troop movements, and artillery positions, and women made journeys to the provincial areas to locate safe houses for allied airmen and forced labour evaders. Women in both France and Germany helped clandestine organizations and groups stay in touch with fellow resisters who had been arrested by pretending to be the fiancées or friends of the prisoners, and thereby gaining information or access to someone through interactions with prison personnel who unwittingly shared knowledge about who was in jail, the legal charges, and so forth. (Kline, p.379; Weitz, ‘As’, p.14). Authorities were reluctant to deal too harshly with the ‘weaker’ sex, even if there was reason to believe they might be engaged in covert activity. E. Ducros, a member of the Lyons underground from 1940-1941, observes that the French police thoroughly combed train stations and the compartments of trains in search of individuals suspected of illegal activity, but that they exercised restraint towards women: ‘Männer wurden regelrecht gefilzt. [. . .] Bei uns Frauen hatten sie [die Kontrolleure] . . . gewisse Hemmungen’ (Men were searched regularly. [. . .] Regarding us women, they [the authorities] had . . . certain inhibitions). Ducros adds that, because women created less suspicion, they transported anything dangerous, including weapons, fliers, orders, and false papers (Kopetzky, pp.57-58). Analysing the situation of German women, Koonz draws similar conclusions about male officials’ wariness toward females, noting that in the Third Reich rough treatment of women would 1

Lucie Aubrac, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse (They will leave in joy) (Paris: Seuil, 1984), p.69. (A mother with her child, what could be more transparently innocent in a public park on a Sunday afternoon? I’m happy to provide some slight cover for this meeting between these two résistants) (Outwitting, p.64).

have undermined the ‘clean’ and ‘noble’ image of the Gestapo and also forced the state to acknowledge women’s autonomy, thus throwing into question the legitimacy of Nazism’s official image of compliant womanhood (Mothers, p.336). Marguerite Duras, in a chapter of her memoir, La Douleur, and Elsa Triolet, in her novella Les Amants d’Avignon, demonstrate the ways in which liaison agents took advantage of society’s expectations of what a woman should be in order to disguise their clandestine activity. These two narratives depict a form of resistance that, despite its often innocuous appearance, placed women in great jeopardy as they fulfilled tasks that sustained the work and furthered the goals of the larger organizations. Like many of the texts in this study, La Douleur and Les Amants d’Avignon also open up the standard notion of resistance to reveal concerns and layers of meaning that have been obscured by a patriotic rhetoric. In the varying shades of grey that emerge from La Douleur, in particular, it is possible to read disquieting emotions, not only fear but also shame at the actions one must take as a resister. Marguerite Duras’s (1914-1996) diverse body of work encompasses novels, plays, screenplays, and adaptations. Some of the recurring themes throughout her fiction, films, and plays are love and sexual desire, suffering, the power of memory, loss and despair, and the pain of isolation. During her years of university study, she was exposed to the works of contemporary French authors writing in 1930s Paris, among them, Aragon, Jules Romains, Jean Giraudoux, Paul Nizan, André Breton, and Roger Martin du Gard. Literary historians have typically classified Duras among the postwar French writers indebted to Hemingway and William Faulkner; however, the independent-minded Duras claimed to have found the source for much of her writing in her difficult early years growing up in French Indochina.2 Duras’s first novels, published during the 1940s and early ‘50s, were generally more realistic and traditional in style and structure than her later writings. As she began experimenting with the narrative techniques of the nouveau roman (new novel), or anti-novel, in the mid’50s, her writing grew more minimalist in plot and style. She pared down words, sentences, and the narrative line to only the essentials. During the late ‘60s, Duras moved toward greater abstraction in her writing, which led to her dispensing with literary rules and conventions and creating ambiguous writing in a spare, terse yet poetic style that no longer contained a story line. For many years, Duras was better known in France, where she attracted a small but devoted following, than internationally. The publication of her autobiographical novel L’Amant (1984; Eng. tr. The Lover, 1985), for which she received the Prix Goncourt (Goncourt Prize) in 1984, finally brought her widespread recognition both at home and abroad. Duras was born and grew up in Gia Dinh, an area north of what is today Saigon. Her parents taught in France’s colonial service in Indochina. Born Marguerite Donnadieu, their daughter would, with the publication of her first novel in 1943, take the name Duras, which was the name of a village in the Lot-Et-Garonne in southwestern France, where her father owned land. Duras studied law and political science from 1933 to 1936 in Paris, and received her law degree and a license in political sciences. In early 1937, she took an administrative post in the Ministry of Colonial Affairs, where she worked until the Vichy regime terminated her position in 1940. That same year, Duras began writing her first novel, Les Impudents (1943; The impudents), a story of family strife, childhood issues, and the struggles of adolescence. The young writer received encouragement from the sur2

Alan Riding, ‘Marguerite Duras and Thoughts of Love’, The New York Times, national edn, 26 March 1990, B1-2 (p.B2).

139

realist writer Queneau, who praised her writing style when she submitted her completed manuscript to Éditions Gallimard, the publishing house where he worked.3 Duras moved to another administrative job in the Office for Paper Allocation at the Book Organization Office in 1942.4 Three years earlier, she had married the writer Robert Antelme, whom she had met at law school. They had a son in 1942, but the child was stillborn.5 The couple and their close friend, the philosopher Dionys Mascolo, joined François Mitterrand’s resistance network, Mouvement National des Prisonniers de Guerre et Déportés (MNPGD; National Movement for Prisoners of War and Deportees) in 1943. (Duras’s biographer, Alain Vircondelet, suggests that the three young people were motivated to join the French resistance out of a sense of adventure (p.82)). The young Mitterrand, who himself had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, had ties to various resistance organizations and also to supporters of Pétain. In January 1943, he began heading up the Rassemblement National des Prisonniers de Guerre (RNPG; National Association of Prisoners of War), with the aim of locating escaped prisoners, providing them with emergency aid, and organizing them into paramilitary units.6 Former prisoners of war supplied the resistance with valuable information and facts about what was going on in the countries where they had been interned. Among the clandestine responsibilities assigned to Duras was establishing a search agency under the auspices of the magazine Libres (Free), an MNPGD publication that communicated information about deportations, circulated the testimony of escaped prisoners, and forged ties among prisoners’ families (Vircondelet, p.92). Among the intellectuals who visited Duras’s apartment in 1943 were Jean Genêt, Georges Bataille, Henri Michaux, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edgar Morin, and René Leibowitz.7 Vircondelet reports that her home became a clandestine meeting place for resisters and a refuge for Jews, a practice made more dangerous by the fact that certain intellectuals sympathetic to Jacques Doriot, the leader of the fascist Parti Populaire Français (Popular French Party), sometimes gathered upstairs at the home of Doriot’s cultural advisor, Ramón Fernandez, and his wife, Betty. The collaborationist writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Gerhard Heller, a representative of the Nazi Propagandastaffel (Propaganda Staff), which had complete authority over the activities of French writers and intellectuals, often visited the couple (p.83). Duras joined the PCF that fall and became the secretary of a party cell (pp.98-99). After Antelme and Duras divorced in 1946, Duras became Mascolo’s companion and they had a son in 1947. (They later married, though they would separate in 1957.) During the mid-1940s, Duras and other intellectuals met at her apartment to discuss their personal 3 4 5

6

7

Alain Vircondelet, Duras: A Biography, trans. by Thomas Buckley (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994), pp.67-68, 141. Laure Adler, Marguerite Duras: A Life, trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp.84, 101. According to Duras’s remarks about her baby’s death in La Douleur, the doctor arrived late for the delivery because, due to shortages, he did not have enough gas to drive to the couple’s apartment at night. Marguerite Duras, La Douleur (The pain) (Paris: P.O.L., 1985), pp.30-31. Laure Adler reports that the delivery was at a maternity home run by nuns and that the nuns were not prepared to cope with an emergency like Duras’s long and difficult labour (p.99). In December 1943, the RNPG united with the Mouvement de Résistance des Prisonniers de Guerre et des Déportés (MRPGD; Resistance Movement for Prisoners of War and Deportees), headed by Michel Calliau, the nephew of de Gaulle, to form the MNPGD. See Veillon, ‘Resistance’, pp.172-74. Christiane Blot-Labarrère, Marguerite Duras (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p.294.

140

conflicts related to the doctrinaire control the Communist Party sought to impose on intellectuals after the war. Among those who participated in these meetings were Antelme, Mascolo, Clara Malraux, Merleau-Ponty, Francis Ponge, Claude Roy, Morin, and others. Mascolo, Morin, Duras, and Antelme were expelled from the party as dissidents in 1950. Duras was too much her own person to adhere to official party policy, but she continued to identify herself as a Marxist over the years and to be associated with leftist politics and feminism. From the end of the war on, she was vocal about her distaste for the de Gaulle regime, and she protested France’s pursuit of the war in Algeria. She joined other writers and intellectuals in support of the May 1968 student protests. Duras battled alcoholism for many years, and her health deteriorated further as her emphysema progressed. She died on 3 March 1996. Part autobiography and part fiction, Duras’s La Douleur captures the arc of emotions that inform the author’s varied roles during the war: a wife who awaits her husband’s return from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and then nurses him back to health; a resister involved in a game of cat and mouse with the Gestapo agent who arrested her husband; an interrogator and torturer of informers after the liberation. The first four chapters are autobiographical, while the last two are fictional. The second chapter, ‘Monsieur X. dit ici Pierre Rabier’ (Monsieur X, here called Pierre Rabier), reconstructs the strange and terrifying relationship Duras established with Pierre Rabier, the Gestapo officer who arrested her husband for resistance activity. (Rabier was a German who used a French name, Charles Delval, and the identification papers of a Frenchman who had disappeared before the war.) Antelme had performed his military service and been mobilized between 1937 and 1940. He then held a job as a clerk at the Ministry of the Interior until 1944 (Vircondelet, p.73). In June 1944, he was picked up by the Gestapo and deported to Bergen-Belsen. Spanning the final days of the war up to the liberation, from June 1944 to August 1944, this chapter consists of brief fragments of the author’s thoughts and impressions as she subtly cultivates a ‘personal’ relationship with Rabier in order to maintain contact with her husband and to glean Gestapo intelligence for the resistance. In language that is spare and direct, Duras strips her resistance activity down to the barest elements as she delineates a role that requires her to play upon the erotic possibilities of the feminine and recreates her determination to know about her husband’s welfare. Hers is a study in the emotional impact of the moment: love and concern for another person, and the fear and shame surrounding the relationship between herself and Rabier. A writer whose fictional treatment of the experiences of a French liaison agent echoes Duras’s memoir is Elsa Triolet (1896-1970). She was a novelist and short story writer, originally from Russia, who wrote several works of fiction in her native language before turning to French, the language of her adopted country. Throughout her writing career she produced twenty novels, critical essays and reviews, biographies of Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and French translations of Russian poetry and novels, which brought Mayakovsky and other Soviet authors to the attention of the French public.8 Triolet, who had left pre-revolutionary Russia, always carried with her a feeling of loneliness and of being a foreigner in a strange land. The sadness and isolation that stemmed from her own exile became a theme in her early stories, and her later works also bore the mark of her personal alienation as she examined the theme of solitude. 8

Helena Lewis, Introduction, A Fine of Two Hundred Francs, by Elsa Triolet (London: Virago Press, 1986), pp.vii-xviii (pp.vii-x).

141

The resistance became another central concept in her work and it remained so, even in her later years and in her novels that had little to do with politics (her later characters were often identified by their actions during the occupation and the resistance). Interested in historical and political topics, Triolet nevertheless had a light touch, often blending fantasy, humour, and the supernatural with the weighty issues of her day. She published three books during the war that examine the individual’s response to the difficulties of life during the occupation and the resistance: the novellas Mille regrets (1942; A thousand regrets) and Le Cheval blanc (1943; Eng. tr. The White Charger, 1946), and a collection of novellas, Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs, which contained Les Amants d’Avignon. Triolet was the first woman to win the Prix Goncourt, which she received for Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs in 1945. Despite her distinguished record as a novelist, essayist, journalist, and translator, Triolet has been long overlooked by literary critics for a number of reasons. One explanation for this is political. As the wife of Aragon, a communist, and as a long-time communist sympathizer herself, she lost popularity with mainstream critics once the Cold War began and the resistance and those formerly associated with the movement subsequently came to be identified with Communism. Triolet alienated her supporters on the left as she grew increasingly disillusioned with the party and aired her views and criticized socialist realism. By the mid-1950s, communist critics seldom reviewed her novels in party journals (Lewis, p.xvii). Triolet’s obscurity was also due to her being overshadowed by her famous husband. The public came to view her more as his wife and the subject of his love poems than as an author in her own right. Nor did Triolet conform to the usual expectations for women authors, because she chose political subjects and did not limit herself to ‘feminine’, romantic material. Finally, the French public always regarded her as a foreigner, even though she adopted France as her homeland and wrote in French.9 Elsa Triolet, born Elsa Yureyvna Kagan, was the younger daughter of liberal Jewish intellectuals. Born and raised in privileged circumstances in Moscow, Triolet possessed rich literary and cultural ties from a young age. Her older sister, Lili, was married to Osip Brik and was the poet Mayakovsky’s lover. Through the connection with Mayakovsky, the two sisters became a part of the Russian Futurist avant-garde in the years prior to the Russian Revolution. In 1918, Elsa married André Triolet, a French naval officer whom she had met at Futurist gatherings, and the couple moved to Tahiti. When the marriage failed after two years, Elsa relocated to Berlin, where there was a thriving Russian literary community that included such writers as Andrei Bely, Ivan Bunin, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Maxim Gorky. Gorky, the Soviet Union’s popular novelist who championed the proletariat in his writing, convinced her to write and shepherded her through her first three books. (Triolet later said she would never have become a writer without his encouragement.) Triolet’s first book described her life in Tahiti, and was published under the title Na Taiti (In Tahiti) in the Soviet Union in 1925. She went on to write two more books, Zemlianitchka (1926; Wild strawberries) and Zachtchitni Tsvet (1928; Camouflage), which were primarily autobiographical. Triolet immigrated to Paris in late 1923, where she lived in a hotel that was home to a number of Surrealists and Dadaists, including Fernand Leger and Francis Picabia and their wives, as well as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.10 In 1928, 9 10

Max Adereth, ‘L’Œuvre d’Elsa Triolet’, La Pensée, 153 (1970), 81-94 (pp.81-83). Lachlan Mackinnon, The Lives of Elsa Triolet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p.45.

142

she met Aragon, whose poetry had impressed her because she saw in it a resemblance to the work of Mayakovsky, who had mentored her in her writing.11 The couple began living together, and later married in 1939. During the 1930s, as the pair became more involved in leftist politics and as Aragon’s enthusiasm for militant Communism and the party’s program of socialist realism grew, his reputation began to eclipse hers, according to Triolet’s biographer, Lachlan Mackinnon. Although she herself never formally joined the Communist Party, she was a fellow-traveller who was instrumental in encouraging Aragon’s eventual break with the Surrealists (in 1932) and his embrace of proletarian literature. Triolet and Aragon attended the Second International Congress for Proletarian and Revolutionary Literature that met in Moscow in 1930, and later made a second trip to the Soviet Union in 1932.12 Mackinnon suggests that one reason why Aragon may have been so eager to adhere to the party’s rigid doctrine was because his new political connections provided Triolet with a means to return to her homeland, something that was becoming increasingly difficult due to repressive conditions inside the Soviet Union (pp.90-91). While Aragon discovered new creative possibilities as a writer and threw himself into meetings with other intellectuals and writers who were uniting against fascism, Triolet’s career stalled. She was drawn into the centre of exciting political and cultural events by virtue of her association with Aragon, who organized the First International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture. However, it became more difficult to get her work published in the Soviet Union due to stricter censorship there. She also found herself without the backing of Gorky, who died in 1936. Triolet now began to write in French instead of Russian. The publication of her collection of short stories, Bonsoir Thérèse (1938; Good night, Theresa), marked her entry into French literature. Mille regrets and Le Cheval blanc followed, and a variety of critics, among them Martin du Gard, Camus, Paulhan, Francis Carco, Max Jacob, and Joë Bousquet praised the novelty of the writing and the tone in these two works.13 When the war began, the couple paid a price for their communist loyalties as the French government pressed forward with its suppression of the PCF. In 1939, Aragon was conscripted into a battalion specifically for men deemed untrustworthy on account of their politics. As a Jew and a Russian-born communist sympathizer, Triolet was subjected to frequent police interrogations and searches of her and Aragon’s apartment. The government confiscated and destroyed her recently published book of translations of Mayakovsky’s poetry and reminiscences of the poet because a publisher affiliated with the Communist Party had issued it (Lewis, ‘Elsa’, p.44). When Aragon was demobilized in July 1940, he and Triolet decided to stay in France and work for the resistance rather than flee to the United States or London, where they had friends. The pair soon came to be regarded as important activists in the French intellectual resistance. They moved to the unoccupied southern zone in September 1940 and stayed there 11

Lewis, Introduction, p.ix; Helena Lewis, ‘Elsa Triolet: Engagé Writer and Heroine of the Resistance’, Contemporary French Civilization, 18 (1994), 43-55 (p.44). 12 Aragon’s explanation for why Triolet did not join the Communist Party is that she might have feared that the party would be able to take advantage of her since she was living abroad. Louis Aragon, Aragon parle avec Dominique Arban (Aragon speaks to Dominique Arban) (Paris: Seghers, 1968), p.96. 13 Michel Apel-Muller, Avant-propos, Chroniques théâtrales: Lettres françaises, 1948-1951 (Theatre reviews: Lettres françaises, 1948-1951), by Elsa Triolet (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), pp.3-6 (p.4).

143

with friends, first in Avignon (the setting of Les Amants d’Avignon), and then in Nice, where they arrived on 31 December. Interested in uniting writers and intellectuals under the banner of the French communist resistance, they returned to Paris for a time where they sought to re-establish contact among writers who had lost touch with each other due to the occupation (Mackinnon, p.128). The couple helped Decour, Paulhan, and Mauriac lay the foundation for Comité National des Écrivains and worked with Camus and Sartre on Les Lettres françaises. As CNE became more stable, Aragon and Triolet departed for southern France, where they planned to establish another branch of this organization (Mackinnon, p.130). Following their return to the southern zone, they took over as editors of Les Lettres françaises after Decour’s murder by the Nazis. This clandestine publishing work often required Triolet to travel illegally to Paris, which put her in danger of arrest because she had underground manuscripts in her possession (Lewis, Introduction, p.xii). Once Germany invaded the southern zone in November 1942, the couple, who had been warned they faced arrest, traded their once comfortable circumstances for privation as they entered a clandestine existence that lasted until the end of the war. Aragon and Triolet carried false papers and were often on the move to avoid detection by the authorities. In the mountain retreats where they lived in Serres and Dieulefit, they slept in straw and heard the scurrying of rats at night (Mackinnon, p.139). The pair’s presence in the South helped to spur the intellectual resistance there as the poet Éluard had done in the North, explains literary critic Max Adereth (‘French’, p.124). Mackinnon relates that, because the resistance prohibited husbands and wives from staying together while they were involved in illegal activity, Triolet left her husband on 31 December 1942 to go to work for the Lyons underground for six months. Aragon tried to convince his wife to remain at his side and continue writing while he carried on his clandestine work, but she responded, ‘I cannot allow the idea that we shall get to the end of this war and that when people ask me, “And what did you do?” I shall have to say, “Nothing”’ (p.139). She made a number of illegal trips for the French resistance, which put her at risk because of her Russian accent, and one time she met with members of FTP. The nature of Triolet’s clandestine trips remains unknown (p.145). Triolet departed from Lyons on 1 July 1943 and went to the village of Saint-Donat in the Drôme countryside, where she and Aragon remained for the duration of the war. There she edited and distributed an underground newspaper, La Drôme en armes (The Drôme at arms), and shared responsibilities for other clandestine publications. Resistance publications that Triolet helped produce included Poésie (Poetry), Fontaine (The well), and Les Cahiers du Rhône (Notebooks of the Rhone). She also wrote short stories for La Bibliothèque française (The French library) and Confluences, a journal published legally (Lewis, ‘Elsa’, p.45). She led a resistance group named Les Étoiles (The Stars) and also worked as one of its couriers. Triolet wrote articles for and printed copies of a newspaper of the same name, which was the southern counterpart of Les Lettres françaises14, and she transported copies of the paper (under fruit at the bottom of sacks) for distribution. Her other responsibilities included travelling to the mountains to gather information about the maquis and acting as a liaison for Russian prisoners of war who had escaped (Lewis, Introduction, p.xii). 14

Brenda Bruckner Casey, ‘Elsa Triolet: A Study in Solitude’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University, 1974), p.20n.

144

After the war, Triolet was decorated for her contributions to the resistance. Helena Lewis indicates that the author’s clandestine involvement provided a way for her to overcome her sense of alienation in a foreign land: ‘She said later that only in the Resistance did she come to feel that France was her country’ (Introduction, p.xiv). Triolet and Aragon maintained their prominence as leftist intellectuals after the war. Triolet reported on the Nuremberg Trials for Les Lettres françaises (now a communist journal), when they began in 1946 (Casey, p.24). The couple took a leading role in the international peace movement, heading up demonstrations against the atom bomb, NATO, the Korean War, and the execution of the Rosenbergs. Triolet was vice-president of Comité National des Écrivains, which had come increasingly under the sway of the PCF, and she was involved in Union des Femmes Françaises (Lewis, Introduction, p.xv). Even as she grew more disenchanted with the Communist Party’s doctrinaire views, she continued to participate in leftist causes, protesting the Soviet Union’s 1956 invasion of Hungary, speaking out against the crackdown in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and voicing her support for the Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (p.xviii). Triolet died of heart disease in 1970. Les Amants d’Avignon was published clandestinely in 1943 by Éditions de Minuit, under Triolet’s pseudonym, Laurent Daniel, a name she used out of respect for Danièle Casanova and her husband, Laurent. (At the time that Triolet was writing the novella, in February 1943, Laurent had escaped from Germany and was working for the communist resistance in France, and Danièle had just been sent to Auschwitz.) The novella moves back and forth between family concerns and events in the French underground as a male narrator relates the clandestine activities of Juliette Noël, a nineteen-year-old typist. Triolet’s trademark combination of realism, humour, and fantasy is evident here as she sets Juliette’s romantic dreams and imaginings and her reveries about film stars against the background of politics and resistance. Juliette’s family, to whom she returns between missions for the resistance, consists of Aunt Aline and Juliette’s adopted son, José, a Spanish refugee child whom she brought back from Paris. Around Christmastime 1942, Juliette is visiting the homes of peasants in the countryside, seeking hiding places for forced labour evaders and political refugees. She is then sent on an assignment to Avignon, where she meets Célestin, a fellow resister to whom she passes on critical information that might save the lives of several other resisters. The couple spends Christmas day walking through the ‘magical’ town where Petrarch declared his love for Laura and touring the fortress where they read the inscriptions of lovers on the walls. Juliette proposes that she and Célestin pretend to be lovers. The centrepiece of the novella, this make-believe interlude during which the pair discovers their real feelings for one another, is abruptly cut short when Célestin is summoned for another mission. Some time later, Juliette meets up with him again, this time in Lyons. Once the couple’s work there is completed, Célestin departs, and the Gestapo captures Juliette, pressuring her to divulge her colleague’s identity. Juliette escapes by losing the Germans in the city’s maze of dark traboules (passageways). She eventually arrives safely at the group’s headquarters, where the other members arrange for her to go into hiding. The two female resisters in Duras’s and Triolet’s narratives play quite different roles as liaison agents, but both hide behind expected feminine images—Duras as the anxious wife and the alluring woman, and the fictional Juliette as the beautiful, naïve young woman. As these and other narratives reveal, women could take advantage of men’s expectations of womanly behaviour in order to accomplish resistance tasks. For instance, the former resister

145

Ducros concludes that her youth and beauty helped her in her work for the French movement. She illustrates her point by relating a story of how she once transported illegal fliers to a small town. After retrieving some lightweight weapons there, she missed her train back to Lyons. A light tank carrying German militia eventually picked up the young woman, who distracted the soldiers’ attention away from her suitcase filled with weapons by mentioning that her grandmother was waiting for her in Lyons. The Germans drove Ducros to her rendezvous point in Lyons, where she was able to keep her appointment on time with her resistance contact and deliver the weapons (Kopetzky, p.58). Social stereotypes of the weak, compliant female blinded authorities to the possibility that women, whom they failed to believe were brave or cunning enough to deceive them, were carrying out subversive actions right before their eyes. It was not unusual for a woman to be able simply to talk her way out of a potentially dangerous situation.15 Other resisters, like Aubrac, bluffed those in charge by posing as a pregnant woman who needed to persuade the father of her child to marry her, or, like Andreas-Friedrich, pretended to be helping a friend.16 Acting the part of the ‘innocent’ female could be a source of power for women who consciously took advantage of such stereotypes to achieve their resistance aims. Women and teenage girls blended in easily with the goings-on around them. Resisters pretended to shop or do errands as they gathered intelligence, smuggled money or written materials, or passed information. Women carried messages, written or typed on thin paper, inside the hem of a coat or a skirt or hidden at the bottom of a briefcase, suitcase, or shopping bag, and transported weapons or illegal pamphlets beneath fruits and vegetables in bags or at the bottom of baby carriages and wagons. Koonz reports that German women met at cafés for coffee and to ‘socialize’ and there exchanged written information hidden in books and purses or under napkins (Mothers, pp.326-27). Some women who brought along their children or who appeared to be expecting (whether they actually were or not) outwitted officials and managed to bring forbidden materials across the border or to various dropoff points (p.327). In Germany, Carola Karg disguised herself as a pregnant woman and carried bundles of illegal printed matter beneath her maternity dress. Chatting with the guards at various checkpoints, she crossed the border numerous times with her material.17 Duras’s resistance work did not require a physical disguise but rather a sharp awareness of how to take advantage of expected roles. In June 1944, while trying to see her husband (called Robert L. in the memoir), Duras made the acquaintance of Rabier. When three weeks had passed after her husband’s arrest and the Gestapo had not yet appeared to search her apartment, she asked to be allowed to resume her duties as a liaison agent for the group headed by Mitterrand, whose nom de guerre was François Morland. Duras was given the responsibility of establishing contact between Mitterrand’s circle and Frenay’s Combat. Once Duras met Rabier, however, Mitterrand strictly ordered her to maintain this connec-

15

See the example of Georgette Wallé, who reports that one time when she was working for the French resistance, a policeman asked to open her suitcase, which contained illegal tracts. When she told him to go ahead, that she had nothing of interest to him, he did not insist and she went on her way (Coudert and Helene, p.162). 16 Rayne Kline, ‘Lucie Aubrac: Resistance Fighter’, Ms., July 1985, 26, 32-33 (p.26); Andreas-Friedrich, Schattenmann, p.208. 17 Annette Kuhn and Valentine Rothe, Frauen im deutschen Faschismus (Women under German fascism), 2 vols (Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1982), II, 89.

146

tion as the only way to stay in touch with the group’s jailed comrades.18 At the end of each day, Duras methodically recorded everything Rabier told her about the deportations of French people to Germany, events at the front, the deprivation affecting Paris and its citizens, the German troops’ low morale, and German transport problems (Douleur, pp.97-98). She periodically met another resister, ‘D’ (Mascolo), far away from where she lived, telling him what she had learned as the pair walked through the streets and parks of Paris. Duras presents her resistance experience as a complex psychology of mutual need. Resistance in this instance can only be accomplished by Duras remaining grounded in the moment, not by flamboyant action. She must remain attentive to the slightest nuances in the relationship with Rabier if she is not to make a misstep. Duras uses Rabier, as he in turn uses her. The young woman accepts his invitations to take her out to lavish meals in black market restaurants, while he confides his private hopes and dreams and pries for information about the resistance. The author’s riveting description of her connection to Rabier is eerie in its attunement to the precariously balanced power between these two. Rabier, it seems, is drawn to the attractive young writer as someone with whom he can share his thoughts about books and art (pp.94, 100). But his intentions are not entirely guileless. His job is to identify and kill those whom he suspects of aiding the resistance, and he is not without his suspicions about Duras. Over elegant meals he tells her about arrests he has made and discusses his long-held desire to buy a little art bookshop. Duras plays along with Rabier, never letting on just how much she knows about her husband’s underground role or whether she, too, is involved with the French resistance. Duras lives with overwhelming fear, with the knowledge that Rabier may kill her at a moment’s notice, but at the same time she dreads losing all connection with Robert L. if she breaks off contact with the German. For his part, Rabier’s attraction to Duras binds him to her. As she observes: ‘Moi aussi je le tiens: si j’apprends que mon mari est parti en Allemagne, je n’ai plus besoin de le voir, et il le sait’ (p.95) (But I have him in my power, too. If I find out that my husband’s been sent to Germany I won’t need to see him any more, and he knows this19). Locked in a game of mutual manipulation, neither ever knows for sure what the other is thinking or planning. Rabier literally holds her life in his hands, but Duras can also spurn his attachment to her. Duras the resister builds her power incrementally as she by turn plays the parts expected of her: the concerned wife, the unassuming and innocent young woman, the potential lover. She asserts control not through political will or knowledge but rather by maintaining a calm centredness in a potentially overwhelming and threatening situation. At one point, when Duras thinks that she and a fellow resister have been exposed and that all is lost, she affects a natural, nonchalant air, smiling at Rabier and asserting how glad she is to have met him on the street (Douleur, p.92). Pretending that she must see Rabier again because she is eager for news of her husband (he has just assured her he will soon have some information about Robert L.), she enters into his game: ‘Immédiatement j’abonde dans son sens, je l’ai souvent fait par la suite, j’insiste pour le revoir, avoir un rendez-vous avec lui’ (p.93) (I immediately play along with him, as I often did later, and insist on seeing him again, on making an appointment) (War, p.78). Duras also feigns ignorance, as if she is the naïve female, when Rabier questions her about what she knows regarding the subversive activi18

Although Duras writes that Mitterrand insisted she remain in contact with Rabier, Adler states that Mitterrand told her (Adler) that Duras herself had asked him for permission to continue seeing Rabier (p.121). 19 Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir, trans. by Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p.80.

147

ties of her husband and others. The demeanour she presents to the Gestapo officer suggests that as a woman she would not have any interest in the politics of the underground. She tells him she does not know most of these other resisters well and that she is interested in little else than writing books (Douleur, p.90). While the author never makes clear whether Rabier caught on to her role-playing (Duras’s characterization of his mercurial temperament and delight in his power would suggest he was too self-absorbed to give it much thought), it is evident here that her own behaviour is intended to disguise her underlying purpose as a member of the French resistance. Reading between the lines, it appears that Duras does little to dismantle the role of the beautiful, seductive woman in which Rabier has cast her in his obvious attraction to her. She does not discourage him from paying attention to her. (The author does not reveal whether this flirtation led to an affair, although Mitterrand and other resistance colleagues thought so, according to Adler (pp.121-23).) She can disguise her illegal work all the better if she does not disturb Rabier’s illusions that something may come of the time they spend together, that he may be able to seduce her. When he walks her to her door after one of their encounters, she is afraid he will ask to come inside for a while. Duras says that she knows he considered this as early as their first rendezvous (Douleur, p.98). Recalling one of their meetings in a restaurant, she observes that, ‘à ses yeux il est ma providence. Quel homme aurait résisté à ce rôle? Il n’y résiste pas’ (pp.104-05) (in his own eyes he’s my good angel. What man would have resisted this role? He doesn’t) (War, p.89). The game continues to the very end. In a final encounter as the war is drawing to a close, the pair meets in a restaurant. As Rabier pours her glass after glass of wine, Duras concludes he is trying to encourage her to go to a hotel with him by making her drunk. ‘Mais il ignore qu’il ne sait pas encore ce qu’il va faire avec moi dans cet hôtel, s’il va me prendre ou me tuer’ (Douleur, p.122) (But he doesn’t know yet what he’s going to do with me in the hotel, whether he’s going to possess me or kill me) (War, p.105). In Duras’s retelling of her experience, Rabier’s desire or need for her companionship blinds him to the fact that she may be involved in the underground. The scope of the female protagonist’s liaison activity in Triolet’s novella Les Amants d’Avignon is more expansive than that which Duras presents in her memoir. Whereas Duras distils her resistance into the personal interactions within a single intense relationship, the fictional Juliette carries out a range of assignments that take her from the countryside to the hearts of cities. Her unsuspecting demeanour as well as her gender and the routine appearance of her activities as a woman shopping or travelling tend to throw off anyone who might suspect her of illegal involvement. Juliette’s responsibilities include smuggling ration cards and money, locating safe hideouts, circulating fliers and information through letterboxes, and passing messages among members of the resistance circle. She carries a suitcase and also a knapsack, where she hides a roll of 100,000 francs (money collected to support the work of the movement) beneath a rabbit for dinner. Here, too, she stows the blank ration cards (for men who join the maquis) that the doctor gives her to deliver to a contact in Valence. Although at one point on her journeys Juliette worries that she has attracted too much attention on the train, first to Lyons and later to Valence, no one, including a male passenger who flirts with her, catches on to her role as a liaison agent. Her presence also goes unnoticed in Valence, where she succeeds in passing ration cards to the proprietress of a café while a policeman and a German officer stand nearby.

148

Juliette takes advantage more deliberately of male expectations of womanly behaviour when she poses as the helpless female in order to escape from the Gestapo. Much like Duras the resister, Juliette must maintain a centred presence if she is to outmanoeuvre the authorities who have the power to arrest her. When the Germans apprehend her in Lyons and press her to take them to Célestin, Juliette first plays dumb and then resorts to fake tears. She looks pleadingly at one of the men and says : ‘—Vous me faites mal [. . .] c’étaient de splendides larmes qui remplissaient les yeux jusqu’aux bords, sans tomber, comme de jolies larmes de glycérine, au cinéma’ (You’re hurting me [. . .] Tears brimmed in her eyes without falling, like the glycerine tears in a film20). Her ploy gains her a momentary respite. The German, touched by her beauty and her tears, is moved to sympathy, and Juliette now has the opportunity to run away (Amants, p.88). In her manipulation of this man, as well as in the ‘mundane’ facade that hides her illegal work, one can see the nature of a resistance in which practically anything at hand, from props like suitcases and knapsacks to one’s behaviour, could be transformed into a tool for resistance. The ordinary appearance of such activity belies the genuine dangers to which liaison agents were exposed. Travel entailed frequent searches and checks of identification papers by the Germans and the French police, particularly when resisters crossed the Demarcation Line. Cities did not necessarily afford security, because more people lived in these areas and this increased the presence of informers (Schwartz, ‘Redefining’, p.151). In Weitz’s view, female agents and couriers faced the possibility of more severe torture than men because officials knew they were the bearers of sensitive materials and information. Furthermore, every contact an agent made during a day subjected her to the possibility of arrest (Sisters, p.77). Women who transported weapons placed themselves in greater danger than men, for women could not defend themselves as easily (Hervé, p.46). Wickert believes that German women faced less danger than men during the early years of the Third Reich, but that as the regime improved its methods of control, women were more and more subject to prosecution. She states that after the war began, ‘not only did the People’s Court pronounce more death sentences in absolute numbers, but the percentage of women among convicted persons also rose’ (‘Women’, p.103). According to Hervé, French women were rarely sentenced to death under the Vichy regime, and when they were, they often received pardons, in contrast to Nazi Germany, where the dictatorship did not hesitate to execute women (pp.118-19). Resistance has a liberating effect for both of the female figures in Duras’s and Triolet’s narratives; their participation expands what they may do as women. The perilous situation in which Duras finds herself with Rabier forces her to gamble with her life and take risks few women would ever face. In a 1985 conversation with Duras, Mitterrand recalled the seriousness of the young Duras’s situation, commenting that it was a ‘dangerous game’ because she could have been arrested so quickly and because she was not used to such a game, whereas it was Rabier’s profession.21 In addition to bravery, Duras’s work requires

20

Elsa Triolet, Les Amants d’Avignon (The lovers of Avignon) (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1943); repr. in Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs (A fine of two hundred francs) (Paris: Denoël, 1944; repr. 1946), pp.9-94 (p.84); Elsa Triolet, ‘The Lovers of Avignon’, in A Fine of Two Hundred Francs (London: Virago Press, 1947; repr. 1986), pp.7-67 (p.60). 21 Marguerite Duras, ‘Le Bureau de poste de la rue Dupin: Entretien Marguerite Duras-François Mitterrand’, L’Autre journal, 26 February 1986, 31-40 (p.35).

149

intelligence and perceptiveness as she gauges every one of Rabier’s responses in anticipation of his next move. Like the figure of Duras the resister, Juliette also assumes grave risks that a woman would not ordinarily confront. The close confines of the city make her especially vulnerable to informers. She works alongside male resisters, travels extensively, and has opportunities to step outside her customary roles as a mother and a secretary. As a young, single female she is relatively free to assume extensive responsibilities for the underground, and can move beyond the boundaries of family life and the household because her aunt cares for her young son. Juliette therefore has the opportunity to try on new identities. She displays grit and determination while travelling long distances on missions to the countryside. As she traverses miles of rugged, snowy slopes on her way from farm to farm and sleeps alone in abandoned, rat-infested houses at night, she places herself at risk because she can never be certain how the peasants will receive her, that is, whether or not they will sympathize with her cause. Juliette’s wits and physical stamina see her through when she eludes her German captors by bounding over a railing and losing them in the traboules. Even as both writers acknowledge a broadening of the feminine identity in their portraits of women resisters, the by now familiar dichotomy between the resister’s ‘new’ behaviours and her traditional way of being comes into sharper focus. Duras reminds the reader that she is also a wife when she highlights her relationship with her husband. Her resistance in fact becomes indistinguishable from her need to stay in touch with Robert L. The author attaches significance to the couple’s closeness by singling out Robert L. in the narrative. Recalling an episode in which Rabier proudly displayed to her a gold chain and key for a set of handcuffs, Duras pauses to recreate the presence of her husband: ‘Je note aussi les nouvelles pour le faire rire, Robert L. Il rit, il éclate de rire. Je note la clef des menottes en or, la chaîne en or. J’entends l’éclatement du rire de Robert L.’ (Douleur, p.108) (I also write down the latest news to make him laugh, to make Robert L. laugh. He laughs, roars with laughter. I write about the gold chain, the gold key to the handcuffs. I can hear Robert L. burst out laughing) (War, p.92). Duras’s focus on this intimate relationship evokes woman’s relational and nurturing identity, and thus a picture of femininity remains in place even as the author exemplifies daring and skill and personal freedom in her clandestine activity. Another image further accents the seeming contradictions within Duras the resister by calling to mind the maternal role. In a scene that is stunning in its power to upend familiar categories of resistance, the author literally transforms what is customarily thought of as a ‘political struggle’ into a wholly personal response, that is, the concern of a parent for a child. About a week after their first encounter, Duras and Rabier meet in the Café de Flore, a popular café for writers and intellectuals that the Nazi Propagandastaffel had appropriated during the occupation. He shows her photographs of Morland and offers to free Robert L. in exchange for knowledge of Morland’s whereabouts. Duras the writer establishes here the closest of emotional bonds. In her imagination the group’s leader becomes her ‘child’ whom she must protect: ‘Morland est entre mes mains. J’ai peur pour Morland. Je n’ai plus peur pour moi. Morland est devenu mon enfant. Mon enfant est menacé, je risque ma vie pour le défendre. J’en suis responsable. Tout à coup, c’est Morland qui risque sa vie’ (Douleur, pp.107-08) (Morland’s fate is in my hands. I’m afraid for him. I’m no longer afraid for myself. Morland has become my child. My child is threatened, I risk my life to defend him. I am responsible for him. Suddenly it’s Morland who’s risking his life) (War, p.91). Here,

150

p.91). Here, Duras interprets the terms of resistance not as the defence of one’s country or the preservation of liberty or human dignity but as a purely visceral reaction, that is, saving the life of one’s ‘child’. Duras’s evocation of motherhood as well as the spareness of her language draw the reader into the very core of her emotional experience at this moment. The brief sentences, which seem to have absorbed every ounce of the author’s feelings, enable readers to grasp the terrifying dimensions of this episode. The contrasting images of the protective, caring mother and the ‘tough’ liaison agent highlight the tension between the female resister’s opposing identities. Triolet’s protagonist exemplifies similar contradictions. For all of Juliette’s obvious competence and bravery as a resister, she never seems entirely at one with the French underground. Nor does Triolet herself see her protagonist as belonging to this arena of politics and violence. In the author’s own words, ‘la dite banalité de Juliette rend son destin apparemment illogique, comme s’il y avait au erreur, comme si la vie qu’elle vivait ne lui était pas destinée’ (Juliette’s seeming banality makes her fate appear illogical, as if there were an error, as if the life she was living were not her destiny).22 Juliette’s courageous accomplishments contrast markedly with the feminine stereotypes and the sentimentality that characterize her. Juliette’s challenge as a woman resister is to bridge the rough and grim existence in the underground with the world of feelings embodied in family, home, and romantic love. The internal split appears most obviously in Juliette’s identity as a mother. Although Juliette has responsibility for her child, the resistance organization often calls her away from home. Her maternal role receives little attention in the novella, yet this element of domesticity nevertheless quietly identifies Juliette with the feminine. Juliette’s participation in the French resistance is never linked to a discussion of national goals, political aims, or ideology. The realm she prefers, that is, romantic dreams and fantasies of imaginary lovers, actually draws her back into the familiar definitions of femininity. Alone at night in abandoned houses in the country, she pictures handsome lovers who resemble Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charles Boyer, and thinks about tragic literary figures of love: Werther, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina. It is fairly easy to see in Triolet’s light touch here a bid to capture the imagination of a mainstream readership. The narrator mentions film stars, draws on other elements of popular culture, such as the image of Juliette as the attractive young office secretary, and alludes to popular love songs (among the titles of sheet music that Juliette reads in a store window are ‘This Cursed War’, ‘The Street of Our Love’, ‘My Legionnaire’, ‘Flowers Are the Words of Love’, ‘My Heart Is with You’, and ‘My Sweetest Song’). While her clandestine responsibilities literally transport Juliette out of the more confined world of caring for others and tending a household, she cannot, as Triolet portrays her, fully enter into or belong to the domain of resistance. In the narrator’s words: ‘Ça ne devait pas être le bon rêve qu’il lui était donné de vivre, c’était le rêve de quelqu’un d’autre, car ceux de Juliette, dans le plus secret de son cœur, étaient simplement des rêves d’amour’ (Amants, p.22) (This dream she must now live couldn’t be the right one: it must be someone else’s dream, because Juliette’s dreams, in the secret places of her heart, were simply dreams of love) (Lovers, p.16). The implication is that resistance brings only temporary freedom from social norms.

22

Elsa Triolet, ‘Préface à la clandestinité’ (Preface to the underground), in Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon (Intersecting fictional works of Elsa Triolet and Aragon), 42 vols (Paris: Laffont, 1964-74), V, 9-28 (p.18).

151

The contradictions within Juliette are more pronounced than in many of the other female resistance figures under consideration in this study. Juliette, for example, receives respect from the men she works with and is known for her reliability and for holding her own as a resister; yet, much more is made of her good looks and sex appeal than her contributions to the movement. Men in general regard her as weak and childlike. Her youth and small size, in addition to her gender, earn her the label ‘child’ (the group’s leader addresses her as mon petit (my little one) and une charmante enfant (a charming child)). Moreover, men feel protective of her, says the narrator (Amants, p.71). Juliette is also objectified and her sexuality is emphasized throughout the narrative. As the novella opens, the narrator describes the protagonist’s physical appearance, including her: ‘cheveux soyeux, longs cils, élégance naturelle dans un modeste chandail collant, une jupe très courte et des talons très hauts’ (p.9) (silken hair, long lashes, and a kind of natural elegance in her close-fitting pullover, her very short skirt, and very high heels) (Lovers, p.7). More than once the narrator brings to the reader’s attention Juliette’s attractiveness as she catches the eye of a man who can see no further than her beauty. The split between Juliette the resister and Juliette the object of men’s fantasies grows more evident when the group’s leader, Dr. Arnold, declares to the exhausted young woman, recently returned from an assignment in the hilly countryside: ‘Pauvre enfant, ce n’est pas une vie! J’ai une jolie fille dans mon lit et, au lieu de lui faire l’amour, je m’emploie à l’envoyer au diable, faire un métier pas fait pour elle, mais pas fait pour elle du tout’ (Amants, p.42) (“Poor child, this is no life! I have a pretty girl in my bed, and instead of making love to her I send her off on a ghastly job for which she’s quite unfitted”) (Lovers, p.30). In this instance, the leader of the resistance circle addresses her not as a colleague but as an object of desire. While the reader may well recognize Juliette’s value to the French underground, the contradictory facets of her as a character must be held in an uncertain balance if the trivial is not to outweigh the more meaningful part she plays as a resister. Duras and Triolet revise the standard resistance rhetoric in various ways. For one, Duras rejects the familiar construct of the ‘victim’ opposing the ‘enemy’. Atack, in her study of resistance discourses in French literature, asserts that the slogans of the French movement were intended to generate unity by setting up the French people against the German occupier: ‘On one side of the opposition lie France, we Frenchmen, truth, courage and dignity; on the other the enemy and Vichy’.23 This division between those who are ‘good’ and those who are ‘bad’ is often clearly established in men’s narratives, as when Frenay describes his fellow resisters as ‘at once soldiers in mufti and citizens in revolt against the established authorities’ (pp.xiv-xv). Likewise, Schlabrendorff distinguishes between the German resistance and the followers of Nazism in his observation that, ‘they [the Nazis] went against everything my own upbringing represented, and the traditions, principles, and history of families such as mine’ (p.37). Duras, in contrast, paints a strikingly different portrait of her enemy, presenting Rabier in his human complexity and thereby undercutting any didactic notions of the noble victim caught in the grip of the cruel enemy. Women’s narratives do not assert such bold divisions between oppressed and oppressor because to do so would suggest a militancy that is not an aspect of their vision. Duras does not allow Rabier to come across as a monster. She lends him a human face. To be sure, she conveys a certain ruthlessness in an image of him on the 23

Atack, p.49. Emphasis in original.

152

opening pages when she describes her second meeting with the Gestapo agent as he comes out an office door holding a woman who is faint and drenched, having been subjected to water torture. What is disturbing about Duras’s picture of the German is less the fact that he tortures and kills people than that he is by turns cruel but also charming and, at times, even laughable. The author traces Rabier’s swiftly changing moods. When she comes upon him holding the woman, and he sees Duras, ‘il me sourit, disparaît. Il revient quelques minutes plus tard, il sourit encore’ (Douleur, p.89) (he smiles at me and disappears. He comes back a few minutes later and smiles again) (War, p.75). His mercurial temperament can shift instantly from smiling, to laughing, to severe, and yet as frightening as this is, he does not come across as irredeemably evil in Duras’s recounting of this moment. Duras reveals other dimensions to Rabier. The man has an almost childlike vanity, an uncomplicated desire for attention and prominence. (He thinks the arrest of an important figure like Morland would bring him a sizable reward.) Duras describes his imbécillité essentielle (Douleur, p.109) (fundamental stupidity) (War, p.93), something that is evident in his buffoonish carrying of an elegant briefcase containing nothing but handcuffs and a revolver, as well as four other revolvers in his jacket pockets. Rabier’s effectedness contrasts with his cultural sophistication. His attraction to Duras is based partly on his fascination with French artists, intellectuals, and writers. The contradictions within the man are best summed up in the opposing images that Duras juxtaposes in her sketch of him. Having noted that he has a wife and child, she goes on to describe his immaculate appearance: ‘Il est habillé comme un monsieur. [. . .] Lui qui frappe, qui se bat, qui travaille avec les armes, le sang, les larmes, one dirait qu’il opère en gants blancs, il a des mains de chirurgien’ (Douleur, p.112) (He dresses like a gentleman. [. . .] He beats people up, fights, works with guns, blood, and tears—and he looks as if he works with white gloves on. He has the hands of a surgeon) (War, pp.95-96). The details that Duras brings out here reflect her status as one who stands outside a military-political resistance. Her narrative remains deliberately ambiguous, implying an essential humanity within a man of violence. Herein lies Duras’s truth. She avoids posing definitive answers such as those that became the foundation for so many postwar resistance myths. Duras’s memoir bears scant resemblance to official resistance discourses in other ways, for the author transforms familiar, idealized categories of glory and patriotism and honour into a terrifying sense of uncertainty and a lack of definitive choices. She explores the feelings, not the political significance, behind her underground involvement. What dominates this narrative of the French resistance is an extraordinary range of troubling emotions, not the author’s politics. As a resister, Duras finds herself caught in an intricate web of feelings. She experiences concern for her husband, despair, shame, and, above all, terror of Rabier and his power. In her candid admission of these emotions, she brings directness and honesty to her treatment of resistance that is not apparent in standard discourses. The language of the narrative cuts directly to the heart of the author’s internal state. Most obviously, Duras’s emphasis on her care and concern for Robert L. shifts the terms of resistance from the impersonal nature of political and philosophical abstractions to more human concerns, such as the well-being of another person. Another dimension of Duras’s psychological state, her fear, actually becomes the framework for the entire narrative. Even as the author relates the chronology of these events of several months (only occasionally flashing forward to describe Rabier’s trial at the liberation), she repeatedly digresses to discuss the feelings of terror that have overtaken her.

153

This particular emotion is a kind of double-edged sword for her. She is, naturally, afraid of Rabier’s power to kill her if he believes her guilty of abetting the resistance, but equally frightening is the possibility of losing all contact with Robert L. Though Duras tries several times to break off the connection with the German, she cannot actually accomplish this, because ‘toujours cette peur insurmontable d’être définitivement coupée de Robert L., mon mari’ (Douleur, p.95) (there’s always the insurmountable fear of being cut off for good from Robert L., my husband) (War, p.79). The way in which Rabier quickly slips back and forth between a charming demeanour and a mocking, almost sadistic delight in Duras’s uncertainty compounds the writer’s horrible daily fear. Rabier tricks the young woman one day by asking her to come with him. Certain that the end has finally come, that she is being arrested, alarm washes over Duras, only for her to hear Rabier invite her to a restaurant and then laugh cruelly at his scheme (Douleur, pp.102-03). In describing this episode, the author invests language with a multidimensional quality as fright overpowers her senses and literally transforms her ability to see and hear. Buildings seem to tanguer dans le ciel (sway) and sidewalks se creuser, noircir (go hollow and black) as her vision blurs. She has difficulty hearing because the noises in the street sound so feutré (muffled), like ‘la rumeur uniforme de la mer’ (p.102) (the regular murmur of the sea) (War, p.87). In this passage the emotion she experiences seems to saturate her actual physical surroundings. In the unadorned language and the often fragmented sentences the reader sees a kind of fear that has broken down the coherence of Duras’s very being as well as her writing. Up until the end of the war, she comments, ‘je fais comme si c’était pour être tuée. Je fais comme s’il n’ignorait rien de mon activité. C’est chaque fois, chaque jour’ (Douleur, p.101) (I act as if I were going to be killed. As if he knew all about my activities. Every time, every day) (War, p.86).24 This terror-filled relationship essentially defines her everyday outlook on life. Duras’s narrative breaks through the heroic and glamorous facade of the resistance myth by revealing other less than noble emotions, such as the author’s shame about this experience. Duras delves into her feelings about the connection between herself and Rabier as she describes one of their final meetings in a restaurant. It is August 1944 and the German lines of defence are crumbling. The Allies are assured of victory, yet there is a dark underside to this tale of the French resistance, for Duras feels mostly ashamed at cultivating this tie to Rabier. One does not sense here that she has acted on behalf of her country. Her narrative, far from glorifying the resistance values of patriotism or national pride, boils down to the revulsion she feels before this member of the Gestapo. She is not repelled by sitting before the ‘enemy’, so much as she is struck by her own debased condition for having interacted with him for so long in the way she has. ‘Je suis en proie à des sentiments élémentaires dont rien ne ternit la limpidité. J’ai honte de me tenir auprès de Pierre Rabier Gestapo, mais j’ai honte aussi d’avoir à mentir à ce Gestapo, ce chasseur de juifs’ (Douleur, p.118) (I am a prey to elementary emotions that are perfectly clear. I’m ashamed of sitting here beside Pierre Rabier of the Gestapo, but I’m also ashamed of having to lie to this member of the Gestapo, this hunter of Jews. The shame extends even to the shame of perhaps having to die at his hands) (War, p.101). These words are a far cry from the ennobling ideals so frequently invoked in treatments of the French resistance, ideals proclaimed to be so dear that no sacrifice was too great to preserve them. 24

See Duras’s conversation with Mitterrand, in which she recalls this intense fear (‘Le Bureau’, pp.36-37).

154

Duras’s La Douleur is not the only narrative to admit that a resister’s experiences lack the sheen of idealism and heroism. In Der Schattenmann, Andreas-Friedrich notes her daughter’s overwhelming feeling of shame after the teenager helped Onkel Emil by attending one of the show trials at the Volksgericht to learn what was happening there. Karin was devastated at the proceedings in which innocent defendants were summarily sentenced to death while spectators watched and laughed in approval: ‘Man darf da nicht zuschauen. [. . .] Ich schäme mich, dabeigewesen zu sein. Ich schäme mich . . . Ach, Kinder, ihr ahnt ja gar nicht, wie sehr ich mich schäme . . .’ (Schattenmann, p.179) (A person shouldn’t sit and watch it. [. . .] I’m ashamed that I was there. I’m ashamed. . . . I tell you, you have no idea how much ashamed I am) (Berlin, pp.178-179; 30 November 1944). Women had it in their power to translate resistance into such terms because as females they were permitted to express their feelings, but also because they were perceived as outsiders to war and politics and therefore were not invested in upholding the myths and legends of resistance. The directness and honesty of Duras’s and Andreas-Friedrich’s narratives strip away the standard devices of resistance rhetoric that ordinarily distance readers from the unpleasantness of the actual moment, and in so doing they reveal a less glamorous but possibly more realistic portrait of life in the French and German movements. Duras’s and Triolet’s narratives share with some of the other texts discussed here the implication that the female resisters’ participation in these movements is different, if not separate, from the politically defined work of the men. In much the same way that AndreasFriedrich casts the war and politics and resistance as masculine concerns, Duras likewise does not discuss the politics of Mitterrand’s organization in her memoir. She instead creates the impression that as a woman resister she herself was remote from the centre of power. Despite her own extensive activity for the underground group, the author minimizes the part she played. She is obviously deeply involved in her work for this organization, as is evident in the letter she writes to Mitterrand several weeks after making Rabier’s acquaintance, promising ‘on her honour’ to do everything in her to power to help the movement kill Rabier before he is legally brought to justice (as soon as she knows that her husband and sister-in-law are safe from him (Douleur, p.96)). Yet at the same time, she appears to have no real say in the movement’s operations, which are run by men. She does mention at one point that she belongs to a resistance movement (p.96), but more tellingly, this woman who through her covert activity has become the most damning witness against Rabier is, in her own words, ‘écrivain et femme de résistant’ (p.98) (a writer, the wife of a member of the Resistance) (War, p.82). Such gaps or silences in women’s narratives, despite the female resisters’ obviously extensive participation in these movements, dim the power of their actions. In Triolet’s Les Amants d’Avignon, the places of female and male resisters remain distinct, and this may be the author’s way of maintaining distance between her female protagonist and the politics and paramilitary aspects of the French movement. Interpersonal connections essentially define Juliette as an individual. The narrator notes that the young woman joined the French resistance not out of political belief but rather on account of her brother’s death in the war. Her role as the adoptive mother of José reinforces her relational identity. She appears to own little actual power within the clandestine organization itself, for she simply receives her orders and carries them out calmly and efficiently (p.74). Moreover, the author depicts her as someone who is oblivious to the political considerations driving the movement, as illustrated in her romantic fantasies that supersede the political

155

aims of resistance. By Triolet’s own description, ‘Juliette [. . .] n’a aucune idée politique en tête’ (Juliette [. . .] does not have a political thought in her head) (‘Préface à la clandestinité’, V, 15). For the men, on the other hand, the underground is a world of power, politics, and violent action. Portrayed as free of personal responsibilities, the men’s identities are based on their authority and political loyalties. The doctor who heads the small resistance group makes plans and issues orders. Célestin’s commitment to his work is grounded in definite convictions, political or otherwise, that are not apparent in Juliette. Triolet describes him as a Gaullist working in conjunction with the communists (V, 15). His role as a fighter who is driven by his belief system emerges in his comment that, in order to kill a man, ‘il faut être tenu par la haine et la conviction de son bon droit pour pouvoir le faire sans déchoir’ (Amants, p.50) (a man needs much hatred and a belief in his cause if he is to keep on and not collapse) (Lovers, p.36). Célestin also exemplifies a sense of duty and concern for the national struggle when he remarks that he must help drive the Germans out of France (Amants, p.57). Triolet designates male resisters as the guarantors of power and the purveyors of violence, and female resisters as the caretakers of personal relationships. As with Thomas and Seghers, Duras’s and Triolet’s own depth of political commitment and extensive participation in the French underground stand in striking counterpoint to the understated ways in which the two authors narrate women’s resistance in their memoir and novella, respectively. Duras does not appear to have been particularly aware at first of the politics behind the occupation, displaying neither anger about the German presence in France nor concern about the fate of the Jews, according to Vircondelet (p.73). Her decision to publish her novel Les Impudents in Paris, which necessitated accommodating the German censors, also suggests a relative lack of understanding about the political implications of her actions. Yet for all of Duras’s efforts to downplay her subversive role and her level of political knowledge through her writing in La Douleur, she was no political novice, as seen in her commitment to Mitterrand’s resistance group and to the PCF. Triolet, who witnessed Russia in the throes of social and political upheaval during the years preceding the Revolution, had a longer and deeper political background than Duras, beginning with her interactions with the Russian Futurists. Lewis takes note of Triolet’s political insight when she remarks that although the author at first held the Surrealists in high regard for the revolutionary fervour of their art and politics, she was also ‘exceptionally politically astute and soon realized that their art, with its blatant sexuality and its ludicrous games and jokes, could never reach the masses’ (Introduction, p.ix). Although Triolet rejected socialist realism, her body of work demonstrates a continuing interest in the historical and political issues of her day (p.x). In much the same way that Andreas-Friedrich’s decision to keep a secret diary represented a political act in Nazi Germany, the act of writing during the occupation and the war was itself charged with political meaning for Triolet, who was faced with German and Vichy censorship. Noting that no one could prevent her from creating another reality through language, she described the writing she did while living a clandestine existence as ‘ma liberté, mon défi, mon luxe’ (my freedom, my defiance, my luxury) (‘Préface à la clandestinité’, V, 21-22). Triolet chose a middle course between those writers such as André Gide, Paulhan, Mauriac, Éluard, Duras, Aragon, Beauvoir, and Sartre, who published legally, and those such as Thomas and Vercors, who rejected any hint of collaboration and only published their writing underground. The clandestine Éditions de Minuit published Les Amants d’Avignon, but Triolet arranged for the collaboration-

156

ist press Robert Denoël to publish her earlier Cheval blanc. She considered the writing she did during the war as part of the long tradition of Russian underground literature with its quality of dissent: ‘I have always thought that one must not censor oneself . . . as long as there is the least possibility of speaking out against the enemy: legally and illegally, legal work against the enemy being always the more dangerous of the two because one is more vulnerable’.25 Both women faced the same pressures that other female authors confronted in attempting to work within a masculine literary establishment. The professional people who surrounded Duras, whether those meeting to discuss art and politics at her Paris apartment before and after the war or those helping her found the publishing house Éditions de la Cité Universelle at war’s end, were predominantly men. Similarly, all of the literary circles in which Triolet travelled, from the Futurists, to the Russian emigré community in Berlin, to the Surrealists, to the international literary congresses she attended with Aragon were maledominated. The evidence indicates that Triolet was well aware of the expectations for her to conform to the part of the submissive female, which is one reason why she eventually tired of the Surrealists and their condescension toward women: ‘She [. . .] hated Breton for his extremely conventional attitudes towards women, and Triolet, author of three books, was unwilling to play the subordinate role of muse and inspiration expected of women among the Surrealists’ (Lewis, Introduction, p.ix). Nor did Triolet in her private life necessarily escape the unequal treatment to which she was obviously so sensitive in the literary world. When she began working on Bonsoir Thérèse in 1937 while travelling with Aragon, she did so secretly, without his knowledge.26 Adereth suggests that Aragon had not encouraged Triolet in her writing up until then, because, not knowing Russian, he was unaware of her literary abilities. But Adereth and Mackinnon alike perceive sexist attitudes in the poet that may have stood in the way of his recognizing Triolet’s talent (Adereth, ‘French’, p.125). Mackinnon writes that when Aragon and Triolet visited the Soviet Union again in 1932, ‘Elsa was also at the end of her first life as a writer. “He doesn’t allow me to write any more”, she had told Vladimir Pozner early in her relations with Aragon’ (pp.96-97). Mackinnon, acknowledging the Surrealists’ penchant for objectifying women, suggests that ‘Aragon’s attitude may have been a hangover from the Breton circle, but in a culture with a long tradition of writing women it was remarkably obtuse’ (p.97). He also quotes an angry Triolet who, looking back, clearly felt as if her companion had discouraged her writing: ‘In 1964 she would write, addressing Aragon through neutral public prose, that she wanted to write “because everything prevented me. You could have helped by taking my side, by saying to me: write! But you weren’t willing to say it, you knew nothing of what I was writing, you did not know Russian, you feared the worst”’.27 Lewis presents another illustration of the sexist attitudes women writers faced from their male counterparts, when she notes that Camus praised Triolet’s Le Cheval blanc, and that ‘he added that one of the most wonderful things about her writing is her ability to show the

25

Unpublished notebook of Triolet [1948?], in Fonds Aragon-Triolet, Paris, cited in Lewis, ‘Elsa’, p.46. Emphasis in original. 26 See Mackinnon, pp.97, 109. See also Malraux, Bruit, V, 12. 27 Mackinnon, p.97. Emphasis in original.

157

“dailiness” of life which is “one of the charms of woman”’.28 The attitudes Triolet perceived in Breton and Aragon and Camus are an indication of the social and artistic climate in which women writers generally sought to discover their voices and express themselves at this time. For women who chose to write about the resistance, this search for an identity as an author was made more challenging by the fact that these were females writing about a ‘masculine’ subject for a generally conservative readership. Often hidden behind the guise of expected feminine roles and behaviours: the enticing woman, the fiancée, the expectant mother, the worried wife, the naïve or helpless female, women’s liaison work has by and large been overshadowed by the more visible military and paramilitary ventures of men. Yet the contributions of female couriers and liaison agents lent vital support to more extensive underground operations and also saved people’s lives. This form of resistance could potentially lead to an enlarged freedom for women. If the female figures in La Douleur and Les Amants d’Avignon finally appear more encumbered by conventional identities or stereotypes than liberated by their unusual roles, the authors may have been responding not only to the traditional values in their own backgrounds but also to the expectations of male-dominated artistic milieus and the requirements of the reading public during wartime. Looking outside of the customary political and cultural frameworks to construct the resistance of women, Duras and Triolet bring to the fore emotions like fear and shame, an ambiguous characterization of the ‘enemy’, and a focus on human attachments, none of which has been evident in romanticized resistance discourses. As will be discussed in the next chapter, narratives that portray women’s resistance within the setting of the home depict forms of anti-Nazi opposition that were even more closely integrated with the fabric of women’s daily lives than liaison activity and were therefore even less visible. In these recountings of a resistance that held its own unique risks and dangers, the strains of political belief become still more muted in favour of everyday routines and details, concern for others, and a tarnished heroism.

28

Unpublished correspondence from Albert Camus to Elsa Triolet, November 1943 to May 1944, in Fonds Aragon-Triolet, Paris, quoted in Lewis, ‘Elsa’, p.48.

158

Chapter Eight Clandestine Activity at Home: Resistance and Relationship

J’ai dit à un camarade: ‘Je suis communiste, c’est vrai, mais je suis une mère de famille, j’ai des enfants, et si je ne commence pas par être une bonne mère de famille, et être bien dans mon métier, je ne serais pas une bonne communiste.’1 [Renée Mirande-Laval]

The private realm of domestic and personal life in its own way afforded French and German women opportunities for opposing Nazism, and this setting colored resistance in ways that gave it a noticeably different appearance from more visible actions in public spaces. Illegal work within the home often appeared indistinguishable from women’s daily lives. Responsibilities for children and a household meant not so much that women’s opposition was limited as that it involved the use of unterschiedliche[n] Mittel[n] (diverse means), in the words of Annette Kuhn and Valentine Rothe (II, 44). Drained of time and energy and unwilling to place their children at risk, some women could not make extensive commitments to the larger underground organizations; therefore, they carried out resistance duties at home. Women who acted on an individual basis or in concert with small, informal groups also did various clandestine tasks there as well. Women secretly sheltered Jews, political refugees, escaped prisoners, or other people who needed to go into hiding, and provided them with food, clothing, and basic necessities. Subversive work became part of the household routine as resisters typed or printed handbills for distribution by other members of the underground, or stashed weapons and illegal materials. Homes became centres for producing false identification papers, collecting and transmitting messages, or manufacturing explosives. Much activity that went on in the environment of the home had a spontaneous character, particularly when Jews and other individuals requiring help appeared at a woman’s door. Like liaison work, the resistance that went on within this setting was effectively hidden behind everyday goings-on and family obligations, and was therefore not easily detectable by authorities. This form of anti-Nazi opposition, despite its seemingly innocuous facade, was valuable not only in giving encouragement to and saving the lives of those hiding underground, but also in providing support services for more extensive networks. Women’s resistance literature bears out the crucial role that home and family played in the lives of many French and German women even as they resisted Nazism. In comparing Clara Malraux’s ‘La Fausse épreuve’ and Langgässer’s ‘Untergetaucht’ it is possible to see 1

(I told a comrade: ‘It’s true, I’m a Communist, but I’m also the mother of a family. I have children, and if I don’t begin by being a good mother and being good at my work, I wouldn’t be a good Communist’) (Chatel, p.90).

a resistance that crosses national boundaries as French and German women’s underground experiences converge around similar issues and challenges of determining whether the physical structure of a house offers adequate security for those in hiding, of providing food and living necessities, and of evading the questions and the risks presented by curious neighbours. These two short stories depict a resistance that bears the imprint of day-to-day living. They are remarkably similar in the unselfconscious way in which they bring together the seemingly contradictory elements of subversive activity and home life.2 The ‘ordinary’ appearance of such work belies the concerns and perils for female activists who worked out of the confined space of the home. As Malraux and Langgässer demonstrate, resisters based at home confronted dangers unique to their situation. The two short stories highlight, much as Duras’s narrative does, the emotional ground of resistance and the uncertainties resisters came up against. Both writers trade the heroic ideal for a disconcerting ambiguity. Malraux portrays the difficulty of coming to grips with the decision to resist, while Langgässer brings out the moral and ethical choices one resister must face. More a memoirist than a prose fiction writer, Malraux (1897-1982) concentrated on recording the major historical events she had witnessed in her lifetime rather than writing fiction. In addition to her six-volume memoir, entitled Le Bruit de nos pas, that was published between 1963 and 1979, her body of work included critical reviews, essays, and translations of works by such German and British authors as Kafka, Keun, Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own), Luise Rinser, and Wiechert. Malraux’s first novel, Le Portrait de Grisélidis (A second Griselda), a reworking of her experiences in Indochina with her husband, André Malraux, appeared in 1945. A collection of short stories, Le Maison ne fait pas crédit, many of which feature female protagonists and depict life in France during the war and the occupation, followed two years later. Malraux, who took up her pen again in 1939 after a long break from writing while she was married, composed these stories throughout the war and a number of them appeared in clandestine journals, including Action, the journal of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance.3 Malraux published a second novel, La Lutte inégale (1958; The unequal struggle), based on her and her daughter’s experiences during the occupation, before turning her attention to writing her memoir. The fifth volume of her memoir, La Fin et le commencement, 1936-1940 (The end and the beginning, 1936-1940), discusses the author’s life during the years before the war and after the French defeat, as well as her activities in the resistance. Born Clara Goldschmidt, Malraux came from a well-to-do Franco-German family that was Jewish on both sides. The family, which took an interest in the arts and culture, was well-assimilated in French society. Throughout much of her early life and young adulthood, Malraux’s forceful personality and family circumstances led her toward greater autonomy than most women at the time enjoyed; nevertheless, she found herself unable to escape the constraints of social norms and expectations. A central conflict in her life for many years revolved around the competing forces of independence and convention. She identified more 2

3

See these accounts of women hiding in the German underground: Ilse Rewald (in Köhler), and Else R. Behrend-Rosenfeld, Ich stand nicht allein: Erlebnisse einer Jüdin in Deutschland, 1933-1944) (I did not stand alone: experiences of a Jewish woman in Germany, 1933-1944) (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1945; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1963). Also, Elisabeth Graßmann recalls giving shelter to someone in terms remarkably similar to those of Langgässer (Köhler, pp.210-216). Isabelle de Courtivron, Clara Malraux, une femme dans le siècle (Clara Malraux, a woman in the century) (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 1992), p.193.

160

with the ‘world of men’ (and her father encouraged this) than the domestic world of her mother, according to her biographer, Isabelle de Courtivron (p.136). The wealth she inherited from her family’s business concerns contributed to Malraux’s financial and personal freedom. Despite the need to be her own person as a writer and a woman interested in political issues and world affairs, the idea of being part of a couple held great appeal for Malraux, observes Courtivron (p.137). She struggled for many years in the shadow of her prominent husband, André, whom she married in 1920, when she was twenty-three and he was nineteen. Unlike some of the other writers in this study who enjoyed the encouragement of husbands or companions or male mentors, Malraux received no such support from André. Throughout much of her marriage she relinquished her own youthful dreams of writing to satisfy her husband’s demand that she not work or write, as remarks scattered throughout her memoir indicate.4 Although André’s dominance gradually eroded her self-confidence, she wrote stories secretly now and then, but confined herself primarily to translations. As conventional as her marriage was, in other ways it gave her the opportunity to explore the world and foreign cultures through the couple’s extensive travels in the early 1920s. In André she had a companion with whom to share their mutual interests in philosophy, politics, and the arts.5 The couple returned to Paris in 1926, and their home became an intellectual salon where leftist writers and exiles met to hold discussions in the early ‘30s. Their daughter, Florence (Flo), was born in March 1933. The contacts Malraux made with Russian and European intellectuals at various cultural meetings she attended with her husband set the stage for her eventual involvement in the struggle against fascism. The couple took part in the First Congress of Soviet Writers, held in Moscow in April 1934, and the following year they participated in the First International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture. Clara interpreted for André and other French writers and thinkers as the pair became acquainted with the growing community of German-speaking emigrés now living in Paris, among them Manès Sperber, Gustav Regler, Arthur Koestler, Becher, Evgeny Zamiatin, and Alfred Kantorowicz (Courtivron, p.119). Moved by the plight of the many Jews and communists fleeing Germany for France, she began working in 1935 with the German resisters of Neu-Beginnen in Paris to aid these refugees. She helped put their documents in order so they could emigrate, edited and translated underground fliers and tracts, and collected funds for aid (Malraux, IV, 191). Clara and André separated during the mid-1930s, and she was left to raise their child alone. André essentially abandoned his wife during the years prior to Germany’s defeat of France, and took up with his new companion, Josette Clotis, whom he would later marry. Clara stayed married to André for the duration of the war because she thought the Malraux name might help Flo and her avoid anti-Semitic persecution by the authorities. (The marriage officially ended in 1948.6) Malraux’s commitment to the resistance placed her at risk, not only because she herself was Jewish but also because many of her clandestine responsibilities involved working with communists and anti-fascists. Forced to leave Paris in late May 1940, when Germany invaded France (several weeks after Malraux fled, the Gestapo 4 5 6

See, for example, Malraux, IV, 34, 50, 71. Louise R. Witherell, ‘A Modern Woman’s Autobiography: Clara Malraux’, Contemporary Literature, 24 (1983), 222-32 (p.225). Alfred F. Goessl and Roland A. Champagne, ‘Clara Malraux’s Le Bruit de nos pas: Biography and the Question of Women in the “Case of Malraux”’, Biography, 7 (1984), 213-32 (p.215).

161

found her name on a list of Neu-Beginnen members), Malraux first went to Lauzès, a town in the south-central area of the country. By the fall, she had moved to the city of Toulouse, outside the occupied zone, where she had to change temporary homes twice. In contrast to her formerly well-off circumstances, her life became one of hardship as she took care of her daughter, who was in poor health, and tried to find food for the two of them. Many of André’s colleagues whom Malraux had once counted among her friends subsequently shunned her and declined to offer help. Gide, who during the ‘30s had indirectly collaborated with Malraux by aiding German Jewish emigrants in Paris, now refused to assist her either financially or otherwise. Malraux found personal support among communists and resisters within the Jewish community in Toulouse, and there she intensified her involvement in the French resistance and began writing again.7 Malraux renewed her activity for the French underground in December 1940 when she was given the task of copying itineraries for resisters who wanted to return to the Forces Françaises Libres (V, 216-17). She became more deeply involved in the activities of NeuBeginnen a year later upon meeting Gérard Krazat, a much younger German man from Hamburg who became her resistance colleague and lover. Krazat, a political activist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, had been jailed in Germany by the Nazis for antifascist and communist activity. (Krazat’s pseudonym was Pierre Vanhaeren, but many people called him Jean the German (Jean l’Allemand).) The Vichy government had interned him in a prisoner-of-war camp, but he had escaped and made his way to Toulouse. Malraux travelled with Krazat among the cities of Toulouse, Cahors, Lyons, and Paris to transport false papers and information (VI, 70, 74-78). Another responsibility she accepted for this organization involved working with resisters to produce secret microfilms and fabricate false identification papers and documents (IV, 193). At the end of 1941, Malraux met Michel Calliau, head of the MRPGD, and she became involved in that organization’s efforts to establish contact with French prisoners of war and forced labourers in Germany. Malraux’s clandestine responsibilities grew as Calliau assigned her to work with the Front Intérieur Allemand (German Interior Front), which made false papers, and as she met with those who could supply information and shelter young Frenchmen who were evading the Service du Travail Obligatoire. She began writing propaganda in tracts and newspapers to be distributed to German soldiers in France and Germany and in prisoner-of-war camps, with the purpose of encouraging the most demoralized soldiers to desert and possibly join a French resistance group. Malraux and Krazat also maintained ties with Freies Deutschland (Free Germany) (VI, 77-78)8, one of the German resistance organizations based in Toulouse.9 In everyday situations, in stores or cafés, Malraux and Krazat spoke with soldiers in German to determine which ones were in the greatest despair and were genuinely considering deserting. If the soldiers succeeded in defecting, Malraux helped them get false papers, locate hiding places, and join the resistance. Accord7 8

9

These experiences are recounted in Malraux, IV-VI. The Soviet-inspired Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland (National Committee for a Free Germany), which began in Moscow in the summer of 1943, was an umbrella movement consisting of German communist emigrés, German officer prisoners of war, and anti-fascist writers. This network focused on propaganda activities to influence German soldiers in prisoner-of-war camps on the front (Benz and Pehle, pp.204-12). The Freies Deutschland movement had a women’s group based in France. German women could participate in this organization while in French exile (Hervé, pp.73, 120). Isabelle de Courtivron, ‘The Resistance and the Liberation of Clara Malraux’, Contemporary French Civilization 18 (1994), 23-32 (p.25).

162

ing to Courtivron’s research, quite a few German, Hungarian, and Austrian soldiers came into the French resistance in this way (p.26). In the summer of 1942, Malraux and her daughter moved to Montauban, an area where many writers, artists, and political refugees lived in hiding. Malraux continued her illegal work, often shuttling by train between Lyons and Paris, accompanied by either Krazat or Morin, as she carried a suitcase containing weapons or dangerous illegal documents.10 Krazat was arrested and tortured by the milice in early 1944. The Gestapo later tortured and then executed him on 20 April 1944 (Malraux, VI, 155-56). As the Gestapo made greater headway in its efforts to wipe out Neu-Beginnen that spring, its members began to go underground. Malraux remarks in Le Bruit de nos pas that she and her daughter, more endangered than ever before, went into hiding. They continually moved from place to place to avoid discovery by the authorities and relied on aid from friends. The mother and daughter occasionally lived in places with no heat or running water because they had so little money (V, 199-217). Malraux carried false papers and took the pseudonym Marie-Claire Lamy (Lamy was the maiden name of André’s mother), though these measures offered little protection. The two of them eventually found themselves in Dieulefit, where Malraux was reunited with other refugee friends living clandestinely, among them Andrée Viollis, Emmanuel Monnier, Pierre Emmanuel, and Aragon and Triolet (Courtivron, Clara, pp.18990). During the postwar years, Malraux continued writing and collaborated with Thomas, Cassou, and others on the short-lived literary and political review Contemporains (Contemporaries). She encountered difficulty in getting her books published, a problem she attributed to the media’s fascination with the self-generated mystique of her ex-husband, André (pp.212-15). Although she never belonged to the PCF, Malraux long identified with leftist and communist issues, siding with those who opposed the war in Algeria, for example.11 She died in 1982 at age eighty-five. The short story ‘La Fausse épreuve’, from the collection La Maison ne fait pas crédit, is a depiction of one woman’s everyday existence and her inner struggle to come to terms with her place in the French underground. The situation of the female protagonist in ‘La Fausse épreuve’ is closely modelled on the writer’s own circumstances. The fictional Lucienne is a widowed, thirty-six-year-old Jewish woman with two daughters, who lived in Toulouse before moving to Montauban. Over a period of time, Lucienne has given temporary shelter to many people who have had to go into hiding. Jean-Paul, a German political refugee (much like Krazat), uses Lucienne’s house as a base of operations for a clandestine organization. When his colleague, Francis, appears one day seeking cover, the stakes rise for Lucienne. She faces a ‘test’ when three French policemen later appear at her door looking for someone. The usually reticent Lucienne must act, giving orders to Jean-Paul and Francis and disposing of a package of illegal microfilm. The police soon leave, without suspecting the men’s presence. This episode breaks Lucienne out of her passivity, and she consciously makes the decision to work alongside the men in the underground. In a very different vein, Langgässer’s short story ‘Untergetaucht’ is both a denunciation of Nazism’s evil power to corrupt a noble act of resistance and a condemnation of a re10 11

Malraux, VI, 76-79; entretien avec Edgar Morin, May 1987, qtd. In Courtivron, Clara, p.183. Christian de Bartillat, Clara Malraux: Le regard d’une femme sur son siècle: biographie—témoignage (Clara Malraux: a woman's look at her century; biography—testimony) (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1985), p.133; Courtivron, Clara, p.217.

163

sister’s unwillingness to own up to her personal guilt. The short story reflects the author’s personal judgment of postwar German society as she mercilessly indicts the failings of public memory that allowed traces of Nazism to linger in Germany after the collapse of the Third Reich. This story is about resistance as well, for wedged within the crevices of the female protagonist’s memories is her tale of opposition against Nazism. Although the protagonist of ‘Untergetaucht’ does not have children, the shape of her commentary, like that of Lucienne in ‘La Fausse épreuve’, focuses on minute domestic details and the suffocating atmosphere of the household in which she hid a Jewish woman. The words of an anonymous male narrator frame ‘Untergetaucht’. He is supposedly an objective observer, an average working man whose emotional distance from the story on which he is eavesdropping allows him to see the truth. By the end of the short story, however, this ordinary citizen will reveal his own soiled conscience and raise suspicions about his personal complicity in Germany’s crimes against the Jews. While waiting for a train after work, the man overhears two women reflecting on the Nazi era and on one woman’s, Frieda’s, act of hiding her former classmate, the Jew Elsie Goldmann. The entire story, as Frieda tells it, turns on the lausig (lousy) parrot Jacob, which, when the Gestapo turned up looking for Elsie, could have easily betrayed his owners by squawking Elsie’s name. The bird’s jabbering would have given the Jewish woman (whose features were not ‘Jewish’) the opportunity to name the darker, ‘Jewish-looking’ Frieda as the Gestapo’s prey. In the end, Elsie was taken away by the Gestapo, while the parrot was saved. It is never clear who denounced Elsie. It might have been Frieda’s husband, Karl, or the nosy neighbour, Frau Geheinke, though evidence points to the husband. Frieda neatly resolves the many ambiguities as she tells the story, and she alleviates the couple’s guilt and responsibility by pinning the sole blame on the parrot. Whereas in ‘Untergetaucht’ Frieda must cope with the all-pervasive fear engendered by living in a terror state, Lucienne’s worries as a Jew in German-occupied France are compounded by the awareness that she alone is responsible for the well-being of her nine- and eleven-year-old daughters. Malraux’s protagonist typifies many women with children who could not afford to commit themselves to extensive work for organized networks. Sabotage missions or travelling long distances required too much time and energy, and, furthermore, put women at risk. In an interview, Malraux illustrated the difficult decisions she herself faced as a resister who was also a mother: Pendant la guerre, je n’étais pas responsable seulement de moi et j’avais de temps en temps des décisions terribles à prendre. Une fois, j’ai eu le choix entre le fait d’emmener, peut-être, mon enfant à la mort ou l’abandonner, protéger sa vie, mais mettre en question son équilibre pour toujours. Je l’ai emmenée. Flo savait tout, elle était d’accord. (During the war, I wasn’t responsible only for myself, and from time to time I had to make terrible decisions. One time, I had the choice between taking my child with me and perhaps putting her in danger of dying, or abandoning her, which would have protected her life but possibly endangered her feeling of security forever. I 12 took her. Flo knew everything and she agreed.)

It is partly out of concern for the welfare of her daughters that Lucienne at first hesitates to join in the subversive activity of Jean-Paul and Francis. In Malraux’s fictional narrative a mother’s need to protect her children overrides any notion of heroism or any noble aspects of resistance. The men’s presence in Lucienne’s home and their dangerous work threaten the children’s safety. What is more, Lucienne’s understanding of what kind of role she can 12

Michèle Perrein, ‘”Mon cher brigand reveille-toi”: Un entretien avec Clara Malraux’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 14 October 1976, 18.

164

play in the French movement is determined by her responsibility for her children and the need to remain at home. The extremely close connection between a woman’s clandestine activity and her domestic as well as personal and emotional life is exemplified not only in Malraux’s story but also in Aubrac’s memoir, Outwitting the Gestapo. As Aubrac observes: ‘Outside the underground life of the Resistance, with its more or less dangerous activity, daily life must be confronted—for a woman more than a man: a household to take care of, a husband and child to feed, clothes to be washed’ (p.23). Aubrac blurs the lines between resistance and everyday existence. For all of her daring actions as a female resister in Lyons, discussion of family members and the mundane aspects of life’s routines are intrinsic to her account of the French underground. Even as this resister recounts her extraordinary experiences in the movement, she also informs her readers about the hardships of living under the occupation, her household duties, and her love of family. Whereas Frenay’s memoir has a legendary feel to it and the author closely identifies himself with the organization he built, Aubrac, in contrast, seems like thousands of other housewives and mothers, observes Dominique Veillon (‘Résister’, p.90). Aubrac illustrates just how aware she was of her everyday obligations when she says that her most vivid memory (which she will tell her children) is not about a particular act of resistance. She recalls, rather, the endless waiting: for the curfew to be lifted, for allocations of food and basic necessities, for ration cards each month (p.131). From her memoir emerges the basic question of physical, if not emotional, survival that many women resisters faced on a daily basis. Care for their children could not be separated, practically or emotionally, from women’s illegal duties. The experience of resistance was thus cast in an entirely different light for women than men. Schefer establishes the crucial connection between women’s roles as mothers and the nature of their illegal duties when she asserts that women developed ‘besondere, “weibliche Widerstandsformen”’ (particular ‘feminine forms of resistance’), and that they did so ‘vor dem Hintergrund ihrer spezifischen Lebenszusammenhänge—der Verantwortlichkeit für die individuelle und gesellschaftliche Reproduktion’ (against the background of the specific contexts of their life—the responsibility for individual and social reproduction’ (p.274). A woman’s pregnancy often made escape from authorities impossible, and moving from place to place each night to avoid discovery by the Gestapo or the police was more difficult with children, who required attention.13 Andreas-Friedrich deliberated at length before taking her daughter into her confidence and including her in the activities of Onkel Emil (Köhler, p.172). The possibility of entering into resistance must have appeared extraordinarily daunting when viewed through the lens of such concerns. Apart from the practical difficulties of trying to cope with the needs of children while carrying out a clandestine assignment, psychological tensions added to the strain of this work. Women who acted as couriers or travelled frequently had to be separated from their children for long periods of time and could not be present to tend to their needs (Wiggershaus, p.116). A mother had to be aware not only of her child’s day-to-day welfare but also of her or his ultimate safety. Inge Kanitz, a member of the German resistance, reports that when the curate brought a Jewish woman to her house one day, seeking a safe place for her to hide, she [Kanitz] could only think of the potential danger that sheltering 13

Schefer, p.277. In Outwitting the Gestapo, Aubrac documents her time in the resistance while she was pregnant. Dumont’s experience as a mother-to-be who was also a resister is described in Coudert and Helene, pp.54-64.

165

someone would impose on her children. Kanitz, who already had three children and a fourth on the way and whose husband was at the front, felt that she had much more to risk than the curate. At first she did not see an opportunity to help a person in need but rather was furious with the curate for endangering all of them. Kanitz knew that she herself could be shot or sent to a concentration camp if it was discovered that she had taken in this woman (something she eventually did despite the risks) (Szepansky, p.283). It is crucial to recognize the importance of the setting in Malraux’s and Langgässer’s stories, for in both instances the home becomes a vehicle for resistance. Each author’s overview of the home’s physical design and of the practical aspects of running the household reflects an awareness of what female resisters had to consider in offering people shelter. The structure of Lucienne’s house, a large villa away from the centre of town, is a good hiding place for people who might be suspect if they stayed at a hotel.14 More striking is the kitchen, which in the context of resistance serves as a strategic lookout point from which Lucienne can spot danger: ‘Sans quitter la table, rien qu’en levant la tête—cette cuisine un peu avancée de la maison avait tout d’un phare’ (Without leaving the table, just by raising her head—this kitchen, jutting out a little from the house, acted as a lighthouse’ (p.22). This description of the kitchen literally transforms the room into a focal point for resistance. The home facilitates underground work in other ways, as when Lucienne moves aside the heavy washing machine and disposes of the package of illegal materials in the fire on the stove. In this merging of the seemingly disparate images of everyday household life: the kitchen, the stove, the washing machine, with subversive activity (the packet of microfilm) the reader discovers women’s power to turn their material conditions into venues and tools for antiNazi opposition. The integration of resistance with life inside the home is also vividly brought out in ‘Untergetaucht’ as Frieda goes into great detail describing the layout of the couple’s house with its garden. Her close attention to the physical structure of her home and its interior spaces indicates the kinds of concerns that faced women who combined clandestine activity with domestic life. Of utmost importance is whether the house offers safety to a person in hiding. Certain features, such as the location of particular rooms or dimly lit passageways, would have surely concealed the presence of anyone hiding there, Frieda assures her companion: Wenn einer erst in der Laube drin war, kam keiner auf den Gedanken, daß sich da jemand versteckt hielt, der nicht dazugehörte. Wer uns besuchte, kam bloß bis zur Küche und höchstens noch in die Kammer dahinter; alles übrige war erst angebaut worden—die Veranda, das Waschhaus, der erste Stock mit den zwei schrägen Kammern, das ganze Gewinkel schön schummrig und eng, überall stieß man an irgendwas an: an die Schnüre mit den Zwiebeln zum Beispiel, die zum Trocknen aufgehängt waren, und an die Wäscheleine. (When somebody first came inside the covered porch, they wouldn’t think that someone was hiding there who didn’t belong there. Whoever visited us just came as far as the kitchen and, at the most, into the room behind it. Everything else had just been built on—the veranda, the laundry room, the first floor with the two diagonal rooms. This whole area was very dim and narrow; you knocked into something everywhere: against the string 15 of onions that had been hung to dry, for example, and against the clothesline.)

14

Clara Malraux, ‘La Fausse épreuve’ (The false test), in La Maison ne fait pas credit (No charge accounts, strictly cash) (Paris: Bibliothèque française, 1947; repr. Paris: Temps Actuels, 1981), pp.15-44 (p.30). 15 Elisabeth Langgässer, ‘Untergetaucht’ (Submerged), in Der Torso (The torso) (Hamburg: Claassen & Goverts, 1947); repr. in Gesammelte Werke, 4 vols (Hamburg: Claassen, 1959-64), Erzählungen, 336-41 (p.338).

166

Frieda’s precise description of her home helps readers comprehend the issues resisters faced as they sought secure places to conceal people so that no one could detect, or even suspect, their presence. The ability to provide food and other basic necessities, like clothing, was also a chief concern of those who took Jews and other persecuted individuals into their homes in France as well as Germany. This responsibility was no small matter because already rationed food and supplies were frequently in short supply. In a scene in which Lucienne describes the coffee she brought the first refugees who came to her, two Polish women who were escaping a raid in their town, Malraux suggests that such resistance entailed offering not only physical sustenance but also such small, life-sustaining gestures of hospitality and care. Lucienne’s continuing role in harbouring people is bound up with a desire to take care of their needs: ‘Elle [. . .] leur avait le lendemain matin apporté au lit un café fait sur un feu de bois humide. [. . .] C’était cet accueil qui avait créé un précédent, même le café. Depuis, il y avait eu beaucoup d’autres hommes, femmes, enfants’ (The next morning she had brought them coffee in bed, which she had made over a fire of damp wood. [. . .] It was this welcome, including the coffee, that had established the precedent. Since then, there had been many other men, women and children) (‘Fausse’, p.31). Lucienne makes a point of mentioning the coffee that she gave the women, just as Frieda remarks on having sufficient food on hand to feed Elsie. The urgency of such a usually commonplace matter as food is also evident in the significance that Frieda attaches to the vegetables she obtained from her garden, which, she notes, provided abundantly (Langgässer, ‘Untergetaucht’, p.338). As interpreted by Malraux and Langgässer, anti-Nazi opposition and domestic life again become one and the same as practical problems and small acts supplant political issues within the household.16 Other narratives by women similarly devote a great deal of attention to the household and its activities. In depicting Berliners making repairs after the heaviest night of bombing in the war, on 2 January 1944, Andreas-Friedrich presents yet another image that dramatically evokes the value of home life: Zerstört man uns den Wohnraum, so ziehen wir in die Küche. Schlägt man uns die Küche entzwei, siedeln wir auf den Korridor über. Sinkt der Korridor in Trümmer, richten wir uns im Keller ein. Wenn wir nur zu Hause bleiben dürfen. Das dürftigste Eckchen Zuhause ist besser als jeder Palast in der Fremde. [. . .] Man kann nicht leben, wenn man nirgendwo hingehört. Deswegen retten die meisten Menschen aus ihren brennenden Häusern als erstes ihr Kopfkissen. Weil es ein letztes Stückchen ‘Zuhause’ ist. (Schattenmann, p.123) (If our living room goes, we move into the kitchen. If the kitchen is smashed, we transfer to the hall. If the hall is in ruins, we set up in the cellar. Anything so long as we can stay at home. The most dismal scrap of home is better than any palace somewhere else. [. . .] You can’t live if you don’t belong anywhere. That’s why the first thing most people save from their burning houses is the pillow from the bed—it’s a last bit of home.) (Berlin, pp.113-14)

For women who resisted, the domestic setting was more than a set of responsibilities to be managed along with their underground duties. The home signified even in its smallest elements, like a bed pillow, a grounding point or a source of stability and security that provided people with a feeling of reassurance even as chaos and violence welled up beyond the walls of the home. 16

See Andreas-Friedrich’s account of Onkel Emil’s efforts to gather fruit and vegetables for the Jewish people whom they were hiding after Nazi race measures were put into effect that denied Jews ration coupons for meat, eggs, and tobacco (Schattenmann, pp.90-91; 19 June 1942). Resisters who attempted to defraud the ration card system in order to obtain food for people hiding underground faced the threat of imprisonment in a concentration camp and possibly death (Stoltzfus, Resistance, p.133).

167

Men’s narratives, on the other hand, have nothing of the ordinary or the mundane about them. Drawing from official political discourses, men fashion a resistance that dwarfs personal concerns or the worries of everyday survival. The very idea of engaging in a struggle to rescue an entire nation of people or to preserve the foundations of a culture leaves little room to consider the issues facing the average person on a daily basis. Schlabrendorff exemplifies this approach when he invests resistance with an almost religious significance by calling it a ‘crusade’. He goes on to define the aim of the officers’ plot as, ‘the reestablishment of the commands of humanity. At the same time, we wanted to free the true concept of the Fatherland, which rests upon respect for the life of other nations, from the errors of racial insanity. Reverence for God once again had to be made the basis of life’ (p.69). His use of rhetoric that is built on abstractions and that bears religious overtones has the obvious effect of distancing anti-Nazism from life’s dull routines. Frenay’s approach similarly lifts resistance out of the context of an uneventful day-to-day reality. Having established this underground movement as an exclusively political and national struggle, Frenay may then narrate not the ordinary events of his everyday existence (there is never any mention of this) but the course of the war in relation to the workings of Combat, the give-and-take of politics as resistance leaders jockey for positions of power and influence, and the overriding concern for national unity in the struggle against the Germans. If Aubrac’s recollections are woven into the fabric of mundane domestic details, the sweeping dimensions of Frenay’s memoir would lead one to believe that Frenay and his colleagues rarely took time to eat or sleep. The contours of the story Frieda tells in ‘Untergetaucht’ reflect not only a resistance set within a household but also a reliance on networks of friends, relatives, and neighbours as a means to support victims of Nazism. Just as a shadowy group directs people needing help to Lucienne’s villa, Frieda also belongs to an informal network of women who take turns sheltering Jews and others hiding underground, known as Unterseeboote or U-Boote (submariners).17 Women were able to take advantage of ties with friends, neighbours, and family in order to insure an individual’s safety or to have enough food and supplies for their charges. These interpersonal connections also provided future hiding places for people who had to move continually from place to place in order to avoid detection. Scholars who have researched the clandestine activity of German women have remarked on their tendency to rely on circles of acquaintances in carrying out resistance (Schefer, p.276). Alice Stertzenbach asserts that women were able to make good use of such contacts because their lives centred around the home and attachments to other people, and they were well aware of whom they could trust. Women could turn quickly to friends or relatives, she notes, to locate safe shelter for people in danger.18 The confined surroundings of a neighbourhood intensified the dangers for women who hid people. Resistance based within the home therefore required specific behaviours of the resister and entailed its own particular risks. Those who turned their house into a hiding place had to remain constantly vigilant for suspicious individuals in the neighbourhood, as well as maintain a semblance of normal life in and around the home so as not to arouse the curiosity of those living nearby. Szepansky, writing of Kläre Bloch, who helped Jews and others living illegally in Nazi Germany, notes one of the considerations for resisters like 17

Leonard Gross terms the name U-Boote (U-Boats) ‘a self-mocking reference to the country’s efficient and effective fleet of submarines’. The Last Jews in Berlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p.113. 18 Cited in Wiggershaus, p.123, above.

168

Bloch: ‘Die Frage besteht immer, wenn man jemanden versteckt: Wie sind die übrige Hausbewohner? Wenn man einen Obernazi als Nachbarn hat, kann es das Todesurteil sein’ (The question that always persists when someone hides a person is: What are the other tenants like? If a Nazi higher-up is one’s neighbour, that can be a death sentence) (p.198). Rossiter evaluates in similar terms the hazards for French safe house keepers who hid escapees, noting that the home, a ‘fixed base’, prevented an easy escape. A saboteur or an intelligence agent, having completed an assignment, could flee, but a safe house keeper, with no place to hide, was particularly vulnerable to the police. Authorities might appear at any time, and they could arrest and interrogate other members of the family, who might possibly face imprisonment or deportation to a concentration camp (p.65). In these two short stories, Lucienne and Frieda must operate within close proximity to nearby neighbourhood residents. Fearing that those living around her will realize that the two men are working out of her house, Lucienne shows herself to be acutely aware of whom she can and cannot trust among her neighbours. When Francis appears, Lucienne thinks to herself it would have been better if he had brought some luggage with him so as to appear less conspicuous, because a man showing up at her house in broad daylight will only make neighbours curious (Malraux, ‘Fausse’, p.18). Lucienne has been posing as JeanPaul’s mistress in order to guard his identity from those living around her. She also fabricates an explanation for her cleaning woman and the neighbours who might have seen him jump out the window and hide behind the hedge when the police came to the door (pp.4041). Lucienne uses another tactic to throw off the neighbours’ suspicions when she gambles that staging a dramatic ‘argument’ with Francis after the police leave will discourage people from asking her why the authorities were at her house. Frieda’s tale reveals the ways in which she, too, tried to keep up everyday appearances while watching for possible threats in the neighbourhood and providing for Elsie. The nameless friend listening to Frieda recognizes the potential danger that came from the close surroundings of the neighbourhood: ‘”Es war aber doch wohl recht gefährlich in eurer kleinen verklatschten Siedlung, wo jeder den anderen kennt”’ (‘It was really very dangerous in your small gossipy neighbourhood, where everyone knew each other’) (Langgässer, ‘Untergetaucht’, pp.337-38). Though Frieda has, in retrospect, succumbed to the illusion that the chattering parrot posed the greatest risk to herself and Karl, she earlier recognized a more immediate threat in her inquisitive neighbour, Frau Geheinke. From the moment that this woman, the wife of the Blockwalter, asks who Frieda’s visitor is (she apparently saw Elsie through the kitchen window), the protagonist finds herself swept into a nightmarish realm of psychological terror. Frieda describes herself as ‘ganz verdattert vor Schrecken’ (completely confused with fear) (p.338). The ‘mundane’ appearance of illegal activity based in the home has until recently disguised the genuine perils of such resistance, if not the acts themselves. Like her fictional counterpart, Frieda, Lucienne takes risks and confronts situations that most women would not usually encounter in their peacetime lives. The new and dangerous circumstances that Lucienne faces do expand the boundaries of gender in certain ways. Although Lucienne’s self-proclaimed passivity and weakness would seem to render her helpless, she steps forward to take deliberate and effective action when the police show up. Shedding her customary demeanour of the weak and helpless female and demonstrating more assertiveness, she gives orders to Jean-Paul and Francis, throws away the dangerous microfilm, and conceals the police visit from the neighbours and the cleaning lady. On the

169

surface, Lucienne’s actions appear almost meaningless, not heroic, but it is actually her calmness and self-assurance that defuse the potentially life-threatening situation and make everything within the house appear entirely normal. Lucienne literally assumes a masculine role when she takes the lead and gives the men instructions, thus momentarily reversing male-female roles. Francis’s reaction indicates that the gender status quo has been seriously challenged, for after the police depart he angrily criticizes her for handling the situation so swiftly and destroying the package: ‘—Alors, ditil, alors vous avez brûlé les papiers pour rien? Deux cents micros, des listes et un plan! Sa voix s’éleva, pleine de colère. Ça vous ressemble, un, deux, on prend des décisions, on ne réfléchit pas aux conséquences, on agit au grand galop’ (So, he said, so you’ve burned the papers for nothing? Two hundred negatives, the lists and a plan! His voice rose, full of anger. This is just like you, one, two, you make decisions, you don’t consider the consequences, you act hastily) (Malraux, ‘Fausse’, p.38). Lucienne has just saved herself, the two men, and her daughters with her quick thinking, but in Francis’s eyes impetuosity, not reason, rules her actions. He takes her to task for not rationally thinking through a decision that actually had to be made in a matter of minutes. His words suggest, too, the momentary loss of his unspoken authority as a male. Lucienne has behaved impulsively, but this kind of decision-making is exactly what was demanded of such resisters, who often did not have time to carefully consider a plan when someone needed help or when the authorities came looking for a person hiding underground. The character of Lucienne exemplifies, perhaps more visibly than any of the other resistance figures in this study, a woman’s internal conflict between expected behaviours and the unusual requirements resistance places on her. At the beginning of Malraux’s story, Lucienne’s silent musings shift back and forth between her own roles as wife and mother and the men’s clandestine activity located in her home. When Francis initially arrives at her house, she is angry that his and Jean-Paul’s presence endangers her and her family (p.17). At this point, Lucienne’s personal difficulties as a Jew, a widow, and a mother of two children counterbalance the threat she perceives in the ‘masculine’ resistance, as represented by the two men. In the second section of the story, Lucienne’s focus on her domestic obligations and on the cleaning woman’s inefficiency contrasts markedly with her conviction that the danger surrounding Jean-Paul and Francis engenders a freedom for the men that she herself does not have. Finally, there is a notable distinction between the insecurity Lucienne expresses in the first two sections of the story and the calm self-assurance and determination she displays in the third section when she must deal with the police. The continuous movement of her thoughts as she tentatively approaches the identity of ‘resister’ and then quickly retreats into her fears and uncertainty (and, it may be said, the security of familiar roles) concretely illustrates the tensions that many female resisters must have experienced as they tried to reconcile opposing identities within themselves. Whereas Lucienne exists in a kind of limbo as her traditional sense of self clashes with uncustomary ways of being, Frieda experiences a short-lived autonomy in Langgässer’s story. Her seemingly small act of harbouring Elsie initially liberates her from social norms by allowing her to step out of her compliant role as Karl’s wife, exert her own authority, and take deliberate action as an independent woman. In her spontaneous decision to shelter Elsie, Frieda moves beyond the limitations of an average, lower middle-class existence, a world of domesticity, to show assertiveness and courage. Though her initial action was decisive, however, Frieda eventually succumbs to the lure of the submissive ‘feminine’ role

170

because she feels she must ultimately answer to her husband. (Her rescue of Elsie is especially dangerous because Karl has recently joined the Nazi Party and received a minor post.) Frieda appears in many respects to be nothing more than an average woman whose world scarcely extends beyond the domestic setting, in this case, a modest suburban home with a garden. Frieda’s appearance and demeanour stamp her as traditional as well. A stattliche (portly) woman, she wears a corset that her husband undoes for her at night. Her speech (like that of both her female companion listening to the story and the narrator) is coarse. As she says, ‘hernach ist der erste ja doch der Dumme’ (later, the first one [who helps someone] really turns out to be the dumb one), referring to the responsibility for Elsie that falls to her when the other women in the network back out (Langgässer, ‘Untergetaucht’, pp.336-37). Her manners are also crude, as the narrator notices when both women, drinking together in the train station café, blow the foam from their beers and gulp down half the glass in one swallow. Frieda’s identification with the common people is assured by the fact that she (like Karl and also Frieda’s women friends in the resistance circle: Hilde, Trude, and Erika) lacks a surname and therefore remains partly anonymous (unlike the Jewish woman, Elsie Goldmann).19 Above all, Frieda’s subordinate relationship to her husband points up the web of expectations that enmesh her identity and daily existence. She supports Karl in word and deed, describing him three times as seelensgut (a dear soul), and backing up his decision to be rid of Elsie. When the parrot’s incessant babble has driven Karl to his ultimatum: ‘”Entweder dreh ich dem Vieh den Hals um, oder ich schmeiße die Elsie hinaus”’ (‘I’m going to either wring the beast’s neck or throw Elsie out’), Frieda concedes, ‘”er hatte ja recht—es blieb keine andere Wahl”’ (he was right—there was no other choice’) (Langgässer, ‘Untergetaucht’, p.336). For all of her apparent independence when she first takes in Elsie, Karl ultimately rules over the household. Describing her decision to aid her childhood friend, Frieda comments that Elsie was very upset, but she adds in the same breath that she could hear her husband in the distance clattering down the street on his wooden leg (p.337). Frieda actually presents Karl with a fait accompli, that is, the presence of Elsie; however, the uncertainty in her words and actions betrays her genuine lack of power in relation to her husband. She comments, ‘natürlich wußte ich ganz genau, daß sie nicht gehen würde; mein Karl, dieser seelensgute Mensch, sagte es schon am gleichen Abend’ (naturally, I knew very well that she wouldn’t leave; my Karl, the dear soul, already said so that same evening) (p.337). Frieda scarcely distinguishes her own identity from that of her husband as she merges the two of them in a single breath here. Her horizons do not extend beyond the home and a dominating husband, nor does she envision possibilities that might be acted out on some kind of ground outside her domestic world. As in other resistance narratives by women, such as Duras’s La Douleur and AndreasFriedrich’s Der Schattenmann, the focus on an omnipresent fear is also a common point of understanding in ‘La Fausse épreuve’ and ‘Untergetaucht’. Malraux’s and Langgässer’s indepth examinations of this emotion further the process of reinterpreting resistance and removing it from the standard mythical framework of brave and fearless action. There is an honesty, if not a strength, in women’s admission of their fears and other emotions that lifts the veil, so to speak, on how individuals actually experienced resistance. The first part of 19

Harry Steinhauer, ‘Submerged Heroism—Elisabeth Langgässer’s Story “Untergetaucht”’, Modern Language Notes, 74 (1959), 153-58 (p.158).

171

‘La Fausse épreuve’ is essentially given over to Lucienne’s fear. The narrator, in fact, notes in the first sentence that Lucienne has been afraid from the moment Francis arrived, and this emotion heightens as it mingles with her thoughts about her vulnerability as the sole protector of her children, her difficult marriage, and the men’s illegal work. As Lucienne prepares dinner in the first scene, Malraux underscores how far removed was women’s reality from the familiar notion of the secure and protected home front. For here in Lucienne’s villa, away from the centre of town, the fear and uncertainty of resistance activity creep into the most ordinary tasks and skew the protagonist’s perceptions of everyday life. If Malraux captures Lucienne’s inability to be fully involved in the daily routine on account of her fear, then Langgässer traces the slightest nuances of her characters’ behaviour in the face of intense psychological terror. The confined space of Frieda’s home only magnifies the heightened tension within, until all three characters succumb to the pressure and begin to show signs of emotional instability. Frieda is immediately consumed with fright once she thinks that Frau Geheinke suspects her of hiding someone. As Frieda remarks, ‘von da ab war meine Ruhe fort; ganz fort wie weggeblasen’ (I had no peace from then on; it was completely gone, as if it had blown away) (‘Untergetaucht’, p.339). The protagonist becomes ensnared by the ever-present fear that infects the close surroundings. The more she observes Elsie, the more ‘Jewish’ the woman appears. Yet Frieda recognizes how foolish her observations are, because both women know that Elsie does not have typically ‘Jewish’ features. Nevertheless, continues Frieda, she cannot help herself; it is as if she has been verhext (bewitched) (p.339). Elsie also reacts to the severe strain by showing signs of ‘insanity’ as the terror inevitably mounts within the suffocating boundaries of the home. When Frieda tells Elsie that she does not look ‘Jewish’, Elsie looks at her ‘verzweifelt und böse und irr zugleich’ (despairingly and angrily and madly, all at the same time) (p.339). Elsie then begins to stare into the mirror constantly. When Frieda takes the mirror away from her, Elsie’s behaviour alters more dramatically as she begins to walk crookedly, to speak with a lisp, to break dishes, and to spill food and drink (p.339). Nor is Karl immune to the contaminating terror. He becomes ganz verrückt (thoroughly deranged) for fear that the parrot’s incessant squawking of Elsie’s name will give them all away, and begins wringing his hands habitually (p.338). A rising hatred between the two women only ratchets up the psychological tension. Once Elsie wagers that the dark-featured Frieda would be taken for a Jew if she appeared on the street wearing the yellow Star of David badge, bitterness erupts. Frieda observes: ‘Von diesem Tag an haßten wir uns. Wir haßten uns, wenn wir am Kochherd ohne Absicht zusammenstießen, und haßten uns, wenn wir zu gleicher Zeit nach dem Löffel im Suppentopf griffen. Selbst der Papagei merkte, wie wir uns haßten’ (From this day on we hated one another. We hated one another when we accidentally ran into each other at the stove, and we hated one another when we grabbed the spoon in the soup pot at the same time. Even the parrot noticed how we hated one another) (p.340). The poisonous fear engulfing the household dominates the narrative at this point, so that Frieda’s act of resistance soon becomes less important than how her deed has inexorably altered the common functions of daily life and the personal interactions within this household. ‘Untergetaucht’ is notable because it so deliberately defies the politics of resistance rhetoric to create the palpable sense of terror and to reveal the emotional toll that an act of resistance exacts upon those who stand up against the Nazi regime and those who are its victims.

172

Frieda constructs her story of her resistance so exclusively around household details that for all appearances she does not seem to realize she is speaking about an act that opposes the laws of the Nazi regime. There is no question, however, that for all of Langgässer’s efforts to de-emphasize the political significance of Frieda’s deed, her action is political. Frieda could face arrest, imprisonment, even a death sentence if authorities discover her complicity. Certainly the mounting feelings of alarm and the ‘insane’ behaviour that grip Frieda and Karl and Elsie indicate that every one of them senses the repercussions that could result from Frieda’s actions. By focusing the reader’s attention on ordinary concerns, Malraux and Langgässer, like Andreas-Friedrich and Aubrac, acknowledge that underground work could not necessarily be separated, as it has been in resistance legends, from making meals, tending to chores, and caring for children. The middle section of ‘La Fausse épreuve’, consisting of Lucienne’s inner reflections about her marriage and family responsibilities and the events that have brought her to her present circumstances, demonstrates how closely interwoven were the rhythms of day-to-day life and illegal action for many women. Although Lucienne perceives herself as a ‘prisonnière de devoirs qui s’alourdissaient chaque jour’ (prisoner of her responsibilities, which each day weighed on her more and more) (Malraux, ‘Fausse’, p.29), her thoughts about her household and family are actually juxtaposed with a narrative of how she came to take in numerous men, women, and children who needed a place to hide, and of the resistance network based in her house. Lucienne claims she has no place in the French underground, that her fears and domestic obligations prevent her from joining the movement. Yet the coexistence of the household and the clandestine work in this short story paints a meaningful picture of the ways in which women made resistance a part of their everyday lives, including their family obligations. Malraux and Langgässer raise questions about the resistance myth and its rhetoric by grounding their protagonists’ anti-Nazi opposition in the ordinary rather than the legendary. Frieda, in fact, never mentions the word ‘resistance’ in discussing her subversive act; instead, she remains absorbed in recounting the routines of the three people in the house. Elsie tries to help out with chores, but, as Frieda’s words illustrate, concealment of the Jewish woman remains uppermost in the protagonist’s mind: ‘Sie schälte Kartoffeln, machte den Abwasch und ging nicht an die Tür’ (she peeled potatoes, did the dishes, and didn’t answer the door) (‘Untergetaucht’, p.338). The escalating fear cannot be dispelled, and through the relating of minute details Langgässer suggests the degree to which this feeling has overtaken both the home and the individuals living there. Remarking on the ‘insanity’ that gripped the terrorized Elsie, Frieda observes: ‘Kein Glas war sicher in ihren Händen, jede Tasse schwappte beim Eingießen über, das Tischtuch war an dem Platz, wo sie saß, von Flecken übersät’ (no glass was safe in her hands, every cup splashed over when it was being filled, the tablecloth was covered with stains at the place where she sat) (p.339). The political implications of Frieda’s resistance as far as the challenge it represented against Nazism give way to a portrait of how these three people lived their lives under the threat of terror. Within such limited spaces, fear governs an individual’s every move, and the simplest gesture seems magnified a thousand times over. In women’s narratives of resistance there are no bands of specially anointed resisters who stand apart from other people; instead, resisters’ lives are intertwined with those of everyone around them. Malraux and Langgässer interpret their protagonists’ motives to oppose Nazism as empathic and as part of a broader web of human connections, in much

173

the same way that Duras characterizes her own resistance as informed by her desire for news about Robert L. or by her need to protect an imagined child, or as Triolet links Juliette’s liaison work to her brother’s death in the war. In the case of Malraux’s Lucienne, a shared sense of persecution moves her to help the two Jewish women. The protagonist does not define her actions as resistance, but rather provides aid because she identifies with the Jewish women’s plight despite her own misgivings about the risks. The hospitality she shows the two women heightens the compassion in her decision to shelter them. Concern for others guides Lucienne’s thoughts as she takes in people and as the two men come and go from her house on underground assignments. Langgässer similarly transforms resistance into an act of care. As with Frau Behagel in ‘An der Nähmaschine’, there is nothing about Frieda that would suggest she is moved to act out of political belief. Rather, Frieda helps Elsie because she has an emotional tie with a friend in dire need, and because she perceives Elsie’s desperation and feels sorry for her. Her former schoolmate, exhausted and drenched from having run through snow and rain to find a hiding place, looks pitiful and is upset. Frieda barely hesitates in deciding to help Elsie, although at the same time she is fully aware that the woman will not leave after only one night. Frieda hears her husband’s approaching footsteps, and, aware of the potential dangers (she stresses that Elsie can stay for a single night), she still adds, ‘weil wir schon in der Schule zusammen gewesen sind’ (because, after all, we were in school together) (‘Untergetaucht’, p.337).20 The bond between the two women, though in the past, shapes Frieda’s decision in the present. Langgässer undercuts any possibility that her protagonist might have acted out of a desire to be a ‘heroine’ by casting her character’s retelling of her story in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. Not unlike the narrator’s simple and direct recitation of Lucienne’s resistance actions in ‘La Fausse épreuve’, Frieda’s diffidence diminishes the heroic dimensions of her act of rescuing Elsie. In looking back on this incident, Frieda minimizes the significance of her decision to hide her school friend. To her nameless friend’s exclamation that she and others silently admired Frieda for her courage, Frieda replies: ‘”Mut? Na, ich weiß nicht. Was sollte ich machen, als sie plötzlich vor meiner Tür stand, die Handtasche über dem Stern?”’ (‘Courage? Well, I don’t know. What should I have done, when she suddenly stood at my door, with her purse over the Star?’) (‘Untergetaucht’, p.337). Such understatement in women’s narratives of resistance has enabled women to conform to social norms that demand an unassertive and modest demeanour. Although resistance in these two stories is defined by the private setting of the home and family and is so closely integrated with ordinary activities that at times it is nearly invisible, the female resisters discover possibilities for enlarging their freedom as women, or at the very least for loosening the restrictive boundaries of gender. Yet for all of the protagonists’ ingenuity, quick thinking, and newly discovered courage and boldness, they continue to identify with a traditional femininity. Frieda’s discussion of her actions, devoid of political overtones and narrated with the matter-of-fact assurance that she was simply helping a friend in need, not only underlines her modesty but also distances her as a female from the customary notion of resistance as political activity.

20

See Elisabeth Graßmann’s account of hiding an escaped prisoner, who was once a childhood playmate. Despite the risks, she says, when he asked for a place to hide, she and her husband could not turn the man away (Köhler, p.215).

174

Malraux’s approach is similar to that of Thomas and Triolet in that she draws a sharp distinction between female and male roles. In Lucienne’s view, the underground is the domain of men, while the household belongs to women. Jean-Paul and Francis take part in organized resistance, and their responsibilities, which consist of maintaining contacts, drafting fliers and tracts, and conducting missions, are visible, dramatic, and dangerous. Moreover, the two men appear thoroughly absorbed in their underground duties, something that is possible because they are free of immediate responsibilities for their families (whom they see during holidays) (‘Fausse’, p.32). The division between male and female spheres is further highlighted as Lucienne slights the value of her own work of harbouring Jews and political refugees in favour of the more conspicuous ventures of the two men. Their activities are labelled as resistance, yet Lucienne’s assistance to those seeking a safe hiding place is not. In fact, as in certain other narratives by women, the word ‘resistance’ never appears in this story in connection with Lucienne’s actions. Lucienne talks about the men’s work as if she, an outsider whose life is her family, is looking onto an altogether different world of action and danger that belongs exclusively to the men. Malraux’s use of gender stereotypes renders the boundaries between male and female behaviours and roles still more apparent. The men’s and Lucienne’s behaviour is imminently predictable, and the contrast between them only serves to make Lucienne appear even weaker than she actually is. Whereas Langgässer characterizes Frieda as a traditional woman, Malraux exaggerates Lucienne’s feminine qualities. Malraux’s approach is not unlike that of Keun, who presents Sanna Moder as a naïve female whose singular desire is to win a man’s love, or of Triolet, who stresses Juliette Noël’s sex appeal and her concern with finding romance and love. Lucienne’s sense of self is partly determined by her homemaking responsibilities. She spends much of her time in the kitchen preparing meals and there deliberates on her place in the resistance. The author also emphasizes her character’s femininity by alluding to her submissiveness towards men (p.27). Furthermore, by Lucienne’s own admission, she is passive and weak, has a fondness for daydreaming (not courageous action), and lacks self-confidence (pp.32-34). In addition, she repeatedly expresses her fear that is brought on by the dangerous situation in which she finds herself. Her emotional expression, while legitimate, adds to the stereotype of the helpless female because, in contrast to other women figures here whose fear often galvanizes their resistance, Lucienne remains paralysed: ‘Oui, j’ai peur de la torture, peur de la Pologne, peur de tout ce qui peut m’arriver si je ne me tiens pas sagement dans mon petit coin’ (Yes, I’m afraid of torture, afraid of Poland, afraid of everything that could happen to me if I don’t remain in my little corner like a good little girl) (p.34). She is unable to determine what her place is in the resistance movement until the police appear. The two men, on the other hand, represent masculine stereotypes of action, courage, and reason. Lucienne notes with surprise Jean-Paul’s calmness despite the risk he faces by carrying false identification papers (p.17). The men appear to thrive on the surrounding danger (p.29). Francis’s chastisement of Lucienne, moreover, evokes the familiar stereotypes of the emotional and impulsive woman and the cool and rational man. Malraux has fit her characters into predictable roles: the passive woman enclosed within the home and the active man fully engaged with the outside world. For Lucienne, the ‘feminine’ realm of home and family is never satisfactorily bridged with the ‘masculine’ realm of clandestine action. The weight of the author’s stereotyping and sentimentalizing prevents the protagonist from integrating the two worlds. Much as

175

Juliette Noël never quite closes the gap between her identity as a resister and her identity as a potential lover in Triolet’s Les Amants d’Avignon, Lucienne’s conscious decision to join the two men’s resistance group is not altogether convincing. Many incongruities result as Lucienne attempts to mesh who she is as a woman with who she might be as an opponent of Nazism—and Malraux finally leaves the reader with a dubious resister. When Lucienne retrieves the packet from the stove, for instance, her action is melodramatically interpreted as a reminder of Isolde’s test by fire in Gottfried’s thirteenth-century poem of love and passion, Tristan and Isolde (p.39). Further, Lucienne describes her commitment to the underground as une sorte de mariage (a kind of marriage) (p.43), a sentimental comparison and one that seems incompatible even with a resistance that encompasses the personal. Lucienne ultimately views the ‘false test’ as an opportunity to gain insight into herself (she now knows her strengths and weaknesses) and as a way to restore her damaged self-esteem (p.44). The problem here is not that Malraux fails to attach a political meaning to Lucienne’s resistance or that the emotional dimensions behind her activity are so evident, but rather that the issues are delineated in such narrowly personal terms and that the protagonist’s actions are so circumscribed by melodrama and sentimentality. In contrast, Langgässer’s depiction of resistance within the intimate setting of a home raises the broader, compelling issue of moral and spiritual values within an essentially evil state. In Langgässer’s world, fear breeds hatred, and fear ultimately reduces a generous act of compassion to betrayal. Malraux claimed she found personal liberation in the French resistance, for her experience helped her come to terms with who she was as a person, restored her sense of identity that was lost during her marriage to André, and gave her an understanding of what it meant to be Jewish (Garcin, p.37). Since she could be killed for her Jewishness, she determined it would be preferable to die by fighting back rather than passively accepting persecution (Bartillat, pp.123-24). Indeed, Courtivron argues persuasively that the ‘Resistance was a new beginning for Clara Malraux because it provided a space that André could not invade’ (‘Resistance’, pp.29-30). It appears that in ‘La Fausse épreuve’ the author has attempted to bring her own personal needs to her character’s resistance. Malraux’s artistic technique, though, fails to translate Lucienne’s experience into something that has a more universal meaning. The author diminishes the power of her protagonist’s commitment to resistance, and also her brave act of saving everyone in the house when she deceives the police, by hemming her in with an overemphasis on emotion that stereotypes her as a sentimental female. A comparison between Malraux’s and Langgässer’s narratives and two works by men, Wolf’s Zwei an der Grenze and Aragon’s short story ‘Les Rencontres’, further illustrates the divergent paths that men and women have taken in recounting the resistance that took place in private-personal spaces. While the two women writers focus on the minutiae of domestic life to suggest the impact that resistance could have on a household, Wolf and Aragon charge such details with the political. Underpinning the overt political orientation of Wolf’s novel is the union of a woman and a man as they build a life together and gradually come to know one another intimately. Yet the novel reflects little of the day-to-day routine evident in Malraux’s or Langgässer’s stories. Most of the novel’s action centres on Hans’s trips to the border to conduct clandestine duties or the political turmoil within the factory. When the couple’s home life is revealed, this private realm is also defined by politics. A scene in which the couple sits together at home as Loni sews baby clothes and Hans

176

reads captures Wolf’s approach. Reflecting on the imminent birth of their child, Hans compares childbirth to the baby’s bloody struggle for freedom. In Hans’s repetition of the words Freiheit (freedom), Kampf (struggle), and Blut (blood) (p.92), the author makes an obvious connection between Hans’s own political commitment and the birth of the couple’s child. There is no examination of his role as a father nor of the way in which his responsibilities for the resistance affect his and Loni’s life at home. Rather, this snapshot of domestic tranquillity and the potential for new life become a metaphor for the continued battle against fascism. Aragon’s ‘Les Rencontres’, from his short story collection Servitude et grandeur des Français: Scènes des années terribles, depicts a brief episode in which the male protagonist shelters a Jewish man, essentially the same form of resistance portrayed by Langgässer and Malraux. But whereas the women writers translate such actions into caregiving and nurturing, Aragon shapes this incident to fit into an interpretation of resistance as paramilitary violence aimed at achieving political and national goals. The ‘chance meetings’ referred to in the title take place over a period of some ten years as the journalist Pierre Vandermeulen, also known by his pen name, Julep, intermittently meets up with the passionate and politically committed Emile Dorin, a metal worker. The story, which begins in 1934, chronicles the gradual evolution of Julep from a naïve, apolitical individual to an active member of the maquis. Yvonne, Julep’s colleague at the newspaper, introduces her brother, Emile, and his wife, Rosette, to Julep at a bicycle race, and this meeting sets the stage for the two men’s future encounters. Julep is approached by the French resistance several times but does not join, instead continuing his work as a journalist and later writing for the collaborationist press. After he hears that Yvonne has been arrested, Julep takes in a Jewish man and hides him. Julep is sent to jail for this act. Emile and his comrades, who are in the same jail, plan a mass escape and include him. He is still unable to imagine himself joining the maquis. One day, Julep learns that the Germans have executed three French terrorists for attacks against the Wehrmacht in the southern zone. Emile was one of the terrorists. The knowledge of Emile’s death moves Julep to join the resistance so that he can carry on the work of his friend. Under his real name and the title of Lieutenant Vandermeulen, he will use his army training to drill the maquis. Since Aragon constructs resistance as a political movement centred on violence, it should come as no surprise that Julep’s act of hiding the Jewish man raises none of the concerns suggested in Langgässer’s and Malraux’s stories about sheltering people. There is no discussion in ‘Les Rencontres’ of how to hide someone safely or of the need to provide food and personal items. Nor is the language of resistance personalized here by the highlighting of emotions or attachments to others. Rather, Julep relates this incident in an understated way in the short space of three paragraphs. He says simply that he decided to hide the man, who was being hunted for no other reason than that he was Jewish. The man was planning to go into hiding in the country, when the French police and the Gestapo arrested him at Julep’s place and deported him. Julep himself was treated leniently and received only a six-month jail sentence, but the Jew was less fortunate. Julep suspects he was put on one of the freight cars headed for Germany. The impact of this illegal act on Julep’s everyday existence goes unnoted, and the author makes no suggestion of his protagonist’s personal or emotional involvement in helping this man. Julep explains his actions by saying only that, ‘on se sent gêné, à la fin, de ne rien faire. L’arrestation d’Yvonne m’avait fait un drôle d’effet’ (in the end, you feel uncomfortable doing nothing. Yvonne’s arrest had a pe-

177

culiar effect on me).21 Nor does he convey any feeling when telling how the Jewish man was discovered by authorities. Julep’s rescue of the Jew is not characterized in any way as resistance, whereas his acts of political sabotage, including destroying factory property, setting explosions in buildings requisitioned by the Germans, and giving weapons instruction to guerrilla fighters in the countryside, are classified as such. The choices that Malraux and Langgässer made to keep so many elements of the feminine identity in place in depicting their female characters, rather than to redefine what it meant to be a woman confronting the pressures of war and resistance, surely reflect the conflicts the authors themselves experienced. These were women who sought both personal validation and autonomy as well as professional recognition as artists in their own right, yet who continued to identify with society’s prescriptions for women. As noted earlier, Langgässer’s letters bring out the contradictory impulses in her own life as she attempted to unite the seemingly irreconcilable parts she wished to play as a wife and mother and as a writer. A similar ambivalence may be seen in various facets of Malraux’s life. She yearned for independence on the one hand, yet submitted to social expectations on the other. Courtivron attributes Malraux’s unconventionality to her intelligence and her family background, which placed her outside French culture. She characterizes Malraux as ‘a rebel against social conventions from childhood whose multicultural background had taught her to accept painful contradictions, an intellectual who felt more comfortable with books and ideas than with tea parties and who rejected the young men approved by her family’ (‘Other’, p.35). Malraux herself cited two women, both physicians, who fascinated and impressed her as a young girl because they challenged society’s prescriptions of domesticity by having careers (Perrein, p.18).22 In describing the various factors that ultimately led to the break-up of the Malraux marriage, Alfred Goessl and Roland Champagne take note as well of Clara’s strong sense of self (p.225). Nevertheless, for all of her independence, Malraux could not escape the weight of tradition that defined women’s roles in her time. Witherell reveals that Malraux explained her setting aside of a writing career by saying that she had internalized the criticism she had always received from male family members, such as her father or husband (p.225). Ironically, Malraux’s personal qualities of strength and intelligence and her activism, so evident in her participation in intellectual and resistance circles, do not seem to have carried over to her female protagonist, Lucienne. As an interpreter, translator, and political activist, Malraux indeed won the respect of many male writers with whom she came in contact. Her descriptions of the writers’ congresses she attended with André during the early 1930s read like a Who’s Who of the period (Malraux, Bruit, IV, 265-69; V, 104-09). At the Second International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture, ‘many intellectuals flocked to Clara for her ideas’ (Goessl and Champagne, p.221). Yet the shape of Malraux’s short story of the French underground differs markedly from that of her own personal narrative concerning her clandestine work for Neu-Beginnen and other organizations. Malraux’s remarks in her memoir give the impression that, for her, resistance indeed broke down some gender 21

Louis Aragon,’Les Rencontres’ (Chance meetings), in Servitude et grandeur des Français: Scènes des années terribles (Servitude and greatness of the French people: scenes of the terrible years) (Paris: La Bibliothèque française, 1945), pp.7-38 (p.22). 22 Witherell cites a passage in the first volume of Malraux’s Le Bruit de nos pas (p.79) that indicates that, ‘even as a child, Clara Malraux began to be aware of the pressures on women in our century to adopt a relatively passive posture’ (pp.229-30).

178

barriers. She claims that the men with whom she worked in the underground assigned her important responsibilities, and she implies that she won the men’s respect, asserting that she was able to discuss and argue with them about critical issues (Bruit, V, 58). Her remarks give every appearance that in her view clandestine work held the possibility of reshaping gender roles. As previously discussed, however, historians have concluded that actual gender equality within these movements was not as extensive as women recalled it to be. Nor were women’s and men’s experiences acknowledged in the same way after the war, as Malraux’s own experience demonstrates. While she was moving from hiding place to hiding place and also working for the resistance, André spent the first three years of the occupation, from fall 1940 to 1943, writing books about art. During this period, he lived first on the Riviera and later in a chateau in St. Chamant in the Corrèze with Clotis and their two sons. When he did join the resistance in March 1944, he became a maquis leader. From September 1944 to March 1945, he led the Brigade Alsace-Lorraine as ‘Colonel Berger’ (Courtivron, ‘Resistance’, p.26). When Clara assumed even more responsibility with Neu-Beginnen in late 1940, she did so a full three years before her husband; however, few people are aware of her as a resister. In any event, one might raise the question of why Malraux gives Lucienne’s resistance such a different cast from her own personal experience. The author’s characterization of Lucienne as weak and her use of stereotypes and melodrama would suggest that she was making a bid to appeal to a reading public that would have generally expected wartime heroines to conform to the ideal of the good wife and mother, not the combatant. Moreover, the prevailing notion of resistance as political violence and as ‘men’s work’ would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for Malraux to turn this female figure into a political strategist or a saboteur. Prevailing social mores are readily apparent in the figure of Lucienne, who values the men’s organized and militant operations over her own efforts to shelter people. These same conservative social and cultural attitudes about what a woman should be would have likewise guided the thinking of the masculine literary world of which Malraux was a part. Like the other writers in this study, she chose a course that might bring her into the fold of established authors. The forms of opposition based within the home so closely resembled women’s daily chores and routines that they were virtually invisible as resistance. Even women themselves later failed to perceive their actions as resistance because their deeds did not match standard concepts of resistance as political terrorism. Moreover, many women who engaged in such illegal activity at home often did so spontaneously and on an individual basis or in affiliation with small groups, not in conjunction with the formally organized networks. Lacking an association with the larger movements, women who merged resistance with their private lives were rendered still less noticeable as opponents of Nazism, and the possibility of their contributions being acknowledged after the war dimmed even more. In its surface appearance the clandestine activity of women at home could be said to resemble that of female liaison agents inasmuch as both groups of resisters disguised their subversive tasks behind various feminine roles and functions. Yet there were also critical distinctions between these two forms of anti-Nazism. Escape was not easy from the fixed location of the home, and therefore these resisters potentially faced greater risks than female agents. Another difference was that women who cared for a family, tended a household, and worked for these illegal movements had relatively fewer opportunities to break

179

out of traditional roles than did the couriers and agents, who had more mobility. Finally, a unique feature of women’s opposition within the home is the extent to which it was interwoven with, indeed was dependent upon, the resister’s social network of friends, family, and neighbours. As the next chapter will demonstrate, such personal relationships maintained their meaning and value for female resisters. These bonds appear as the touchstone of many resistance narratives by women.

180

Chapter Nine Bonds of Communion: The Emotional Context of Resistance

Mais, ai-je su rendre pleinement ici, l’angoisse qui nous habita quatre ans durant? Elle était, cette angoisse, comme une sorte de chant intime qui, parfois, s’intensifiait.1 [Clara Malraux, La Maison ne fait pas credit]

Socialized to consider the needs and the well-being of other people, women brought to all forms of resistance, from public protest to less visible acts within private spaces, a sense of responsibility for emotional connections with family and friends. In honouring such relationships even as they participated in the French and German resistance movements, women conformed to social mores, but they also found in these bonds a source of support and sometimes even the motivation for their illegal work. As the anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo argues, women, lacking access to the hierarchical structures of various social institutions that provide men with rank, come to be defined not by their positions within social groups but by motherhood and their relationships to men. ‘Women, then, are conceived almost exclusively as sisters, wives, and mothers.’2 The Personal Narratives Group, in considering the form of women’s autobiographies, echoes Rosaldo’s view, saying, feminists have long noted the special reliance of women upon the resources of networks of family and kin, and the important role women play in nurturing and maintaining such networks. Indeed, this reliance may well be a function of women’s relative powerlessness, their lack of access to more formal and institutional routes to 3 influence, and as such a survival strategy shared with other relatively powerless groups.

The various interpersonal ties that generally define women’s identity would in many respects define their resistance as well. Certainly, within the German and French resistance organizations women did not often have the chance to make their way up through the ranks and into positions that would free them from caregiving responsibilities. Therefore, their resistance activity would embrace customary obligations and also personal connections with others. The words of Dumont illustrate the extent to which such attachments were bound up with women’s resistance work. She recalls that 1942 was the worst year for her as an organizer of French women for the communist underground. Not only did she live with the fear of arrest and police searches, which necessitated constantly changing her identity and her address, ‘mais être 1

2

3

(But did I know how to render completely here the anguish that dwelled inside us during these four years? This anguish was like a kind of intimate song that sometimes intensified) Clara Malraux, La Maison ne fait pas credit (Paris: Bibliothèque française, 1947; repr. Paris: Temps Actuels, 1981), p.9. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, ‘Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview’, in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp.17-42 (p.29). Interpreting Women’s Lives, ed. by Personal Narratives Group (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p.20.

coupée de ma région, de mes amis, de ma famille, cela me fut très dur’ (but to be cut off from my region, my friends, and my family was very difficult for me) (Coudert and Helene, p.59), she remarks. Research supports the notion that women’s anti-Nazi activity could not be disentangled from social connections. There is evidence that strong friendships and love relationships played a crucial role for everyone, but especially for women, in developing solidarity and furthering resistance in both France and Germany.4 In his article entitled ‘Resistance as Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, Struggles for Civil Society’, historian Michael Geyer puts human connections at the heart of the German resistance. He proposes a concept of resistance aimed at ‘reconceiving human bonds’ within a culture that fostered and indeed thrived on rending apart relationships and at a sense of ‘collectivity’.5 Such ties grounded women in the real and the human even as the confusion of war and resistance tore at their lives. Resistance narratives such as Thomas’s short story ‘L’Arrestation’, Andreas-Friedrich’s diary Der Schattenmann, Triolet’s novella Les Amants d’Avignon, and Simone de Beauvoir’s novel Le Sang des autres enable one to see how an awareness of the value of human connections inevitably informed women’s subversive work. The female resistance figures in these texts are mothers, wives, daughters, friends, and lovers. Their definitions of self are relational, and thus their affiliation with other people remains paramount even as resistance demands new behaviours of these women. Female (and male) resisters came up against a complex interplay of emotions as they confronted the possibility of physical torture and death, lived with ever-present uncertainty, experienced psychological pressures, and felt constant concern about placing family members and friends in jeopardy, observes Eck (p.219). The war and commitment to the underground threatened and sometimes finally severed personal bonds, and so the need to protect such ties took on greater than usual significance for people. In Thomas’s short story about the French communist movement, ‘L’Arrestation’, the author invents a caring daughter’s affection for her mother, while Andreas-Friedrich recreates in her diary the closeness between herself and Jewish friends who fell victim to the Holocaust. Although the women figures display bravery in these two narratives, the authors do not deliberately highlight acts of courage or heroism, exploring instead the concern and worry, the fear and terror, the grief and sadness that seeped into the lives of French and German resisters. Other narratives merge a story of lovers with the activities of resistance. Romantic relationships are located so centrally in Triolet’s Les Amants d’Avignon and Beauvoir’s Le Sang des autres that issues related to the French underground more or less take second place as the authors suggest the fragility of intimate attachments in wartime. The care and empathy that women authors frequently interpret as the motivation behind a woman’s illegal activity, as seen earlier in the narratives of Duras, Langgässer, and Malraux, may extend to individuals whom the resister already knows or may reach out more broadly to strangers for whom the resister feels compassion. The importance of sustaining various social connections figures prominently in women’s oral testimony as well. Helene 4

5

See ‘Woher nehmen mutige Menschen im Alltag und im Extremfall ihre Kraft? Zwischen Anpassung und Widerständigkeit’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 26 August 1994, Wolfgang Heuer auf der Tagung der Evangelischen Akademie Hofgeismar, cited in Hervé, p.125. Michael Geyer, ‘Resistance as Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, Struggles for Civil Society’, Journal of Modern History, 64, suppl. (1992), S217-41 (p.S226).

182

Jacobs, who gave friends money and helped them cross the German border into Holland and Switzerland, comments: ‘Diese erste Phase meiner Tätigkeit gegen die Nazis war also ein rein persönlicher Einsatz für Menschen, mit denen ich eine enge Beziehung hatte’ (This first phase of my activity against the Nazis was therefore a purely personal effort for people with whom I had a close connection) (Szepansky, p.63). Karin Friedrich (-Hess) similarly links Onkel Emil’s initial undertakings to friendship. The circle began its work in 1938 by helping friends who were in danger, she explains: ‘Da wir viele jüdische Freunde hatten, ergab es sich von selbst, daß wir ihnen beistanden. Der “Widerstand” war also anfangs ein rein menschliches Eintreten für Verfolgte’ (Since we had many Jewish friends it automatically followed that we assisted them. ‘Resistance’ was therefore at first a purely human act on behalf of the persecuted).6 Ties to other individuals might be even less direct than what Jacobs and Friedrich (-Hess) describe. Tilly Spiegel, for instance, cites the example of an Austrian farmwoman who came to the aid of a man who appeared at her door, wrapped in a torn blanket and asking for bread. The woman said she helped him because she thought of her five sons away at the front and imagined what might happen to them in the same situation.7 Women’s narratives delve into the resistance experience to expose the sorrow, the hurt, and the terror that informed illegal work. Writers put a human face on anti-Nazi activity by replacing the dispassionate political rhetoric and the catchwords of resistance with a close attention to the pain, grief, fear, and other feelings that pervaded the day-to-day existence of individuals involved in these movements. Official resistance discourses that emphasize patriotism or national goals or cherished ideals have distanced readers from the ways in which involvement in the underground had an effect on an individual’s psychological and emotional state. The private dimensions of war and subversive activity have been omitted from standard discussions of the resistance because such expressions of feeling would undermine the assumption that a soldier or a partisan was waging a battle for a just and noble cause. As Fussell demonstrates in Wartime, the messiness of war was exactly what various governments were at great pains to avoid showing to their publics. To portray honestly the gruesomeness or the suffering of combat would be to take serious chances with losing popular support for the war effort. But women, barred from the front lines and lacking acceptance as chroniclers of war, had the freedom to bring their own concerns and their own reality to the telling of war and resistance. The immediacy of women’s narratives provides a unique view onto an emotional landscape that has rarely been revealed. Ironically, even as the expression of feelings serves the valuable function of laying bare for readers what it was like to participate in resistance, this strategy reinforces existing gender standards by singling out the woman resister as one who is aware of emotions and by identifying her with the ability to nurture. German women, remarks Tröger, communicate the ‘inferno of burning cities’ in vivid imagery because the culture allows them ‘to express their fears and anxieties and to admit their helplessness’ (p.286). In the tension between a resister’s expression of emotion and her obvious strength and power can be seen the ambivalence that many a woman resister must have experienced as she tried to accommodate opposing ways of being within herself. 6 7

Karin Friedrich–Hess, Letter to the author, 13 November 1985. Dokumentationsarchiv der Österreichischen Widerstandsbewegung Zeitungsordner, IIIa, qtd. in Tilly Spiegel, Frauen und Mädchen im österreichischen Widerstand (Women and girls in the Austrian resistance) (Vienna, Frankfurt, and Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1967), p.19.

183

The vivid contrast between Aubrac’s Outwitting the Gestapo and Frenay’s The Night Will End highlights the differing modes of discourse women and men have employed in describing personal and romantic relationships against the background of the resistance. Women weave these bonds into their treatments of the underground, while men attribute little meaning to feelings or ties with others because these considerations have no relevance within the mythic parameters of a resistance constructed exclusively as soldiering or battling an oppressor. Fashioning an account of resistance that cannot be separated from her identity as a wife and mother, Aubrac structures her memoir around the nine months (May 1943-February 1944) that she was pregnant with her second child while working for the French underground. Aubrac opens her narrative from the point of view of a mother, not a resister, as she describes waking up in a London hospital on 12 February 1944 and seeing her newborn daughter for the first time: ‘As I wake up, everything is hazy. Hospital odors, whispers . . . I raise my head, then, lifting myself on my elbows, I see an iron bassinet hanging from a rack. Inside is a sleeping baby, its head down at the end. Our daughter . . .’ (Outwitting, p.9). Locating her resistance role within the bonds of family, she later remarks without hesitation that she was involved in the French resistance as part of a couple. Moulin was well aware that her and her husband’s commitment to the underground was bound up with their commitment to each other, she notes (p.64). Even as she recounts her often dangerous duties for the French underground, Aubrac continually returns to her love for her husband, concern for the couple’s eighteen-month-old son, and anticipation of her second pregnancy. Frenay’s memoir, on the other hand, is guided from the outset by a sense of responsibility for the nation’s welfare and its future, a desire to safeguard a particular set of values and ideals, and a focus on the course of the war. He rarely takes note of individuals outside the movement. Frenay’s approach is consistent with his interpretation of his own role as that of soldier and founder of the organization Combat. The strict separation between the part he plays as a resister and his role as a future husband and father is evident in his brief mention of the woman he would eventually marry. Frenay notes that during the time he was painstakingly building his underground network, he met Chilina Ciosi; however, she literally and figuratively remains in the background of this narrative. The couple was separated much of the time due to the dangers associated with Frenay’s work and Chilina’s health problems. Relating an encounter in early 1943 with Chilina, whom he had not seen for a year, he writes: In my note I told her I was in Toulouse and that I very much wanted to see her. [. . .] We talked halfway through the night. It was then that I asked her, ‘Chilina, if God wished us to have a child, how would you feel?’ She replied, ‘I’d be the happiest woman in the world.’ Little Henri was born October 6, 1943, while I was still in Algiers. For the safety of both mother and child, he was declared to be of unknown parentage and placed in a foundling home until the end of the hostilities. After the Liberation we had no trouble recognizing him. (p.236)

This is as close as Frenay comes to elaborating on his love for Chilina, and this is the only mention of his son. The extent to which Frenay considers these relationships as something separate from his role in the French underground becomes more evident when this passage is contrasted with Aubrac’s description of the birth of her second child at the beginning of her memoir. Men’s roles as resisters, combatants, strategists, and organizers require them as narrators of the resistance to step outside such interconnecting webs of relationships. As in Thomas’s ‘FTP’, the concept of anti-fascist resistance as part of the revolutionary struggle to build a new French society also guides ‘L’Arrestation’, another short story from the collection Contes d’Auxois. In much the same way that Thomas expands the political 184

discourse of resistance through the character Alice (in ‘FTP’), who reveals the emotional context behind the partisans’ work, here too she broadens the political language that forms the foundation of ‘L’Arrestation’. The story follows the conflicting inner feelings and thoughts of Anne Roger, a member of the communist resistance, as she becomes enveloped in terror when the Gestapo arrest her at her mother’s hospital bed, in the opening pages of the story, and then search Anne’s apartment for evidence of illegal political activity. When the two Germans attempt to apply more pressure by taking the young woman to their headquarters for further questioning, the story abruptly concludes. The author fashions the story around a complex interplay of emotions: Anne is by turns terrified at the impending situation once she is caught in the Gestapo’s snare, and saddened and pained at having to abandon her frail mother when the Germans take her away for questioning. Personal feelings count for as much as ideology here. Thomas literally frames ‘L’Arrestation’ with Anne’s concern for her mother. As the story opens, the narrator describes the ailing, older woman’s efforts to open her eyes and smile at her daughter, who sits at her bedside. The care that Anne continues to show for her mother as her own situation grows more dire exemplifies the way in which female resisters remained immersed in family and personal relationships and continued to feel a sense of responsibility for others, even though it might seem that work for these movements would have freed them from such traditional commitments. The connection between mother and daughter threads its way throughout this story, and Anne seems to draw inner strength from this bond when she is faced with the Gestapo’s interrogation and an uncertain fate. Before Anne goes off to the Germans’ offices, she sends a message to her mother by way of the housekeeper so as to allay her mother’s fears, and thus the framework is complete. Anne’s heartfelt concern literally encompasses the references to her strong political loyalties; her identity as a resister is one and the same with her identity as a daughter. Thomas empowers Anne by characterizing her as political, thereby permitting her protagonist to escape the social mores that defined politics as exclusively ‘men’s work’. In her devotion to Communism and to the communist resistance Anne stands out from the other women figures in this study, whose anti-Nazism is often characterized as highly personal and removed from political considerations. Although most French and German women of this era did not identify with political issues, as discussed earlier, the female protagonists in the narratives of Keun, Langgässer, Malraux, Triolet, and Beauvoir profess so little interest in and seem so isolated from the politics of resistance that they resemble stereotypes of the apolitical female. Although Thomas offers little insight into Anne’s character, the protagonist’s allegiance to Communism is well established. Her bookshelf contains volumes of Karl Marx’s writings, and her resistance has a political basis. While it is impossible to gauge the extent of Anne’s responsibilities for the French underground (the author leaves the exact nature of the group and Anne’s assignments undefined), ideological belief does inform her place in the movement. The author’s use of communist rhetoric tones down some of the story’s emotional impact and thereby validates Anne’s political identity. For this protagonist, the meaning of resistance extends beyond individual concerns to an effort to save humanity. In the same way that the saboteurs in ‘FTP’ unite in solidarity to erect a more equal society, so is Anne’s anti-Nazism defined by ‘toute la souffrance et le misérable bonheur de la terre’ (all the suffering and the wretched happiness of the world). The vast human toll exacted by the

185

war is also intrinsic to this picture, as seen in Anne’s reflections on the many young men dying in combat at the time.8 Thomas lowers the emotional pitch of the story in another way, through the voice of a narrator who maintains distance between Anne and the reader. Unlike the sentimental mode of expression that Keun, Triolet, Malraux, and Beauvoir adopt as they immerse their women characters in the ‘feminine’ realm of feelings, Thomas’s objective journalistic style removes the reader somewhat from the protagonist’s emotional concerns. Even when the terror descends on Anne with the sound of the Germans’ bootsteps, the narrator, not the protagonist herself, describes her situation. Further, the moment is conveyed less as a coming-to-grips with conflicting emotions of fear, worry, and courage (although it is that) than as a test of Anne’s value as a resister: ‘C’est maintenant seulement qu’elle allait savoir réellement ce qu’elle valait’ (It was only now that she was going to really know what she was worth) (p.45). The Gestapo’s ransacking of Anne’s apartment is likewise presented in a detached, matter-of-fact tone as if to demonstrate, in accordance with the standard rhetoric, that the resistance is a struggle between the enemy occupier and the French: Ils étaient entrés. Ils avaient demandé où était son bureau et elle les avait menés à sa chambre. Et maintenant elle les voyait ouvrir tous les tiroirs, en jeter le contenu sur le tapis. De temps en temps, ils butaient sur un papier, le lisaient attentivement, le rejetaient parmi les autres. (They’d entered. They’d asked where her study was, and she’d led them to her room. And now she was watching them open all the drawers and throw the contents on the carpet. From time to time they stumbled upon a piece of paper, read it attentively, and threw it down among the others.) (p.47)

The evenness of the narrator’s tone of voice here and throughout the narrative directs the reader’s attention away from singularly personal matters and toward the larger picture of resistance as a political and humanitarian cause. Yet even as Thomas identifies Anne with the greater struggle of the working class and mutes the emotional impact of her story, the author brings home the fact that the work of the underground did not take place within a sterile space devoid of emotional concerns. The character Anne presents a contrast to the stereotype of feminine weakness when she displays mental toughness in the face of the Gestapo’s terror. As Anne controls her emotions and channels her personal anguish and fright into an effective challenge to the two Germans, she transforms her feelings into a test of her strength. Upon hearing the Germans’ approaching bootsteps, she thinks to herself: ‘Elle savait maintenant que les pas bottés venaient pour elle. Est-ce qu’elle avait peur? Avoir peur, c’est consentir à sa peur, ce n’est pas la ressentir’ (Now she knew that the bootsteps were coming for her. Was she afraid? Being afraid means accepting her fear; it doesn’t mean feeling it).9 In a notably masculine image of a boxer prepared to withstand an opponent’s blows (pp.48-49), Thomas suggests the extent to which resistance requires Anne to draw forth unusual qualities from within herself. The author focuses on Anne’s emotional responses not as a means of limiting her protagonist’s identity to that of a female whose feelings rule her actions, but as a way of allowing her character to escape the implication that such emotions are a sign of weakness. As much as the figure of Anne poses a challenge to a socially prescribed femininity, Thomas does pay lip service to convention in various ways. The overriding image of this woman resister is that of a daughter who is worried about her aged mother. For one, the 8 9

Edith Thomas, ‘L'Arrestation’ (The arrest), in Contes d'Auxois (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1943), pp. 43-50 (pp.43-44). Thomas, ‘L’Arrestation’, p.45. Emphasis in original.

186

reader cannot be certain of the extent to which her illegal work allows her to break out of a traditional identity because the author leaves the nature of Anne’s resistance role so vague. Further, Thomas subtly distinguishes between the underground as an arena for men and the private spaces typically occupied by women. Like Triolet’s Juliette Noël, who is described as out of place in the French underground because she really belongs in a dream world of love and romance, Anne is also said to inhabit a ‘foreign’ world as a woman resister. As she is led away by the Germans, the narrator remarks: ‘Elle entrait dans un monde inconnu, le monde de la bête chassée et du chasseur, où toutes les feintes, tous les pièges sont bons’ (She entered an unknown world, the world of the hunted animal and the hunter, where any decoy, any trap can be used) (p.46). A male resister’s encounter with such risks would likely be taken for granted and not even noted, yet Anne’s lack of belonging in this dangerous realm is underlined. Turning from bonds of family to those of friendship, one finds that Andreas-Friedrich reconstructs her emotional world in Der Schattenmann by recreating the presence of close Jewish friends whom Onkel Emil tried to rescue. In her case, feelings of loss and mourning become inextricably bound up with resistance. For all of its underlying political significance, this diary of life inside the Third Reich is as much about love and affection and how these feelings transform into sadness and grief as it is about anti-Nazism. In an entry dated 4 February 1944, the author poignantly highlights the significance of family and personal ties, and the resulting pain, as the fabric of relationships is rent apart by Nazi terror: So unvorstellbar ist das Grauen, daß die Phantasie sich sträubt, es als Wirklichkeit zu begreifen. [. . .] Könnten wir denn weiterleben, wenn wir wirklich begriffen, daß unsere Mutter, unser Bruder, unsere Freundin, unser Geliebter—fern von uns unter unfaßbaren Leiden zu Tode gefoltert wurden? (The horror is so unbelievable that the imagination struggles against comprehending it as reality. [. . .] Could we go on living, then, if we really understood that our mother, our brother, our girlfriend, our lover—while far away from us—was tortured to death under conditions of inconceivable suffering?) (Schattenmann, p.126)

As if to counter the horror she describes here, Andreas-Friedrich artistically weaves throughout the diary a tapestry of images and motifs that bring to life the presence of various friends and evoke the author’s feelings for them. She portrays Margot Rosenthal, the woman who claimed not to miss her home while she was living underground, and fouryear-old Evelyne Jakob, who along with her parents and grandparents shared a late Christmas celebration with Andreas-Friedrich and members of Onkel Emil on 30 December 1942. The author also depicts the Besenmädchen (broom girls), women forced out of their jobs by racial laws and permitted only to sweep streets or to clean buses. But more important, this diary recasts the standard elements of resistance rhetoric by bringing to light the essence of these relationships and the emotional cost of trying to preserve them. The figure of Dr. Heinrich Mühsam, one of Andreas-Friedrich’s dearest friends, reappears throughout two-thirds of the diary. Mühsam, a former editor at the publishing house where Andreas-Friedrich works, is, by the author’s description, a homely, rumpled-looking, older man. He has lost his job because he is Jewish, and now passes the time by typing letters to himself. Andreas-Friedrich writes of their friendship: Ich mag ihn gern, den Dr. Mühsam. Wir sprechen die gleiche Sprache. Wenn wir uns am Tisch gegenübersitzen, lieben wir uns beinahe. Nur küssen mag ich ihn nicht. Aber das wage ich ihm nicht zu sagen. Man kann nicht Leute kränken, die es ohnehin schwer genug haben. (I like Dr. Mühsam very much. We speak the same language. When we sit across the table from each other, we almost love each other. Yet I do not wish to kiss him. But I don’t dare tell him this. One can’t hurt people for whom things are already difficult enough.) (Schattenmann, p.12; 27 September 1938)

Riding home in a taxi with Mühsam, she claims to ‘forget’ the proscriptions of race and kisses her friend (p.20; 15 October 1938). The motif of this friendship continues as the 187

writer begins another entry with a litany of names of eight people, including Mühsam, whom Onkel Emil has helped. Here, the author recaptures the goodbye she shared with this man, who was deported two days earlier. She writes that at this moment she suddenly realized, ‘daß ich ihn küssen möchte. Heute! Morgen! Alle Tage’ (that I would like to kiss him. Today! Tomorrow! Every day!) (p.91; 3 July 1942). Later, when the word secretly comes out of Theresienstadt that Mühsam, sent on to Auschwitz, has died there, the sombre refrain reappears: ‘Heinrich Mühsam. Treuester der Freunde. Warum habe ich dich nicht öfter geküßt? Er starb! Als Gelähmter in einer Gaskammer. Starb “als Soldat und brav”’ (Heinrich Mühsam. Dearest of friends. Why didn’t I kiss you more often? He died! As a handicapped person in a gas chamber. Died ‘as a soldier and a worthy person’ (p.176; 12 November 1944). Andreas-Friedrich’s vision links the destruction of a people with the destruction of an individual human relationship (in much the same way as did her earlier remarks when she rhetorically asked if the man who died in the couple’s apartment should be ‘burned in the stove, sent up in smoke, blown out the chimney’). By revealing her affection for Mühsam—and the ultimate tragedy of their friendship—the journalist magnifies the brutality of Nazism and implicitly criticizes Nazi racial policy. She also uncovers here the layers of emotion that were the resister’s reality. The intense fear and sense of powerlessness that resisters experienced is equally a part of the texture of feelings that women writers capture in their narratives. Andreas-Friedrich takes the reader down into the depths of a resister’s fear, not in terms of its psychological repercussions, as seen in Duras and Langgässer (‘Untergetaucht’), but rather the literal physical sensations that overtook her in a moment of utter fright.10 Participating in one of Onkel Emil’s last resistance acts, the NEIN-Aktion (‘No’ action), Andreas-Friedrich goes out in the middle of the night on 19 April 1945 to paste up leaflets and to chalk NEIN in public places as a protest against the war. A feeling of terror descends upon her entire being when she hears a nearby patrol of soldiers: Meine Hände sind eiskalt. [. . .] Mir ist, als wären meine Füße am Erdboden festgewachsen. [. . .] Mit übermenschlicher Anstrengung ziehe ich den linken Arm in die Höhe. Zwänge ihn in die Tasche und umklammere das Päckchen mit den Flugblättern. Leibesvisitation, Verhaftung, Standgericht, Galgen . . . wirbelt es mir durchs Gehirn. Wie mit Nadeln piekt es unter der Haut. [. . .] Mir sind die Knie schwach geworden. (Schattenmann, pp.259-61) (My hands are icy cold. [. . .] I feel as if my feet had grown fast to the ground. [. . .] With a superhuman effort I lift my left arm. I force it into the bread bag and clutch the packet of leaflets. Search, arrest, court-martial, gallows—it all tumbles through my head. I feel a pricking as of needles under my skin. [. . .] My knees are ready to fold under me.) (Berlin, pp.268-69)

Andreas-Friedrich engages her readers in the immediacy of her feelings to such an extent that there is no room here to consider resistance in any other terms, political or otherwise, than as the emotions that physically engulf a resister’s being. Just as Duras makes the reader privy to the unglamorous and unheroic details of her own experience as a resister by relating her feelings of shame and revulsion before Rabier, so too does Andreas-Friedrich undercut the legend of the underground. The journalist does not hesitate to reach beyond surface appearances to present a disconcerting truth of pain and loss and to maintain the focus of her gaze on the individual, not the national welfare. Returning to her account of the bombing that killed Ursel and Eva, one can read AndreasFriedrich’s anxiety about her two friends in the distress of this scene, one that must have been a painful and routine sight for those living in Berlin and other heavily bombed cities: 10

See also the remarks of Rosel Bibo, who says that she lived in constant fear (Szepansky, pp.232-33).

188

‘So stehen wir und schauen—wir und die Fremden—, wie sie Balken für Balken, Stein für Stein von der drückenden Last abtragen, die Ursel Reuber und Eva Gerichter auf den Schultern liegt. Stein für Stein. Balken für Balken. Vorsichtig und entsetzlich langsam’ (Schattenmann, p.211) (We stand and watch—we and the strangers—as timber after timber, stone after stone is removed from the crushing weight that lies upon the shoulders of Ursula Reuber and Eva Gerichter. Stone after stone. Timber after timber. Carefully, and horribly slowly) (Berlin, p.216; 22 March 1945). As difficult as it is for readers to picture these agonizing images, Andreas-Friedrich’s deliberate, exacting style as she records this process of unearthing the victims personalizes what might otherwise be a sanitized description in an official account of the war or the German resistance. She portrays the death of actual people whom she knew, not nameless figures. Like Duras and other women writers, AndreasFriedrich dispels some of the myths surrounding resistance by transforming an essentially sterile battle to preserve ideals and values into a profound sense of hurt. A look at male writers’ handling of personal relationships and emotional experience in their narratives makes more apparent the points at which women’s texts take an entirely different direction. Men place the bonds of friendship within the context of the larger political struggle, and emotions become a source of power that drives one’s resistance. Ties with other people are put in service against Nazism, so that friends, then, become comrades-in-arms. The common fight against Nazism, not the emotional give-and-take of relationships as they are encompassed within clandestine activity, concerns male writers in their resistance narratives. Schlabrendorff, describing one of his ‘closest friends’, Nikolaus von Halem, as ‘outstanding among the earliest fighters against Hitler’, does not share any personal interactions between himself and Halem as much as he enumerates the notable personal qualities (‘his integrity, lofty sense of honor, and unswerving loyalty to his friends’) that ‘made him [Halem] one of the most distinguished and valuable members of our group’ (p.58). Frenay’s memories of friendships formed in Combat are consistent with his initial characterization of himself and his fellow resisters as soldiers and revolutionaries. Friendship is borne out of the political fight in which all are engaged. Frenay remarks of his colleagues at the May 1943 meeting to unite Combat with Libération and Franc-Tireur: ‘Most of my colleagues were absolute strangers to one another. Yet so powerful was the bond that our common struggle forged among us that no more than a day was required for the birth of strong friendships’ (p.184). Returning to Wolf’s novel, here friendship appears indecipherable from the effort to bring down Nazism and to establish a classless society. A scene in which Hans and a fellow resister, Stummel, meet at the brook and then embrace before they part is in no way personalized, although the men are good friends. The emotions of this moment go unexamined, and yet the two men’s highly dangerous work surely places their friendship in jeopardy. Instead, the closeness they briefly share serves to underline their roles as fighters and revolutionaries. In saying goodbye, each man considers for a moment his life and their friendship and the movement in which they are involved. The men’s belief in their political cause allows them to put up with living abroad, losing comrades who defect, facing the threat of tanks, and maintaining utter secrecy about their work (p.160). It is actually Hans’s role as a courier of communist propaganda that unites him with other people. Although he begins to feel isolated in the Czech border town because he is separated from friends, comrades, and homeland, he suddenly realizes that through his underground activity he is an integral part of a chain that connects him with members of the communist resistance and also with the

189

men and women battling the Spanish fascists (‘er ist wieder eingeschaltet in den glühende Strom der Arbeit und der Kameradschaft’ (he again becomes adjusted to the glowing current of work and comradeship) (p.162)). Günther Weisenborn recreates a personal friendship in much the same detached way in his prison memoir, Memorial. Weisenborn, a playwright and freelance writer who collaborated with Brecht on the play Die Mutter (1933; The mother), belonged to the German resistance from 1937 to 1942. The Nazis burned his writings in 1933, but Weisenborn continued to work and publish under a pseudonym. His volume of memoirs, which he wrote partly on the backs of paper bags while in jail, contains, in addition to discussions of his early career, brief sketches about his underground work for Rote Kapelle and his three-year imprisonment for political activity during the latter years of the war. Weisenborn’s portrait of his friend H., the head of their resistance group, is guided by antiNazi rhetoric, not the language of emotions and shared understanding. Much as the classconscious Emile’s friendship with Julep inspires the journalist to join the maquis in Aragon’s short story ‘Les Rencontres’, friendship is here again interpreted as a means to achieve victory over Nazism, for Weisenborn depicts H. as an enemy of Hitler. Once the Nazis arrest H. for illegal political activity and sentence him to death, he comes to represent in Weisenborn’s narrative less an emotional attachment for the writer than a hope for a better world if the German resistance succeeds in its endeavours. One particular entry, dated 31 August 1939, exemplifies the way in which the connection between the two men stands for the underground’s efforts to oppose Nazism. Weisenborn describes a conversation with H. while sailing on Wannsee Lake in Berlin one evening, shortly after the two men became involved in the anti-Nazi movement. This scene presages the war, which would begin the next day. In the dusky twilight on the sailboat, Weisenborn can barely see H., whom he describes as ‘einen Deutschen, einen Mann, einen Freund am abend vor dem Krieg’ (a German, a man, a friend on the evening before the war). The writer immediately establishes here the political role of his friend, who as a German is involved in a battle against other Germans who are Nazis. Weisenborn goes on to recall H.’s words about the impending war and the meaning that the potential conflict holds for the entire world. As Weisenborn concludes this vignette, he notes that Hitler, who started the war, did not survive it, but, the author solemnly and unemotionally adds, ‘auch nicht sein Feind und mein Freund’ (neither did his enemy and my friend).11 Weisenborn’s is not a commentary on emotional closeness with another person but rather on the significance of a friend, a resister, who opposes Nazism. Weisenborn binds the notion of friendship even more closely with resistance when he records his encounter with H. shortly before his friend’s execution. As moving as Weisenborn’s words are in this instance, his description of H. is so detached and he identifies H. so thoroughly with the ideals of the German resistance that the young man appears more as an abstract symbol of anti-Nazism, that is, the noble values the movement was said to represent, than as a fully realized human being with feelings and concerns and relationships with people. In this sketch of their chance meeting in the basement of the Gestapo’s offices, Weisenborn, who himself had been arrested and was returning from a hearing, relates this incident without any expression of emotion or acknowledgement of the bond between the two of them: 11

Günther Weisenborn, Memorial (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1948), pp.17-18.

190

Er stand hoch und schlank und mit sehr bleichem Gesicht. Es war kurz vor seiner Hinrichtung. Er trug den Kopf hoch. [. . .] In seinem Gesicht war eine Art eiserner Heiterkeit, die einen heiter machte. Er kniff mir ungesehen ein Auge zu, und ich blinzelte zurück. [. . .] Hier stand er im Gestapokeller, jung, begabt, sauber, ein gefolterter Bote der zukünftigen Welt, er hatte jetzt alles hinter sich, Kampf und Qual. Es war sein Lebensabend hier im Keller, hier stand die Hoffnung der Deutschen, kühn, rein und jung. Am Tag vor Weihnachten hängten ihn Deutsche in Plötzensee. (He stood tall and slender, and his face was very pale. It was shortly before his execution. He held his head high. [. . .] There was a kind of strong serenity in his face that made you serene. Unnoticed, he winked at me, and I winked back. [. . .] Here he stood in the basement of the Gestapo offices, young, gifted, upstanding, a tortured messenger of the future world. Now he had everything behind him, the struggle and the agony. Here in the Gestapo’s basement he had come to the end of his life. Here stood the German people’s hope—daring, pure, and young. On the day before Christmas, Germans hanged him in Plötzensee.) (p.82)

In Weisenborn’s account of his final meeting with H., the ideals of a better world, the fight against Nazism, and the hope for a new Germany overshadow any idea of friendship as an emotional or a psychological connection, thus reinforcing the notion of resistance as political struggle. Whereas women frankly admit to their fears, weaknesses, sadness, and pain, as if peeling back layer after layer of emotion generated by their resistance experiences, men associate feelings with the means to do battle. Emotion is interpreted as a kind of force that spurs them further into the anti-Nazi fight. Walter Seitz tells Köhler that the risks entailed in his clandestine responsibilities for Onkel Emil were equivalent to those involved in rock climbing. Translating his fears into a flirtation with the danger involved in a sport, he claims he enjoyed challenging and testing himself to see whether he could prevail over a dangerous, opposing force, be it the face of a mountain or the Nazi regime. As Seitz tells it, it is precisely the fear and the peril that motivate him in his illegal activity (Köhler, p.202). Frenay, in a rare allusion to his anxiety about his work for the French movement, similarly employs a sports metaphor to suggest that he was sometimes fearful. He notes his nervousness upon receiving a discharge from the army as he began to undertake the daunting task of erecting a clandestine network. Looking back on this moment from a distance of some thirty years, he writes: ‘But in the pit of my stomach it was fear that I felt, the fear of a young boxer the first time he enters the ring’ (p.45). Like Seitz, Frenay interprets his own apprehension as a kind of personal test. The metaphorical expressions of Seitz or Frenay detach these narratives from emotion and reinforce the concept of resistance as an effort to overpower or defeat the enemy. This is not to say that women never looked upon clandestine activity as an opportunity for exciting new experiences. Some women, particularly in France, were attracted to the element of risk or adventure in the resistance, which, relatively speaking, was less dangerous for them than for German women. In an interview with Kline, Aubrac attributes her decision to become a resistance leader and a member of a rescue command to her ‘adventurous nature’ (‘Lucie’, p.33). For Malraux, the resistance signified ‘une sorte de renaissance, un dépassement de moi-même [. . .] ce qui m’a toujours poussée à agir d’une certaine façon, c’est l’envie d’être à la hauteur des exigences’ (a kind of rebirth for me, a surpassing of myself [. . .] what always drove me to behave in a certain way is the desire to be up to what is expected) (Bartillat, p.127). Malraux nevertheless rejects any notion of heroism, remarking in another interview, ‘l’héroïsme vous savez, j’ai toujours eu horreur de ça. Mais la prise de conscience d’un être dans une situation maximale, voilà ce qui me passionne’ (heroism, you know, I’ve always loathed that. But the way one comes to realize oneself in an unknown and risky situation, that is what I have a passion for) (Garcin, p.37). Even when women did view resistance as an opportunity to test themselves or to be daring and 191

adventurous, they did not necessarily bring this perspective to their narration of the resistance, possibly because such a slant would not have accorded with social expectations. Men characterize other emotions, such as pain or sorrow, as forces that drive their effort to defeat Nazism. In commenting on his feelings of grief for lost comrades, Frenay calls forth the presence of these individuals as their images rise before his eyes. But his lament is not a sad refrain that draws the reader into his emotional state, as Andreas-Friedrich’s narrative does. While Frenay’s sorrow over the loss of his friends is genuine, there is nevertheless an underlying, and possibly more pressing, concern for the welfare of the movement. These people are ‘comrades’, ‘brothers and sisters’; they are fellow soldiers of the French resistance. Thus, when forty resisters are arrested in the southern zone, Frenay’s pain is tinged with shame at what he sees as his failure as a leader: ‘I felt ashamed to be free, spared in the battle into which I had led them and in which they had fallen’ (p.131). Another wave of arrests in Paris in early February 1942 results in the imprisonment of forty-seven fellow members of the underground. A devastated Frenay worries about their fate, but at the same time the network itself is at stake: ‘the complete destruction of our movement in the northern zone. Crushed and disheartened, on the verge of tears, I saw the entire edifice that we had so painfully constructed over the months lying in ruins and rubble’ (p.149). People continued to live their lives as best they could during the war, and attachments to others remained important to them, indeed, may well have kept up their spirits and provided a grounding force in the midst of violence, social upheaval, deprivation, and hardship. Triolet and Beauvoir legitimate the value of another form of intimacy during wartime in Les Amants d’Avignon and Le Sang des autres, as they portray romantic relationships against the background of the French underground. These two narratives are unusual in that they depict resistance in ways that allow the otherwise traditional female protagonist to test the boundaries of gender more dramatically than do most of the other resisters in this study. Despite creating unusual opportunities for these characters to break free of confining feminine roles, the two authors’ stereotyping and sentimentalizing of their protagonists, combined with the romantic themes, inevitably draw the women resisters back into the more limited identity of the woman who seeks to be little more than the companion of a man. Known for her delineation of existentialist philosophy through prose fiction, Simone de Beauvoir embraced many literary forms in her body of work, including the novel, the short story, drama, the memoir, and the philosophical-theoretical essay. Like many other writers of this period, Beauvoir expressed admiration for such modernists as Kafka, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, and she also cited the innovative techniques of Dos Passos, Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, and Hemingway as influences on her own style (Bair, p.229). A devotion to self-discovery was a constant theme in nearly all of Beauvoir’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction. She focused her attention on other subjects as well, such as the complexity of personal relationships, life and death, loneliness and alienation, and choice and responsibility to the self and society. Beauvoir received the Prix Goncourt in 1954 for one of her major works, Les Mandarins (1954; Eng. tr. The Mandarins, 1956), a novel about French intellectuals after the liberation that drew heavily on the author’s own life. Le Deuxième sexe (1949; Eng. tr. The Second Sex, 1953), her exhaustive study of woman’s subordinate position throughout history, had a profound effect on people’s thinking about women’s roles,

192

and it moved Beauvoir into the forefront of feminist ranks. She came to be more widely recognized for her analysis of the female condition than for any of her other writings. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), born in Paris, was the eldest of two daughters in a well-to-do, middle-class family. Beauvoir and her sister received a convent education, but at age fifteen Beauvoir determined to go her own way and gave up her Catholic faith. Despite her parents’ and teachers’ efforts to discourage her unconventional choice to study philosophy (they feared the dangerous influences of this ‘man’s field’), Beauvoir ultimately had her way (pp.91, 93). She enrolled as a student of philosophy in the Sorbonne, where, at age twenty-one, she met Sartre, another philosophy student. She would become his longtime companion and remain with him until his death in 1980. Beauvoir became part of the circle of left-wing French intellectuals who surrounded the renowned existentialist philosopher. After completing her studies in 1929, she taught philosophy in the lycée in Marseilles, Rouen, and Paris until 1943. During the decade between 1929-1939, the pair pursued their teaching and writing without expressing any interest or becoming involved in the urgent social and political events brewing in France and other countries that were attracting other intellectuals, like Simone Weil and Nizan.12 Although Beauvoir and Sartre sympathized with many communist issues, they never belonged to the Communist Party, nor were they fellow-travellers. With the publication of her first major novel, L’Invitée (1943; Eng. tr. She Came To Stay, 1949), Beauvoir gave up teaching to concentrate on her writing. The war brought hardship and scarcity to her life as it did to most everyone else in France, but little actually changed for her socially or professionally. Beauvoir spent the war years in Paris pursuing her writing; she wrote two philosophical essays, a novel, and a play. She kept her same routine, seeing friends and family, teaching, and writing in cafés, particularly the Café de Flore (Bair, pp.241, 248). Beauvoir also went on bike and hiking excursions and spent time reading in the Bibliothèque nationale.13 Beauvoir did not participate in the French resistance and, according to her biographer, Deirdre Bair, she claimed not to know anyone personally who belonged to the movement (pp.243-44). Her brief and limited contact with the underground came entirely through her association with Sartre. Sartre’s experiences in a prisoner-of-war camp for nine months after the defeat of France and his discussions with the other prisoners had heightened his political awareness. Beauvoir had assumed that after his return to Paris in March 1941 the couple would pick up where they had left off, writing, talking and exchanging ideas (p.248), but Sartre had become interested in organizing a resistance circle of leftist intellectuals. He intended to collect information and write it up for distribution in the form of pamphlets and news bulletins. His group, named Socialisme et Liberté (Socialism and Liberty), lacked a focus from the outset, however, because the members could neither decide what type of information would be most useful nor how to transmit it effectively to other organizations. The circle held meetings that consisted more of philosophical and political debate and discussion rather than direct action, and the activities members did engage in were usually characterized by

12

Anne Whitmarsh, Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp.13-14, 24. 13 Carol Ascher, Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), p.31.

193

ignorance and recklessness. Sartre’s short-lived group remained isolated and ineffectual, and it disbanded before the year came to an end.14 Beauvoir participated in these resistance efforts to the extent that she accompanied Sartre to meetings of Socialisme et Liberté as the small network tried to recruit members, make contacts, and gather information to disseminate (Beauvoir, Prime, p.383). She excused the couple’s limited participation in the French resistance by asserting that it was difficult for networks like Sartre’s to operate and have an impact in the German-occupied North. She also blamed the circle’s weakness on the composition of its membership, which was mainly middle-class intellectuals who lacked experience in resistance or other political activity (p.396). Throughout Socialisme et Liberté’s turbulent and brief existence, Beauvoir maintained her aloofness from the politics of the occupation and the resistance, as is evident in her description of her own role vis-à-vis Sartre and his group: ‘I continued to act as his [Sartre’s] trusted critic, both for his writing and for his action. My main concern was for his safety—and mine, of course—and I thought it my duty to plot all the possibilities to insure that nothing happened to either of us’ (Bair, p.252). Beauvoir says in her memoir The Prime of Life that she later had the opportunity to attend meetings of Comité National des Écrivains, the organization to which Thomas, Aragon, and Triolet belonged. However, Beauvoir did not become active in this group because, she writes, Sartre was taking part in its meetings and her presence would have been superfluous since she agreed with his beliefs and ideas (p.445). Both Beauvoir and Sartre were published authors by the end of 1943 and widely recognized as France’s leading intellectuals. During the occupation they continued not only to produce novels but also to write and stage plays that were well received in the latter years of the war. (Bertrand Poirot-Delpech notes how sharply the experiences of Beauvoir and Clara Malraux, both from well-to-do backgrounds and both the partners of prominent French intellectuals, differed during the war.15) In contrast to the uncompromising stance of Thomas, who refused to submit to the censorship requirements, or even of Triolet, who justified publishing her work legally and illegally as an act of resistance, Sartre and Beauvoir cooperated with German authorities by turning over their writings to the Nazi Propagandastaffel. Their works were published by Éditions Gallimard, whose chief, Gaston Gallimard, was charged with collaboration during the purge after the liberation (he was acquitted) (Bair, p.260). Sartre was also writing for the collaboration journal Comœdia at this time. In late winter of 1943, a friend of his who was an editor there got Beauvoir a job at Radiodiffusion Nationale (National Radio), the official state station controlled by the Germans. As ‘writer-producer’, she was responsible for choosing songs, stories, and poems of the medieval period for a one-hour broadcast each week. Beauvoir was well aware that the station’s journalists and announcers were considered collaborators (pp.279-80). Although neither Sartre nor Beauvoir was formally charged with collaboration when the war ended, they later faced criticism that their activities had given the appearance of supporting the Germans and the Vichy regime. Beauvoir defended her actions, claiming, ‘we did what we had to do to live, and that was all’ (p.242). In a 1985 interview she explained that she had 14

Bair, pp.250-53. See also Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. by Peter Green (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962), p.397. 15 Le Monde, 9 February 1979, qtd. in Denis Boak, ‘Clara Malraux: “La difficulté d'être”’, Essays in French Literature, 16 (1979), 89-110 (p.108).

194

taken the radio job because she needed the money and that she had done nothing wrong (p.280) Beauvoir continued to carefully and deliberately shy away from political commitment until 1970. In the decades following the war she produced the major works that would establish her as one of France’s foremost writers and thinkers. Yet even as Sartre increasingly turned to political activism and she accompanied him on his travels in Europe, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union at the invitation of foreign governments during the 1960s, Beauvoir concentrated on ‘two concerns: my commitment to Sartre and to my writing’, as she told Bair. Beauvoir believed that as a woman her views would not be taken seriously (pp.362-63). Moreover, the focus of her life had always been her writing. By the late ‘60s, however, as she came to realize that the status of French women had scarcely improved over the previous twenty years, she began to speak out and write about women’s issues and other political matters. Throughout the ‘70s and mid-’80s she added her name to various petitions that condemned the repressive measures of particular foreign governments. She died in April 1986. Beauvoir’s Le Sang des autres marked a new, ‘moral’ phase in the author’s consciousness as she began to investigate ethical and moral topics related to individual responsibility and personal freedom in her novels and essays.16 Le Sang des autres, which is concerned with the philosophical issues raised by anti-Nazi resistance, is not devoted to one woman’s illegal involvement, but is, instead, the existential journey of a man and a woman as they gradually come to terms with their personal and social responsibilities and finally participate in the French underground. Beauvoir chose the subject of the resistance as a stage on which to investigate certain existential problems because the movement provided a suitable social context in which to examine the individual’s connection with others: The Blood of Others was afterward described as a ‘novel about the Resistance.’ In actual fact it took shape in my mind without any direct impulse from events; the theme I wanted to tackle was there, but I found it difficult to excogitate a ‘social’ act which embodied it. It was that October, when I had actually begun to write the book, that the notion of using guerilla [sic] attacks and reprisals forced itself upon me. (Prime, p.432)

When Beauvoir began the novel in October 1941, her intention was for the underground press Éditions de Minuit to publish it. She completed the novel in early 1943; however, it was not published until 1945.17 Although the essential plot of Le Sang des autres is straightforward, the structure of the novel is a complex interplay of various points of view. The two protagonists, Jean Blomart and Hélène Bertrand, confront the existential question of how their lives and actions inevitably have an impact on other people. Not only does the narrative shift back and forth from Jean’s first-person perspective (odd-numbered chapters) to Hélène’s third-person point of view (even-numbered chapters), but within each chapter there is movement between the past, recalled in flashbacks, and the present. Adding to the novel’s complexity are other strands of narrative as events are told through the consciousness of the minor characters. The novel begins as Jean sits at the bedside of Hélène, who has been mortally wounded during a mission to free a friend from a prison camp. While he watches the dying woman 16

Beauvoir’s novels, essays, and plays of this ‘moral’ period (1943-1946) include: L’Invitée, Le Sang des autres, Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946; Eng. tr. All Men Are Mortal, 1955), Les Bouches inutiles (1945;Useless mouths), and Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944; Pyrrhus and Cinéas) (Ascher, p.49). 17 Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, eds., Les Écrits de Simone de Beauvoir: La vie, l’écriture (Writings of Simone de Beauvoir: the life, the writing) (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p.128.

195

through the night, Jean recalls his entire life in flashbacks, from his bourgeois upbringing, to his repudiation of his family background and his embrace of the Communist Party, to the final days with his lover, Hélène. In the past, he extricated himself from all political or emotional involvement and refused to commit himself to any kind of action, even when a leader of the Austrian resistance urged the French to organize against the Germans. Yet once the war begins, Jean does sign up and is sent to the front. He eventually forms a resistance circle that bombs German trains and headquarters. After Hélène witnesses the harshness of the occupation and the victimization of the Jews, she joins his group of saboteurs, shedding her complacency and self-centredness for a committed action that ultimately costs her her life. The pair works out the issues of guilt and freedom and responsibility on both a personal level with one another, and also on a political level as participants in the occupation and resistance unfolding before them. Although Beauvoir herself did not consider Le Sang des autres a ‘resistance novel’, it does contribute to a general understanding of the French resistance. The author experienced the occupation first-hand, and her personal situation and relationships with Sartre and others inspired various scenes in the novel (Bair, pp.221-22, 237). Moreover, the book’s unusual vividness captures the disturbing feeling of aloneness, desolation, and terror that emerged out of the German occupation of France. The starkly realistic, nearly photographic images of the streams of refugees, the empty streets, the executions of hostages, and the rounding up of Jews create a sense of what the average person’s daily reality was actually like during the occupation as the pulse of French life ebbed away under repressive German measures. Finally, in Jean’s commitment to violence the novel raises some of the most troubling ethical and moral questions that resisters had to confront. Is it just to kill French collaborators when the ‘real’ enemy is the Germans? Is killing not simply appropriating the enemy’s methods? Is the use of violence justifiable if French people suffer in the process? In much the same way that Duras or Andreas-Friedrich records a resister’s shame, or Langgässer (‘Untergetaucht’) leaves uncertainty and doubt about how a resister’s noble actions came to be corrupted, Beauvoir also hints at disturbing ambiguities that have seldom emerged within the clear-cut terms of official resistance rhetoric. It would appear that Hélène’s unorthodox role in the underground has the potential to reframe her identity as a female. The members of Jean’s group sabotage German-controlled buildings, trains, warehouses, and factories by planting home-made bombs, and they plan secret runs to liberate fellow resisters from prison camps. Hélène’s participation frees her from the social taboos that barred women from combat-related activity. In its focus on a terrorist organization and political violence, Beauvoir’s novel is a departure from the other narratives discussed here that mainly portray forms of resistance defined by women’s caretaking functions and everyday responsibilities. Beauvoir distinguishes her female protagonist in other ways, as when she dramatically reverses gender roles. Higonnet and others have noted that while Jean runs the clandestine circle from a distance, where he is safe, Hélène is located directly in the middle of a risky operation that will take her life (Introduction, p.16). Beauvoir ‘also questions the identification of masculinity with strategic planning and heroic sacrifice and femininity with the preservation of life and horror of shedding “the blood of others”’, Higonnet and others suggest (p.16). By placing her female protagonist in such a ‘masculine’ context, the author calls into question social mores related to women and combat. To be sure, Beauvoir’s characters function more as the abstract concepts the

196

author is examining, or as representations of particular ideas, rather than as fully rounded characters. Although Beauvoir’s rather weak characterization does not allow much insight into Hélène and the ways in which resistance changes her18, one can assume that these dangerous runs demand of her many of the same qualities other female resisters had to find within themselves: focus, courage, steeliness, sharp thinking. Yet as with many of the other female resisters described in this study, especially Juliette Nöel and Anne Roger, uncertainty also surrounds Hélène concerning the extent to which she actually belongs to this world of political violence. Like other women narrating the resistance, Beauvoir acknowledges gender norms in depicting her female protagonist, and the result is a resister who displays many personal contradictions. Despite the boldness and toughness implied by her role as a saboteur, Hélène’s behaviour otherwise mimics that of the stereotypical frivolous female. She is by turns innocent and naïve, unreflective, and obsessed with finding a man, qualities that undercut her believability as a resister. Like Juliette Noël, Hélène is frequently referred to as a ‘child’ or a ‘girl’. Her looks are said to resemble a child’s, and her impetuous behaviour and frankness are childlike as well. The words ‘child’ or ‘girl’ suggest emotionality and simplicity, and imply that Hélène does not have the capacity to think rationally or to act bravely. Throughout much of the novel (until she commits to Jean’s group), in fact, Hélène displays an interest mainly in simple pleasures and her own contentment. Her selfishness extends to the political, and in this respect she does not so much mirror the outlook of many women of this era who did not identify with politics, as she appears stereotypically emptyheaded and apolitical. When faced with a political question, Hélène reacts by declaring her boredom or disinterest. Early in the novel, when Jean asks her what she does care about, she responds that she loves chocolate and bicycles.19 Consumed with self-interest, she maintains: ‘Les gens que je ne connais pas, je m’en balance’ (Sang, p.49) (I don’t care a rap for people I don’t know20). Nor can Jean convince Hélène of the necessity of combating fascism. The scope of her world is so narrowed down to her own personal needs and desires that she concludes repression would be better than fighting for freedom, because she does not want to see Jean killed (Sang, p.149). Finally, she appears to have no clear sense of personal identity, for she is convinced that only a man can bring meaning to her life. She behaves coquettishly and is not above manipulating men to get her way. The critic Cornelia Wagner similarly characterizes her as a stereotypical female.21 For the greater part of the novel this apparent superficiality prevents Hélène from confronting the larger issues of life outside of herself, including the resistance. The author’s need to affirm social mores is evident not only in the contrasting elements that make up Hélène’s identity but also in the character Madeleine, who wants to join the militia and fight against the fascists in Spain’s civil war, and who asks Jean for help to get across the frontier. Jean later learns that Madeleine was not issued a rifle because she was a 18

In later years, Beauvoir herself acknowledged the characters’ one-dimensionality, which she blamed on her overly abstract treatment of the material (Prime, pp.431-32). 19 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Sang des autres (The blood of others) (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p.69. 20 Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others, trans. by Roger Senhouse and Yvonne Moyse (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948), p.56. 21 Cornelia Wagner, Simone de Beauvoirs Weg zum Feminismus (Simone de Beauvoir's path to feminism) (Rheinfelden: Schnäuble, 1985), pp.106-07.

197

woman, and was sent instead to work in a kitchen (where she accidentally spilled boiling oil on her feet and had to be hospitalized for six months). It may be argued that in these two female figures Beauvoir is expressing criticism about women’s subordination to men and suggesting the possibility that women could liberate themselves from confining feminine roles.22 On the other hand, given the historical controversy surrounding such a volatile topic as women and combat, as well as Beauvoir’s own traditional upbringing, it seems more likely that the author was not eager to challenge strict taboos by radically redrawing the female identity to portray women as gun-wielding militants. Beauvoir’s novel shares with most of the other resistance narratives under consideration here a concern to validate the importance of emotional connections as a motivation for resistance. The author not only highlights the sustaining power of love in the midst of war, but she also transforms human feeling into the impulse for anti-Nazi action. Hélène’s empathy and concern for a Jewish friend match the response described by former resisters in oral interviews and by Andreas-Friedrich, Langgässer (‘Untergetaucht’), and Malraux in their written narratives. The impetus for Hélène’s resistance, sparked first by a genuine concern for the welfare of anonymous persons who are suffering, soon narrows down to focus on the well-being of a close friend. Over a relatively short period of time, Hélène shakes herself loose from her usual self-absorption and begins to develop a deeper moral and ethical consciousness. She observes the effects of France’s defeat as long lines of refugees pass her on the road, and begins to comprehend the impact of anti-Semitic measures when the French police begin rounding up Jews in her neighbourhood for deportation. A friendship is now endangered by the police actions, for Hélène’s Jewish friend, Yvonne, is at risk. Hélène plans to ask Jean if he can arrange to help Yvonne cross the Demarcation Line into the unoccupied zone. A final scene propels the protagonist into more forceful resistance as her feelings of outrage and pity intensify when she witnesses a policeman snatching a child from its mother’s arms. With the cries of the mother ringing in her ears, Hélène asks Jean to let her join his resistance circle, and she thus enters into the cause for which she gives her life. Beauvoir’s Le Sang des autres parallels Triolet’s Les Amants d’Avignon in the portrayal of a romantic relationship played out against the backdrop of the resistance, as well as in the implication that such bonds provided support for people in these trying times. Jean and Hélène’s love is a central focus of Le Sang des autres, as seen in the growth of their feelings for one another over the course of the novel. The pair moves from her early games and strategies to conquer Jean and his refusal to love her, to a mature, mutual understanding. After Hélène joins Jean’s group, the pair reconciles and he lets himself truly feel love for her, which he had not been able to do earlier. Hélène also develops more selfinsight, recognizing that her past attempts at manipulating Jean were not loving (Sang, p.220). She finally grants Jean the freedom to be himself, without attempting to coerce him into loving her, and she is able to love him all the same. In the two characters’ closeness, Beauvoir emphasizes the significance of such personal connections even under the threatening conditions of resistance and war. In Les Amants d’Avignon, the centrality of Juliette and Célestin’s relationship is underscored by the novella’s structure, for the romantic meeting that takes place in Avignon falls in the centre of the narrative (it is the fourth of the eight sections). The mystical setting of 22

See Higonnet and others, who express a related view (Introduction, p. 16).

198

Avignon, a city that the narrator says is known for love and for the ‘immortal’ couples who have walked its streets, adds to the romantic mood by distancing the two resisters from the brutality of the occupation and resistance (pp.47-48). While they are in Avignon, the pair’s actions have little to do with their clandestine work, almost as if they have been swept away into another dimension by the city’s fairy tale-like ambience. As Célestin and Juliette dine together on Christmas Eve and, at Juliette’s suggestion, pretend they are lovers, their game soon evolves into genuine feelings for one another. While they tour the city on Christmas day, their imaginings quickly become indistinguishable from their own real emotions. Walking arm in arm, they are ‘attentifs à ne pas s’éloigner l’un de l’autre, pas d’un pouce’ (p.52) (concerned only to stay together, and not be separated an inch) (Lovers, p.37), remarks the narrator. In a bistro they hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes. As they read a series of inscriptions on the stone walls in the tower of the old fort that poignantly detail a great love affair between a man and a woman who met there over a period of eleven years, Juliette is moved to tears. She sees before her the romantic ideal that she herself cannot attain in her own war-torn world. Juliette’s unsuccessful attempts to realize her dreams of romance by falling in love with Célestin indicate the problems that members of the underground faced when they were attracted to a resister of the opposite sex.23 There was such a need for utmost secrecy within these movements that men and women who become romantically involved with one another did so at great risk. Such a relationship could place both partners in jeopardy. (Afraid of what she might reveal if questioned or tortured, Juliette ponders the risks in meeting Célestin a second time, and after she does so finds the Gestapo waiting to pick her up (Amants, p.83)). In showing the power of war and resistance to tear apart the fabric of personal bonds, Triolet is also validating the need for connection to another human being. Men writers treat such intimate bonds in much the same way as they do friendships, that is, by placing the subject of love and romance within the political-military framework of their narratives. The nuances of feeling evident in women’s resistance texts are largely absent in men’s. Women create images of loved ones: Duras records the laughter of Robert L., and Andreas-Friedrich mentions her fondness for her companion, Leo Borchard, or they relate stories of romantic love, as in Beauvoir and Triolet, and thereby revise official resistance discourses. Weisenborn takes a contrasting approach when he distances his wife, Joy, entirely from the discussion of his clandestine activity.24 Several times in his Memorial he addresses her directly in the form of letters he writes from prison, but for the most part she remains a vague presence, not even as fully realized a figure as the resistance leader H. or some of Weisenborn’s prison comrades. The reader receives only glimpses of the couple’s closeness, although Weisenborn describes their love for one another and notes his pride in his wife for remaining strong in spite of now being alone. After he has been sentenced to death, he assures Joy through his letters that their love will not die (4 February 1943), and several months later (21 July) he recalls the time when they met and fell in love. Yet he 23

See Schwartz, who briefly discusses love relationships between male and female resisters within the French underground (‘Partisanes’, p.142). 24 Beatrix Herlemann reports that Joy began to work for Rote Kapelle in 1939. Among her responsibilities were transcribing radio speeches by Winston Churchill or Thomas Mann into shorthand and preparing translations from Dutch. ‘Die Einheit in der Vielfalt: Die Frauen in der Roten Kapelle’, in Frauen gegen die Diktatur— Widerstand und Verfolgung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (see Wickert, above), pp. 98-105 (pp.98, 101).

199

does not attempt to sketch an image of her or to establish her presence on the page. In his only mention of the couple’s happiness, he reminds the reader of the political struggle and his role in it: ‘Wir haben für unser Glück viel Bitterkeit zahlen müssen, aber je härter das Schicksal mich anpackte, desto weiter öffnete sich mein Herz der Weichheit, der Liebe, der Poesie. Die Schlacht ist geschlagen, ich darf sagen, daß ich mich anständig gehalten habe’ (We’ve had to pay for our happiness with a lot of bitterness, but the harder fate treated me, the more receptive my heart became to tenderness, love, poetry. The battle is done. I’d say I’ve behaved respectably) (Memorial, p.136). Political rhetoric finally determines Weisenborn’s meaning. In Wolf’s Zwei an der Grenze, politics define the love between Hans and Loni. The story of their growing closeness actually contributes to the basic definition of resistance as political action. Throughout much of the novel, the pair lacks any shared personal understanding; they are essentially divided by her lack of political knowledge and insight. What gradually redefines their relationship and draws them together is Loni’s dawning political consciousness. Initially a political innocent, her outlook on the world is circumscribed by the simplicity of farm life and the village. The narrator acknowledges Loni’s ignorance, noting Hans’s disappointment when she does not understand the revolutionary message of Gorky’s novel The Mother (1906) (p.94). As her awareness develops and Hans eventually confides in her about his role in the communist resistance, she becomes not only his wife but also a Kameradin (comrade) (p.346). She goes on to lead a factory strike. The transformation of Loni from a simple farmwoman into a participant in the class struggle highlights the importance of doing battle against fascism and of the workers’ revolution, for now Hans has a genuine partner to sustain him in his political work. Through Loni’s evolving awareness, Wolf points up the necessity of placing politics, in this instance the collective needs of a class of people or the welfare of the German nation, before individual interest or love for another person. In an effort to distance her female protagonist from a ‘masculine’ resistance, Beauvoir employs the strategy, already noted in the narratives of Thomas, Triolet, and Malraux, of creating distinct female and male spaces within the underground, identifying men with organizing capabilities, politics, and violence, and portraying apolitical women as expressing emotion and showing concern for others. Beauvoir, then, interprets Hélène’s aid to Yvonne as empathic, not political. While her efforts to spirit her friend to the unoccupied zone via Jean’s contacts represent a valid motivation for resistance, this narrative strategy locates Hélène’s helping activity in the foreground. Jean’s existence, in contrast, is grounded in political thought and the politics of resistance. He has belonged to the Communist Party and done trade union work, he reflects on ways to fight fascism, and he debates with fellow resisters the reasons for using violence. Finally, he instigates highly visible sabotage actions against the Germans. His group explodes munitions trains and blows up requisitioned hotels in the belief that these dramatic displays will give the French people hope and the will to resist further (Beauvoir, Sang, p.179). Much like his counterpart Célestin, in Les Amants d’Avignon, Jean takes his public identity from politics, and he has access to political language and events in a way that Hélène does not. Hélène stands apart from Jean’s world in that even when she appears to overcome her disdain for politics and she gravitates to the resistance circle, she still shows herself to be separated from the political meaning behind the terrorist activity that she has now chosen. Beauvoir does not endow her female protagonist with a political voice, which further con-

200

tributes to Hélène’s exclusion from the politics of resistance. The first half of Hélène’s section of the narrative contains few political references.25 Late in the novel, after Hélène has traded her former complacency for a broader perspective on the world, her words and behaviour still appear narrowly limited to self-interest. Her commitment to Jean’s circle is questionable, especially given her previous preoccupation with her own happiness and her woeful lack of interest in the social and political conditions around her. She does not reflect at any length on her decision to join the group, and knows little more about its work than that the members help people (Beauvoir, Sang, p.219). Her newfound awareness is virtually instantaneous: ‘Brusquement, les mots montèrent à ses lèvres; elle n’avait pas pensé à les dire, mais ils s’imposaient avec tant d’évidence qu’il lui sembla être venue là exprès pour les dire: Jean, je veux travailler avec vous’ (p.219) (Abruptly, words rose to her lips; she had not thought of saying them, but they thrust themselves on her so forcibly that it seemed to her that she had come there on purpose to say them. ‘Jean, I want to work with you’) (Blood, pp.281-82). In Le Sang des autres, Beauvoir’s choices as to who has a way into (and who does not) the political discourse of resistance suggest boundaries that are very much determined by gender. The elements of love and romance and sentimentality overlaid on Beauvoir’s Le Sang des autres and Triolet’s Les Amants d’Avignon reinforce the female character’s identification with a traditional femininity. In Beauvoir’s novel, once Jean faces up to his personal and social responsibilities he becomes effective in both the public-political and the private-personal realms. Jean declares his love for Hélène but also continues to lead the saboteurs, giving orders and making decisions. Célestin is likewise capable of embracing both of these very different worlds. Despite his melodramatic proclamations of love for Juliette, he remains identified with the resistance (Triolet, Amants, p.56). Recognizing the impossibility of truly falling in love with Juliette, because his clandestine work must come first, Célestin expresses regret about the time they have spent together, calling it un jeu terrible (p.62) (a terrible game) (Lovers, p.45). The depth of his feeling is still evident at the conclusion of the novella, when, searching for a way to reunite the two of them, he suggests that Juliette go into hiding with him. Célestin shows himself to be emotionally involved with Juliette in an authentic way, yet by obeying the orders of the group’s leader and taking a plane to safety, he maintains his identity as a resister, not as Juliette’s lover. He moves freely back and forth between his illegal work and his love for Juliette, but the reader’s fundamental understanding of who he is comes from his actions for the resistance. Unlike the men, the female protagonists in these two narratives take their identities primarily from their romantic attachments, which frequently overshadow their membership in the underground. Hélène, for all of her bravery and unconventional resistance role, still perceives herself through her relationship with Jean. Although she assured Jean that she was not joining the resistance group on his account, her final words to him lead one to wonder how deeply she grasps the implications of her sabotage work. To her lover, who blames himself for her death, she now says of her engagement in the French underground: ‘Je te choisissais. Je ferais encore le même choix’ (Beauvoir, Sang, p.224) (I chose you. I would make the same choice over again) (Blood, p.288). The British literary critic Terry Keefe likewise expresses reservations about the genuineness of Hélène’s new stance, suggesting that it is ‘more of a reaction to individual distress’, and noting that it is made ‘apparently 25

See Terry Keefe, Simone de Beauvoir: A Study of Her Writings (London: Harrap, 1983), p.162.

201

spontaneously, in Blomart’s presence and perhaps specifically in his name’ (p.166). Hélène does not break new ground here as a female terrorist or as a committed resister who sacrifices her life for a cause. Rather, the author bypasses the significance of her protagonist’s involvement in the French movement, and Hélène’s courageous actions become, at best, a product of her personal and romantic relationship with Jean. However much her sabotage activities may have drawn her out of conventional womanly roles, Hélène’s declaration of love secures her again within the stereotypical feminine concerns of love and romance. In Triolet’s hands, Juliette’s feelings and emotions are not integrated with her resistance, but instead separate her from a genuine identification with the movement. Whereas Andreas-Friedrich’s sorrow appears to be an inextricable part of her clandestine activity, or Duras’s feelings for Robert L. impel her to continue in the French underground, Juliette’s emotional expression appears quite separate from the meaning of resistance. She fills the lonely, empty hours of assignments imagining romance and thinking about past love affairs and marriage proposals she has received. When Juliette does have the chance to articulate her thoughts about the resistance group’s work, she remains enclosed within her fantasy world, as seen in this telling juxtaposition of Juliette’s and Célestin’s words. While the couple is pretending to be lovers, Célestin tells her, ‘avant-hier, j’ai tué un homme’ (I killed a man day before yesterday), and Juliette responds, ‘—Ah! [. . .] je vous aime’ (Oh, [. . .] I love you). As he continues, filling her in on the details of the killing, she interjects, ‘C’est la guerre. [. . .] –On ne vous soupçonne pas? Je vous aime, je ne veux pas vous perdre’ (Amants, pp.49-50) (That’s war. [. . .] I hope no one suspects you. I love you, I don’t want to lose you) (Lovers, pp.35-36). Throughout the novella, Juliette despairs of ever attaining her romantic dreams. Triolet’s strategy of separating Juliette from the resistance supports the narrator’s continuing assertion that Juliette does not belong in the world of the underground but rather at her secretarial job, at home in the evening with her aunt and small son, and dreaming her ‘real’ dreams of love (Amants, pp.21-22). What predominates in Triolet’s portrait of a female resister, then, is less Juliette’s rising to the new challenges of clandestine activity than her desire to fall in love. Beauvoir’s Le Sang des autres is not as sentimentalized as Triolet’s novella with its melodrama, dreamy setting, and allusions to film stars and ill-fated lovers in great literary works, all of which seem calculated to heighten the novella’s emotional appeal to the popular imagination. Yet as Hélène draws closer to Jean and, consequently, nearer to the actual work of the French underground, Beauvoir characterizes their relationship in sentimental ways. When Hélène is about to leave on what will be the fatal mission, she tells Jean, who has just cautioned her about the extraordinary dangers this time around, that her personal happiness keeps her from being afraid (Sang, p.219). Here, the couple’s closeness becomes indistinguishable from their clandestine activity. For all of the risks involved in sabotage against the Germans, the couple’s final moments together are more nearly presented as romantic and joyous than dangerous or political. As Hélène prepares to depart for her final run, Jean bids her, ‘—prends bien soin de toi. [. . .] Et reviens vite. Il la prit dans ses bras: Reviens-moi’ (Sang, p.222) (take great care of yourself. [. . .] And come back quickly. He took her in his arms. Come back to me) (Blood, p.285). Such effusive displays of emotion dominate to such an extent in both Les Amants des autres and Le Sang des autres that Juliette and Hélène begin to appear wholly removed from the operations of the resistance. Such sentimentality, specifically as Jean and Célestin declare their love for Hélène and Juliette, respectively, draws the women back into the socially dictated feminine identity. For the two

202

men address these women not as fellow resisters but as lovers, and the men’s declaration of their feelings relocates the two women in recognizable roles as the companions of men. Many of the same tensions and countertensions that the other women writers in this study experienced were also present in Beauvoir’s life. She inherited the conservative, middle-class values of her family and her era, but her forceful personality and the intellectual opportunities she received placed her outside social conventions in many ways. The author’s description of her parents’ tradition-bound relationship highlights the extent to which the woman was seen as essentially an appendage of the man in France of the early twentieth century: At home, his [her father’s] pre-eminence was undisputed, and my mother, younger than he by eight years, willingly took second place. It was he who had introduced her to life and the world of books. ‘The wife is what the husband makes of her [. . .],’ he often said. My father enjoyed the greatest prestige in her eyes, and 26 she believed that the wife should obey the husband in everything.

As a product of her upbringing and social class, Beauvoir could not help but feel ‘convinced [. . .] of my sex’s intellectual inferiority, a fact admitted by many women’, as she observed (Memoirs, p.295). Writing about the young Sartre and Beauvoir, Bair asserts that, ‘in their society [in 1929], everyone was expected to follow conventions: as a man, he was expected to earn a living; as a woman, even though an educated one, she would never have been faulted had she married or returned home to be supported by her family (p.157). Beauvoir’s choice of a teaching career perpetuated the values with which she had been raised, for in the comfort and privilege of their civil service roles she and Sartre were living out the status quo and had no cause to question customary standards. In other respects, though, Beauvoir stood outside society’s expectations for what a woman should be. In her intelligence, drive, and clear sense of who she was, Beauvoir exhibited a degree of independence that ensured she would never conform entirely to what was demanded of her as a female. She identified with her father, who had so concerned himself with her education, rather than her mother, who ran the household and took care of everyday details (p.60). Although Beauvoir’s father very much encouraged his daughter’s intellectual pursuits, he was at the same time, she says, ‘obsessed by the “well-bred young lady” idea: it was a fixation’ (Beauvoir, Memoirs, p.178). He was proud of her achievements, but wanted his teenage daughter to fit in with the demure feminine image prescribed by French middle-class society. Simone recognized that she ‘cut a poor figure’ in social circles because she could not fulfil the superficial role that required her to attend teas, smile and act charming, engage in small talk, in short, pretend that she was merely an ‘ornament’ (p.178). It appears, in retrospect, that her awareness that she could not measure up to the norm allowed her some freedom to be herself. She had determined early on, at age fifteen, to be a writer because she held writers in high esteem and felt that a woman had a good chance of achieving notoriety in this area (p.141). A few years later, when she changed course and decided to study philosophy, she was motivated by the desire to be ‘one of those pioneers’, because at the time women who held a degree or a doctorate in philosophy were extremely rare (p.160). Beauvoir’s success at the university, where she competed with and sometimes outshone the male students, contributed to her certainty that she was the equal of the men around her. Beauvoir observes that she did not envy her fellow male students; she regarded them as 26

Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. by James Kirkup (New York: Harper & Row, 1959, 1974), pp.36, 37.

203

colleagues, not rivals. She was not aware that her position or status as a female was unusual; rather, she saw it as something that enhanced her place instead of making her an oddity or an outcast (p.295). Social mores assigned women a lesser status than men, but in many ways Beauvoir transcended society’s obstacles. As Bair suggests: ‘She had never known discrimination, she had never felt inferior, she had always been able to do everything she wanted to do, and no barriers had been placed in her way’ (p.325). As a strong and independent woman, Beauvoir was forced to straddle vastly different realms, never entirely conforming to what society expected of her as a female, yet never achieving complete autonomy, either. Beauvoir’s later contacts with intellectuals, notably in her personal and professional relationship with Sartre as well as her friendships with fellow philosophy students, likewise betray the insoluble contradictions she encountered as a woman determined to pioneer the ‘masculine’ field of philosophy. Looking back at the early years of her friendship with Sartre, she writes of her need to hold onto her goal of becoming a writer. Not only did she receive Sartre’s support in this, but he also planned to be actively involved in helping her realize her dream (Memoirs, p.340). She credited him with urging her to write Le Deuxième sexe. Sartre considered theirs to be a relationship of equals, and asserted that Beauvoir was the only person he knew who understood what he wanted to accomplish in devising a philosophical system.27 He asked her to critique all of his ideas as he developed them (Bair, p.144). In Beauvoir’s mind, Sartre regarded her as a person in her own right: ‘Sartre always tried to see me as part of my own scheme of things, to understand me in the light of my own set of values and attitudes’ (Beauvoir, Memoirs, p.340). Yet for all of the couple’s assertions about their equality, Sartre nevertheless took the lead in this partnership, and Beauvoir acceded to him (Bair, p.174). She never saw herself as the independent woman her achievements suggested, but rather, ‘her view of herself until the day she died was absolutely settled upon the idea that she was part of a couple, firm, fixed and inviolate’ (p.294). In the public’s mind, as well, they were an intellectual couple, and therefore Beauvoir felt her major responsibility was to stand by Sartre (p.463). Whereas she devoted careful attention to his writings, at his request, he did not reciprocate with the same close criticism of her work, according to Bair (pp.173-74). She sometimes willingly neglected her own writing when he sought her advice, once stopping work on her novel L’Invitée to help him with his major philosophical study, Being and Nothingness (pp.23334). Beauvoir also followed Sartre in his political thinking, as his friends recognized. She had established no political credibility of her own; her views on various issues were derived from Sartre’s positions (p.359). Her memoir indicates that she regarded him as her intellectual superior, not only in his breadth of knowledge but also in his single-minded desire to write books (Beauvoir, Memoirs, pp.340-341).28 In spite of Beauvoir’s own stature as a philosophy student and, later, as a philosopher, novelist, and essayist in her own right, her perceptions of her own lesser ability suggest the array of conflicting forces that pulled her in different directions: as a traditional woman, as a female intellectual forging new paths, and as a woman writing about political terrorism in the French resistance. 27

Jean-Paul Sartre, Life Situations: Essays, Written and Spoken, trans. by Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), pp.58-59. 28 See Ascher, who describes Beauvoir’s ‘subjective dependency’ on Sartre (p.23).

204

Women writers of the resistance portray female opponents of Nazism who are attuned to the ways in which subversive activity could not only disrupt or even shatter bonds with other people but also evoke an array of powerful feelings. Thus, the female resisters in ‘L’Arrestation’, Der Schattenmann, Les Amants d’Avignon, and Le Sang des autres are cast in dual roles as resisters and as emotional caregivers. Andreas-Friedrich (the resistance figure) and the fictional resisters Anne Roger, Juliette Noël, and Hélène Bertrand contribute to the underground, while at the same time they attend to the physical and emotional wellbeing of those whom they love and care for. In defining themselves relationally, these women display the inevitable contradictions between a traditional womanly identity and that of a resister. Resistance does endow these women with new power and a freedom that allows them to move beyond the limitations ordinarily imposed by gender. In various ways these female opponents of Nazism counter many of the stereotypes of woman as weak, passive, unconcerned with politics, or incapable of waging violence. Yet at the same time, all of these resisters are quite conventional figures. While the inescapable tension between the empowered resister and the traditional female brings to light the contradictory reality of the woman activist, it also suggests the extent to which customary social attitudes about gender roles held true even under conditions of war and resistance. The authors’ choices to highlight family, personal, and romantic relationships and to focus on emotional responses point up the power of social and cultural messages that communicated that women did not belong in the arena of war and violence and resistance. The authors’ narrative strategies ultimately limit the protagonists’ potential to escape a confining feminine identity. Attention to emotion and interpersonal relationships reinforces familiar images of womanhood that are perhaps not only indicative of the authors’ own middle-class backgrounds and their desire for acceptance within a masculine literary establishment, but also highlight the need to appeal to the outlook of a conservative readership. By choosing to cast resistance in such terms, however, the authors allow readers to perceive the human need for intimate connections, which could have lifesustaining power in a world filled with destruction and death. Moreover, the authors’ determination to paint such a vivid canvas of emotions—pain, love, anguish, grief, fear— breathes life into an otherwise sanitized resistance myth that has ordinarily been predicated on courage, heroism, and unattainable ideals.

205

Conclusion

Although the dramatic images of fearless female agents and partisanes may still retain some hold over the popular imagination, the ‘ordinary’ actions by German and French women have gradually gained wider acceptance as resistance since scholars have come to validate such activities as legitimate forms of anti-Nazism. What is nevertheless still missing from these two perspectives of resistance, that of political violence and that of everyday opposition, and what this study has attempted to bring out, is an understanding of how gender influenced not only women’s perceptions of themselves as resisters but also the choices they made in standing up against the Vichy and Nazi dictatorships. Women’s resistance literature conveys a sense of the social and cultural mores that women and men could not escape, although they participated in movements that gave every appearance of challenging many of the norms of their societies, particularly in terms of class and politics. As the writers discussed here shroud women’s illegal actions in silence or create narrative gaps that prevent resistance by women from being named as such, or as they stereotype or sentimentalize the female resister, they point up the weight of social expectations that enveloped women’s anti-Nazi activity. As unobtrusive as this resistance may at times appear or as contradictory as the female figures may seem, the narrative strategies of these writers address the power of often unspoken social messages to exert a presence, even at a time when gender standards appeared more fluid amid circumstances of war and resistance. Women’s resistance narratives suggest that while the gender system became more flexible during the war, it nevertheless still ensured women and men’s conformity to prescribed identities. The Nazi and Vichy regimes evoked in their family ideologies the social and cultural attitudes that were already well entrenched in German and French society in the early twentieth century and during the years between the two wars. Many customary peacetime roles carried over to resistance operations, and expectations about who should do what in these movements were communicated through a general understanding about appropriate functions for women and men. That German and French women resisters so easily succeeded in exploiting male authorities’ expectations of feminine behaviour in order to accomplish many illegal duties indicates just how deeply ingrained were these mores. Although men generally assumed the high-profile roles as resistance leaders, political strategists, and organizers, while women engaged in support functions and gave shelter to Jews and others in need, there were also instances in which male resisters took part in helping activities and women (in France) participated in paramilitary actions. These role reversals have largely been disregarded in order to uphold the resistance myth that men are fighters and women are caretakers, and that resistance is a violent political struggle, not a process of aiding victims. Here, again, it is easy enough to see gender standards being put in service to maintain cultural norms. Although women’s point of view on resistance and on their options for taking action were informed by gender, their experience as females, as those outside familiar power structures, provided them with a perspective that opens up new dimensions on resistance and what it meant to oppose Nazism. Lacking an identity as combatants or political activists or defenders of a culture, women brought an entirely different consciousness to resistance than did men, as seen in this body of literature. They generally perceived themselves as

wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters, and their historical estrangement—physically from the battlefield and terrorist activity and psychologically from the soldiering role—freed women to find other forms of resistance that fell outside the conventional parameters of resistance as political violence. In the majority of these narratives, women maintain their identification with home and family, whether by merging clandestine activity with the domestic setting, as seen in Langgässer’s ‘Untergetaucht’ or Malraux’s ‘La Fausse épreuve’, or by helping Jews hiding underground to preserve a modicum of normal life, as in Andreas-Friedrich’s Der Schattenmann. Keun’s Nach Mitternacht and entries in Der Schattenmann also illustrate the ways in which female resisters became adept at exploiting everyday situations and circumstances to turn them into venues for anti-Nazi opposition. In short, women’s grounding in the everyday carried over to the uncertain and chaotic realm of resistance. Women additionally brought to resistance an awareness of the need to be attentive to personal relationships, which were more fragile in time of war. Thomas’s ‘L’Arrestation’ and Andreas-Friedrich’s diary highlight female resisters’ on-going concern and responsibility for others at home or in hiding, even as the resisters participate extensively in the French and German undergrounds. Triolet and Beauvoir, in Les Amants d’Avignon and Le Sang des autres, bring out the resister’s own need for emotional closeness with another person in the difficult and trying conditions of war, occupation, and resistance. Thomas’s ‘FTP’ and Seghers’s Das siebte Kreuz emphasize the importance of social connections for the resister in another way, that is, by underlining the strength and solidarity that issue from an interlocking network among people. Women treat their accounts of resistance in a way that is distinctly lacking in the trademark heroism seen in official interpretations of resistance. Since women have historically not been regarded as legitimate narrators of war, they have not had the opportunity to draw from the standard language and imagery of battle, violence, politics, and resistance. Instead of ‘heroines’, then, these writers portray conventional women who are often reluctant, if not unwilling, participants in the drama of the resistance, as seen most obviously in Langgässer’s ‘An der Nähmaschine’ and Malraux’s ‘La Fausse épreuve’. Furthermore, as Duras’s La Douleur or Langgässer’s ‘Untergetaucht’ vividly illustrate, resistance did not necessarily present definitive choices for a resister to make decisively and courageously as much as it drew a resister into a world ruled by uncertainty and shame and, perhaps, lapses in personal convictions. In choosing to recreate the familiar and essential details of most women’s world as the context for resistance: home, family, attachments to other people, these authors shift the emphasis away from violence and the glory of battle to decidedly unheroic spaces, as when Thomas reveals Alice’s fear and worry for her saboteur husband in ‘FTP’. Finally, women writers’ exclusion from the rhetoric of war and resistance, and, at the same time, the concerns for relationships and feelings to which they have been socialized have allowed them to paint a picture of emotions that frankly conveys the pain, the fear, the grief, the gruesome reality of resistance, without hiding these truths of war behind abstractions and high-flown language and without glossing over the value of feelings. To expect to see female heroines in this body of literature wielding guns and throwing bombs is perhaps to look at these narratives from the viewpoint of contemporary standards, not the web of tradition in which these authors lived and worked at the time. Artistic considerations enabled these writers to observe critically the interconnections between gender

207

and resistance, which in this case meant recognizing the contradictions and conflicts that female resisters faced, not recasting the feminine identity. The authors discussed here could perceive the possibilities inherent in resistance for opening up new paths to women, but they were also aware of the imbalance of power between female and male resisters, as seen in Thomas’s admission that she personally could not become a saboteur as she would have liked. The female resistance figures in these narratives are not entirely free to inhabit the masculine spaces of war and resistance and politics. The personal conflicts shared by many of the authors as they sought to negotiate life paths that combine traditional feminine roles as wives and mothers with professional roles as writers and intellectuals suggest that these women were unable to completely shrug off their own traditional backgrounds and that they also understood the need to appeal to a conservative reading public. In their resistance narratives they could thus criticize social norms only to a certain extent. By pinpointing the inner contradictions of the female resister who cannot entirely break free of a traditionbound identity, these writers actually present a more realistic assessment of gender standards in the German and French movements than would a wholesale redefining of the feminine role that transformed a resister into an action figure. This body of literature brings the resistance of French and German women into sharper focus by providing another avenue by which to legitimate further some of the forms of women’s opposition that have begun to be acknowledged in historical research. More important, these narratives turn aside the familiar political concepts of resistance in order to reveal the human side of these movements. Clandestine operations give way to the routines and settings of everyday life, where women and children try to carry on with their daily existence. The national welfare recedes into the background as emotional and private concerns—husbands jailed or sent to concentration camps for resistance activity, Jewish friends caught up in the Holocaust, loved ones whom resisters must leave behind—become a focal point. Political goals take second place to the impulse to help the individual. The violence of sabotage and bombs is displaced in favour of the non-violence of caring for those in need. The heroic and mythical dimensions of resistance are reduced to simple gestures that save a life or lift a person’s morale. Women’s narratives of the resistance compel readers to perceive resistance in a different light, as something more than killing an enemy in the name of a particular cause. As these writers suggest, resistance was about people living with worry and grief, confusion and fear, as they worked to save others who were in danger of dying.

208

Bibliography

Ackermann, Michael, Schreiben über Deutschland im Exil: Irmgard Keun, Nach Mitternacht, Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz (Stuttgart: Klett, 1986) Adereth, Max, ‘French Resistance Literature: The Example of Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon’, in Literature and War, ed. by David Bevan (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990), pp.123-34 ---, ‘L’Œuvre d’Elsa Triolet’, La Pensée, 153 (1970), 81-94 Adler, Laure, Marguerite Duras: A Life, trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) Albistur, Maïte, and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français, 2 vols (Paris: Des Femmes, 1977) Altmann, Peter, and others, Der deutsche antifaschistische Widerstand, 1933-1945: In Bildern und Dokumenten (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1975) Andreas-Friedrich, Ruth, Berlin Underground, 1938-1945, trans. by Barrows Mussey (New York: Holt, 1947) ---, Der Schattenmann: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1938-1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984) ---, Schauplatz Berlin: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1945 bis 1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985) Apel-Muller, Michel, Avant-propos, Chroniques théâtrales: Lettres françaises, 1948-1951, by Elsa Triolet (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), pp.3-6 Aragon, Louis, Aragon parle avec Dominique Arban (Paris: Seghers, 1968) ---, ‘Les Rencontres’, in Servitude et grandeur des Français: Scènes des années terribles (Paris: La Bibliothèque française, 1945), pp.7-38 Aron, Robert, and Georgette Elgey, The Vichy Regime: 1940-1944, trans. by Humphrey Hare (London: Putnam, 1958) Ascher, Carol, Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981) Atack, Margaret, Literature and the French Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) ---, ‘Narratives of Disruption 1940-1944’, French Cultural Studies, 1 (1990), 233-46 Aubrac, Lucie, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse (Paris: Seuil, 1984) ---, Outwitting the Gestapo, trans. by Konrad Bieber (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993) Augsberger, Eva, Elisabeth Langgässer: Assoziative Reihung, Leitmotiv und Symbol in ihren Prosawerken (Nuremberg: Carl, 1962) Bair, Deirdre, Simone de Beauvoir (New York: Summit Books, 1990) Bangerter, Lowell A., The Bourgeois Proletarian: A Study of Anna Seghers (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980) Bartillat, Christian de, Clara Malraux: Le Regard d’une femme sur son siècle: biographie-témoignage (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1985) Batt, Kurt, ed., Über Anna Seghers: Ein Almanach zum 75. Geburtstag (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1975)

Beauvoir, Simone de, The Blood of Others, trans. by Roger Senhouse and Yvonne Moyse (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948) ---, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. by James Kirkup (New York: Harper & Row, 1959, 1974) ---, The Prime of Life, trans. by Peter Green (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962) ---, Le Sang des autres (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) Behrend-Rosenfeld, Else R., Ich stand nicht allein: Erlebnisse einer Jüdin in Deutschland, 1933-1944 (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1945; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1963) Beicken, Peter, ‘Anna Seghers: Das siebte Kreuz (1942)’, in Deutsche Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts: Neue Interpretationen, ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler (Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum Verlag, 1983), pp.255-72 Bellanger, Claude, and others, eds., Histoire génerale de la presse française, 5 vols (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1969-76), IV (1975) Benz, Wolfgang, and Walter H. Pehle, eds., Encyclopedia of German Resistance to the Nazi Movement, trans. by Lance W. Garmer (New York: Continuum, 1997) Bertin, Célia, Femmes sous l’Occupation (Paris: Stock, 1993) Bertrand, Simone, Milles visages, un seul combat (Paris: Les Éditeurs français Réunis, 1965) Beuys, Barbara, Vergeßt uns nicht: Menschen im Widerstand, 1933-1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1987) Bier, Jean-Paul, ‘The Holocaust and West German Strategies of Oblivion, 1947-1979’, trans. by Michael Allinder, New German Critique, 19 (1980), 9-29 Blot-Labarrère, Christiane, Marguerite Duras (Paris: Seuil, 1992) Boak, Denis, ‘Clara Malraux: “La Difficulté d’être”’, Essays in French Literature, 16 (1979), 89-110 Boak, Helen L., ‘Women in Weimar Germany: The “Frauenfrage” and the Female Vote’, in Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany, ed. by Richard Bessell and E.J. Feuchtwanger (London: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981), pp.155-73 Boberach, Heinz, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich: Auswahl aus den geheimen Lageberichten des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, 1934-1944 (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1965) Bock, Gisela, ‘Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization and the State’, in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. by Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review, 1984), pp.271-96 ---, ‘Women’s History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate’, Gender and History, 1 (1989), 7-30 ---, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986) Bock, Sigrid, and Manfred Hahn, eds., Erfahrung Exil: Antifaschistische Romane 19331945 (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1981) Boehm, Eric H., ed., We Survived: The Stories of Fourteen of the Hidden and the Hunted of Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949) Bohec, Jeanne, La Plastiqueuse à la bicyclette (Paris: Mercure de France, 1975)

210

Bood, Micheline, Les Années doubles: Journal d’une lycéene sous l’occupation (Paris: Laffont, 1974) Boor, Lisa de, Tagebuchblätter aus den Jahren 1938-1945 (Munich: Biederstein, 1963) Bossinade, Johanna, ‘Haus und Front: Bilder des Faschismus in der Literatur von Exil- und Gegenwartsautorinnen: am Beispiel Anna Seghers, Irmgard Keun, Christa Wolf und Gerlind Reinshagen’, Neophilologus, 70 (1986), 92-118 Boston, Anne, Introduction, Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War, ed. by Anne Boston (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), pp.xi-xx Bourderon, Roger, ‘Le Régime de Vichy était-il fasciste?’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, 91 (1973), 23-45 ---, and Germaine Willard, La France dans la tourmente, 1939-1944 (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1982) Brandes, Ute, Anna Seghers (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1992) Bridenthal, Renate, ‘Something Old, Something New: Women Between the Two World Wars’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2nd edn, ed. by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp.422-44 ---, and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) ---, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984) Broszat, Martin, The Hitler State, trans. by John W. Hiden (London and New York: Longman, 1981) ---, ‘Resistenz und Widerstand’, in Bayern in der NS-Zeit, ed. by Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich, and Falk Wiesemann, 6 vols (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1977-83), IV (1981) ---, ‘A Social and Historical Typology of the German Opposition to Hitler’, in Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, ed. by David Clay Large (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute: 1991), pp.25-33 ---, Elke Fröhlich, and Falk Wiesemann, eds., Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 6 vols (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1977-83) Bueb, Francis, ‘Clara Malraux: “Un Garçon de dix-neuf ans inconnu sans profession precise”’, Magazine littéraire, October 1969, 42-43 Burckhardt, Joachim, ‘Berliner Leben in schwerer Zeit’ , rev. of Der Schattenmann and Schauplatz Berlin, Der Tagespiegel, 24 February 1985, [n.pg.] Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Buthge, Werner, Anna Seghers: Werk, Wirkungsabsicht, Wirkungsmöglichkeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1982) Casey, Brenda Bruckner, ‘Elsa Triolet: A Study in Solitude’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University, 1974) Char, René, Hypnos Waking: Poems and Prose, trans. by Jackson Mathews (New York: Random House, 1956) Chatel, Nicole, ed., Des femmes dans la résistance (Paris: Julliard, 1972) Claassen, Eugen, In Büchern denken: Briefwechsel mit Autoren und Übersetzern, ed. by Hilde Claassen (Hamburg: Claassen, 1970)

211

Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, ed., La Gouvernement de Vichy, 19401942: Institutions et politiques (Paris: Colin, 1972) Corday, Pauline, J’ai veçu dans Paris occupé (Montreal: Éditions de l’Arbre, 1943) Coudert, Marie-Louise, and Paul Helene, Elles, la résistance (Paris: Messidor/Temps Actuels, 1983) Courtivron, Isabelle de, Clara Malraux, une femme dans le siècle (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 1992) ---, ‘The Other Malraux in Indochina’, Biography, 12 (1989), 29-42 ---, ‘The Resistance and the Liberation of Clara Malraux’, Contemporary French Civilization, 18 (1994), 23-32 Coutrot, Aline, ‘La Politique familiale’, in La Gouvernement de Vichy, 1940-1942: Institutions et politiques, ed. by Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Colin, 1972), pp.245-63 Crowley, Martin, Duras, Writing, and the Ethical: Making the Broken Whole (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) Dammer, Susanna, ‘Kinder, Küche, Kriegsarbeit—die Schulung der Frauen durch die NSFrauenschaft’, in Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch, ed. by Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981), pp.215-45 Daniel, Ute, The War from Within: German Working-class Women in the First World War, trans. by Margaret Ries (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997) Dank, Milton, The French Against the French (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1974) D’Eaubonne, Françoise, Histoire et actualité du féminisme (Paris: Moreau, 1972) Debû-Bridel, Jacques, ed., Les Éditions de Minuit: Historique et bibliographie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1945) ---, ed., La Résistance intellectuelle (Paris: Julliard, 1970) Demetz, Peter, Postwar German Literature (New York: Pegasus, 1970) Desanti, Dominique, Les Clés d’Elsa (Paris: Ramsay, 1983) Deutschkron, Inge, Ich trug den gelben Stern (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1978) Diersen, Inge, ‘Anna Seghers: Das siebte Kreuz’, Weimarer Beiträge, 18 (1972), 96-120 Doctorow, E. L., ‘False Documents’, American Review, 26 (1977), 215-32 Drews, Jörg, Nachwort, Schauplatz Berlin: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1945 bis 1948, by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp.275-86 Dumont, Yvonne, ‘Activités spécifiques de femmes dans la Résistance’, in Les Femmes dans la résistance française, Actes du colloque, Paris, La Sorbonne, 22 and 23 November 1975, ed. by Union des Femmes Françaises (Paris: Rocher, 1977), pp.123-36 ---, ‘La Contribution des femmes à la libération de la France’, in Les Femmes dans la résistance française, Actes du colloque, Paris, La Sorbonne, 22 and 23 November 1975, ed. by Union des Femmes Françaises (Paris: Rocher, 1977), pp.167-70 Duras, Marguerite, ‘Le Bureau de poste de la rue Dupin: Entretien Marguerite DurasFrançois Mitterrand’, L’Autre journal, 26 February 1986, 31-40 ---, La Douleur (Paris: P.O.L., 1985) ---, Outside: Papiers d’un jour (Paris: P.O.L., 1984) ---, The War: A Memoir, trans. by Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986) Eck, Hélène, ‘French Women under Vichy’, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, in A History of Women in the West, ed. by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, 5 vols (Cambridge:

212

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992-94), V (1994), ed. by Françoise Thébaud Eley, Geoff, ‘Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit 1986-1987’, Past and Present, 121 (1988), 171-208 Elling, Hanna, Frauen im deutschen Widerstand (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1979) Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987) Équipe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur Elsa Triolet et Aragon, Elsa Triolet: Un Écrivain dans le siècle, Actes du colloque international, Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, Maison Elsa Triolet-Aragon, 15-17 November 1996 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000) Evans, Richard J., The Feminist Movement in Germany (London: Sage Publications, 1976) ---, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840-1920 (London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977) Fishman, Sarah, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) ---, and Leonard V. Smith, Introduction, France at War: Vichy and the Historians, ed. by Sarah Fishman and others, trans. by David Lake (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), pp.1-9 ---, and others, eds., France at War: Vichy and the Historians, trans. by David Lake (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000) Flower, John, and Ray Davison, ‘France’, in The Second World War in Fiction, ed. by Holger Klein (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp.47-87 Foley, Barbara, ‘Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives’, Comparative Literature, 34 (1982), 330-60 Foot, Michael R.D., Resistance: European Resistance to Nazism, 1940-1945 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977) Francis, Claude, and Fernande Gontier, Les Écrits de Simone de Beauvoir: La vie, l’écriture (Paris: Gallimard, 1979) Francos, Ania, Il était des femmes dans la résistance (Paris: Stock, 1978) Fraser, Antonia, The Warrior Queens (New York: Knopf, 1989) Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung, ed., Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981) Frenay, Henri, The Night Will End, trans. by Dan Hofstadter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976) Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1997-), I (1997) Friedlander, Henry, ‘The Manipulation of Language’, in The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide, ed. by Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (Millwood, NY: Kraus International, 1980), pp.103-13 Friedrich-Hess, Karin, Letter to the author, 13 November 1985 Fritsch, Christian, and Lutz Winckler, eds., Faschismuskritik und Deutschlandbild im Exilroman (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1981) Frühwald, Wolfgang, and Heinz Hurten, eds., Christliches Exil und christlicher Widerstand (Regensburg: Pustet, 1987) Fussell, Paul, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996) ---, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)

213

---, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) Garcin, Jérôme, ‘Clara Malraux: “La guerre m’a liberé”’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 23 July 1981, 37 Gerhard, Ute, Elisabeth Hannover-Drück, and Romina Schmitter, eds., ‘Dem Reich der Freiheit werb’ ich Burgerinnen’: Die Frauen-Zeitung von Louise Otto (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat Verlag, 1979) Geyer, Michael, ‘Resistance as Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, Struggles for Civil Society’, Journal of Modern History, 64, suppl. (1992), S217-41 Glassman, Deborah N., Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure (London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991) Glenthøj, Jørgen, ed., Dokumente zur Bonhoeffer-Forschung 1928-1945 (Munich: Kaiser, 1969) Goessl, Alfred F., and Roland A. Champagne, ‘Clara Malraux’s Le Bruit de nos pas: Biography and the Question of Women in the “Case of Malraux”’, Biography, 7 (1984), 21332 Gould, Jenny, ‘Women’s Military Services in First World War Britain’, in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. by Margaret Higonnet and others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp.114-25 Grass, Günter, ‘Resistance’, Granta, 12 (1984), 198-201 Gray, Francine du Plessix, ‘The Power of Our Obsessions’, rev. of The War, The New York Times Book Review, 4 May 1986, metro edn, sec. 7, 1, 48-49 Green, Mary Jean, ‘Writing War in the Feminine: De Beauvoir and Duras’, Journal of European Studies, 23 (1993), 223-37 Gross, Leonard, The Last Jews in Berlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982) Haag, Lina, How Long the Night (London: Gollancz, 1948) Haestrup, Jørgen, European Resistance Movements, 1939-1945: A Complete History (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1981) Heller, Gerhard, In einem besetzten Land: NS-Kulturpolitik in Frankreich: Erinnerungen, 1940-1944, trans. by Annette Lallemand-Rietkotter (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1982) Herlemann, Beatrix, ‘Die Einheit in der Vielfalt: Die Frauen in der Roten Kapelle’, in Frauen gegen die Diktatur--Widerstand und Verfolgung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. by Christl Wickert (Berlin: Hentrich, 1995), pp.98-105 Hervé, Florence, ‘Wir fühlten uns frei’: Deutsche und französische Frauen im Widerstand (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1997) ---, and Renate Wisbar, Leben, frei und in Frieden: Frauen gegen Faschismus und Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1982) Higonnet, Margaret R., and others, eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). ---, and others, eds., Introduction, Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp.1-17 Hildebrand, Karl, Das Dritte Reich (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1980) Hoffmann, Peter, German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) Hoffmann, Ruth, Meine Freunde aus Davids Geschlecht (Berlin: Chronos Verlag, 1947)

214

Hoffmann, Stanley, Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s (New York: Viking Press, 1974) Holland, Carolsue, and G.R. Garett, ‘The “Skirt” of Nessus: Women and the German Opposition to Hitler’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, 6 (1983), 363-81 Horsley, Ritta Jo, ‘”Warum habe ich keine Worte? Kein Wort trifft zutiefst hinein”: The Problematics of Language in the Early Novels of Irmgard Keun’, Colloquia Germanica, 23 (1990), 297-313 ---, ‘Witness, Critic, Victim: Irmgard Keun and the Years of National Socialism’, in Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers, ed. by Elaine Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), pp.65-117 Hübner, Irene, Unser Widerstand: Deutsche Frauen und Männer berichten über ihren Kampf gegen die Nazis (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1982) Huston, Nancy, ‘Tales of War and Tears of Women’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 (1982), 271-82 Jaretzky, Reinhold, and Helmut Taubauld, ‘Das Faschismusverständnis im Deutschlandroman der Exilierten’, Sammlung, 1 (1978), 12-36 Jehser, Werner, Friedrich Wolf: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Volk und Wissen Volkseigener Verlag, 1965; repr. 1977) Jelinek, Estelle C., ed., Women’s Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980) Jenson, Jane, ‘The Liberation and New Rights for French Women’, in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. by Margaret Higonnet and others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp.272-84 John, S.B., ‘The Ambiguous Invader: Images of the German in Some French Fiction about the Occupation of 1940-1944’, Journal of European Studies, 16 (1986), 227-88 Kaufmann, Dorothy, Introduction, Le Témoin compromis, by Edith Thomas (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1995), pp.9-24 ---, ‘”Le Témoin compromis”: Diaries of Resistance and Collaboration by Edith Thomas’, L’Esprit créateur, 33 (1993), 17-28 ---, ‘Uncovering a Woman’s Life: Edith Thomas (novelist, historian, résistante)’, French Review, 67 (1993), 61-72 Kedward, H.R., Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance 1940-1944 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) ---, Resistance in Vichy France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) ---, and Roger Austin, eds., Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1985) Keefe, Terry, Simone de Beauvoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) ---, Simone de Beauvoir: A Study of Her Writings (London: Harrap, 1983) Keegan, John, The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin, 1976) ---, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993) ---, The Second World War (New York: Viking, 1989) Kershaw, Ian, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 19331945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) Kesten, Hermann, Meine Freunde, die Poeten (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1980) Keun, Irmgard, After Midnight, trans. by Anthea Bell (London: Gollancz, 1985)

215

---, Ich lebe in einem wilden Wirbel: Briefe an Arnold Strauß, 1933 bis 1947, ed. by Gabriele Kreis and Marjory S. Strauß (Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1988) ---, Nach Mitternacht (Amsterdam: Querido, 1937; repr. Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1980) ---, Wenn wir alle gut wären, ed. by Wilhelm Unger (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1983) ---, ‘”Woanders hin! Mich hält nichts fest”: Irmgard Keun im Gespräch mit Klaus Antes’, Die Hören, 27 (1982), 61-75 Klemperer, Klemens von, ‘”What Is the Law That Lies Behind These Words?” Antigone’s Question and the German Resistance Against Hitler’, Journal of Modern History, 64, suppl. (1992), S102-11 Kline, Rayna, ‘Lucie Aubrac: Resistance Fighter’, Ms., July 1985, 26, 32-33 ---, ‘Partisans, Godmothers, Bicyclists, and Other Terrorists: Women in the French Resistance and under Vichy’, Proceedings of the 5th Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, Las Cruces, NM, 10-12 November 1977, ed. by Joyce Duncan Falk (Santa Barbara, CA: Western Society for French History, 1978), pp.375-83 Klinksiek, Dorothee, Die Frau im NS-Staat (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1982) Köhler, Jochen, Klettern in der Großstadt: Geschichten vom Überleben, 1933 bis 1945 (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1981) Kohut, Karl, ed., Literatur der Résistance und Kollaboration in Frankreich, 3 vols (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion; Tübingen: Narr, 1982-84) Koonz, Claudia, ‘The Competition for a Women’s Lebensraum 1928-1934’, in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. by Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), pp.199-236 ---, ‘Mothers in the Fatherland: Women in Nazi Germany’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2nd edn, ed. by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp.445-73 ---, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987) Kopetzky, Helmut, Die andere Front: Europäische Frauen in Krieg und Widerstand, 19391945 (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1983) Krechel, Ursula, ‘Irmgard Keun: Die Zerstörung der kalten Ordnung’, Literaturmagazin, 10 (1979) 103-28 Kreis, Gabriele, ‘Was man glaubt, gibt es’: Das Leben der Irmgard Keun (Zurich: Arche, 1991) Krüger, Horst, Nachwort, Ausgewählte Erzählungen, by Elisabeth Langgässer (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1980), pp.345-56 Kuckhoff, Greta, ‘Begegnungen mit dem “Siebten Kreuz”’, in Über Anna Seghers: Ein Almanach zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. by Kurt Batt (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1975), pp.14958 Kuhn, Annette, and Valentine Rothe, Frauen im deutschen Faschismus, 2 vols (Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1982), II: Frauenarbeit und Frauenwiderstand im NSStaat Kuhnert, Max, Will We See Tomorrow? A German Cavalryman at War, 1939-1942 (London: Cooper, 1993)

216

Langer, Lawrence L., The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) ---, Holocaust Testimonies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) ---, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) Langgässer, Elisabeth, ‘An der Nähmaschine’, in Das Labyrinth: Fünf Erzählungen (Hamburg: Claassen & Goverts, 1949); repr. in Gesammelte Werke, 4 vols (Hamburg: Claassen, 1959-64), Erzählungen (1964), pp.405-11 ---, Briefe, 1924-1950, 2 vols (Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1990) ---, ‘Schriftsteller unter der Hitler-Diktatur’, Ost und West, 1 (1947), 36-41 ---, . . . soviel berauschende Vergänglichkeit: Briefe, 1926-1950 (Hamburg: Claassen, 1954) ---, ‘Untergetaucht’, in Der Torso (Hamburg: Claassen & Goverts, 1947); repr. in Gesammelte Werke, 4 vols (Hamburg: Claassen, 1959-64), Erzählungen (1964), pp.336-41 Large, David Clay, ed., Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1991) Laska, Vera, Nazism, Resistance and Holocaust in World War II: A Bibliography (Weston, MA: Laska, 1982) ---, ed., Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983) Leck, Ralph M., ‘Conservative Empowerment and the Gender of Nazism: Paradigms of Power and Complicity in German Women’s History’, Journal of Women’s History, 12 (2000), 147-69 Lewis, Helena, ‘Elsa Triolet: Engagé Writer and Heroine of the Resistance’, Contemporary French Civilization, 18 (1994), 43-55 ---, Introduction, A Fine of Two Hundred Francs, by Elsa Triolet (London: Virago Press, 1986), pp.vii-xviii Löwenthal, Richard, ‘Widerstand im totalen Staat’, in Widerstand und Verweigerung in Deutschland, 1933-1945, ed. by Richard Löwenthal and Patrick von zur Mühlen (Berlin and Bonn: Dietz, 1982), pp.11-24 Loriska, Irene, Frauendarstellungen bei Irmgard Keun und Anna Seghers (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1985) Lovenduski, Joni, Women and European Politics: Contemporary Feminism and Public Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986) Lukacs, John A., The Last European War, September 1939-December 1941 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976) McMillan, James F., Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 18701940 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981) Mackinnon, Lachlan, The Lives of Elsa Triolet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992) Maassen, J.P.J., Die Schrecken der Tiefe: Untersuchungen zu Elisabeth Langgässers Erzählungen (Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden, 1973) Mallmann, Klaus-Michael, ‘Zwischen Denunziation und Roter Hilfe: Geschlechterbeziehungen und kommunistischer Widerstand, 1933-1945’, in Frauen gegen die Diktatur-Widerstand und Verfolgung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. by Christl Wickert (Berlin: Hentrich, 1995), pp.82-97

217

Malraux, Clara, Le Bruit de nos pas, 6 vols (Paris: Grasset, 1963-79), IV: Voici que vient l’été (1973); V: La Fin et le commencement (1976); VI: . . . Et pourtant j’étais libre (1979) ---, ‘La Fausse épreuve’, in La Maison ne fait pas credit (Paris: Bibliothèque française, 1947; repr. Paris: Temps Actuels, 1981), pp.15-44 ---, ‘Une Jeunesse désenvoûtée’, Le Nouvel observateur, 7 January 1965, 15-16 ---, La Maison ne fait pas credit (Paris: Bibliothèque française, 1947; repr. Paris: Temps Actuels, 1981) Maltzan, Maria Gräfin von, Schlage die Trommel und fürchte dich nicht: Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1986) Marchlewitz, Ingrid, Irmgard Keun: Leben und Werk (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1999) Marcus, Jane, ‘The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War, and Madness—Is There a Feminist Fetishism?’, in The New Historicism, ed. by Aram H. Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp.132-51 Marrus, Michael R., and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) Martin, Elaine, ed., Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993) Mason, Tim, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Matheson, Peter, ed., The Third Reich and the Christian Churches (Edinburgh: Clark, 1981) Meding, Dorothee von, Mit dem Mut des Herzens: Die Frauen von 20. Juli (Berlin: Siedler, 1992) Michel, Henri, Les Courants de pensée de la Résistance (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962) ---, Les Mouvements clandestins en Europe (1938-1945), 2nd edn (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965) ---, Pétain et le régime de Vichy (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1978) ---, ‘La Révolution nationale: Latitude d’action du gouvernement de Vichy’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, 81 (1971), 3-22 ---, The Shadow War: European Resistance, 1939-1945, trans. by Richard Barry (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) ---, and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, eds., Les Idées politiques et sociales de la résistance: Documents clandestins, 1940-1944 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954) Milosz, Czeslaw, The Captive Mind, trans. by Jane Zielonko (New York: 1951, 1953; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1990) Milton, Sybil, ‘Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and Jewish-German Women’, in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. by Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), pp.297-333 Mommsen, Hans, ‘The German Resistance against Hitler and the Restoration of Politics’, Journal of Modern History, 64, suppl. (1992), S112-27 Monestier, Marianne, Elles étaient cent et mille (Paris: Fayard, 1972)

218

Morgan, Claude, ‘Vingt-trois mois d’action: Comment véçurent “Les Lettres françaises”’, Les Lettres françaises, 9 September 1944, 7 ---, ‘Vingt-trois mois de publication clandestine: La Vie cachée des “Lettres françaises”’, Les Lettres françaises, 16 September 1944, 8 Morris, Alan, ‘Attacks on the Gaullist “Myth” in French Literature since 1969’, in The Second World War in Literature, ed. by Ian Higgins (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986), pp.71-83 Müller, Henning, ‘Friedrich Wolf—Kindheitsmuster und Lebenslinien’, Weimarer Beiträge, 36 (1990): 823-36 Müller, Karlheinz, Elisabeth Langgässer: Eine biographische Skizze (Darmstadt: Gesellschaft Hessischer Literaturfreunde, 1990) Niethammer, Lutz, ‘Die Jahre weiß man nicht, wo man die hinsetzen soll’: FaschismusErfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin: Dietz, 1983) Nolan, Mary, ‘The Historikerstreit and Social History’, New German Critique, 44 (1988) 51-80 O’Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1990) Oldfield, Sybil, ‘German Women in the Resistance to Hitler’, in Women, State, and Revolution, ed. by Siân Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp.81101 Pasche, Wolfgang, Interpretationshilfen Exilromane: Klaus Mann, Mephisto; Irmgard Keun, Nach Mitternacht; Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz (Stuttgart: Klett, 1993) Paxton, Robert O., Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972) Perrein, Michèle, ‘”Mon cher brigand reveille-toi”: Un entretien avec Clara Malraux’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 14 October 1976, 18 Perrot, Michelle, ‘The New Eve and the Old Adam: French Women’s Condition at the Turn of the Century’, in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. by Margaret Higonnet and others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp.51-60 ---, ‘Women, Power and History: The Case of Nineteenth-century France’, in Women, State, and Revolution, ed. by Siân Reynolds, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp.44-59 Personal Narratives Group, ed., Interpreting Women’s Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) Peukert, Detlev, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. by Richard Deveson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) ---, Ruhrarbeiter gegen den Faschismus: Dokumentationen (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1977) ---, The Weimar Republic, trans. by Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989) Pfeiffer, Johannes, ‘Über Elisabeth Langgässers Kurzgeschichte “Untergetaucht”’, Wirkendes Wort, 1 (1950/51), 159-61 Phayer, Michael, Protestant and Catholic Women in Nazi Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990) Pikarski, Margot, and Günter Übel, Die KPD lebt! Flugblätter aus dem antifaschistischen Widerstandskampf der KPD, 1933-1945 (Berlin: Dietz, 1980) Pollard, Miranda, Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)

219

---, ‘Women and the National Revolution’, in Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology, ed. by H.R. Kedward and Roger Austin (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1985), pp.36-47 Pore, Renate, A Conflict of Interest (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981) Powers, Thomas, ‘The Conspiracy That Failed’, The New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997, 49-54 Rabaut, Jean, Histoire des féminismes français (Paris: Stock, 1978) Rémond, René, Conclusion, La Gouvernement de Vichy, 1940-1942: Institutions et politiques, ed. by Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Colin, 1972), pp.291-309 Reynolds, Siân, ed., Women, State, and Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987) Riding, Alan, ‘Marguerite Duras and Thoughts of Love’, The New York Times, national edn, 26 March 1990, B1-2 Riley, Anthony W., ‘Alles außen ist innen’, in Christliches Exil und christlicher Widerstand, ed. by Wolfgang Frühwald and Heinz Hurten (Regensburg: Pustet, 1987), pp.186-224 Rinser, Luise, Gefängnistagebuch (Munich: Fischer, 1946; repr. 1979) ---, Magische Argonautenfahrt: Eine Einführung in die gesammelten Werke von Elisabeth Langgässer (Hamburg: Claassen, 1959) Ritchie, J.M., ‘Irmgard Keun’s Weimar Girls’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 60 (1989-1990), 63-79 Romero, Christiane Zehl, Anna Seghers: Eine Biographie, 1900-1947 (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 2000) Roos, Peter, and Friederike J. Hassauer-Roos, eds., Anna Seghers Materialienbuch (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1977) Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, ‘Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview’, in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp.17-42 Rosenberg, Dorothy, Afterword, The Seventh Cross, by Anna Seghers, trans. by James A. Galston (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), pp.347-75 Rossiter, Margaret L., Women in the Resistance (New York: Praeger, 1986) Rothfels, Hans, Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler (Krefeld: Scherpe, 1949) Rousso, Henry, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) Rowbotham, Sheila, Women, Resistance and Revolution (London: Lane, 1972) Rupp, Leila J., Mobilizing Women for War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) Sachse, Carola, Industrial Housewives: Women’s Social Work in the Factories of Nazi Germany, ed. by Jane Caplan, trans. by Heide Kiesling and Dorothy Rosenberg (New York: The Institute for Research in History and The Haworth Press, 1987) Sartre, Jean-Paul, Life Situations: Essays, Written and Spoken, trans. by Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977) Sautermeister, Gert, Christian Fritsch, and Lutz Winckler, ‘Irmgard Keuns Exilroman Nach Mitternacht’, in Faschismuskritik und Deutschlandbild im Exilroman, ed. by Christian Fritsch and Lutz Winckler (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1981), pp.15-35

220

Sayre, Joel, Introduction, Berlin Underground, 1938-1945, by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, trans. by Barrows Mussey (New York: Holt, 1947), pp.vii-xii Saywell, Shelley, Women in War: From World War II to El Salvador (Markham, Ontario: Viking, 1985) Schabrod, Karl, ed., Widerstand gegen Flick und Florian: Düsseldorfer Antifaschisten über ihren Widerstand, 1933-1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1978) Schefer, Gitte, ‘Wo Unterdruckung ist, da ist auch Widerstand—Frauen gegen Faschismus und Krieg’, in Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch, ed. by Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981), pp.273-91 Schirmbeck, Heinrich, ‘Das Dilemma Elisabeth Langgässers’, Frankfurter Hefte, 32 (1977), 50-58 Schlabrendorff, Fabian von, The Secret War against Hitler, trans. by Hilda Simon (New York: Pitman, 1965) Schmidt, Maruta, and Gabi Dietz, eds., Frauen unterm Hakenkreuz: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Elefanten Press Verlag, 1983) Schneider, Peter. ‘Saving Konrad Latte’, The New York Times Magazine, 13 February 2000, 52-57, 72-73, 90, 95. Scholl, Inge, Die Weiße Rose (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1973) Schröder, Nina, Hitlers unbeugsame Gegnerinnen: Der Frauenaufstand in der Rosenstraße (Munich: Heyne, 1997) Schwartz, Paula, ‘Partisanes and Gender Politics in Vichy France’, French Historical Studies, 16 (1989), 126-51 ---, ‘Redefining Resistance: Women’s Activism in Wartime France’, in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. by Margaret Higonnet and others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp.141-53 Scott, Joan W., ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 1053-75 ---, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) ---, ‘Rewriting History’, in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. by Margaret Higonnet and others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp.19-30 Sebald, W.G., On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. by Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003) See, Wolfgang, and Rudolf Weckerling, Frauen im Kirchenkampf: Beispiele aus der Bekennenden Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg, 1933-1945 (Berlin: Wichern-Verlag, 1984) Seghers, Anna, Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, comp. by Sigrid Bock, 3 vols (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1970-71) ---, Das siebte Kreuz (Mexico City: Editorial El Libro Libre, 1943; repr. Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1973) ---, The Seventh Cross, trans. by James A. Galston (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942) Seitz, Walter, Letter to the author, 8 December 1985 Serke, Jürgen, Die verbrannten Dichter (Weinheim: Beltz & Gelberg, 1977) Simons, Margaret A., and Jessica Benjamin, ‘Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview’, Feminist Studies, 5 (1979), 330-45 Spiegel, Tilly, Frauen und Mädchen im österreichischen Widerstand (Vienna, Frankfurt, and Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1967)

221

Spies, Bernhard, Anna Seghers: Das siebte Kreuz (Frankfurt am Main: Moritz Diesterweg, 1993) Steinbach, Peter, ‘The Conservative Resistance’, in Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, ed. by David Clay Large (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1991), pp.89-97 Steinhauer, Harry, ‘Submerged Heroism—Elisabeth Langgässer’s Story “Untergetaucht”’, Modern Language Notes, 74 (1959), 153-58 Stephan, Alexander, ‘Geschichte von unten: Täglicher Faschismus und Widerstand in Anna Seghers Roman Das siebte Kreuz’, in Wider den Faschismus: Exilliteratur als Geschichte, ed. by Sigrid Bauschinger and Susan L. Cocalis (Tübingen: Francke, 1993), pp.191-219 Stephenson, Jill, The Nazi Organisation of Women (London: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981) ---, Women in Nazi Society (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975) Stoltzfus, Nathan, ‘”Jemand war für mich da”: Der Aufstand der Frauen in der Rosenstraße’, Die Zeit, 21 July 1989, 9-10, 12-13 ---, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York: Norton, 1996) Sullerot, Evelyne, La Presse féminine (Paris: Colin, 1963) Swaffar, Janet, and Eileen Wilkinson, ‘Aesthetics and Gender: Anna Seghers As a Case Study’, Monatshefte, 87 (1995), 457-72 Sweets, John F., Choices in Vichy France: The French Under Nazi Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) ---, ‘Hold That Pendulum! Redefining Fascism, Collaborationism and Resistance in France’, French Historical Studies, 15 (1988), 731-58 ---, The Politics of Resistance in France, 1940-1944 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976) Szepansky, Gerda, Frauen leisten Widerstand, 1933-1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983) Terrenoire, Elisabeth, Combattantes sans uniforme (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1946) Thomas, Edith, ‘L’Arrestation’, in Contes d’Auxois (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1943), pp.43-50 ---, Contes d’Auxois (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1943) ---, ‘FTP’, in Contes d’Auxois (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1943), pp.51-60 ---, La Libération de Paris (Paris: Mellottée, 1945) ---, Pages de journal, 1939-1944 (Paris: Hamy, 1995) ---, Le Témoin compromis (Paris: Hamy, 1995) ---, The Women Incendiaries, trans. by James and Starr Atkinson (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966) Triolet, Elsa, Les Amants d’Avignon (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1943); repr. in Le Premier Accroc coûte deux cents francs (Paris: Denoël, 1944; repr. 1946), pp.9-94 ---, Chroniques théatrales: Les Lettres françaises, 1948-1951 (Paris: Gallimard, 1981) ---, ‘D’un journal de 1938-1939’, Les Lettres françaises, 24 October 1964, 4 ---, Elsa Triolet, choisie par Aragon (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) ---, ‘The Lovers of Avignon’, in A Fine of Two Hundred Francs (London: Virago Press, 1947; repr. 1986), pp.7-67

222

---, ‘Préface à la clandestinité’, in Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon, 42 vols (Paris: Laffont, 1964-74), V (1965) ---, ‘Préface à la contrebande’, in Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon, 42 vols (Paris: Laffont, 1964-74), III (1963) ---, ‘Préface au désenchantement’, in Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon, 42 vols (Paris: Laffont, 1964-74), IX (1964) Tröger, Annemarie, ‘German Women’s Memories of World War II’, in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. by Margaret Higonnet and others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp.285-99 Trümmer, Träume, Truman: Die Welt, 1945-1949 (Berlin: Elefanten Press Verlag, 1985) Union des Femmes Françaises (UFF), ed., Les Femmes dans la résistance française, Actes du colloque, Paris, La Sorbonne, 22 and 23 November 1975 (Paris: Rocher, 1977) Union für Recht und Freiheit, ed., Deutsche Frauenschicksale (Prague and London: Malik, 1937) Van Roon, Ger, Widerstand im Dritten Reich. (Munich: Beck, 1979) Veeser, H. Aram, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989) Veillon, Dominique, ‘The Resistance and Vichy’, in France at War: Vichy and the Historians, ed. by Sarah Fishman and others, trans. by David Lake (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), pp.161-77 ---, ‘Résister au féminin’, Pénelope, 12 (1985), 87-92 Vircondelet, Alain, Duras: A Biography, trans. by Thomas Buckley (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994) Wagner, Cornelia, Simone de Beauvoirs Weg zum Feminismus (Rheinfelden: Schnäuble, 1985) Wagner, Frank, Der Kurs auf die Realität: Das epische Werk von Anna Seghers, 19351943, 2nd edn (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978) Weisenborn, Günther, ed., Der lautlose Aufstand: Bericht über die Widerstandsbewegung des deutschen Volkes, 1933-1945, 4th edn (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1974) ---, Memorial (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1948) Weitz, Margaret Collins, ‘As I Was Then: Women in the French Resistance’, Contemporary French Civilization, 10 (1986), 1-19 ---, Femmes, Recent Writings on French Women (Boston: Hall, 1985) ---, Introduction, Outwitting the Gestapo, by Lucie Aubrac, trans. by Konrad Bieber (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp.vii-xxii ---, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940-1945 (New York: Wiley, 1995) Whitmarsh, Anne, Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) Wickert, Christl, ed., Frauen gegen die Diktatur--Widerstand und Verfolgung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Berlin: Hentrich, 1995) ---, ‘Widerstand und Dissens von Frauen—ein Überblick’, in Frauen gegen die Diktatur-Widerstand und Verfolgung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. by Christl Wickert (Berlin: Hentrich, 1995), pp.18-31 ---, ‘Women between Dissent and Resistance’, in Encyclopedia of German Resistance to the Nazi Movement, ed. by Wolfgang Benz and Walter H. Pehle, trans. by Lance W. Garmer (New York: Continuum, 1997), pp.101-13

223

Wiggershaus, Renate, Frauen unterm Nationalsozialismus (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1984) Wilkinson, James D., The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) Winckler, Lutz, ‘Diese Realität der Krisenzeit: Anna Seghers’ Deutschland Romane, 19331949’, Text und Kritik, 38 (1982), 1-26 Witherell, Louise R., ‘A Modern Woman’s Autobiography: Clara Malraux’, Contemporary Literature, 24 (1983), 222-32 Wolf, Friedrich, Zwei an der Grenze (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1948; repr. 1951) Zeldin, Theodore, France, 1848-1945, 2 vols (Clarendon Press, 1973-77), I (1973) Zorn, Gerda, and Gertrud Meyer, Frauen gegen Hitler (Frankfurt am Main: RöderbergVerlag, 1974)

224

Index

Abetz, Otto, 102 Académie française, 102 Action, 160 AEAR, see Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires Albrecht, Berty, 26, 71n Allert de Lange, 80 Alliance, 62n Alltagsgeschichte, 47 L’Amant (Duras), 139 Les Amants d’Avignon (Triolet), 139, 142, 145, 148-49, 151-52, 155-56, 158, 176, 182, 199, 201, 202, 205, 207 Amsterdam, 80, 105 ‘An der Nähmaschine’ (Langgässer), 120, 125, 126, 128-34 Andreas-Friedrich, Ruth, 9-10, 26, 27, 29-31, 32, 72n, 81-82, 83-92, 94, 9598, 119-25, 132, 134, 136, 146, 156, 165, 167, 173, 192, 196, 198, 199, 202 Borchard, Leo, 82, 92, 199 Der Schattenmann, 26, 29-30, 78, 81-90, 92, 94, 95-98, 119-25, 132, 134, 155, 171, 182, 18789, 193, 199, 205 see also Onkel Emil Antelme, Robert (pseud. Robert L.), 140, 141, 146, 150, 174, 199, 202 anti-Semitism, 41, 42, 43, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 82, 90n, 91, 120, 124, 127, 161, 198 and the Church, 42, 65 round-ups, 65, 94, 119-22, 198 see also Rosenstrasse protest Anti-War Congress, 105 anti-war demonstrations, 52, 54 Aragon, Louis, 101, 139, 142, 143-45, 156, 157-58, 163, 176, 177, 190, 194 Arles, 72 Armée Sécrète, 67n, 71n

L’Arrestation’ (Thomas), 182, 184-87, 197, 205 Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR), 100 Aubrac, Lucie, 17-18, 23, 71n, 138, 146, 165, 173, 184, 191 Aubrac, Raymond, 71n Der Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara (Seghers), 104 Auschwitz, 72, 106, 122, 127, 145, 188 Auvergne, 70 Avignon, 144, 198 Ballestrem-Solf, Lagi, 8 Balzac, Honoré de, 104 Barbusse, Henri, 32 Bataille, Georges, 140 BCRA, see Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, BDF, see Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine BDM, see Bund Deutscher Mädel Beauvoir, Simone de, 9-10, 17, 156, 182, 185, 186, 192-98, 199, 200-01, 20204 Le Deuxième sexe, 192, 204 influences, 192 L’Invitée, 193, 204 Les Mandarins, 192 Prime of Life, 194 Prix Goncourt, 192 Le Sang des autres, 182, 192, 195-98, 200-01, 205 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 192-95, 203, 204 Socialisme et Liberté, 193-94 Bebel, August, 118 Becher, Johannes, 81, 96, 161 Beck, Ludwig, 44 Behrend-Rosenfeld, Else R., 161n Beimler, Hans, 105 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 204

Bekennende Kirche, 43, 50 Bely, Andrei, 142 Benn, Gottfried, 126, 135 Bergen-Belsen, 141 Bergengruen, Werner, 126 Berlin, 26, 29, 42, 44, 52, 53, 58, 79, 81, 82, 94, 95, 119-24, 125, 127, 142, 157, 188, 190 bombing attacks, 29-31 Final Round-up, 120 Rosenstrasse protest, 52, 55n, 95, 119-24, 136 Berliner Rundfunk, 39n, 126 Bernanos, Georges, 125 Bernard, Jacqueline, 23-24 Besenmädchen, 187 La Bibliothèque française, 144 Bibliothèque nationale, 101, 193 Bibo, Rosel, 188n Bidault, Georges, 67 Bloch, Kläre, 39n, 168-69 Bock, Gisela, 48, 52 Bohec, Jeanne, 21n Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 43 Bonsoir, Thérèse (Triolet), 143, 157 Borchard, Leo, 82, 92, 199 Bousquet, Joë, 143 Brandt, Günther, 82n, 92 Braun, Madeleine, 23 Brecht, Bertolt, 104, 190 Bredel, Willi, 105 Breton, André, 139, 157, 158 Brik, Osip, 142 British Secret Intelligence Service, 62n ‘Brot und Frieden’, 54 Le Bruit de nos pas (Malraux), 160, 163, 178n Büchner, Georg, 104 Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), 37 Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), 38 Bund Proletarisch-Revolutionärer Schriftsteller, 105, 134 Bunin, Ivan, 142 Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), 28

226

Café de Flore, 150, 193 Les Cahiers du Rhône, 144 Cahors, 162 Calliau, Michel, 140n, 162 Camus, Albert, 101, 143, 144, 157, 158 Carco, Francis, 143 Casanova, Danièle, 72, 145 Casanova, Laurent, 145 Ce soir, 64, 100 censorship, 102, 194 Ceux de la Libération, 63 Ceux de la Résistance, 63 Le Chagrin et la pitié (Ophuls), 69 Char, René, 93, 94 CHDGM, 69 Chekhov, Anton, 141 Le Cheval blanc (Triolet), 142, 143, 157 Churchill, Winston, 62, 199n Ciosi, Chilina, 184 class struggle, 46, 100, 103, 105, 106, 107, 112, 114, 200 Claudel, Paul, 125 Clermont-Ferrand, 64, 70, Clotis, Josette, 161, 179 CNE, see Comité National des Écrivains CNR, see Conseil National de la Resistance Code de la Famille, 58 Cologne, 79, 104 Combat (resistance group), 26, 27, 64, 67, 71n, 92, 146, 168, 184, 189 Combat, 23, 93 Comet, 62n Comintern, 41, 80 Comité d’Action Féminine du MLN, 73n Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (CHDGM), 69 Comité National des Écrivains (CNE), 101, 116, 117, 144, 145, 194 comités des femmes (women’s committees), 52, 72, 75-76 Comités locaux d’aide aux réfractaires, 73n Commissariat Géneral à la Famille, 58 Commune, 101 Communism, 17, 99, 100, 101, 104, 107,

Communism (continued) 108, 115, 118, 135, 142, 143, 185 class struggle, 46, 100, 103, 106, 107, 112, 114, 200 France resistance by party, 64-64, 6667 women, 70-71, 72, 73, 100 Germany resistance by party, 40-42 women, 49, 99 see also Francs-Tireurs et Partisans; KPD; PCF; workers’ movement Communist International (Comintern), 41, 80 Communist Party, 37, 65, 105, 140, 141, 143, 145, 156, 193, 196, 200 see also KPD; PCF Comœdia, 194 Confluences, 144 Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR), 67 Contemporains, 163 Contes d’Auxois (Thomas), 101, 102, 121, 184 Cordesse, Henri, 112 Daladier, Édouard, 64 Darmstadt, 125 De Gaulle, Charles, 20, 21, 62, 66, 67, 68, 140n Decour, Jacques, 101, 144 Défense de la France, 63 Demarcation Line, 56, 61, 63, 67, 149, 198 Denger, Fred, 82 Deutsche Christen, 43 Deutsche Evangelische Kirche, 43 Die Deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler (Rothfels), 46 Deutsches Frauenwerk, 38 Le Deuxième sexe (Beauvoir), 192, 204 Dieulefit, 144, 163

Doctorow, E.L., 15 Döblin, Alfred, 78, 79, 126 Doriot, Jacques, 140 Dos Passos, John, 104, 192 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 104 La Douleur (Duras), 139, 140n, 141, 145, 146-48, 149-51, 152-55, 156, 158, 171 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 140 Drôme, 144 La Drôme en armes, 144 Duchamp, Marcel, 142 Ducros, E., 138, 145-46 Dumont, Yvonne, 72, 113, 165n Duras, Marguerite, 9-10, 17, 139-41, 145, 146-48, 149-51, 152-55, 156, 174, 188, 189, 202 L’Amant, 139 Antelme, Robert, 140, 141, 146, 150, 174, 199, 202 Communist Party, 140, 141, 156 La Douleur, 139, 140n, 141, 145, 146-48, 149-51, 152-55, 156, 158, 171 Les Impudents, 139, 156 nouveau roman, 139 Prix Goncourt, 139 resistance, 141, 142, 146-48, 14951, 152-55 East Berlin, 103 East Germany, see German Democratic Republic Éditions de la Cité Universelle, 157 Éditions de Minuit, 101, 102, 145, 156, 195 Éditions Gallimard, 140, 194 Edvardson, Cordelia, 125, 127n Ehrenburg, Ilya, 142 Eich, Günter, 125 Einem, Gottfried von, 82 Éluard, Paul, 101, 144, 156 Emmanuel, Pierre, 163 Engels, Friedrich, 118 Les Étoiles (resistance group), 144

227

Les Étoiles, 144 Étude de femmes, 102 Europe, 101 exode, 61 Fallada, Hans, 79 Faulkner, William, 139, 192 ‘La Fausse épreuve’, (Malraux), 159-60, 163, 164-65, 166, 167, 169-70, 171, 172, 173 Federal Republic of Germany, 12-13, 21, 31, 79, 80, 103 postwar resistance myths, 21-22, 31, 45-46 revisionist interpretations of resistance, 46-47 feminist movement (women’s movement), 36, 37, 58, 70, 79 Femmes de Provence, 75 Femmes Françaises, 72 Fernandez, Ramón, 140 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 78 FFI, see Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur FFL, see Forces Françaises Libres La Fin et le commencement, 1936-1940 (Malraux), 160 Final Solution, 123-24 First Congress of Soviet Writers, 161 First International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture, 105, 143, 161 FN, see Front National Fontaine, 144 Fontane, Theodor, 104 food riots and demonstrations, 52, 73, 76 forced labour draft, 60, 66, 73, 76, 120, 162 Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), 67, 68, 70, 71 Forces Françaises Libres (FFL), 20, 21n, 62, 66, 73, 92, 162 Franc-Tireur, 64, 67, 189 Le Franc-Tireur, 64 France defeat, 56, 61-62, 106 division, 61-62

228

and women, 58 free zone German invasion of, 67, 145 maquis, 67 resistance, 64 Vichy restrictions, 63, 64 occupied zone censorship, 102, 194 maquis, 67 Nazi restrictions, 62 resistance, 64 postwar resistance myths, 21-22, 31, 45-46, 68-69 revisionist interpretations of resistance, 69-70 Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), 66, 67n, 70, 71, 73 Frankfurt, 81, 83, 84, 125, 135 Frauenarbeitsdienst, 39 Frauenvereine, 20 Freies Deutschland (resistance group), 162n Freies Deutschland, 106 Frenay, Henri, 26, 27, 69, 92, 93, 94, 96, 146, 152, 165, 168, 184, 189, 191, 192 The Night Will End, 26-27, 92-93, 96, 152, 165, 168, 184, 189, 191, 192 French Armistice Army, 66, 67n French resistance and social class, 16 clandestine press, 61, 74 public demonstrations, 61n republican heritage, 40, 52, 61, 64 French Revolution, 19, 20, 40, 61, 74, 75, 101 Friedrich (-Hess), Karin, 26, 82, 90, 97, 155, 165, 183 Front Intérieur Allemand, 162 Front National (FN), 65, 66, 72 FTP, 66, 67n, 70, 71, 73 ‘FTP’ (Thomas), 99, 103, 106-08, 109, 110-11, 114, 118, 184, 185 Futurist movement, Russian, 142, 156, 157

Gallimard, Gaston, 194 Genêt, Jean, 140 Georg-Büchner Preis, 103, 127 Gerichter, Eva, 29, 82, 87, 89, 188-89 German Democratic Republic, 21-22, 31, 45-46, 103, 134 German Popular Front, 105 German resistance and social class, 16n, 48 and the Church, 36, 42-43, 50 national-conservative, 43-44, 46 public demonstrations, 51-52, 53, 5455 role of violence, 41 see also 20 July conspiracy German Revolution of 1848, 20, 40 Gide, André, 156, 162 Giese, Betty, 112 Gilgi, eine von uns (Keun), 79 Giraudoux, Jean, 139 Gleichschaltung, 37, 43 Goebbels, Josef, 120, 122, 123, 124 Goerdeler Gruppe, 44, 46, 48 Goerdeler, Carl Friedrich, 44 Göring, Hermann, 81, 84 Gorky, Maxim, 142, 143, 200 Grass, Günter, 9 Graßmann, Elisabeth, 113, 160n Groupes Francs, 23, 64, 67n Haas, Georgette, 75n Halem, Nikolaus von, 189 Harnack, Arvid, 42 Harnack, Mildred, 42 Hasenclever, Walter, 80, 81 Heidelberg, 104 ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, 85, 87 Heller, Gerhard, 140 Heller, Hermann, 125 Hemingway, Ernest, 32, 139, 192 Hessen, 125 Himmler, Heinrich, 45, 123 Historikerstreit, 47, 48 Hitler, Adolf, 25, 28, 35, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 53, 64, 79, 81, 83, 84,

92, 190 Hoffmann, Wilhelm, 126, 133n Holocaust, 9, 47 see also Final Solution, 124-25 Huch, Ricarda, 126, 135 Huchel, Peter, 125 L’Humanité, 64 L’Humanité de la femme, 75 Ils partiront dans l’ivresse (Aubrac), see Outwitting the Gestapo Imperial Civil Code, 36 Les Impudents (Duras), 139, 156 inner exile, 126 Institut de l’Histoire du Temps Présent, 17, 69 Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 47 International Association of Revolutionary Writers, 105 L’Invitée (Beauvoir), 193, 204 Jacob, Katharina, 117 Jacob, Max, 143 Jacobs, Helene, 182-83 Jews, 9, 42, 51, 65, 69, 86, 90, 102, 12024, 154, 156, 161, 164, 168n, 196, 198 assistance to, 12, 22, 27, 41, 63, 67, 82, 94, 96, 140, 159, 168, 177, 198 see also anti-Semitism; Final Solution; Holocaust; Third Reich Joyce, James, 192 Kafka, Franz, 104, 160, 192 Kanitz, Inge, 165-66 Kantorowicz, Alfred, 161 Karg, Carola, 146 Kesten, Hermann, 78, 80, 97 Keun, Irmgard, 9-10, 79-81, 130, 160, 175, 185, 186 emigration, 80, 81

229

Keun, Irmgard (continued) Gilgi, eine von uns, 79 Das kunstseidene Mädchen, 79 Marieluise-Fleißer Preis, 80 Nach Mitternacht, 77, 78, 79, 8081, 83-86, 108, 110 Neue Sachlichkeit, 78 Roth, Joseph, 80, 97 Keun (-Geburtig), Martina, 80 ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’, 59 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 80 Klatt, Senta Maria, 50 Kleist Preis, 104 Kleist, Heinrich von, 104 Koestler, Arthur, 161 Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), 37, 40-42, 49, 51, 104, 105, 118, 134 Koonz, Claudia, 23, 25n, 48, 146 Kordt, Erich, 82, 92 KPD, 37, 40-42, 49, 51, 104, 105, 118, 134 Krazat, Gérard, 162, 163 Kreisau Kreis, 42, 44, 46, 48-49 Kristallnacht, 42, 82, 86 Krüger, Horst, 128 Kuckhoff, Adam, 126 Kuckhoff, Greta, 105, 107 Kuhnert, Max, 30 Das kunstseidene Mädchen (Keun), 79 Das Labyrinth (Langgässer), 128n Lange, Horst, 125 Langgässer, Elisabeth, 9-10, 120-21, 125-36, 159, 163-64, 166, 167, 17071, 185, 188, 196, 198 ‘An der Nähmaschine’, 120, 120, 126, 128-34 anti-Semitic persecution, 126, 127, 128 Catholicism, 125, 126, 136 Hoffmann, Wilhelm, 126, 133n influences, 125 inner exile, 126

230

Das Labyrinth, 128n Der Laubmann und die Rose, 126 Literaturpreis des deutschen Staatsbürgerinnen-Verbandes, 126 ‘Mars’, 126 ‘Prosperpina’, 126 Der Torso, 128 Das unauslöschliche Siegel, 126, 127, 128 ‘Untergetaucht’, 128, 159, 16364, 166-167, 168, 169, 17071, 172-73, 188, 196, 198 Langhoff, Wolfgang, 105 Der Laubmann und die Rose (Langgässer), 126 Der lautlose Aufstand (Weisenborn), 46n Lauzès, 163 Laval, Pierre, 66, 68 Lawrence, D.H., 192 Leger, Fernand, 142 Legion Condor, 54n Lehmann, Wilhelm, 126, 135 Leibowitz, René, 140 Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim, 104 Les Lettres françaises, 101, 144, 145 liaison agent, 26, 70, 71, 136, 138, 139, 141, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 158 Libération, 67, 189 Libération-Nord, 63 Libération-Sud, 23, 64 Liberté, 64 Libres, 140 Lichtwitz, Ludwig, 82 Die Linkskurve, 105 Liste Otto, 102 Literaturpreis des deutschen Staatsbürgerinnen-Verbandes, 126 Loerke, Oskar, 126, 135 London, 20, 28, 29, 62, 65, 66, 92, 143, 184 London, Jack, 104 Lugebiel, Erna, 95 Lukács, George, 104 La Lutte inégale (Malraux), 160

Luxemburg, Rosa, 37, 52 Lyons, 9, 64, 139, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 162, 163, 165 Madrid, 105 Le Maison ne fait pas credit (Malraux), 160, 163 Malraux, André, 160, 161, 162, 163, 176, 179 Malraux, Clara, 8, 9-10, 17, 95, 141, 159-63, 164, 166, 167, 171-72, 17374, 185, 186, 194, 200 Le Bruit de nos pas, 160, 163, 178n ‘La Fausse épreuve’, 159-60, 163, 164-65, 166, 168, 169-70, 171-72, 173 La Fin et le commencement, 1936-1940, 160 La Lutte inégale, 160 Le Maison ne fait pas crédit, 160, 163 Malraux, André, 160, 161, 162, 163, 176, 179 Le Portrait de Grisélidis, 160 resistance, 161-63, 164, 176, 179 Malraux, Florence (Flo), 161, 162, 164 Maltzan, Maria von, 35 Man Ray, 142 Les Mandarins (Beauvoir), 192 Mann, Heinrich, 81, 96, 105 Mann, Thomas, 81, 199n maquis, 27, 66-67, 71, 110, 116, 144, 177, 179, 190 Marieluise-Fleißer Preis, 80 ‘Mars’ (Langgässer), 126 ‘La Marseillaise’, 73, 87 Marseilles, 73, 75, 193 Martin du Gard, Roger, 139, 143 Marx, Karl, 185 Marzin, Madeleine, 73 Mascolo, Dionys, 140, 141, 147 Mauriac, François, 101, 144, 156 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 141, 142, 143 médaille de la Famille, 60

médaille de la Résistance, 101 Memorial (Weisenborn), 190-91, 199200 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 140, 141 Mexico City, 106 Michaux, Henri, 140 Michel, Henri, 69 milice, 9, 67, 163 Milles regrets (Triolet), 142, 143 Milosz, Czeslaw, 29n Mirande-Laval, Renée, 159 Mischling(e), 122, 129, 132 Mitterrand, François (nom de guerre, François Morland), 69, 140, 146, 147n, 148, 149, 150, 154n, 155, 156 MLN, see Mouvement de la Libération Nationale MNPGD, 140 Moltke, Freya von, 49 Moltke, Helmuth von, 44 Monnier, Emmanuel, 163 Montauban, 163 Montluçon, 73 Montpellier, 64, 72 Morgan, Claude, 101 Morin, Edgar, 140, 141, 163 La Morte de Marie (Thomas), 100 Moscow, 105, 142, 143, 161 The Mother (Gorky), 200 Mother’s Day, 38, 50, 60 Moulin, Jean, 17, 66, 67 Mouvement de la Libération Nationale (MLN), 67 Mouvement de Résistance des Prisonniers de Guerre et des Déportés (MRPGD), 140n, 162 Mouvement National des Prisonniers de Guerre et Déportés (MNPGD), 140 Mouvements Unis de Résistance (MUR), 67, 71n, 160 MRPGD, 140, 162 Mühsam, Heinrich, 187-88 Münzenberg, Willi, 80 MUR, 67, 71n, 160 Die Mutter (Brecht), 190 Mutterkreuz, 38, 50, 75

231

Nach Mitternacht (Keun), 77, 78, 79, 8081, 83-86, 108, 110 Napoleonic Code, 57 Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland, 162n Naturlyrik, 126 NEIN-Aktion, 82, 188 Neu-Beginnen, 42, 161, 162, 163, 178, 179 Neue Deutsche Blätter, 105 Neue Sachlichkeit, 78, 125-26 Nice, 144 Niemöller, Martin, 43 The Night Will End (Frenay), 2627, 92-93, 96, 152, 165, 168, 184, 189, 191, 192 Nîmes, 72 Nizan, Paul, 139, 193 nouveau roman, 139 NS-Frauenschaft, 38, 50 NS-Volkswohlfahrt, 50 Nuremberg, 86 Nuremberg Laws, 45 Nuremberg Trials, 145 O’Brien, Tim, 11 Onkel Emil, 26, 27, 82, 84, 86, 89, 92, 94, 96, 112, 124, 134, 165, 167n, 187, 188, 191 Onkel Ernst, 82 Ophuls, Marcel, 69 Organisation Civile et Militaire, 63 Organisation Todt, 133n Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels), 118 Outwitting the Gestapo (Aubrac), 7, 18, 138, 165, 184 Ouzoulias-Romagon, Cécile, 71n Papon, Maurice, 9 Paris, 19, 63, 68, 105, 117, 139, 144, 147, 156, 161, 162, 163 Paris Commune uprising, 19, 58, 61, 73, 75, 100, 102

232

Parti Communiste Française (PCF), 6465, 70-71, 72, 100, 101, 140, 143, 145, 156, 163 Parti Populaire Française, 140 Paulhan, Jean, 101, 143, 144, 156 Paxton, Robert O., 56n, 69 PCF, 64-65, 70-71, 72, 100, 101, 140, 143, 145, 156, 163 People’s Court, see Volksgericht Pétain, Marshal Henri Philippe, 56, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 140 Peters, Hans, 82, 92 Petersen, Jan, 105 les pétroleuses, 58 Les Pétroleuses (Thomas), see The Women Incendiaries Picabia, Francis, 142 Poelchau, Harald, 82 Poesie, 144 Ponge, Francis, 141 Le Portrait de Grisélidis (Malraux), 160 Prague, 105 Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs (Triolet), 142 Prime of Life (Beauvoir), 194 prisoners of war, French, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 140, 162, 193 wives and families of, 11, 14, 72, 75 see also forced labour draft prisoners of war, German, 50, 163 Prix du Premier Roman, 100 Prix Fémina, 102 Prix Goncourt, 139, 142, 192 Propagandastaffel, 140, 150, 194 ‘Prosperpina’ (Langgässer), 126 Protestant Church, 36, 42-43 anti-Semitism, 42 Bekennende Kirche, 43, 50 women’s resistance, German, 50 Proust, Marcel, 104, 192 Provence, 75, 93 Prüser, Hermann, 118 Queneau, Raymond, 101, 140

Querido, 80 Rabier, Pierre, 141, 146-48, 149-50, 15254 Radiodiffusion Nationale, 194 Radványi, Laszlo, 104 Radványi, Peter, 104 Radványi, Ruth, 104 Raschke, Martin, 125 Rassemblement National des Prisonniers de Guerre (RNPG), 140 Regards, 101 Regler, Gustav, 161 Reichskulturkammer, 79 Reichskulturkammergesetz, 79 Reichsschriftumskammer, 79-80, 126 Reichssicherheitshauptamt, 45, 123 ‘La Relève’ (Thomas), 120 relève program, 66 Remarque, Erich Maria, 32 ‘Les Rencontres’ (Aragon), 176, 177-78, 190 resistance definitions of, 11-12 gender divisions, 23-24 postwar myths, 21-22, 31, 45-46, 68-69 revisionist interpretations of, 46-47, 69-70 Resistenz, 47 Reuber, Ursel, 29, 82, 89, 188-89 Révolution Nationale, 56, 58, 59 Rewald, Ilse, 160n Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 82 Rinser, Luise, 160 RNPG, 140 Robert Denoël, 157 Romains, Jules, 139 Roman Catholic Church France, 57, 65, 69 Germany, 42-43, 50-51 women’s resistance, 50-51 Rosenstrasse protest, 52, 55n, 95, 12124, 132, 134, 136 Rosenthal, Margot, 96, 187

Die Rote Fahne, 41, 105 Rote Hilfe, 50 Rote Kapelle, 42, 49, 105, 190, 199n Roth, Joseph, 80, 97 Rothfels, Hans, 46 Rouen, 193 round-ups, 65, 94, 119-24, 198 Roy, Claude, 141 Russian Revolution, 104, 142, 156 Saint-Donat, 144 Sakharov, Andrei, 145 Le Sang des autres (Beauvoir), 182, 192, 195-98, 200-02, 203, 205 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101, 145, 157, 193-95, 203, 204 satire, 84, 85, 129-30 Schaefer, Oda, 125 Der Schattenmann (Andreas-Friedrich), 26, 29-30, 78, 81-90, 92, 94, 95-98, 119-25, 132, 134, 155, 171, 182, 18789, 192, 199, 205 Schlabrendorff, Fabian von, 92, 93-94, 96, 152, 168, 189 Scholtz-Klink, Gertrud, 38 Schreibverbot, 126, 128 Der Schriftsteller, 105 Schulze-Boysen, Harro, 42 Second International Congress for Proletarian and Revolutionary Literature, 105, 143 Second International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture, 105, 178 The Secret War Against Hitler (Schlabrendorff), 92, 93-94, 96, 152, 168, 189 Seger, Gerhart, 105 Seghers, Anna (Netty Reiling), 9-10, 17, 99-100, 103-07, 108, 111-12, 114, 156 anti-fascist activity, 105-06 Der Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara, 104 influences, 104 Kleist Preis, 104

233

Seghers, Anna (continued) KPD, 104 Radványi, Laszlo, 104 Das Siebte Kreuz, 99, 103, 10509, 111-12, 114-15, 118 socialist realism, 104 Seidel, Ina, 126 Seitz, Walter, 82, 89, 112, 191 Serres, 144 Service du Travail Obligatoire see forced labour draft Servitude et grandeur des Français: Scènes des années terribles (Aragon), 177 short story form, 102, 127-28 Das Siebte Kreuz (Seghers), 99, 103, 105-09, 111-12, 114-15, 118 Simonis, Susanne, 82 Socialisme et Liberté, 193-94 socialist realism, 104, 142, 156 SOE, 20, 62, 71 Sohst, Hanna, 30 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 145 Soviet Union, 20, 41, 64, 92, 101, 105, 107, 134, 142, 143, 145, 157, 195 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), 37, 40-42, 49, 51, 125 Spanish Civil War, 54, 116, 117 SPD, 37, 40-42, 49, 51, 125 Special Operations Executive (SOE), 20, 62, 71 Sperber, Manès, 161 Spiegel, Tilly, 183 Spiquel, Flore Marie, 27 Star of David badge, 65, 86-87, 127, 172 Stauffenberg, Claus von, 45 Stendhal, 104 Stertzenbach, Alice, 113n, 168 Strauß, Arnold, 81, 95 Surrealists, 142, 145, 156, 157 swastika flag, 87, 88 Le Témoin Compromis (Thomas), 56, 101, 102, 116 Theresienstadt, 127, 188

234

Third Reich, 12, 37-42, 45-48, 50-51, 54, 59, 60, 61, 70, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 87, 88, 89, 95, 98, 102, 105, 106, 107, 113, 119, 123, 126, 128, 138, 149, 164, 187 and women, 35, 36-37 comparison with Vichy regime, 59 economic incentives, 15, 38 labour, 38-39, 53-64 propaganda, 15, 38 anti-Semitic policies, 65, 82, 120, 123, 124, 126, 127 the Church, 36, 42-43, 50 demonstrations against, 51, 54 see also Rosenstrasse protest ideal of womanood, 38 total war, 39, 124, 133 Thomas, Edith, 9-10, 17, 74, 100-03, 104, 106-07, 108-09, 110-11, 112, 114-18, 156, 175, 185-87, 194, 200 ‘L’Arrestation’, 182, 184-87, 197, 205 Contes d’Auxois, 101, 102, 121,184 Étude de femmes, 102 ‘FTP’, 99, 103, 106-08, 109, 11011, 114, 118, 184, 185 La Morte de Marie, 100 Prix du Premier Roman, 100 Prix Fémina, 102 ‘La Relève’, 120 resistance, 101, 110, 116-17 Le Témoin Compromis, 56, 101, 102, 116 The Women Incendiaries, 74, 102 Tillion, Germaine, 19, 24n Toller, Ernst, 81, 96 Tolstoy, Leo, 104 Der Torso (Langgässer), 128 total war, 39, 123, 132 Toulouse, 64, 162 Touvier, Paul, 9 Tralow, Johannes, 79 Triolet, André, 142 Triolet, Elsa, 9-10, 17, 102, 141-45,

Triolet, Elsa (continued) 148-49, 151, 155-58, 163, 175, 185, 186, 192, 194, 199, 200 Les Amants d’Avignon, 139, 142, 145, 148-49, 151-52, 155-56, 158, 176, 182, 199, 201, 202, 205, 207 Aragon, Louis, 142, 143-45, 156, 157-58 Le Cheval blanc, 142, 143, 157 Bonsoir, Thérèse, 143, 157 Milles regrets, 142, 143 Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs, 142 Prix Goncourt, 142 resistance, 143-45, 156-57 socialist realism, 142, 156 Trivialliteratur, 79, 91 Tucholsky, Kurt, 79 20 July conspiracy, 45, 46, 49, 92, 99 UFF, see Union des Femmes Françaises Ullstein, 81, 92 Das unauslöschliche Siegel (Langgässer), 126, 127, 128 Union des Femmes Françaises (UFF), 12, 72, 73n, 101, 117, 120, 145 ‘Untergetaucht’ (Langgässer), 128, 159, 163-64, 166-167, 168, 169, 170-71, 172-73, 188, 196, 198 Unterseeboote, 168 Veillon, Dominique, 17, 22, 69, 70, 165 Vendredi, 101 Vercors (Jean Bruller), 102n, 157 Vérités, 64 Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (Paxton), 56n, 69 Vichy regime, 11, 15, 56-62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 119, 136, 139, 149, 152, 162, 194, 206 and women comparison with Third Reich, 59

economic incentives, 15, 60 forced labour draft, 73 ideal French woman, 59, 76 propaganda, 15, 25, 59, 60 social measures, 15, 60 anti-Semitic policies, 65, 68 the Church, 65 conservative identity, 56 forced labour draft, 66, 73, 120 social values, 57 see also Révolution Nationale victim-perpetrator debate, 48 Vigerie, Emmanuel d’Astier de la, 64 Villon, Pierre, 117n Viollis, Andrée, 163 Volksgericht (People’s Court), 44, 45, 149, 155 Volkssturmdienst, 82 Von Molo, Walter, 126, 135 Wallé, Georgette, 89, 146n Der Weg der Frau, 105 Wehrmacht, 54n, 177 Weil, Simone, 193 Weimar Republic, 35, 40, 42, 43, 52, 79, 91, 104, 118, 125n Weisenborn, Günther, 46n, 190-91, 199200 Weisenborn, Joy, 199-200 Weiße Rose, 26, 82, 97 Werfel, Franz, 78 West Germany, see Federal Republic of Germany Wiechert, Ernst, 78, 160 Winterhilfswerk, 87, 88 Wolf, Friedrich, 134, 189 women and combat, 19-20 and paramilitary resistance, 20-21, 70-71 and war literature, 21 and workers’ movement, 37, 49, 112 anti-war demonstrations, 52, 54 clandestine press, 24-25, 74 comités des femmes, 52, 72, 75-76

235

women (continued) demonstrations, 51-53, 54, 55n, 7274, 76, 95, 119-24 historical examples of resistance, 52, 74 suffrage, 36, 52, 57 see also feminist movement Women and Socialism (Bebel), 118 The Women Incendiaries (Thomas), 74, 102 women’s clandestine press, 24-25, 74 women’s suffrage, 36, 52, 57 Woolf, Virginia, 160 workers’ movement (working-class movement ), 16, 40, 42, 46, 48, 51, 58, 64, 101, 106, 112, 117, 118, 134, 135, 186 and resistance, 40, 42, 46, 48, 112 and women, 37, 49, 112 World War I, 20, 25, 28, 29, 52, 58, 62, 101, 104, 134 World War II, 8, 9, 10, 20, 21, 22, 28, 29, 33, 58, 69, 100, 134 Zamiatin, Evgeny, 161 Zetkin, Clara, 37, 52 Zwei an der Grenze (Wolf), 134-35, 17677, 189-90, 200 Zweig, Stefan, 80

236