Modernism's Second Act: A Cultural Narrative

A Cultural Narrative

I. Nadel

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137302229
• eBook ISBN: 9781137323378
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

European modernism underwent a massive change from 1930 to 1960, as war altered the cultural landscape. This account of artists and writers in France and England explores how modernism survived under authoritarianism, whether Fascism, National Socialism, or Stalinism, and how these artists endured by balancing complicity and resistance.

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Art and Occupation

Abstract: A detailed examination of several key modernists who found themselves by choice or necessity living under the Occupation in Paris and confronting the challenge of creativity and authoritarianism. Their response, personally and artistically, and what freedom meant to them with the Liberation, the return of DeGaulle and the renewal of French Communism.

Nadel, Ira. Modernism’s Second Act: A Cultural Narrative. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. DOI: 10.1057/9781137323378.

We are currently living in terrifying times which could become tragic overnight.

Robert Esménard to Irène Némirovsky, 28 September 1939

If anybody jumps back or jumps at all in the streets of Paris you can be sure they are foreign not French.

Gertrude Stein, Paris France, 1940

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For writers in France under the Occupation, the choice was simple: “when the Nazis occupied France . . . French writers had two alternatives: collaboration or silence”(Vercors, Battle 11). To publish in France would be to submit oneself to German censorship and every publication, especially those that seemed neutral, were suspect. “Any attempt at public expression served the Nazis, who put their own interpretation on it which nobody could challenge,” Vercors complained (Battle 123).

A German-run paper commission controlled paper distribution, allotting material only to those publishers deemed most worthwhile (i.e., in line with German attitudes). It acted as a de facto censor board: approved were Goebbels’ memoirs, Claudel’s Ode to Marshall Pétain, and the anti-Semitic novel The Debris by Lucien Rebatet. Rejected were titles by Freud, Zola, and Colette. One of its minor bureaucrats was Marguerite Duras who would later indict the Occupation through her filmscript for Hiroshima Mon Amour. But the publication of her first novel, Les Impudents, previously rejected by several publishers, suddenly found acceptance through her connections and received a strong review from the collaborationist critic Ramon Fernandez. As Sartre argued in a 1946 radio broadcast, to decide to publish was to accept a complex and sinister system submitting to German control (“Lecture” 351).

Lack of paper regulated the number of books printed and no more than five or six thousand copies was the rule. François Mauriac, for example, who published a single book at the beginning of the war, and who had a normal readership of 80,000, now found his audience reduced to 5000. Others heard about a book only through the newspapers that were, in fact, entirely collaborationist publications. Sartre learned about Saint-Exupéry’s Pilot de guerre (1942) only through the press but had no chance to buy it. The Germans banned it two weeks after publication (Sartre, “Lecture” 351).

One curious effect of restricted publication was style: word inflation diminished. The Resistance taught writers to “observe severe economy when it came to words” because of the danger to typesetters, lack of paper, and often clandestine operations (Sartre, “Lecture” 352). Printers were frequently discovered, beaten, and on occasion killed. For typesetters, each word they set put their lives at risk. Politics and persecution made it imperative to say things rapidly and clearly. “People have acquired a kind of severity in their use of words,” Sartre remarked (“Lecture” 353).

The social and political function of literature increased. Literature had no alternative but to be engaged, committed: “la littérature engagée—is worth a fortune in France,” Sartre declared, because it is committed “to defending certain social structures and ideas because they are deemed linked to the literary exercise itself. It’s the idea that the writer is accountable” (“Lecture” 353; emphasis mine). This is one of the most important concepts to emerge from the Occupation, anticipated by Picasso’s use of painting for political or semi-political purposes as in Guernica. The most engaged writers, Sartre also notes, move toward journalism. Mauriac and Camus, for example, became editors of important papers. Journalism became a “vehicule for speaking to the masses, and one of the ways in which he [the writer] must defend his ideas and his theses” (Sartre, “Lecture” 353).

Three images from the period initialize the problem of art, collusion, and resistance. The first is Tête de femme (1941) painted by Picasso on the 17 July 1941 issue of Paris-Soir; the second is a photograph of Gertrude Stein and a group of American soldiers offering a semi-parodic Hitler salute at Hitler’s Berchtesgaden; the third is a photograph of Ezra Pound giving the Fascist salute upon his arrival in Naples on 9 July 1958 shortly after his release from St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Washington, DC where he spent thirteen years.

Picasso’s Tête de Femme is an angular profile done in harsh black ink, a protest against the German occupiers of Paris and a metaphor of the complex line between Picasso’s tenuous artistic freedom and Nazi control. It displays art imposed on Nazi propaganda, since the newspaper over which Picasso paints was the German controlled French daily that prior to the Occupation boasted a daily circulation of two-and-half million readers. Picasso literally overwrites and overturns the text of 17 July 1941, painting the image upside down on the page. It is a metaphor of Picasso’s life in Paris: circumscribed by the Nazis, his imagination embeds itself in, or on, authoritarian texts. Overriding authority, his imagination encodes itself within the typographical frame of the page: the image never exceeds the border of the actual printed text, while simultaneously subverting its content, giving it new meaning.

The second image is visually more disturbing: Gertrude Stein with seven American soldiers at Berchtesgaden in 1945. This was Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Alps, 30 km south of Salzburg, 180 km southeast of Munich and where Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met Hitler on 16 September 1938 to seek a non-aggression pact.¹ Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland, although Chamberlain was able to obtain assurances that Hitler had no designs on the remainder of Czechoslovakia or on the areas in Eastern Europe that had German minorities. Here, Chamberlain also received guarantees of Czechoslovakian independence. Two subsequent visits falsely established a détente with Hitler, the second the famous Munich Agreement that meant little as Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and then Poland within months.

What is odd about the photo is not Stein with the soldiers—she was a great cheerleader of American GIs—but the pose. They are standing on a balcony with their right arms raised, strangely imitating the Nazi salute. Intentionally or not, the visual grammar of the image suggests the very world that the Allies fought to destroy. It is disturbing in its implications, especially given Stein’s attraction to authoritarianism in the 1930s and 1940s, which she shared with Pound. The image appeared in a multipage Life magazine spread of 6 August 1945 featuring Stein and American soldiers touring postwar Germany. With faux jauntiness, she wrote that the scene of American GIs traipsing through Hitler’s mountain retreat was both comical and absurd: then “we all got together and pointed as Hitler had pointed but mostly we [she and Alice B. Toklas] just sat while they climbed around” (Stein, “Off” 138). The title of the article is “Off We All Went to See Germany.” But a disconnect exists between tone and subject, a clue to the apparent disconnect yet union between modernism and political extremism corroborated by Stein’s protected life in Vichy.

The image of Pound arriving in Naples echoes the pose of Stein and the soldiers but its meaning is the reverse: his Fascist salute insults the United States and its granting his freedom. The prime minister, Amintore Fanfani, tolerated Pound’s return, although the picture of the American poet offering his allegiance to Fascism (with a sly smile of satisfaction) offended many. Pound, it seems, did not care that he angered the public, believing the sign would symbolize his solidarity with the country’s immediate past and its deposed leader. The image, quickly sent around the world, infuriated Americans.

The response of Picasso, Stein, and Pound to authoritarianism and its impact on art during and after the World War II reveal unexpected parallels. Picasso chose to remain in Occupied Paris, Stein in Vichy France, Pound in Fascist Italy. Pound and Picasso each won controversial postwar prizes: Pound the Bollingen Prize in 1949, and Picasso the Lenin Peace Prize in 1950 (then called the Stalin Peace Prize) and again in 1962. Picasso believed that the crimes of Stalin did not undermine the goals of Communism; Pound continued to support Mussolini even after his 1935 invasion of Abyssinia, passage of racial laws in 1938, and pact with Hitler in 1939 (Utley, Picasso 217). Stein saw no contradiction between her support of Pétain and his policies and her identity as a Jew.

Not surprisingly, the FBI had files on all three figures: on Picasso because of his avowed Communism, on Stein because of her tenuous association with the Partisan Review initiated by her response to a 1939 symposium, “The Situation in American Writing,” and on the poet because of his overt Fascism. Picasso benefited from on-again and off-again support of Nazi officials. Stein in Vichy France enjoyed the protection of the collaborator Bernard Faÿ and worked to support the Pétainist position. Pound capitalized on Fascist friendships to ensure his residence as an American in a country at war.

France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 but no direct confrontation with the Germans occurred until 10 May 1940. This so-called phony war (aka le drôle de guerre) allowed the allies to consolidate economic and military strength. At first only thousands thought to flee but soon it seemed like millions—and as French military resistance disintegrated, frantic refugees fled the advancing Germans. The government, not anticipating the rapid demise of the military, had no plans for evacuation in place. People left before the government could order them to leave. In some cases, the first to go were the municipal authorities themselves, the populace immediately feeling betrayed by their political leaders. Taxis disappeared, phone lines were cut, children and even dogs were off the streets. The population fled south before the German armies, combining with fleeing Dutch and Belgians to form some estimated eight million, the largest population movement in history up to that date.² Smoke filled the sky, not from advancing Germans but from burning oil storage tanks and papers as diplomatic missions and French ministries torched memos, code books, and secret files. By 10 June 1940, the day the government ordered the evacuation of Paris, the French army had been defeated. Parks, cafes, churches were all deserted and within seven weeks of entering France, the Nazi flag flew from the Eiffel Tower. The Germans occupied Paris on 14 June; by the 24th, Hitler reviewed his Wehrmacht troopers marching down the Champs-Élysées. The day before, Pétain signed an armistice with the Führer.

But the nine-month drôle de guerre intensified political and social tensions, ending with the German Occupation of Paris on 14 June 1940. A French bureaucrat in 1939 expressed the general dilemma: “France divided into two camps, those who do not want to make peace and those who do not want to make war” (in May 271). Communism was then seen by the Germans as a new threat with many interned on suspicion alone; by March 1940 some 300 Communist municipalities were suspended and 3400 Communist activists arrested (Jackson 115). Anti-Fascist refugees, many of them Communists, were sent to internment camps originally inhabited by Spanish refugees. Arthur Koestler was one; his book Scum of the Earth provides a vivid account of conditions.

But a demoralized French army, unclear war objectives, improper public communication explaining why the war was being fought, and poor military planning all contributed to a weakening defense as Koestler vividly outlines in the first section of Scum of the Earth (3–53). The wish of most soldiers waiting for either invasion or peace was “il faut en finir,” put an end to it. But when fighting actually commenced, little stood in the way of the advancing Germans and Paris. In the interregnum, Paris turned gray: “the pavement in the streets had lost its magic” writes Koestler. People walked “in despair through her suddenly hostile avenues, like on tombstones,” although theaters boîtes, and restaurants de luxe remained overcrowded (Koestler 40–41, 155).

Officials quickly prepared to evacuate the capital. By 10 June the government had fled and declared Paris an open city: the benefit to such cities, which waived their right to resist, was a peaceful occupation.³ The American Ambassador William Bullett became the de facto mayor of the city since the local administration had left. The Germans entered on the 14th and for the next fifty months occupied the capital (14 June 1940–25 August 1944).

Suite Française Irène Némirovsky’s 1942 novel (unpublished until 2004; Eng. 2006), conveys the confusion, panic, and disbelief of the French who initially fled joining a sea of dispossessed and dislocated families and individuals. She herself was a stateless woman of Jewish descent. But as letters from her husband Michel Epstein make clear as he pursued her location after her arrest and deportation, Némirovsky made every effort not to be seen as Jewish. She and himself were Catholic, he claimed (converting in 1939): their children were French and “she took refuge in France to escape the Bolsheviks, who also stole her parents’ entire fortune,” he added.⁴ However, the passage of new racial laws in October 1940 deemed them Jewish and stateless since they did not have French citizenship. Life in Issy-l’Evêque, where they took refuge in the occupied zone, was difficult, made more so by the requirement to wear the Jewish star.

Her Jewishness was inescapable. Her publisher Robert Esménard, writing to her on 27 October 1941, explained that although she needed money and suggested a payment of 3000 francs a month due to her as royalties, all royalties received from the sale of Jewish authors’ works must be sent to their “blocked account” (“Correspondence,” SF 397). He also returned to her a proposal from a film company apparently interested in producing one of her works. But a project of this type, he explained, can be undertaken only if the author of the adapted work is Aryan (SF 397).

Némirovsky understood that contrast was the only way to grasp the impact of the Occupation. In notes for a sequel to Suite Française, she explained that to create something memorable it is not the misery of the people but their prosperity that needs to be emphasized. Instead of describing the death of hostages, “it’s the party at the Opera House I must show, and then simply people sticking posters up on the walls: so and so was shot at dawn.” “Yes!” she adds, “it must be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Art and Occupation
• 2  Modernist Politics
• 3  Marketing Modernism
• Coda: Making Sense of Modernism or the Bomb
• Works Cited
• Index