Negotiating the Nazi Occupation of France

Gender, Power, and Memory

Sandra Ott

• Publisher: Center for Basque Studies Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781949805529
• eBook ISBN: 9781949805994
• Subtopic: French History

The French, the Basques, and the myriad of foreigners who lived in wartime France often developed clever strategies for negotiating the Nazi Occupation of 1940–1944. This sometimes entailed living in harmony and cooperating with the "enemy," accommodating to the Germans' presence, or rejecting them through various modes of resistance and hostility. People so often simply tried to survive the Occupation as best as they could; and contrary to early perceptions of the French people. Most were neither "bad" nor "good" in a murky moral universe that was decidedly not black and white. As this book argues, that murky universe needs to be explored beyond the solely French or German experience. By largely focusing on daily life, the authors create a space in which to explore relations among people of varying ethnic, religious, regional, and national identities. They also engage with multiple disciplines: anthropology, history, visual studies, genocide studies, as well as transnational, memory, and gender studies.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Human Photography: Julia Pirotte’s Portraits of Life in Occupied Marseille
• 2. The Effects of the German “Occupation” on Relief Work in Unoccupied France
• 3. A Women’s Occupation?
• 4. The “Wild East” and the “Soft West”
• 5. Otto Doberschütz: A Nazi Officer’s Unlikely Relationship with a Basque Double Agent
• 6. Dining at the Tour d’Argent
• 7. “Millions of men in Germany and elsewhere have more than one reason to be ashamed”
• Contributors