'" Un livre pour enfants '": Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Picture Book

Philip Smith

Children's Literature, Volume 47, 2019, pp. 104-119 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.2019.0006

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/725044

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] ‘“Un livre pour enfants’”: Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Picture Book

Philip Smith

The Gurs camp was the largest internment center in occupied France. Despite hunger, thirst, separation from loved ones, scarcity of even the most basic resources, an uncertain future, and widespread sickness, its occupants actively sought to maintain signs of culture within the camp, including hosting lectures, staging plays, performing music, and creating visual art. One work to have emerged from Gurs is ’s Mickey au Camp de Gurs, which uses Disney’s Mickey Mouse as a representative camp prisoner. Rosenthal’s use of irony, gallows humor, and satirical wit is all the more remarkable for the fact that he produced the work while under such terrible conditions. Mickey au Camp de Gurs, this essay argues, uses a visual vocabulary borrowed from the picture book and the comic book to offer a double-voiced criticism of Vichy racial politics, highlighting not only the violence of the regime, but the ways in which it sought to legitimize that violence through bureaucracy and nationalist rhetoric. In criticism to date, Mickey au Camp de Gurs has often been associated with Art Spiegelman’s Maus and, as such, has received significant atten- tion from comics scholars. This essay instead reads Rosenthal’s work as one that shares certain generic conventions with the picture book. It draws out Mickey au Camp de Gurs from the shadow of Maus to explore it using analytical tools from children’s literature. It shows, first, that approaching Mickey au Camp de Gurs as a picture book yields readings beyond the codes found in comics, and, second, that Mickey au Camp de Gurs’s primary target is not German anti-Semitism as in Maus, but rather the officiousness, xenophobia, violence, and hypocrisy of the Vichy regime. Mickey au Camp de Gurs, this essay argues, uses a form of double address to ridicule the Vichy regime’s treatment of foreigners, and Jews in particular, as a danger to French ideals. In order to appreciate the import and context of Rosenthal’s work, we must begin with his biography. Horst Rosenthal was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1915. Faced with rising anti-Semitism and an uncertain future, he fled to France in 1933—the year Hitler

104 Children’s Literature 47, Hollins University © 2019. ‘“Un livre pour enfants’” 105 came into power. At first, he lived in Paris, on rue de Clignancourt and then rue Richomme. After war broke out, he was arrested in a round-up of French Jews and Jewish refugees from Germany. He was held first in Buffalo Stadium in Paris, then Marolles in Loir-et-Cher, Damigny, Dreux, Tence, and finally the camp in St. Cyprien. As he was moved between these camps, in 1940, northern France fell under German control. Most of France was occupied by the German military, and the remaining regions were administered by the Vichy regime in accordance with the terms laid out by Germany. The Vichy regime was, as Michael Marrus and contend, “authori- tarian, traditionalist, pious, and neutral in the war between Hitler and the Allies” (xvi). They were also nationalistic and deeply anti-Semitic, blaming immigration and foreign influence for, as they saw it, the degradation of French society. The persecution of Jews, Marrus and Paxton argue, was not purely a case of the Vichy government aligning their policies with those of the German occupiers, but also a project of recovering (in their eyes) French values by purging France of those considered a threat to national unity—the most demonized among these groups being communists and Jews. Their policy was not of extermination but of forced relocation or (in a minority of cases) as- similation with the goal of building a “homogeneous French nation” (xvii). A series of laws came into place, denaturalizing French Jews, closing Jewish businesses, barring Jews from certain occupations, and allowing for the internment of foreign Jews. The anti-Semitism that Rosenthal had sought to flee had found him in France. After the St. Cyprien camp was destroyed in a flood, Rosenthal was transferred to Gurs in late 1940 (Rosenberg 274). Gurs was the largest camp in occupied France. It had originally been intended to house refugees from the but had been repurposed to hold those whom the Vichy regime considered, to use Pnina Rosenberg’s term, “anti-French” (273), namely communists, foreigners, and Jews. Many of those held in Gurs were members of the International Brigade (internationaux), who fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War (Rosenberg 274). Claude Laharie maintains that Gurs held 21,790 in- dividuals between March 1939 and November 1943 (219). The camp itself consisted of separate male and female barracks that collectively comprised 382 hastily constructed wooden huts, each twenty-five square meters in size. The huts, each housing up to sixty inmates, had no in- sulation and the tarred fabric roofs deteriorated quickly. During the period 1940–41, Lisa Mulman asserts, dysentery, typhoid fever, and 106 Philip Smith other diseases claimed the lives of 800 prisoners (“Mice” Tale 90). In the face of such privations, however, as Hanna Schramm and Barbara Vormeier document, prisoners put on lectures, musical and theater performances, and art exhibitions for one another (131–46). While in the camp, Rosenthal created picture books, of which three survive. One of these three books, Mickey au Camp de Gurs—the focus of this essay—places Disney’s iconic character Mickey Mouse within the wire fences of the Gurs camp. In the book, Mickey takes a walk through France. He is challenged by a gendarme (police officer) and fails to produce his papers, claiming innocently to be “international” (3). Mickey is arrested and taken to Gurs, where he meets a bureau- crat who is buried beneath a mound of papers. When asked about his parentage, Mickey states that Walt Disney is his father and that he has no mother. The bureaucrat asks if he is a Jew, and Mickey pleads ignorance of such matters. He asserts that he is American, “mais je suis international,” a term that the bureaucrat seizes on, declaring Mickey to be a communist (6). In the Gurs camp, Mickey witnesses and endures several hardships, most significant among them being starvation and restricted movement. Ultimately, Mickey decides to erase himself from the story and reappear in America, a place, he tells the reader, where the spirit of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity remains alive. Rosenthal was not the first to appropriate Mickey Mouse. In America, “Tijuana Bibles,” such as those collected by Bob Adelman, featured Disney characters, Mickey included, in various sexual scenarios. Disney characters were also invoked in international politics; for example, on 28 July 1931, an article in Film-Kurier, in response to Nazi attacks on American cartooning, argued that Mickey Mouse might serve as an antidote to “swastika and persecution” (qtd. in Leslie 80). Rosenthal was also certainly not the last to use Disney or an animal allegory: during World War II, Donald Duck fought the Nazis in Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943); and Edmond-François Calvo’s La Bête est morte! (1944) uses cartoon animals and imagery from the French Revolution to depict the end of German occupation. What makes Rosenthal’s text unique, however, is its status as Holocaust art. The authorities who operated the Gurs camp were more tolerant of artistic expression than those elsewhere in Europe, but the survival of Rosenthal’s work is nonetheless miraculous. Those who created art within the camps, Nelly Toll asserts, had to do so using whatever materials they could find or bargain for while under conditions that were far from conducive to the preservation of delicate materials such as hand-drawn and bound books (xvi). Every work of ‘“Un livre pour enfants’” 107 art, whether commissioned by the authorities or created by prisoners often at great personal risk, represents a triumph of art over almost insurmountable circumstances. As works of art produced within the camps, Rosenthal’s books rep- resent a fragment of a world that has otherwise been buried. The Nazi killing project, in which the Vichy regime was complicit, was intended to be self-erasing; in 1943, Himmler remarked of , “[t] his is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written” (qtd. in Gilbert 614); and, indeed, as with many of the German-operated camps, many of the records for Gurs were destroyed by the camp authorities. Rosenthal’s picture books, then, like the works of Leo Haas, Esther Lurie, Felix Nussbaum, Bedřich Fritta, Karel Fleischmann, Yehuda Bacon, and Dina Babbitt, are not only self-expression but documentary made under almost impossible conditions; they capture, to use Stephen Feinstein’s words, “[w]hat the camera did not see” (55).1 The French authorities held Rosenthal in Gurs from 1940 to 1941, and, after a period in a forced labor camp, he returned to Gurs for several months in 1942. He was transferred to Drancy on 11 September 1942, and sent on to Auschwitz, where he died two years later. He was just twenty-seven years old. Mickey au Camp de Gurs is now held in the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, along with another of his picture books, La Journée d’un hébérge: Camp de Gurs 1942. A third picture book, Petit guide à travers le Camp de Gurs 1942, is part of the collection of Elsbeth Kasser (1910–92).

Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Maus Urtext

In academic criticism, Mickey au Camp de Gurs has often been treated as evidence of an essentialism, or what Art Spiegelman calls “deep roots” in his two-volume comic book (auto)biography MetaMaus (Spiegelman and Chute 138).2 Maus describes the life of a character based closely on Spiegelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, an Auschwitz survivor. Spiegelman, famously, draws the German characters as cats and Jewish characters as mice. The texts are similar in that, like Mickey au Camp de Gurs, Spiegelman makes use of both theriomorphism and allusions to Disney in order to describe life in a concentration camp. The tendency to read Mickey au Camp de Gurs in terms of its discourse with Maus has produced two recurring complications in criticism that link the books: readings that interpret Rosenthal’s work solely through the lens of comics scholarship, and those that relate the text to Nazi propaganda. 108 Philip Smith The first way in whichMickey au Camp de Gurs has been (mis)read as an urtext to Maus is in a tendency among scholars such as Glyn Morgan to understand it primarily as a comic rather than a picture book. The two genres tend to have formal differences such as frequency of pic- tures per page (generally one per page in a picture book compared to multiple panels in a comic). Children’s picture books, Perry Nodelman argues, contain simpler written language and syntax than one might find in a conventional novel, a child-like focalizer, desire and knowledge as central preoccupations, and a sense of crossing the threshold from a familiar space to an unfamiliar one (76–81). These distinctions are important because comics and picture books encode different audi- ences and expectations. As Charles Hatfield and Craig Svonkin argue, comics and picture books tend to be received differently; “picture books are generally seen as empowering young readers to take part in a social structure that prizes official literacy, while comics, in contrast, are often seen as fugitive reading competing with or even obstructing that literacy” (431). Certainly, Mickey au Camp de Gurs makes use of conventions from the comic book format like those described by Thierry Smolderen as “the clear line, the modeled line, the combination of heterogeneous graphic styles, the schematic representation of instantaneous move- ment, the use of postures or physiognomic expressions, caricature, speech balloons, etc.” (3). We see, for example, motion lines (what cartoonist André Franquin, quoted in Menu, calls “krollebitches”) on pages 13 and 14, and speech bubbles throughout the work. Rosen- thal’s use of Mickey suggests that the author was aware of (although perhaps not wholly familiar with) Disney comics. Prior to Rosenthal’s arrival in Gurs, Mickey Mouse had appeared in shorts and films, which had played in Germany, perhaps the most famous among them being Steamboat Willie (1928). As Maurice Horn documents, the Mickey Mouse daily comic strip, with Disney as author, Ub Iwerks as artist, and Win Smith as inker, first appeared in 1930.3 Translations of Mickey Mouse comics first appeared in French inLe Journal de Mickey in 1934—only one year after Rosenthal had left Germany—and appeared in German in the Swiss publication Micky Maus Zeitung in 1937. While his main point of reference was certainly animated film, Rosenthal was likely aware that Mickey existed in comic form. Reading Rosenthal’s work solely as a comic, however, may hinder access to other analytical tools. In addition to employing the visual language of comics, the work also fits the conventions of the children’s ‘“Un livre pour enfants’” 109 book as described by Nodelman. It features a child-like protagonist who enters an unfamiliar realm in the search for knowledge, and it has a single image on each page. It also refers to itself as a children’s book (“c’est un livre pour enfants,” Mickey announces on page 7).4 It presents itself, then, as a child’s picture book, albeit one that uses certain visual language from comics. This does not necessarily mean that its first au- dience was made up primarily of the children interned in Gurs—the majority of whom were in the women’s section of the camp and thus separated from Rosenthal and the other men—but that it uses in part the semiotics of the picture book and the language of children’s litera- ture to deliver its message.5 By repositioning Mickey au Camp de Gurs as a hybrid of the picture book and comic book formats, we make available certain other modes of criticism such as the semiotics of picture books outlined by William Moebius and J. Hillis Miller, as well as the narra- tive modes of children’s books described by Barbara Wall and Perry Nodelman. By employing these models, we can read Mickey au Camp de Gurs as a double-voiced text, which, as shall be argued below, at once innocently accepts and yet at the same time ridicules the xenophobia and bureaucracy of the Vichy regime. The second way in which Mickey au Camp de Gurs remains in the shadow of Maus is through readings such as those by Glyn Morgan, Lisa Mulman, and Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, which understand Mickey as representative of the Jewish concentration camp prisoner. This has allowed critics to read Rosenthal’s work as embodying the same mechanisms as Spiegelman’s, in the sense that both texts appropriate and subvert anti-Semitic propaganda. One can understand why critics have sought to read Mickey as a Jew—Spiegelman and Rosenthal were Jewish, their protagonists are cartoon mice, and their work is set in a concentration camp. The original “Maus,” which appears in Spiegel- man’s first collection,Breakdowns , even features a character called Mickey. In the later version, Vladek, the Auschwitz survivor, wishes that his son might become a “big-shot cartoonist . . . Walt Disney,” and an image that features in both Co-Mix and the back cover of the collected Maus depicts “Art Spiegelman” (a cartoon mouse) holding a realistic rodent while Mickey Mouse’s head looms over him (135). Certainly, at one key moment in the text, Mickey is associated with Jewishness. This reading is not sustained, however, and when the two books are compared using the lens of Nazi anti-Semitism, Mickey au Camp de Gurs inevitably serves as the weaker example. While Rosenthal derives humor from the juxtaposition of Mickey Mouse and the bureau- 110 Philip Smith cracy of , his shorter, whimsical format does not facilitate the same exploration of dehumanization found in Spiegelman’s work. Maus, in the words of Andrew Loman, “disclose[s] the inadequacy of its governing metaphor” (221). Spiegelman’s use of the Jew-as-mouse trope is rendered untenable over the course of the text. Mickey au Camp de Gurs, certainly, responds in part to the demonization of Jews in Vichy propaganda. Unlike Maus, however, its animal allegory is not primarily or solely a question of race or religion; Rosenthal derives dark humor from the attempts of France’s authorities to classify an American car- toon mouse within their matrix of “anti-French” individuals (Rosenberg 273). Indeed, one central complication of the Mickey-as-Jew reading is that in Mickey au Camp de Gurs, the term “Jew” arises only once: Mickey is asked if he is a Jew and responds with confusion. He is then accused of being a communist. The term that is most frequently used (inno- cently by Mickey, and with menace by the authorities) is “international,” which, to the ears of the Vichy regime, means one of the brigade of foreigners who fought for the Republicans against Franco and Fascism in the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War (George Orwell and Laurie Lee be- ing among them). Mickey naively uses the term to mean citizen of the world, traveling American, or perhaps a figure of mass culture, but the gendarme and bureaucrat he encounters hear “communist.” Mickey, then, is not precluded from being Jewish; his professed statelessness potentially aligns him with certain formations of Jewish identity, but his status in the comic makes such classification ridiculous. Rather than being classified solely as Jewish, Mickey finds himself placed in a series of categories—communist, Jew, “international”—all of which are comically ill-fitting given that he is racially ambiguous (his name has Irish associations and he is visually associated with black minstrels in Steamboat Willie) and, more crucially, a cartoon mouse. These changing classifications no doubt reflect Rosenthal’s own frustrations at having been imprisoned for being a German refugee before the occupation, and under Vichy rule for being a Jew. It is the inability of the French authorities to classify Mickey and Mickey’s inability to decode their highly bureaucratized and ultimately ridiculous taxonomy of enemies that make the text so effective in its criticism of the Vichy regime.

Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Picture Book

There exists a significant body of scholarship that theorizes what John Cech calls the “duet” between images and text in picture books (118). ‘“Un livre pour enfants’” 111 In Mickey au Camp de Gurs, the word/image relationship might best be understood using Miller’s concept of “interference,” where, using a metaphor from wave theory, the meeting of two waves creates complex new patterns—the effect of the text is not created by either the words or images alone, but the interaction between both words and images, and images with other images (95). In his essay “Picturebook Codes,” Moebius provides a taxonomy for the symbolic language of picture books. He suggests that recurring devices in picture placement, fram- ing, line-work, color, and word/image relationships all encode certain meanings within a text.6 The semiotics of picture books, then, offer us a means to identify and understand the codes of authority, risk, and intellectual rigidity in Mickey au Camp de Gurs. In terms of character placement, Mickey au Camp de Gurs conforms to Moebius’s assertions concerning picture book composition—for the majority of the book, Mickey is coded as being less powerful than the individuals with whom he interacts. He is typically found close to the margin of a given image (albeit in the middle of the page as a whole), positioned lower than other figures. The front cover ofMickey au Camp de Gurs offers a window into the first page. When the book is closed, the circle of a hut window encloses Mickey’s face. When the reader opens the book, Mickey is freed from the confines of the hut and, in- stead, is in motion. He is positioned in the center of the page without background or color. On the following page, he is confronted by a gendarme. Whereas in the first image Mickey is positioned in the center, on the second page he appears in the lower-left corner of the image, by the margin. Reading the sequence of images as “interference,” it seems as though he has been pushed back in order to make space for his uniformed interlocutor. While Mickey is squeezed into the corner of the image, the gendarme is right and centered. Even before we read the text, it is immediately obvious where the power lies. From this page onward, Mickey appears consistently in the lower-left corner of each image. On pages 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 12 (more than half of the book), we see Mickey placed close to the margin, looking up at a figure who is to the right of center. Most significant among these is page 4, which features a photograph of the camp itself. Mickey is so dwarfed by the image that he has not simply been forced into the lower corner of the page but seems to have been propelled out of the frame. Mickey au Camp de Gurs also makes use of the picture book’s capacity to code danger through the use of double-page displays. In Rosenthal’s text, each verso (left) page is blank, and the images and text appear 112 Philip Smith only on the recto (right). While it is impossible to know the author’s intentions, one might speculate that paper quality and availability may have been a factor in Rosenthal’s decision not to use the verso pages. If he had made a mistake on one side of a page, then the entire sheet would have to be thrown away. Indeed, we can see evidence of Rosenthal’s reluctance to dispose of a sheet of paper on page 9, where an erroneous word has been scribbled out. Whether by accident or design, the absence of verso pages elicits a sense of danger throughout the text. Moebius asserts that a “character shown on the left page is likely to be in a more secure, albeit potentially confined space than one shown on the right, who is likely to be moving into a situation of risk or adventure” (317). The positioning of all the images on the recto page means that Mickey is perpetually moving toward an unknown fu- ture—toward risk or adventure. Rosenthal uses the suspense provided by the reader’s inability to look ahead to great effect. On page 3, for example, Mickey states, “C’est comme cela que j’arrivais à. . . .” The reader then must turn the page only to be greeted by a large photograph and the word “GURS!!!” (4). By removing the possibility of a reader taking in two pages at a time, Rosenthal infuses the text with a constant sense of risk and uncertainty. The surprise produced by turning a page is reinforced by the fact that Mickey appears to be in an almost constant state of shock. On page 5, when a head pops up from a pile of papers, Mickey’s speech bubble simply reads “?” This is repeated two pages later when Mickey surveys the living conditions in Gurs. On page 9, when Mickey observes one prisoner’s ineffectual attempts to make soup, his surprise rises to the point that two exclamation points are added to his question mark. The sense of Mickey being in danger is also coded in the appearance and disappearance of a horizon. On page 3, having been confronted by the gendarme, Mickey is shown frozen, with one finger raised in an unvoiced objection. He has turned so that now, rather than facing toward the reading direction, he has turned his back to the future, emphasizing his vulnerability. Significantly, where on the previous page the background had been visible, on this page it is gone. Moebius asserts, “[w]here it has been present earlier, the sud- den absence of a horizon, of a clear demarcation between ‘above’ and ‘below’ is likely to spell danger or trouble” (317). In this case, before we have even turned the page, Rosenthal makes absolutely clear to the reader that Mickey is imperiled. Moebius’s semiotics of picture books allow us to decode the criti- cisms Rosenthal makes of the Vichy regime. Moebius writes that a ‘“Un livre pour enfants’” 113 “character located within a two-dimensional façade is likely to be less ‘open-minded,’ less able to give imaginative scope to desire than one pictured within a three-dimensional ‘depth’” (317). In Mickey au Camp de Gurs, Mickey meets a bureaucrat—a man buried beneath a mound of papers. It is noteworthy that, although Mickey is frequently decen- tered, the combination of prose and images means that he is generally positioned in the center of each page. This is particularly relevant when he meets the bureaucrat; while the bureaucrat dominates the image, the positioning of words and text means that Mickey is at the physical and, we might infer, moral center of the exchange. In the conversation that follows, the man asks Mickey about his parentage. Mickey says that his father is Walt Disney and, as for his mother, “Je n’ai pas de mère.” The man is clearly unable to comprehend that he is speaking to a cartoon mouse and responds with an outburst that Rosenthal has edited for propriety: “Comment? Vous n’avez pas de mère? Vous vous F . . . . [foutre] de ma gueule!!” (5).7 The man can only see the world in terms of the Vichy classifications of loyal, noble, French citizens on one side, and foreigners, Jews, and communists on the other. He lives in a world where citizenry (and thus identity) is measured by paperwork—in France one’s identity papers are simply “des papiers,” and an individual who resides in France without the legal right to do so is “un sans-papiers.”8 As evidence of his power, the bureaucrat has so many papers that they engulf him—his papers serve as a small fortress, within which he is unassailable. Rosenthal reflects this sense of the man being contained by paperwork by not only giving the scene no backdrop, thus render- ing the image two-dimensional, but by enclosing the man, first, within his papers and, second, within the hard edges of a frame. This is an individual who is decidedly immersed in and empowered by bureau- cracy. He quickly reasserts his worldview; he accuses Mickey of being a Jew (Mickey replies with bafflement), and then identifies him as an “INTERNATIONAL!!” (6).

Color and the Double Address

Clearly, then, Rosenthal makes use of the picture book genre to com- municate the subtext of Mickey’s encounter with the Vichy authorities: he uses only the recto page so as to present Mickey in danger, character positioning to show him being intimidated, and frames and a lack of backdrop to show French authorities as blind to the violence of their regime. In other instances, Rosenthal’s use of codes is as revealing in 114 Philip Smith the breach as in the observance. Curiously, Rosenthal chooses to de- pict Mickey’s life prior to his internment in black and white, whereas his time within the camp is depicted in vivid colors. The use of color, in other words, signals entry into a different space. Whereas in, for example, The Wizard of Oz, the switch from black and white to color indicates entry into a world of fantasy, here color indicates that Mickey has left the familiar and entered into the nightmarish world of Gurs.9 This represents a reversal of the usual codes of picture books; as Moe- bius notes, more colorful images tend to suggest “exhilaration and discovery,” whereas darker tones, particularly black and white, suggest “disappointment and confusion” (319). One might explain this reversal of the normal color tropes of picture books by reading the book as double-voiced. Barbara Wall suggests that “double address” is a key facet of early children’s literature, that chil- dren’s books contain two simultaneous modes of discourse: onedirected at the child reader, and the other addressing the adult who reads with the child (or over the child’s shoulder) (9). Perry Nodel- man expands on this, demonstrating that many children’s books allow multiple interpretive paths not specifically tied to either the adult or child, so that a reader can observe the events of a book from both the perspective of the “focalized child protagonist” and the narrator who offers a “different reading of [his or] her situation” (22). Mickey au Camp de Gurs, of course, was likely only ever written for an adult audience, and so Wall’s image of two readers is an imperfect fit. Following Nodel- man’s argument, however, we might nonetheless observe a mechanism of simultaneous address at work in the text and the expectation that the audience will recognize the tension between what is stated and what is known. The inversion of color in Mickey au Camp de Gurs can thus be read as an indicator of Mickey’s perspective, described by Mulman with the wonderful oxymoron “knowingly naïve” (“Tale” 87). Mickey’s reading of the things he encounters betrays childish innocence. The reader, however, is assumed to have knowledge that surpasses that of the char- acter and thus, in Nodelman’s terms, is able to understand the events described from a more knowing perspective. Mickey’s innocence and his naïve sense of discovery prevent him from fully understanding the horrors to which he bears witness, and, hence, he imbues all he sees with a sense of discovery rather than revulsion. Double address runs throughout the text. Mickey uses the word “hébergé” (hosted) (11), for example, implying that he believes that the ‘“Un livre pour enfants’” 115 prisoners in Gurs are there by choice. He also assumes that the huts in Gurs are dog houses, that the term “international” means “citizen of the world,” and that “poules” refers to literal chickens (10). As discussed above, on almost every page Mickey appears to be in a state of surprise, either scratching his head, or with a large question mark above him. Gurs presents him with scenes that he cannot accommodate within his child’s worldview. Mickey’s innocence is not necessarily presented as wrong, however. Clearly, our sympathies are with Mickey; he represents the book’s moral center, and so, while the logic of the Vichy authorities baffles him, his interpretations seem more sensible than those of the individuals with whom he interacts. Certainly, he is far more open- minded than the foul-mouthed autocrat who sends him to Gurs. In Mickey, then, one is reminded of the child on the first page of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, who calls to an adult to “pipe that song again,” or the narrator of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943), who is baffled by adults’ inability to understand those things that make com- plete sense to children. Morag Styles writes that the injunction to play in Blake’s work “challenges the prevailing common sense that adults know best” (202). Mickey’s innocence, in other words, highlights the insanity of the world that he inhabits. In this sense, one might read Rosenthal’s Mickey as “Signifyin(g),” a term introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to describe the practice of African American writers who appropriated white words and imbued them with a secondary, coded meaning. The practice of Signifyin(g) can also be usefully applied in the context of the concentration camp, where the young Vladek Spiegelman—a prisoner in Auschwitz—simultane- ously occupies and disrupts the stereotypes associated with Jews within Nazi rhetoric (Smith). Vladek has a keen business sense and drives a hard bargain. He is, on the surface, “the anti-Semite’s prototypical Shylock” (Gerber 162), and yet he also acts as a mediator, helping his friends and others who are in need. He thus occupies and subverts the Nazi expectations of him as a Jew. He, to use Gates’s words, “rewrites the received order” (135). Without wishing to fall into the trap of reading Mickey au Camp de Gurs as no more than an extension of Maus, we might note a similar process at work in Rosenthal’s text around the word “international.” Mickey uses this term to mean that he easily traverses cultural and lin- guistic borders—his cartoonish appeal, in other words, extends beyond the United States. He is a foreigner and symbolic Jew yet represents, Rosenthal asserts, many of the values that the Vichy regime purported 116 Philip Smith to protect from foreign (and particularly Jewish) influence. At the end of the text, Mickey declares that he will return to America “au pays de L . . . é, de l’E . . . é, et de la F . . . é” (13)—the land of liberty, equality, and fraternity (the omission of these words suggests, mockingly, that such terms would offend a French censor). Coded in this assertion, of course, is an observation of Vichy hypocrisy: how can a nation claim to believe in Liberté while operating an incarceration project on the scale of Gurs? Mickey not only believes in the national motto of France but puts it into practice—his childish innocence allows him to believe that the people with whom he interacts are essentially good, and that people are in the camp by choice. For the French authorities, however, his internationality means that he is an immigrant, a Jew, a member of the International Brigade, or perhaps all three—in any case, an enemy of the French people and the French way of life. Mickey is positioned, awkwardly and unwittingly, as both: he is a foreign citizen in France; his appearance in the text does, in a certain sense, threaten France with foreign influence; and, within the warped tautological rhetoric of the camps, his internment in Gurs appears as evidence of guilt. Despite being designated as an enemy of the state, however, Mickey remains an unwitting symbol of what Rosenthal sees as the very values that the Vichy regime purported (and failed) to preserve. Mickey is simultaneously an outsider and a bastion of French values—he plays the role of the “international” by both symbolizing all those whom the Vichy regime sought to remove from France, and by celebrating the ide- als that xenophobia alleged to protect. Crucially, Rosenthal articulates his criticism of the Vichy regime by employing the double address that is intrinsic to children’s literature; to use Nodelman’s words, the text “opens a dispute between alternative views of the relative merits of in- nocence and knowledge that seems quite able to survive . . . a one-sided closure of it” (21). The French authorities misunderstanding of the term “international” (and Mickey’s failure to recognize their mistake) relies on dramatic irony—of the characters presenting a flawed political argument to a child-like figure, the whose innocence seems to insulate him from the violence of his circumstances. Opportunities to create art within concentration camps were few and far between. Inmates in Gurs, for all their other privations, had slightly more freedom to create art than others elsewhere in occupied Europe. That Mickey au Camp de Gurs was ever created, and that it still exists, is a triumph of art over circumstance. Such works are vital because they allow us a view of the camps beyond empirical historiog- ‘“Un livre pour enfants’” 117 raphy and retrospective testimony from those who lived. Rosenthal’s humor and his self-conscious play with comic book and cartoon forms show us an aspect of camp life that is distinct from dominant modes of Holocaust remembrance. In this sense, we might read Rosenthal’s works, like the portraits drawn by Esther Lurie, as a reminder that the Holocaust happened to people—that every individual who died had his or her own personality, hopes, aversions, and an entire inner life that was destroyed almost beyond trace. Such is the importance of this work that it demands examination and interrogation: it provides a window into a world, to a community, and to an artist, that are otherwise lost. This essay has sought to show that Mickey au Camp de Gurs is, first, a hybrid form borrowing elements of both picture book and comic, and, second, that Rosenthal criticizes the Vichy regime for the ways in which it attempted to legitimize its racial violence through the trappings of bureaucracy and a misplaced desire to recover French values. Through the code of the picture book, Rosenthal depicts the Vichy authorities as domineering, close- minded, and dangerous bullies. By adopting the double address that is intrinsic to the picture book form, Rosenthal further criticizes the Vichy regime by emphasizing the misunderstandings around the term “international.” The word takes on a double meaning, symbolizing both the corruption of French values and the mischaracterization of international influence as a threat to France’s cultural interests.

Notes

1Felix Nussbaum was also interned in St. Cyprien. His Self-Portrait in the Camp (1940) shows similar scenes to those in Mickey au Camp de Gurs such as the barbed wire, huts, and emaciated figures. Unlike Rosenthal’s, however, his contempt is not masked by satire. 2Hillary Chute, Lisa Mulman, and I all discuss Mickey au Camp de Gurs as part of longer works on Maus. In MetaMaus, Chute and Spiegelman likewise discuss the text as embodying similar rhetorical strategies to Maus. 3The comic was quickly handed over to Floyd Gottfredson, who would write and draw it for forty-five years. 4The comment, of course, is made by Mickey, an unreliable narrator, and so it should not be read as transparently indicative of Rosenthal’s intentions. The term bande dessinée (comic) was not widely used at the time, and so it is difficult to know if Rosenthal would have distinguished between the forms (Tancé). 5The use of censored expletives on page five suggests that while Rosenthal has em- ployed in part the picture book format, Mickey’s assertion that it is a book for children should not be taken at face value. 6The archive that Moebius draws on includes French writers from Rosenthal’s period such as William Pène du Bois. In addition to Mickey au Camp de Gurs, the mechanisms that he describes can be observed in other French children’s books of the period such as Paul-Émile Victor’s Apoutsiak (1948), where, for example, the positioning of characters on the verso page is used to create suspense. 118 Philip Smith

7“What, you have no mother? You are fucking with me!” (a literal translation of this expression would be “fucking my mouth”). 8The author wishes to thank Dr. Bettina Severin-Barboutie for this observation. 9The work was created during a period, documented by Bordwell and Thompson, when TechnicolorTM was becoming widely used, particularly in Disney films such as Flowers and Trees (1932). Such experimentation may have informed Rosenthal’s work.

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