H-Diplo Review Essay 199 on Gordon. War Tourism. Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage

H-Diplo H-Diplo Review Essay 199 on Gordon. War Tourism. Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage

Discussion published by George Fujii on Thursday, March 5, 2020

H-Diplo Review Essay 199

5 March 2020

Bertram M. Gordon. War Tourism. Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9781501715877 (hardcover, $42.95). https://hdiplo.org/to/E199 Review Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by Donald Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"War tourism,” the title of Bertram M. Gordon’s book on the experience and memory of World War II in France, is an awkward phrase, but this awkwardness signals to the reader the breadth of Gordon’s project. For the chapters on the war, he uses tourism in the conventional sense, if in the unconventional situations of the visits the Germans took to sites in occupied France and excursions of the French in occupied France. Some French took advantage of the paid holidays that were introduced by the Popular Front and maintained during the war, while others added to the activities in prewar Michelin guides what Caroline Moorehead inVillage of Secrets refers to ironically as tourisme alimentaire, the starving French going to bargain with farmers that was a complement to the gastronomic tourism of German officers in occupied Paris. Moorehead also shows how prewar tourism to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon had introduced some French to people and places that provided them otherwise unattainable security during the Occupation.[1]

If the tour of Europe was originally reserved for those who could afford to benefit by such interruptions to their lives, the German soldiers’ tour of duty— ‘join the army and see the world’ in British parlance—extended the activity to less elevated social groups. In a shock to readers, Gordon says that some French who did forced labor service in Germany had “their tourism moments” as well. (96) Yet what sets Gordon’s work apart is that he makes curiosity, not necessarily physical displacement, a key to touristic behaviors. He draws on the theoretical literature on tourism to extend the concept of tourists to Parisians who watched German military parades in their city in 1940 and, four years later, observed the victory parade led by Charles de Gaulle down the Champs- Elysées.

In his examination of the Germans during their first years in occupied France, Gordon develops the concept of tourism beyond that of a business or of activities for German soldiers who were on rest and relaxation tours away from the eastern front. He argues that tourism is experienced through “tourism imaginaries.” (11) The Germans came to France with the idea that it was an important, if

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Review Essay 199 on Gordon. War Tourism. Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage. H-Diplo. 03-05-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5920320/h-diplo-review-essay-199-gordon-war-tourism-second-world-war Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo antiquated, site of European culture; the invaders believed that they showed their own high culture by recognizing this. The Germans presented themselves as the energetic, modern inheritors of this culture and took the opportunity to tell the French what they were doing to protect buildings and objects from damage in war. Gordon quite rightly contrasts the German recognition of a cultural heritage in France in which they could place themselves with the consequences of their rejection of such an interpretation in dealing with Poland. But this tourism imaginary valued sites in France, not the defeated French themselves; the Germans asserted their superiority by criticizing the decadence of French culture. Touring France, German authorities believed, made Germans feel more German and more proud.

Gordon does not just assert the existence of this imaginary. He suggests its role in central events at the beginning and the end of the Occupation. Why in June 1940 did Germany not sweep through France and ally with Franco’s Spain to take Gibraltar and cut the United Kingdom off from the western Mediterranean? Gordon posits that Adolf Hitler was fixated on an earlier war memory from the First World War. He toured World War I battlefields and sought to show that he dominated the places he visited in Paris. Germany signed the armistice with France in June 1940 in the same railway car in Compiègne in which Germany had signed the armistice in November 1918. In July 1940, Hitler declared that France would “become a country of tourism.” (100) Gordon contends that Hitler’s celebratory tours of battlegrounds and of Paris “helped postpone any further serious German offensive either against England or to the south until it was too late.” (61)

The Compiègne railway car did not survive the war, but, despite Hitler’s orders to destroy Paris in 1944, Paris did not suffer the fate of Warsaw. Though the story may have been embellished over time, in its canonical telling, a member of the Paris municipal council took General Dietrich von Choltitz out on a balcony with a view of the Place de la Concorde and asked him to imagine looking out over Paris in the future “as a tourist.” (145) The general then decided to disobey Hitler and save Paris. Another story of a political leader threatening to destroy the cultural sites of a nation, and the military leadership refusing to do so is playing out as I write this review, although what impeded the American military in Iran was international law, not the sense that an American would ever visit these sites as a tourist. Gordon recognizes that the tourist imaginary in occupied France replicated elements of the colonial experience. However, the cultural and political relations between one-time opponents before and after World War II made the postwar tourism Gordon examines particular to a conflict like World War II in Europe. It will not have cognates for Europeans and Americans in Algeria, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

There is an element of this imaginary that Gordon does not directly address. Is war tourism a gendered concept, not only for many war tourists—men remembering when they were men—, but in its discursive construction? At one point, Gordon hypothesizes that if the ratio of male to female history professors were to change, this would change the gender distribution of visits to historical sites. (211) Perhaps, but such a phenomenon would not be specific to war-related sites. During the Occupation, the large number of POWs and primarily male French laborers in Germany made the population of occupied France disproportionately female. Gordon recognizes that German and later American troops came to France with sexual fantasies about French women, but that these troops were primarily composed of young men only reinforced a situation inherent in many forms of tourism: the nation that sends tourists is gendered male and where they go and are looked after is gendered feminine. A typical tourist tract of 1941 directed to Germans featured “an attractive young woman in

French peasant costume standing at the seashore.” (128) Not surprisingly, the scene the municipal councilor showed von Choltitz of what he could save features “an attractive young woman riding by on her bicycle, children sailing their boats in the Tuileries pond,” but no men. (144) Gordon does not devote a lot of attention to service personnel in tourist economies. However, the cruel act of watching as “the objects of tourist curiosity” (6) the post-liberation parades of women in one’s community whose heads had been shaved because they had slept with Germans could be interpreted as a gendered response to the shame attributed to one form of tourist culture in occupied France.

Just as Gordon’s examination of Germans in occupied France takes readers beyond a political and economic history to address the ways that Germans experienced France in terms of the cultural representations they brought with them, Gordon develops the concept of the site of memory by integrating it with the political and economic histories of areas of postwar France. Gordon locates historically the interaction of memory and practices of tourism at the Maginot Line, and in Normandy, Paris and elsewhere for national and international visitors. He devotes particular attention to lingering Pétainophiles and to the situation of Vichy, a prewar tourist site that has struggled with the dramatic decline in spa tourism. It is no longer frequented by colonial officials on leave or covered by the state health insurance, and has had to deal with a bad brand name inherited from the Occupation. Gordon places developments at Vichy and elsewhere in the context of the conflicts within France over the memory of the Occupation and the war. He shows that there is an international dimension to this history as well. Gordon agrees with the historian Friedhelm Boll that the elements of the commemorative sites at Normandy that appeal to Anglo-American tourists maintain the feeling and value of the ongoing conflict in which battles took place (156-157). This, Boll and Gordon aver, is very unlike the call for peace and reconciliation that marked Franco-German World War I sites like Verdun or the interpretive goals of World War II sites like the Caen Memorial- Museum of Peace.

War Tourism could have been more tightly edited. Sometimes Gordon tells us more than we need to know, for example, a TripAdvisor comment on Oradour-sur-Glane that concludes “There is adequate car parking, and information areas with toilet, shops and the counter to buy tickets” (173); he often gives a more detailed account of a document like a guidebook than is necessary to present the evidence for his argument. Yet this should not obscure the innovative qualities ofWar Tourism. Gordon does not simply write an internal history of the tourist imaginary, but argues that it played an important role in the political and economic history of twentieth-century France. And, in turn, Gordon develops our understanding of sites of memory associated with World War II by interpreting them with reference to this political and economic history, without making them simply epiphenomenon of these developments. War Tourism is well worth the visit.

Donald Reid is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2008) and Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968-1981 (Verso: 2018).

Note

[1] Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets. Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).