Women Writing Under Occupation: Marguerite Duras, Colette, and Janet Flanner

An Honors Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of the Department of English

University of Florida

By

Alexandria Rasmussen

April 15th 2019

Rasmussen 2

“I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about

women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their

bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the

text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.”

—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

Women Writing Under Occupation: Marguerite Duras, Colette, and Janet Flanner

War narratives have generally been written from a masculine, individualistic perspective surrounding being a soldier in battle, while women’s narratives in wartime have been granted less attention. The lack of attention given to women’s stories effectively excludes them from history, and specifically, histories of war. Women writing their experience is a way to encapsulate it within history. An active part of the feminist effort has been rediscovering women’s writing and asserting its importance within literary history, writing about women’s work, and creating a feminist history, separate from the male-dominated canon. This paper is an exploration of the ways in which women experienced the German occupation of Paris and translated their experience into writing. Specifically I will engage with Marguerite Duras and

Colette, two influential French writers and journalists, as well as Janet Flanner, an American journalist who was stationed in France for most of her life but fled to the United States during

World War II for her safety. Though Flanner was stationed in the US, she was still the War

Correspondent for The New Yorker and used a host of sources to acquire information about the situation in France and disseminate it to the American audience. All three of these women had partners arrested and interned by the Nazis, informing their experience of the war. Their writing is primarily concerned with the trauma and memory of war and its manifestations. They focus on the experience of civilians, primarily women, as opposed to those within military, and are Rasmussen 3 interested in the shared experience and suffering of those residing in France during the

Occupation.

Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras (born in 1914 in Vietnam—died in 1996 in Paris) is a revered French writer. She resided in Paris during World War II and the Occupation. Duras and her husband

Robert Antelme were members of the French Resistance, becoming a part of the Mouvement national des prisonniers de guerre et déportés (MNPGD) headed by François Mitterrand.

Antelme was arrested by the Gestapo on June 1st, 1944 and initially interned at Fresnes and

Compiègne, then deported to Buchenwald Internment Camp as a political prisoner. As the Allies were advancing, he was taken from the work camp Gandersheim to Dachau, where he was rescued by Dionys Mascolo, George Beauchamp, and Mitterand, which Duras recounts in The

War: A Memoir (Crowley 5). During the last leg of the Occupation and the Liberation, Duras did not receive any updates on her husband’s status or location, leaving her uncertain if he was dead or alive. The War: A Memoir is derived from a journal that she claims she wrote during the aftermath of WWII, published forty years later. Comprised of six autobiographical narratives translated from the French La Douleur, the collection recounts her experience during the

Occupation and fallout of World War II and her involvement in the Resistance movement. The first narrative, which will be the focus in this paper, describes the abject despair she feels as she waits for her husband to return from a concentration camp. Duras also wrote the screenplay for

Alan Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) about the intersection of a fictional Japanese man and French woman’s account of World War II, demonstrating her preoccupation with the historical trauma of the war. Rasmussen 4

Working from models proposed by Freud (repetition compulsion) and Melanie Klein

(mourning), in her work titled, “Forgetting and Marguerite Duras” Carol Hofmann developed the notion of “Durasian forgetting”. Hofmann writes that two distinct kinds of forgetting exist in

Duras’ texts: forgetting-as-repression, which, “In this state, as defined by Freud, forgetting seemingly takes place in one’s conscious waking life. A memory trace, however, lingers in the unconscious. Being refused admission to consciousness, it maintains itself indefinitely in an unchanged state” (Hofmann 2). The purpose of psychotherapy is to confront those memories within the unconscious, as only through their emergence can they be forgotten. The second form of forgetting in Duras’s oeuvre is forgetting-through-remembering, “a forgetting made possible through the remembering of an event that had been repressed because of its traumatic or painful nature” (Hofmann 2). The notion of Durasian forgetting set forth is then derived from this model of forgetting-through-remembering, which in Klein or Freud’s terms would ultimately lead to some resolution, but in Duras is “open-ended, ever changing, a fusion and acquiescence to pain and to memory” (Hofmann 86).

This concept of Durasian forgetting is useful considering that most of Duras’ characters exist within a state of mourning, pervading the atmosphere of the text. Hofmann analyzes

Hiroshima mon amour within this context of mourning theory, as “mourning, repetition, memory, and forgetting are obvious and important components of the story” (Hofmann 86). Hiroshima, the site of atomic bombing by the US, is used as the backdrop and counter-narrative to the woman’s traumatic personal history. Duras revealed in an interview that she had originally intended to begin the film with the image of the “fameux ‘champignon’ de Bikini” to give the spectator “le sentiment à la fois de revoir et de voir ce ‘champignon pour la première fois”

(Hofmann 87). Ultimately the film does not begin this way, but the imagery presented of Rasmussen 5

Hiroshima has this intended effect nevertheless, as the viewer is confronted with archival footage of the aftermath; it feels like reseeing and seeing for the first time. This contradictory notion of reseeing and seeing for the first time set forth by Duras relates back to Hofmann’s categories of

“forgetting-as-repression” and “forgetting through remembering” and “to prepare the reader/spectator for the mourning process so much a part of this Duras work” (Hofmann 87).

Hiroshima mon amour at once makes the viewer cognizant of their memory(-ies) and their own forgetting. The process of forgetting is explored within the script, as Elle (the female character) says, “De même que dans l’amour cette illusion existe, cette illusion de pouvoir ne jamais oublier, de même j’ai eu l’illusion devant Hiroshima que jamais je n’oublierai. De même que dans l’amour” [Just as in love this illusion exists, this illusion of being able never to forget, so I was under the illusion that I would never forget Hiroshima (Hma 19)] (Hofmann 87). Just as one does not forget the atrocities inflicted on those in Hiroshima in order to honor them in memory, some level of forgetting is necessary to adapt and reconvene back into life, successfully complete the mourning process, rather than remaining in a state of melancholia.

This premise is then applied to the woman’s personal history, as she speaks of “the désir d’une inconsolable mémoire” [an inconsolable memory (Hma 23)] (Hofmann 88). During the war in her hometown Nevers, the young French woman had been romantically involved with a

German soldier whose death she witnessed on the day of liberation. She has idealized the memory of her first love and made a great effort to hang onto the memory of her trauma. She has lived in a state of repression for her adult life, now being in her thirties, and has previously refused to speak of her experience with anyone, including her husband. Her encounter with the

Japanese man in Hiroshima during a film shoot provides the springboard for recounting her trauma, bringing the memory to consciousness so she can proceed with the mourning process. Rasmussen 6

“The point in the mourning process where we find her in the text/film is the most painful one, according to Klein, that of genuine grieving. Moving from the state of repression through repetition, she painfully accepts the inevitability of change and forgetting, leaving behind the idealization and denial of the first stages of mourning in Klein’s model” (Hofmann 88).

Repetition is an essential premise to the film, the mourning process, and the woman’s life. Her encounter with the Japanese man resembles and echoes in many ways the original love with the

German soldier, being another foreign man and former enemy, another impossible love.

“‘Hiroshima’ allows the ‘woman of Hiroshima’ to repeat a situation similar to the traumatic one of her youth. Having happened at the end of the war, having been the end of the war, Hiroshima provides a time frame and context easily associated with wartime France where her story took place” (Hofmann 89). The trauma inlaid in the city of Hiroshima, as well as the man’s personal trauma associated with the atomic bombing, remind the woman of her own war traumas, forcing her to confront these repressed memories.

Duras’ storyline of the woman’s head being shorn also illustrates the ways in which trauma can be gendered. Following the death of the German soldier she was involved with, her head was shaved in the town square and she was locked in the cellar of her home. Having your head shorn was the punishment doled out to women who were suspected of collaboration, specifically “collaboration horizontale,” having romantic/sexual relations with a German soldier.

French men in the military or obligatory work service in Germany (STO) were never punished for relationships conducted with German women. This punishment was performed in public, meant to be an act of humiliation and shame. Considering that long hair is meant to be a symbol of femininity, removing the hair is meant to take away the woman’s desirability, and therefore a facet of her power. This practice is violent, violating women’s bodily autonomy and represents Rasmussen 7 the power that men wield over women generally, and their control over women’s sexuality.

Duras’s inclusion of this historical event within the story incorporates women’s history into the discourses of World War II and allows it to be remembered.

The Japanese man encourages the French woman to share her story of Nevers. Talking in this way can be seen as a form of therapy—psychotherapy—as she works through these memories. “As her story unravels, the ‘tu’ to whom she is speaking is no longer the Japanese lover of the present but slips into the past, becoming the lost German one of her youth. His hands, his body, become those she held all day and night while he (her lover) slowly died” (Hofmann

89). Her fluctuation between the past and present communicates her instability, and the power and emotion of these memories that overcome her. Repeating and recounting her trauma, facing the pain and horror of her experience, allows her to move through the process of mourning through ways of remembering. Her memory is not only tied up with pain, but guilt and fear. She fears that she will ultimately forget her German lover, filling her with a sense of guilt. She holds onto the pain as a means to hold onto the person. She has the guilt of betraying her family and country through her involvement with an enemy soldier. In the text, the repetition of, “Tu me tues. Tu me fais du bien” [You destroy me. You’re so good for me. (Hma 25)] illustrates the process of mourning for the woman. “Killing the memory she has held onto for so many years is in a sense the killing of the self she has encapsulated and protected in her repressed state as well as the killing (or ‘rekilling’) of the German enemy lover she has idealized and petrified in frozen inviolate memory” (Hofmann 88). By speaking her experience, she is in a way betraying her self and revealing the moment of her betrayal of her country and family. “Allowing the old memory to die through its recounting (remembering) as well as its repetition (reliving) in the relationship Rasmussen 8 with the new foreign lover (and former enemy) is painful yet ultimately liberating, hence the recognition: ‘Tu me fais du bien’” (Hofmann 91).

The framework of Durasian forgetting set forth by Hofmann can be further applied to

Duras’ The War: A Memoir. As a small preface, Duras writes:

“I found this diary in a couple of exercise books in the blue cupboards at Neauphle-le

Château. I have no recollection of having written it. I know I did, I know it was I who

wrote it. I recognize my handwriting and the details of the story. I can see the place, the

Gare d’Orsay, and the various comings and goings. But I can’t see myself writing the

diary. When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house? I

can’t remember. One thing is certain: it is inconceivable to me that I could have written it

while I was actually awaiting Robert L.’s return. How could I have written this thing I

still can’t put a name to, and that appalls me when I reread it? And how could I have left

it lying for years in a house in a country that’s regularly flooded in winter? The first time

I thought about it was when the magazine Sorcières asked me for a text I’d written when

I was young. The War is one of the most important things in my life. It can’t really be

called ‘writing’. I found myself looking at pages regularly filled with small, calm,

extraordinarily even handwriting. I found myself confronted with a tremendous chaos of

thought and feeling that I couldn’t bring myself to tamper with, and beside which

literature was something of which I felt ashamed.” (Duras 3-4)

I interpret her inability to remember writing this as an indication of repression. Just as the woman of Hiroshima mon amour had “petrified in frozen inviolate memory” the memory of her

German lover, Duras’s careful recording of her pain, locked away in a cupboard serves the same purpose. The “small, calm, extraordinarily even handwriting” gives the impression that this diary Rasmussen 9 is an exercise and a meditation, preserving the memories of the war for attenuated safekeeping.

Revisiting and publishing the text forty years later enables “forgetting-through-remembering,” as she sifts through the pages “appalled” as she rereads it, confronted by the pain of these memories—“confronted with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling” (Duras 4). Duras’s remembering The War when the feminist magazine Sorcières asked for writing from her youth demonstrates that her memory of youth is inextricably tied to the war. Paris is likely also tainted by the trauma of war, as this is one of her only pieces of writing taking place there. As psychotherapy aims to work through trauma by talking about it, repeating, reliving, writing can be seen as another, perhaps greater exercise. In writing about La Douleur, Kathy Comfort recognizes, “The memoir is particularly therapeutic in that it can, as Buss notes, ‘imitate through self-performance the ways in which trauma victims process the fragmented or silences memories, feelings, and events of a past that they were not able or permitted to process in language at that time” (Comfort 554). Comfort’s assertion that the memoir is not simply writing, but a therapeutic tool for processing trauma and memory, elucidates Duras’s statement that The War “can’t really be called ‘writing’”. This idea can also substantiate Duras’s pronouncement that The War is one of the most important things in her life, both the occurrence and effects of World War II and her writing this memoir The War.

Within The War, Duras portrays herself within the throes of mourning, similar to the woman in Hiroshima mon amour—the state of genuine grieving that is most painful. Duras’s abject suffering permeates beyond the page, as the reader is confronted for the first time with the painful experience Duras is recounting and working through. Duras’ work contends to ascribe language to that which is beyond language, putting words to those experiences and feelings that can only be authentically felt. Rasmussen 10

“Gilmore contends that ‘language fails in the face of trauma’ while ‘trauma mocks

language and confronts it with its insufficiency’. This is the case for La douleur because,

as Emma Wilson argues, ‘it testifies not […] to the imperative necessity of testimony, but

rather to the need to bear witness to the very inadequacy of testimony, to the horrifying

inability of the self… to be a reliable witness.” (Comfort 554)

Much of reading The War feels like bearing witness to Duras’s testimony of the war, and the inadequacy of language to fully convey this testimony. Throughout much of the narrative, Duras is silent. She may convey her thoughts and anxieties to the reader, but outwardly, to those she communicates with, she does not speak about these things. Many of her conversations end with

“Silence.” or the word “Silence” is used to divide the dialogue, and show the constraint and discomfort with which people spoke. For example, “‘You know Belsen’s been liberated? Yes, yesterday afternoon…’ ‘I know.’ Silence. Am I going to ask again? Yes. ‘What do you think?’ I ask. ‘I’m beginning to get worried’. Silence” (Duras 6). The choppiness of the dialogue, furthered by the ellipses and frequent punctuation, fosters the creation of a tense atmosphere, the one that she feels awaiting news as the war comes to a close. Both parties conduct the conversation with an element of restraint, which appears to be especially stifling to Duras. “She said, ‘You know Belsen’s been liberated?’ I didn’t know. One more camp liberated. She said,

‘Yesterday afternoon.’ She didn’t say so, but I know the lists of names will arrive tomorrow morning. I must go down and buy a paper and read the list. No. I can hear a throbbing in my temples getting louder and louder. No, I won’t read the list” (Duras 6). As she mourns Robert L. silently, tacitly, the inability to speak of her pain or communicate candidly accelerates her anxious thinking. Duras feels isolated from those around her by her situation. D. takes her out to a restaurant to get her out of the house and encourage her to eat. She writes, “I’m nauseated by Rasmussen 11 other people eating. I want to die. I’m cut off from the rest of the world by a razor; even from D.”

(Duras 45). When she witnesses people eating, it only serves as a reminder that Robert L. is being deprived of food. As people celebrate the liberation of Paris, it only serves as a reminder that the war is coming to a close and he is still not home, fueling her conviction that he is dead.

“Those who live on generalities have nothing in common with me. No one has anything in common with me. The street. At this moment there are people in Paris who are laughing, especially the young. I have nothing left but enemies” (Duras 8). These thoughts isolate her from the people around her that could provide some form of comfort or solace, further encapsulating her in the darkness. Regarding those around her as enemies illustrates that she does not see them as experiencing or understanding her sense of loss, and speaks to resentment and anger that are tied to her despair. This anger is directed at those people around her she perceives as not suffering and her situation itself. These feelings of anger and resentment are elements of the mourning process. However, the inability to verbalize her trauma perpetuates it. Writing about her trauma, and forgetting-through-remembering, provides a medium to process these memories.

In “Relieving Pain in Marguerite Duras’s ‘La Douleur’ and ‘Albert des Capitales’” Kathy

Comfort argues that “because of language’s inadequacy to convey the horror of war… Duras privileges physiological descriptions— especially in ‘‘La douleur’’—as she recounts her experience during the final days of the war” (Comfort 554). She translates anxiety into physical terms, replicating psychological trauma through somatic descriptions, particularly of her head and heart. This is evident early in the narrative, as she first imagines Robert L. is dead and she is going to receive news of it:

“It’s time to move. Get up, take a few steps, go to the window. The medical school is still

there. And the people going by—they’ll still be walking past when I hear he’s never Rasmussen 12

coming back. A notification of death. They’ve started sending them out recently. A ring

at the door. ‘Who is it?’ ‘A social worker from the town hall.’ The throbbing in my head

is still there. I must stop it. His death is in me, beating in my head. No mistake about it. I

must stop the throbbing, stop my heart, calm it down—I must help it, it will never calm

down on its own. I must stop my reason from flying off at a tangent, out of my head.”

(Duras 6-7).

This passage is disorienting— occurring early on in the narrative it is difficult to distinguish what is real and what is imagined. This is effective, however, in reproducing Duras’s experience, and her oscillating perception between what is really happening and her anxiety-induced thoughts. Her anxiety has a physical manifestation: the throbbing in her head that frequently occurs. It also manifests in her heart, the metaphorical home of emotion. “The locus of the symptoms is significant because it establishes the link between mind and body. The throbbing in her head accompanies the beating of her heart so that her emotional pain becomes systemic, flowing from her heart to her head” (Comfort 555). She recognizes that her emotions have overwhelmed her, and that she is not thinking straight, as she says, “I must stop my reason from flying off at a tangent, out of my head” (Duras 7). The psychosomatic nature of her malady is recognized here as well. She tries to stop the throbbing in her body, recognizing that she has worked herself up and she needs to calm herself down- “it will never calm down on its own.”

Duras aligns herself with Robert L. by psychosomatically feeling those pains she perceives of him suffering, as terms of mourning. She imagines him having starved to death, so she cannot eat. Throughout the narrative, other people comment that she has lost weight. She notes that she is sick and unwell from not eating. “We sit down to eat. But at once I want to throw up again. The bread is the bread he hasn’t eaten, the bread for lack of which he died” Rasmussen 13

(Duras 10). She repeatedly remarks on the exhaustion and fatigue that she feels. “The stress of not knowing her husband’s fate goes beyond a simple transformation to an outright destruction of the self” (Comfort 555). As Duras writes, “I fall apart, come undone, change” (Duras 37).

When she lies in bed, she is haunted by the image of Robert L.’s dead body left in a ditch, inaccessible to her. She imagines the brutal ways in which he may have been killed. “I turn out the lights, go into my room. I go slowly so as to gain time, so as not to stir up the things in my head. If I’m not careful I won’t sleep. And when I don’t get any sleep, the next day is much worse. I fall asleep beside him every night, in the black ditch, beside him as he lies dead” (Duras

10). Freud described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that those who hold onto repressed traumatic memories, refusing to confront them, experience recurring dreams that serve as reminders (Hofmann 88). In a similar vein, Duras is haunted by the recurring image of Robert L. alone in a ditch, somewhere in Germany. She is not able to rest, she does not get good sleep, which only exacerbates her anxious thinking and malaise. When Robert L. finally returns home,

Duras experiences some relief but is still traumatized and shaped by it.

“I start to eat again too, and to sleep. I put on some weight. We’re going to live. Like him

I haven’t been able to eat for seventeen days. Like him I haven’t slept for seventeen days,

or at least that’s what I think. In fact, I’ve slept for two or three hours a day. I fall asleep

anywhere. And wake in terror. It’s awful, every time I think he’s died while I was asleep.

I still have that slight fever at night.” (Duras 62)

The fusion of their identities is clear. She cannot divorce his experience from her own. Their bodies and their pain have coalesced. Her fears that he has died alone in a ditch are now only replaced with fear that he will die under her care; that his body will concede. Rasmussen 14

Duras’s situation is similar to that of many women around her. Madame Bordes, the house concierge, is a neighbor whose daughter has been sent to a concentration camp, and one of the few who can empathize with Duras. She visits her at her home, remarking, “The Lodge is dark, dirty, and untidy. Full of Madame Bordes’s tears; like France” (Duras 31). She refuses to get out of bed and her face is disfigured from crying. Duras takes on the opposite role, reassuring

Madame Bordes that there is no reason to worry yet, many of the camps have not been freed, and her daughter will come home soon.

“Madame Bordes and I exist only in the present. We can think in terms of one more day

to live. We can’t think in terms of three more days. For us, to buy butter or bread for

three days hence would be an insult to God’s discretion. We cling to God, cleave to

something like God. ‘You’ll have uttered every possible stupidity,’ says D., ‘every

possible kind of nonsense.’ So will Madame Bordes… Another connection obsesses us:

the one linking their bodies to our lives.” (Duras 34-35)

They are both “in the vanguard of waiting” (Duras 35) and are able to share a pain that only they can intimately know. Visiting Madame Bordes allows Duras to leave her mental and physical isolation. Duras’s own feelings and actions are reflected in Madame Bordes’s reaction to trauma.

Duras’s processing of trauma, or lack thereof, comes across to D. as nonsense, uttering

“stupidity”, but she witnesses the similarity between her own feelings and actions and that of

Madame Bordes. “D. sees Duras’s actions as selfish, but what she describes underscores her solidarity with thousands of other Parisian women” (Comfort 556). Despite her feelings of isolation, Duras is aware that many women experienced similar situations to her own. Writing this memoir is not only an opportunity to work through her own traumatic memories, but can Rasmussen 15 function as a resource for other people that were traumatized by the war, to have their experiences recounted and recorded and their feelings echoed and validated.

Colette

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) known simply as Colette is another revered

French author. Although her writing style is very different from Duras’s, they share similar experiences of the war and emphasize similar themes in their writing. Colette’s third husband,

Maurice Goudeket, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and taken to Compiègne Internment

Camp because he was Jewish. He was released after a few months through the intervention of

Colette’s influential friends. Colette spent the years of the Occupation in a state of anxiety afraid of a possible second arrest of her husband. He was hidden by a network of neighbors and shopkeepers in their Palais-Royal apartment at 9 rue de Beaujolais, where he and Colette lived

(Portuges, Jouve 80-81). She was also immobilized by arthritis in her hip during this time and required a wheelchair. Colette wrote several autobiographical works about the Occupation that were published during the years of the war— Journal à Rebours (1941) and Paris de ma fenêtre (1942). They have been compiled and translated into English by David le Vay in Looking

Backwards in 1975. However, it is through L'Etoile Vesper (Evening Star, 1946), written later in

Colette’s life, that it is possible to know her personal experience during World War II. In this work she writes more openly about her husband’s arrest and the traumatic imprint it left on her life.

In Looking Backwards, Colette uses humor and optimism to raise the French’s morale during wartime. She adopts the role of an advice columnist, suggesting keeping warm in bed by

“leaving room for the cat” (LB 132). Colette also describes about the individual daily efforts Rasmussen 16 made by civilians. She writes about women devising new recipes out of necessity, due to rationing and limited produce available during the German occupation. “Someone reads aloud, wishing to make us laugh, a gastronomic recipe of other days, I mean of 1939: ‘Take eight or ten eggs…’ ‘From whom?’ asks a young girl who does not laugh” (LB 115). Colette uses humor to get across the severity of the Occupation, the sad situation that this girl was born into the war and has only known scarcity—you cannot buy eight eggs anywhere. She writes about the degradation of silk stockings, “Natural silk or not, a pair of stockings today uses eight to ten grammes of textile material. A frail protection, ten grammes, against frost, against rain and storm, against the staircases of the metro and thin soles. The remarkable thing is that women suffer without yielding, and that only the comfortable and sensible wear woolen stockings” (LB 119). She goes on to explain that even woolen stockings are not ideal, given that they can be too thick for footwear and this has caused one of her friends to develop chilblains. Colette admires the fashionable women that carry on in their silk stockings, unperturbed by the weather conditions and more generally, the German occupation. She sees their continuation of daily life as a site of resistance. It is rare to find these daily minutiae of wartime recorded and highlighted, especially highlighting the changes in women’s lives and routines. By including them in her collection and recording them, Colette asserts their importance within history and memory.

“What is most accentuated throughout these texts is the human capacity for adapting, making and mending, what in From My Window (1942) Colette names bricolage or ‘making something out of nothing’” (Holmes 54-55). Bricolage has been translated in to “handiwork,” and bricoleur “handyman” in Looking Backwards (which perhaps inadvertently genders it masculine). She reveres the bricoleur, admiring that, “A handyman is rarely not given to poetry.

The whole of France is addicted to handiwork” (LB 122). Given the wartime scarcity, people had Rasmussen 17 to make do with what they had, finding and multiple purposes for items, and if they broke, fixing them. “Skillful, jack-of-all-trades, indiscreet, artistic, industrious, modest at heart, boastful on the surface… when I paint the portrait of the typical handyman, I paint that of the Frenchman. In

France we are impelled by the desire to meddle with what is not our affair; my greatest pleasures are of this type” (LB 123). The French thrift and craft are a source of national pride for Colette, and function as a mode of resistance, as they are another form of refusal to accept defeat. She revives anecdotes of a delivery-boy mending her useless kitchen clock, strangers in the street assisting her when the leather strap of her sandal broke, and the handyman in her house repairing the front-door bell, a porcelain horse from 1830, and her divan cover. These anecdotes shed light on all the people doing good deeds and helping others during the war. They are meant to boost the morale of the Parisians reading Colette’s collection, and to imbue some optimism during those trying times.

In Evening Star, Colette writes with greater vulnerability. She confides the details of her husband’s arrest:

“No, nothing bothered me. What could happen to bother me, as we say, for we have long

substituted the moderate for the tragic word. Bother serves for all purposes. The cash is

low in the till? It’s a bother. A friend, whom we loved, dies, his death is a bother to us.

‘It’s a bother that your leg plagues you so…’ Our language diminishes the phrase since…

since the ‘bother’ of the war— more exactly since a day in December in 1941 when rings

of the bell and blows on the door informed us that a man, the master of this house, had to

get up at six in the morning and leave his bed for the camp at Compiègne. Since then,

what that was really a bother could happen to this man and to me? A ring at the bell still

afflicts me, to a lesser degree, with nervous shock, a twitch of the mouth and the corner Rasmussen 18

of the eye, of the shoulder raised to the ear. Will one ever get over it? Yet many women

who suffered the same experience at the same time change so as to obliterate these

reflexes…. But I... I’m too old to get over it…” (ES 19-20)

The incident is crystallized in time and deeply traumatic. The experience has altered her use of language even, the atrocities of the war destroying any sense of scale with which to compare, creating a sense of resignation—it is all a “bother”. The impact of the initial trauma still radiates whenever someone rings her doorbell. The doorbell becomes a trauma trigger, eliciting a physical and emotional reaction when it rings. She empathizes with the many other women who had similar experiences, highlighting that she is not alone. She commends them for working through their trauma, appearing to “obliterate these reflexes” and bounce back from the war, allowing the possibility for trauma to be overcome. However, she resigns that she will not be able to get over it; she is “too old to get over it” and will live with the effects.

The connections to Duras are evident, seeing as their husbands were both arrested and taken into internment camps. As with Duras, the anxiety of the war pervades Colette’s work. She refers to the experience of her husband’s arrest as a “nightmare of absence,” which is what

Duras’s work could be characterized as—a nightmare. Colette writes, “this is the first time that

I’ve written pages which revive the time whose consequences developed into the perfect and classical nightmare of absence…” (ES 20). This confessional is published when Colette is 73 years old, and The War: A Memoir is published by Duras when she is 71. Though Colette was much older than Duras when the war began, she still chooses to reflect upon her experience again in a separate work than what she published during the war. She wrote several autobiographical works about the Occupation that were published during the years of the war—

Journal à Rebours (1941) and Paris de ma fenêtre (1942). Her admission that, “this is the first Rasmussen 19 time that I’ve written pages which revive the time” refers to her previous omission of her husband’s arrest, and her personal stake in the war in these works. Similar to the argument set forth about Duras’s work, psychotherapy is the process of talking through memories to relieve trauma, writing can be seen as a form of psychotherapy. Colette’s work can be seen through the lens of Durasian forgetting: forgetting-through-remembering, which, rather than leading to resolution, is more open-ended, and acquiescent to pain and memory. As she writes, “What did I have in mind to write on the subject of the nightmare of absence? Certainly nothing very urgent.

I can always recapture what I want to say about it since it is, I believe, indelible” (ES 21). As it is clear from this statement, the trauma of her husband’s arrest and internment is unforgettable, yet there is clearly the desire, or need, to write about it. Duras and Colette emphasize the collective experience of women during the war, emphasizing the similar struggles between people. Colette writes, “sustained by a hunted companion, then deprived of the same companion when in prison,

I took my place in the ranks of the host of women who waited” (ES 26). This recalls Duras’s image of the women waiting at the Gare d’Orsay station: “Outside the center, wives of prisoners of war congeal in a solid mass… Some women are there at seven o’clock in the morning. Some stay till three in the morning and then come back again at seven. But there are some who stay right through the night, between three and seven” (Duras 16). Duras goes to the center frequently to collect names of the prisoners returning to France, to compile lists of information about survivors to distribute, and ultimately to seek out any information about Robert L.. The duration of her memoir is about the pain of waiting. As previously discussed, she writes of herself and

Madame Bordes, “We’re in the vanguard of a nameless battle, a battle without arms or bloodshed or glory; we’re in the vanguard of waiting” (Duras 35). She characterizes waiting as a war. Similar to Colette’s worry that she is too old to get over the trauma of the war, Duras feels Rasmussen 20 guilt for her own processing of trauma. “This evening I think about myself. I’ve never met a woman more cowardly than I am. I go over in my mind other women who are waiting like me— no, none is as cowardly as that. I know some who are very brave. Extraordinary.” (Duras 22). An element of shame exists in their recollection of their experience, their inability to overcome their trauma, for there is the recognition that many people had experienced worse. Referencing the separation of Jewish children from their mothers and fathers, Colette asks, “Can I compare my own nightmare of absence to such separation as these? I do not dare” (ES 21). Colette’s and

Duras’s experiences are nonetheless important, as many women throughout war share them, and their pain has been neglected in most discourses.

Colette and Duras describe the physical symptoms of their husband’s in similar ways.

Colette writes that the nightmare of absence ended,

“when my absent one, set free, staggering on roads glazed with frost, arrived at the

station at Compiègne and the train, reached the Métro and the Palais-Royal, and stripped

himself to the skin on the second-floor landing so as to abandon, with his clothes, the

grosser of the swarming souvenirs he had brought back from Compiègne. As well as

being thin, I had never before seen in a man such non-human colouring, the greenish-

white of cheeks and forehead, the orange of the edges of the eyelids, the grey of the

lips…” (ES 21)

Her focus on the non-human element of her husband’s condition communicates the dehumanization he has endured at Compiègne. The discoloration signals starvation, cold, and a myriad of physical and emotional suffering. He is quick to rid himself of his clothing, a symbol of his stay at Compiègne. This clothing is gross and swarming, very visceral descriptions reflecting what the conditions of the camp must have been like to permeate his clothing. Duras is Rasmussen 21 interested in a similar dehumanization of Robert L., as she describes his bowel movements at length:

“For seventeen days the turd looked the same. It was inhuman. It separated him from us

more than the fever, the thinness, the nailless fingers, the marks of SS blows. We gave

him gruel that was golden yellow, gruel for infants, and it came out of him dark green

like slime from a swamp. After the sanitary pail was closed you could hear the bubbles

bursting as they rose to the face inside. Viscous and slimy, it was almost like a great gob

of spit. When it emerged the room filled with a smell, not of putrefaction or corpses—did

his body still have the wherewithal to make a corpse?—but rather of humus, of dead

leaves, of dense undergrowth. It was a somber smell, dark reflection of the dark night

from which he was emerging and which we would never know.” (Duras 58)

The inhuman qualities that Colette and Duras write about are the physical manifestation of the inhuman treatment perpetuated by the Nazis. Bearing witness to this dissolution of the human body is traumatic in itself, as well as listening to their accounts of the internment camps. Women who were lucky enough for their loved ones to return still faced a major challenge—nursing them back to health. One must have needed to function as a round-the-clock nurse, confidant, and therapist, which is all difficult and unacknowledged labor. Most people who have no experience or knowledge of how to treat someone returning from such abhorrent conditions, and yet these women, and many others, managed.

Even when Colette’s husband had been released from Compiègne, he was never really

“free” as they feared another arrest. Colette had to spend much of the years of the war separated from her husband, especially at night. He was still required to wear the Yellow Star identifying him as a Jew, so he needed to avoid recognition or contact with any Nazis that may come to Rasmussen 22 arrest him. She refers to him as, “my exhausted traveller, who used to sleep here and there like a chimney-swallow,” and details that “he would make his way in the evening from attic to attic, in our district or in the Étoile” (ES 28). She reveals that, “For eighteen months he experienced in these places the discomfort of heat, the suffering of cold, quietly enjoying the contrast of the one and the other with his memories of the camp and resisting the friendly overtures made to him by the Palais-Royal” (ES 28). She details the kindness of her neighbors, especially the women that stepped up to offer Goudeket a place to stay. She includes these anecdotes as part of her recollection of war memories:

“‘Do you know how to climb down a knotted rope’ Mme K... the bookseller asked him

point blank. ‘If you’re forewarned it’s easy enough, you tie a knotted rope to your

window, you come down in front of the door of my shop which I’ll leave ajar, and I’ve

put you out a cushion and a small lamp behind the big Gustave Dorés…. But don’t let the

cat get out’

Another neighbor, the one who traces with a needle on canvas the blue ribbons and

bouquets of roses that are unaffected by war, came with her mouse-like step, with even

fewer words, to hand over a key to my nightly evictee. ‘It’s the one to the back of my

shop,’ she said. ‘You’d better keep it on you all the time, monsieur.’” (ES 28-29).

Colette highlights the kindness and mercy people exhibited during the Occupation, rather than dwelling on the cruelty for too long. This kindness did not extend only to her husband, but rather to anyone in need.

“To mock, resist, evade, to slacken the torturing bonds, to thwart the spies… The

embroideress used to sleep on a narrow mattress in her shop so as to give those who had

‘fallen from the sky’ the use of a diminutive dwelling on the Left Bank. Quite near me Rasmussen 23

the elegant shadow of a Russian neighbor, thrown on the sand of the garden, would

replicate itself at night in singularly masculine outlines… This was the time when,

through he arched windows of the entresol, the hidden soldiers breathed the night air, the

scent of lawns, and smoke seated between the horned shadows of two cats.

Who did not offer his cellar, his house, his bed? A woman who lived in one of the attics

suggested to a Jew who was a dear friend of mine —his service of ’14-18 did not save

him from the camp at Compiègne — ‘If they come to take you away, run to my room, it’s

not bolted, and go on, hurry, don’t be ashamed, snuggle up with me in my bed! You can

be sure they won’t think of looking for you there!’

This close tacit understanding lasted as long as was necessary.” (ES 24).

Colette’s memories focus on the daily bravery of the individual Parisian and their contribution to the war effort, as opposed to writing about military effort, generals, or soldiers. She maintains a positive outlook on human nature—this “close tacit understanding” that it is one’s responsibility to help their neighbor, even given the possible detriment to one’s self, be it having to sleep on the floor or being arrested by the Gestapo.

Nevertheless, in The Evening Star Colette reveals, “I care for nothing of what the war years bequeathed to me. Not even the trying passivity, devoted less to deceiving the occupying forces than to inspiring optimism among the occupied, since optimism is a matter of contagion"

(ES 32). In this she is referencing her collection Paris de ma fenêtre/Looking Backwards, in which she writes of her admiration of the Parisians, encourages their daily resistance and bravery against the Occupation, and ultimately hopes to inspire optimism, because that is what she regarded as necessary and beneficial. In Looking Backwards, she primarily looks outwardly at the scenery and her fellow French neighbors, valorizing them, as opposed to revealing her Rasmussen 24 innermost feelings and her own situation within the Occupation. Later in Evening Star she reveals, “I marvel that I am capable of putting into writing the memories evoked by the ringing of a bell… Among other earthly blessings I longed for the freedom it would grant me to relish my sadness. ‘Oh, when everything’s all right again I’ll let myself go, I’ll cry in buckets…’

That’s what one says at the time” (ES 32). Colette finally seems able to attain some of this freedom by writing the sadness of her husband’s arrest and of her wartime anxiety. While Colette is writing The Evening Star she is half-paralyzed from her rheumatoid arthritis and housebound.

Up until the end of her life, Goudeket took care Colette, whose health steadily declined following the shock of his arrest (Portuges, Jouve 81). Colette mentions her disability and declining health:

“An accident and its consequences have settled my fate. I don’t complain that it offers

me the pleasure of staying put, whereas that of the young and healthy is to go out. My

fate demands only resignation—not that it’s easy—and harmony between past and

present. I have devoted a little time to assimilating the recent past, in the shape of ‘war’

and ‘memories of Compiègne’, which I wanted to absorb, then reject and bring up. But

the released prisoner gave me no help and answered every question with a disarming

patience: ‘I’ve forgotten… It wasn’t so bad…’” (ES 31).

Colette is disabled within multiple definitions of the word. Her movement is literally inhibited by her arthritis, the Occupation keeps her indoors, and she is not able to intervene in her husband’s case because of the situation alone, as well as her physical condition. Given her confinement, she is essentially trapped inside with only her own thoughts for much of the day, and in order to feel at ease, she needs “harmony between past and present”. Achieving this harmony requires grappling with the traumatic memories of war and Compiègne, which she admits she needs to Rasmussen 25

“absorb, then reject and bring up”. The pain tied to these memories is clear given her previous inability to absorb them, and her husband’s inability to discuss them, signaling repression. Her necessity to work through these memories, partially through her writing, is also apparent, to find harmony between the past and present and feel comfortable.

Janet Flanner

Janet Flanner (1892-1978) was a highly acclaimed American journalist and titled “War

Correspondent” best known for her fortnightly “Letter from Paris” written for The New Yorker and published under the nom de plume “Genêt” from 1925 to 1975. She lived as an expatriate in

Paris during the 1920s and documented the culture and activities of the decade for an American audience. Through her “Letter,” she was also able to record the changes and events leading up to

World War II. She stayed in France until October 1939, then once France had declared war on

Germany, reluctantly fled for her safety on a boat back to New York. Flanner was devastated about having to leave France and felt a constant sense of guilt, especially over leaving her friends that had stayed. However, American expatriate women that stayed in France during the

Occupation were under threat of being arrested by the Nazis (Wineapple 178-179). Flanner’s writings from wartime have been compiled within the collection Janet Flanner’s World:

Uncollected Writings 1932-1975 edited by Irving Drutman—friend, journalist, and former press agent.

Noel Murphy, a singer and thespian, was another American expatriate that moved to

France in the 1920s. Following the death of her husband, she bought a small farm in the village of Orgeval, slightly northeast of Paris. She and Flanner met through mutual friends and by 1932 had eventually developed an intimate relationship. When WWI broke out Murphy refused to Rasmussen 26 leave France, unlike Flanner, creating a point of contention in their relationship. She then worked for Anne Morgan (daughter of J.P. Morgan) who had founded “American Friends for Devastated

France” during WWI, and then called the “Comité Américain pour le Secours Civil,” where she evacuated disabled people from Paris (Wineapple 160). Murphy felt passionately about staying and providing humanitarian aid. She also drove truckloads of refugees, the majority pregnant women and old men, away from the war zones. Flanner read about Anne Morgan’s efforts in the

New York Mirror, seeing a photograph of Murphy at work (Wineapple 161). The intention of these women was to highlight the effects of war on everyday people, and the mass displacement they were facing. Writing to Flanner on June 1st,1940, Murphy records her experience in Givet:

“I arrived about 10 o’clock and slept in my car by the side of the river Meuse. At dawn a

huge Henckel bomber flew 6 times around Givet. Evacuation began. Little bombing that

day. The next day, Whitsunday, three thousand old men, women, and children were

assembled in the Grande Palace and 23 bombers flew over. Everyone flung themselves

flat on the ground, including Miss Morgan. The Germans bombed the railway station 200

meters away. It is true that the German fliers will leave their formation to machine gun

refugees on the road. I’ve had too many times to hide in a ditch. On one of my trips I had

a camion load of pregnant women. The English on duty ordered me to stop to get them

out to lie in the ditch. It was hell, all fainting and vomiting, poor women, you can

imagine.” (Wineapple 161-162)

Murphy’s letter communicates the grave severity of the war and the aggressiveness of the

Germans, which many Americans back home were not aware of yet. She documents the experience of many people displaced and threatened by the war, focusing her attention on those who were not sent to fight, but remained at home. Murphy’s involvement illustrates women’s Rasmussen 27 active efforts during wartime, complicating simple narratives of women only as passive victims of war. Murphy was on the front line, which she communicates was a dangerous place to be. Yet she and the women in her committee risked their lives in an attempt to counteract German efforts and help civilians. The French Foreign Legion ambulancers helping them were captured and sent to Germany as prisoners, forcing Murphy and the others to leave the old people behind and only take the children (Wineaple 162). The situation was dire, and the committee had to navigate through many difficult situations and decisions. Murphy also prepared for the worst—writing her will, hiding money she received from Flanner, putting precious possessions like Tchelitchew drawings in a valise. She was determined to stay in France and fight. When official Paris fell to the Germans, the French government first moved to Touraine and more than three million people fled the former capital. She describes the roads being clogged in an exodus that approached biblical proportions. Paris was handed over to the Nazis as an “open city” on June 13th, and the following day the government moved to Bordeaux while German troops marched triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées (Wineapple 162).

On September 24th, 1942 the Nazis arrested Noel Murphy along with other American women still living in and around Paris. After the United States declared war on Germany, the

Americans were classified as enemy alien. Living on her farm in Orgeval, Murphy had lived relatively undisturbed by the Germans up until September. She was nonetheless monitored; she had been ordered not to leave Orgeval and required to report to the local police every week. On

September 24th she was told to pack her things and taken to Paris along with other figures like

Sylvia Beach (owner of the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company), Katherine Dudley

(writer), and Drue Tartière (actress/broadcaster). Over 350 women were put into an “improvised dorm,” heavily guarded by Nazis in every corner, even in the bathroom. They were transported Rasmussen 28 by bus quickly the next morning, before anyone could notice what was happening, and given a sausage, a small piece of cheese, and a loaf of bread. Then they were herded onto a filthy train headed for an internment camp in the spa town of Vittel. When the train passed through stations, some of women would drop notes out of the carriage windows in the hope that someone would mail them. In Nancy, the German Red Cross threw coffee dregs in their faces. When they arrived in Vittel the next morning, Murphy was assigned a room with five other women at the Grand

Hôtel— “a symbol of elegance now surrounded by barbed wire” (Wineapple 178). Murphy was luckier than most, as friends in Paris interceded on her behalf. Many of the women were eventually released, but not without suffering and duplicitous maneuvering. Drue Tartière used smuggled drugs to induce hemorrhaging, faking the guards into believing she had uterine cancer.

She and Murphy were released on the same day in early December. Flanner did not receive the official notice of Murphy’s release until February 1943 (Wineapple 177-178).

Janet Flanner was exposed to the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism of the Third Reich as early as 1933. In autumn of that year, she traveled through Germany with five women including

Noel Murphy and her life partner, writer Solita Solano. When stopping at a small guest house, they were hounded by Nazi soldiers at their dinner table, demanding to see that their papers were in order, and if not, they were threatened to be deported. While in Murnau, Solita was told that she could not wear trousers: “German women must wear skirts, and the Americans must dress like their German counterparts, who were also forbidden to use powder and lipstick or to smoke in public” (Wineapple 134). Evident from this interaction is the Nazi policing along gender lines, enforcing conservative gender roles on women within the country. This is very different from the relative freedom of gender expression and sexuality that she found after moving to Paris in the

1920s. Signs saying “Jews Not Welcome” were already being posted in some towns. In Rasmussen 29

Nuremberg, they witnessed a young Jewish boy being forced to parade through the streets with a sign around his neck saying, “I kissed a Christian girl, I promise never to do it again”

(Wineapple 134). Reporting for the DAC News, Solano describes what they confronted immediately on crossing the border: "Hitler flags everywhere. Hitler emblems on every male arm and on every handlebar. Hitler photographs in every window. The Hitler salute from every passerby. A 'Heil, Hitler' from every child" (Zox-Weaver 111). Janet told her New Yorker audience that wherever one went, 1933 had been a “worrying kind of year” (Wineapple 132).

During the 1920s and 30s, Flanner tried to remain apolitical. This was in line with Harold

Ross’ vision for The New Yorker, as editor, which his 1924 prospectus captures:

“The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be

human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a

jester. It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical. It will be what is

commonly called sophisticated in that it will assume a reasonable degree of

enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk. . . . The New Yorker will be the

magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in

what she is thinking about” (Zox-Weaver 104).

Ross wanted all of the magazine’s contributors to appear anonymous, not advertising any writers on the cover and thus allowing the writing and the character of the magazine to speak for itself.

This would create what “Lionel Trilling derisively called its writers’ ‘corporate’ existence, an interchangeable aloofness and humor and a low-key, if not altogether repressed, public spiritedness” (Wineapple 98). Ross bequeathed Janet with the pen name “Genêt,” giving her a character to fill, and sometimes a mask to hide behind. Flanner believes Ross though “Genêt” Rasmussen 30 was the Gallicized version of Janet. She was a prose stylist, concerned with aesthetics, and tried to be objective and detached. Flanner’s biographer describes her style:

“Janet felt her assignment should exclude the editorial, the impressionistic, and the

personal as much as possible. At their best, her Paris letters told not just what the French

were thinking—if they did that at all—but what she thought in precisely the way she

wanted her thought known, through style. She wanted to appear crisp, incisive, good-

humored, and intelligent. She wanted to seem down to earth, aristocratic, amused”

(Wineapple 102).

Flanner’s approach was successful, as she garnered a lot of praise for her letters and acquired a loyal readership, becoming one of the key figures in The New Yorker. Few people knew Genêt’s identity, and Genêt functioned both as a way for Flanner to conceal her personal life, feelings, and opinions, and an institutional incentive to keep these things private. This concealment was likely deemed necessary by Flanner given that she was a queer woman writing for an American audience, and the androgynous and anonymous name Genêt provided an advantage against those that may be intolerant of these facets of her identity. Genêt provided Flanner with money and mobility, allowing her to participate in many events and meet new people. She was also able to elevate her interests to “culture” by covering them in her Paris letter. Much of what is remembered of Paris in the 1920s and beyond is what Flanner chose to write about. The compilation of her letter provides an insightful record to those in the present, and in this way, she is responsible for the formation of history. “Genêt placed Janet inside history, because she was there, as well as outside it, as an American in Paris, a woman, a spectator” (Wineapple 105).

In 1935, Flanner was assigned to write a profile on Hitler. Flanner had a number of personal connections that could get her an invitation to the Nazi Congress Rally fall of 1935. Her Rasmussen 31 best connection was Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a half-American, half-German Harvard graduate who circulated around New York City modernist circles in the 1920s as the fiancé of Djuna

Barnes, and where he may have met Flanner (Zox-Weaver 117). Hanfstaengl had subsidized

Hitler since the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, and was the chief of foreign press at the time, so he could get any information that Flanner desired, although, he was not able to arrange an interview. Flanner claimed that she preferred to be known as a tourist rather than a foreign journalist in Germany anyways, and this allowed her to acquire information from official and unofficial sources easier. Flanner never met Hitler but was able to construct her intimate profile through her expert use of these sources. She also felt safer traveling around Germany as a private citizen rather than a reporter, as she would not draw attention to herself and her ambiguous politics. Those around Flanner expressed their concern for her taking on this project. In a letter in

The New Yorker archives, her editor urges her to consider the ramifications of attaching her name to the article. She risked the wrath of the Third Reich's Propaganda Ministry, and feared the possibility of not being able to enter Germany again, or worse, being jailed by the Germans and facing an internment camp. From the beginning she saw her work as an “"unfriendly journalistic comment” but chose to forgo the Genêt moniker and signed all three parts of the profile “Janet

Flanner” (Zox-Weaver 116). Flanner’s intention was to write a personal profile of Hitler, to humanize in order to demythologize. Flanner wanted to treat the Hitler profile just as she did her other subjects. “Primarily an empirical undertaking, the profile was to be like ‘one of anybody,’ she wrote her editor, ‘the life story, inner and outer, of a human being, without adding whether or not you or I or anybody agrees with his sectarian views.’” (Zox-Weaver 117). Flanner considered politics to be a form of polemics at this time, and herself to be above politics—neither a debunker nor an advocate. “She told herself that her job demanded neutrality and that neutrality Rasmussen 32 implied objectivity; to be objective was to be fair, detached, bemused” (Wineapple 144). While

Flanner’s approach to humanize Hitler and her refusal to outright condemn fascism can easily be read as problematic, her profile is nonetheless critical of Hitler and his ideology. She was greatly surprised when Germany considered her profile “pro-Führer,” and there were many polarizing views on it.

The first installment of “Führer” was published on February 29th, 1936. It begins:

“Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer, and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaler, nonsmoker, and celibate” (Flanner 6). Evident here is Flanner’s keen sense of irony and her characteristic humor. She goes on to describe his idiosyncrasies, choice in food, cars, clothes, and the schedule he keeps, all in great detail. She writes about his interest in film, especially films that include him. However, she specifies, “Hitler, like all people who have no talent for it, has never had time for a good time” (Flanner 9). She writes that, “Conversation excites him. In anything approaching serious talk, his sapphire-blue eyes, which are his only good feature, brighten, glow heavily as if words fanned them” (Flanner 9). These snide comments humorously deployed serve to undermine the serious and respected aura crafted by

Hitler. Flanner pays considerable attention, and devotes a lot of space, to the women surrounding

Hitler. She speaks about the upper-class women that have sympathized with Hitler and provided him with much of his financial backing and support from the beginning. She also mentions those women who Hitler considers his personal friends and companions, such as Frau Winifred

Wagner, widow of Richard Wagner’s son. Flanner is particularly entranced by Leni Riefenstahl, who cut and edited the 1934 Nazi propaganda film “Der Triumph des Willens”. She was in line to photograph the forthcoming Berlin Olympic Games, just as she did the previous summer’s

Nazi Nürnberg Congress. Rasmussen 33

“At the tremendous, opening Shovel Parade of the Arbeitsdienst, she was not only the

sole motion-picture director, she was also the only woman on the great parade field—one

white linen skirt moving freely before fifty-four thousand green-woolen, mechanical men,

one professional woman on her job, and so rare a sight in masculinized Germany today

that among the quarter-million spectators assembled, there wasn’t a person who didn’t

know who she was. She is unique, and the white-skirted figure couldn’t have been

anybody else.” (Flanner 11)

At the beginning of Flanner’s career in journalism, she wrote about film and was considered to be one of the first film critics in the United States, as was Colette in France. Her admiration of

Riefenstahl seems to move beyond professional respect for her craft into an erotic fixation.

Flanner is entranced by the single white skirt among the thousands of men’s uniforms, and projects a queer gaze onto this image. Riefenstahl is a pioneering woman in the field of filmmaking, although clearly on the wrong side of history, Flanner likely related to her position in the male-dominated work field and was attracted to her talent and success. Flanner’s gaze towards Riefenstahl disrupts the profile of Hitler. Just as Riefenstahl’s film about Hitler is superseded by her own image, the profile itself is momentarily stolen by the German cinema-star.

Flanner’s focus on the influential women of the Nazi party is particularly subversive given her acknowledgement in the following paragraph that the party “doctrinally enforces the domestic submission of women to ‘men’s natural rule as illustrated by the Wagnerian heroes like Wotan and Siegfried’” (Flanner 11). Flanner also recognizes Hitler’s contradiction of this doctrine, preferring, “the Walküre type of lady who gets around on the public heights,” (Flanner 11). She also addresses the rumors that Hitler is homosexual, claiming they have no basis, “outside of the fact that, until he finally had most of them shot, there were pederasts among his Party friends and Rasmussen 34 file” (Flanner 13). The frank inclusion that he had his Party members shot communicates the brutality of the Führer, but the matter-of-fact statement also comes across humorously because of its absurdity. Flanner also reasons that homosexuality is paraded in all walks of life within most of the major European cities, so Hitler’s association with gay people is not rare or incriminating.

Writing about Hitler’s treatment of gay men (having them shot) and his own rumored homosexuality is a bold choice, given Flanner’s own homosexuality. The Nazi party actively persecuted homosexuals, and while they targeted gay men more than women, it must have struck a nerve. One can only imagine her feelings approaching this subject. She concludes that his most significant sexual abnormality is his celibacy and lack of sexual impulse, although this has since been suggested to be false by Eva Braun’s biographer, Heike Görtemaker. When discussing the very few male companions Hitler tolerates, she once again highlights the humorous qualities of these relationships. She describes some of the infighting within the Nazi Party over positions and being close to Hitler, making it appear childish— “Göring says he is ‘Hitler’s skin and hair,’ whatever that means” (Flanner 12). By bringing out the absurd and farcical elements of the Third

Reich, she takes away some of its power. However, making Hitler seem less threatening has negative as well as positive ramifications.

The New Yorker published the second installment of the Hitler profile on March 7th, 1936.

It begins by discussing the Hitler lineage, family history, as well as his childhood and adolescence. Flanner covers his literary influences:

“Hitler clearly read up on the Hapsburg Empire’s lamentable history, thus founding his

angry, racial Nazi Weltanschauung of today; he certainly also read the French Count de

Gobineau, from whom he got his notions of Nordic race superiority… He obviously read

the philologist Max Müller, and not carefully, since Hitler’s use of the adjective “Aryan” Rasmussen 35

to describe race instead of language is as muddled, Müller had already point out, as to

refer to ‘a brachycephalic dictionary’… Hitler also says that in Vienna for the first time

he came across anti-Jewish literature; Jews may be interested to learn that, according to

Hitler himself, he struggled for two years ‘against being converted to anti-Semitism.’

Communists may be informed by his statement that he got through ‘Das Kapital’ in two

weeks.” (Flanner 15)

Flanner is decidedly critical of Hitler’s “angry, racial” philosophy that found inspiration from the

“lamentable history” of the Hapsburg Empire. She notes his misreading of these texts, revealing that he misuses the “Aryan,” which is a cornerstone of his racial philosophy, calling into question his authority. His anti-Semitic policies—that he claims hesitant to adapt—come across as bogus and opportunistic, pulled from a few partially misread texts. The quality of Flanner’s research also shines through, as she was able to garner this information, and delve into these texts, without even an interview from the Führer himself. She segues from his involvement in

World War I, where he was “disliked in the trenches; the soldiers thought him courageous but queer,” (Flanner 16) to the early beginnings of the Nazi party and his shifty rise to power. She outlines his twenty-five point Nazi platform, focusing on Point 4—the famous anti-Semitic decree. She describes the fallout from this decree, like small Jewish shop-owners being forced out of business, boycotts of Jewish establishments, and segregation between Aryan and Jewish products and spaces. Even Jewish owned cows are declared incapable of producing milk fit for

Aryans. Flanner writes:

“In 1934, there were less than six hundred thousand Jews in al Germany for the twelve

million Nazi Party members to accuse of dominating the sixty-five billion German

Gentiles; today there are not quite a half-million Jews still in the Reich. It is difficult for Rasmussen 36

inhabitants to leave a land from which they are permitted to take only ten silver marks to

embark on a journey as momentous as crossing the Red Sea must once have seemed.”

(Flanner 19)

If Flanner was hesitant to delve into the political situation of Germany, she did it nonetheless. It is unavoidable to write a comprehensive profile of Hitler without charting into his ideology, given that he is such a political figure. Nonetheless, Flanner’s sympathizes with the Jewish population in Germany, which is evident from statements as the above. Flanner also devotes a section to Hitler’s response to criticism and humor, clarifying, “Hitler dislikes jokes at his own expense, whether native or foreign” (Flanner 19). Her acknowledgment of this fact, within a profile that makes many jokes at Hitler’s expense, clearly denotes its subversive nature. She also includes a bit about Claire Waldorff, a German cabaret singer who made dinner-table jokes about

Hitler, and was interned for doing so. Flanner knows the risks of being critical of the Führer, and proceeds anyway.

The final installment of the Hitler profile was published March 14th, 1936. Flanner delves deeper into Hitler’s personality and temperament, with its many contradictions. She paints him as an overly emotional man, a megalomaniac that is steadfast in his opinions but mercurial and quick to change his mind. “He believes in intolerance as a pragmatic principle. He accepts violence as a detail of the state, he says mercy is not his affair with men, yet he is kind to dumb animals. He becomes sick if he sees blood, yet he is unafraid of being killed or killing. He has mythical tendencies, no common sense, and a Wagnerian taste for heroics and death” (Flanner

20). She writes of his love for music and theatre, specifically Schubert, Beethoven, and Wagner’s opera. It was increasingly difficult for him to go to these performances because of the threat of assassination. He was devoted to art as well, wanting to be an artist or an architect in his Rasmussen 37 adolescence. Flanner is critical of his artistic taste— “Hitler has since compensated by regarding himself as Germany’s governmental art arbiter, with some, though not enough, reason. Certainly he has talked nonsense about art history” (Flanner 21). She writes about his abode in Munich (he is not a fan of Berlin) painted in his favorite baroque blue, white, and gold. It has now become somewhat of a tourist attraction, where down below, private cars have been forbidden. Mein

Kampf is ubiquitous in Germany, given to newlyweds and distributed by Germans as far as the

Canary Isles, China, and the USA, making it impossible to know how many copies have been willingly purchased. Flanner remarks that anti-French sentiment has been removed in the French translation. The American translation “condensed Hitler’s rambling so the book might be sold at a moderate price” (Flanner 23). She concludes that most Germans have not been able to read through Mein Kampf, given that it is nearly a half-million words strewn together on various topics (Danubian politics, Dadaist art, Nazism, Germanism, Semitism, motherhood, movies, racial theories, autocracy etc.) and “superimposed on some remarkably interesting politico- philosophical formulae” (Flanner 24). Flanner read the “earnest jumble” three times for the profile, and had to order the highly problematic French translation from a pornographic book dealer (Zox-Weaver 116). She found Hitler to be an unattractive man and made no effort to hide it. “Though Hitler takes the worst photographs in the world, there are seventy-thousand of them, all different poses, in the Berlin files” (Flanner 24). She elaborates on the ways in which photography was utilized by the propaganda machine, distributing new photos of Hitler’s likeness with the weekly news. She recognizes the impressive pomp and circumstance of the

Nazi party that is entwined with the propaganda—“Hitler’s use of flags, banners, scarlet, gold, of music, of singing, and of marching, massed men” (Flanner 26), as well as the symbol of the swastika, the customary “Heil Hitler!” greeting and salutation. Flanner ends the profile on Rasmussen 38

Hitler’s oratory gifts, his specific talent of appealing to the emotion of a crowd and producing excitement. She dissects his favorite words, the prophecies and rhetoric he puts forward. “Ten years ago when he was making eleven speeches nightly, when his goal was to talk in every

German city, when he was orating daily for hours and without pause before hundreds of thousands, in wind, rain, or smoky beer halls, he was warned that his voice could not last”

(Flanner 27). Since, he had two nodules cut from his vocal chords (usually an operation for hard- worked opera singers) and made a full recovery. Flanner conveys that public speaking is his passion, his talent, and ultimately what makes him a dangerous man. She concludes on the humorous and haunting note: “Adolf Hitler still talks more than any other man in Europe,”

(Flanner 28).

On December 7th, 1940, Flanner published, “Paris, Germany,” a piece about the German

Occupation for The New Yorker. The prose is a clear divergence from her previous energetic, humorous and ironic tone, and rather, comes from a place of mourning and melancholy.

“Anybody who loved Paris and grieves at its plight is fortunate not to see it now, because Paris would seem hateful” (Flanner 51). She mourns what has come of the twentieth century, lamenting, “This was to have been remembered as the century of perfected human communications—of swift air-mail letters flying over oceans and lands, of radio stations comfortably crackling sparks of news into the night, of wireless telephoned headlines presumably announcing that mankind was all well” (Flanner 50). Rather than perfect communication, Europe is rife with violence and cruelty. Johannesburg, South Africa had reported that storks migrating there from Holland came attached with notes that read, “The

German Occupation of Holland is hell” and “The Dutch people are dying under injustice”.

Flanner writes that written and verbal communication coming out of Occupied France was rarer Rasmussen 39 than any other German conquered territory. She emphasizes the suppression of French publications, formerly “the world’s greatest news-publishing and news-reading centre” (Flanner

53) all of the newspapers were taken over by Germans and infused with Nazi propaganda.

Critical and anti-Nazi writings were also banned. Information about Paris was brought to

America by refugees, American expatriates, members of volunteer organizations, and people in similar positions, and it was only oral. It can be surmised then that these are the types of informants Flanner consulted with to gather the information for her article, which was then immortalized in print. Her ability to capture the state of Paris while being so geographically distant is remarkable. According to Flanner, Parisians refer to the Germans as corrects and emmerdeurs—“this superficial adjective and this scatological substantive, taken together, are probably important historically” (Flanner 51). By corrects they are referring to the German’s forced polite and disciplined decorum. By emmerdeurs they meant they found the mentation grating and boring. “These two curious words so far represent merely the intellectual periphery of a vocabulary not yet filled in with words for the despair and anguish which some of the conquered French are beginning to feel not with their brains but with their stomachs and hearts”

(Flanner 51). What is particularly interesting is Flanner’s recognition of the difficulty to verbalize the despair and anguish over the Occupation, which can be read as a trauma, and the formation of new modes of thinking and language to verbalize this trauma. The Occupation was extreme—there were about twenty thousand Nazi men in Paris according to Flanner. She remarks that they were constantly shifted around to prevent fraternization with the French, and required higher ratios of officers to men once they realized “that even the model Nazi soldiers failed to remain model, in France, if left without strict supervision” (Flanner 56). The Germans in command sought segregation in as many ways of possible, even telling the soldiers that all Rasmussen 40

French women are diseased. Ultimately only the women would pay the price for any fraternization with German soldiers, as was reflected in Hiroshima mon amour.

Similar to Colette, Flanner focuses on the daily experience of Parisians under Occupation.

She writes about the vast scarcity of food and materials goods, the Germans’ uniform looting from the French, their never-ending bureaucracy. While previously soldiers looted with disorderly enthusiasm, “Nazis ring the French front-door bell while an Army truck waits in the street, and soldiers do the job of fanatical moving men” (Flanner 51). She describes an irate

Frenchwoman, forbidden to buy more than one pair of stockings, while a German officer in the shop bought dozens to send home to his wife. The Germans love the French commodities and guzzle as much food and champagne down as possible, justifying it because of their own lack following WWI. “Rice is so scarce that it is not given out except on a doctor’s certificate, pure starch having already reached pharmacopoeial ranking” (Flanner 52). Milk was only sold to babies, pregnant women and people over seventy. French women then rented babies, borrowed grandparents, and stuffed their stomachs in order to buy milk. She stresses the Parisian’s ability to accommodate to change, scarcity, and demoralization. Nevertheless, “War and conquest are, in some small ways, humanizing disasters” (Flanner 58). As Colette had written about the ways in which people empathized deeply with one another and went out of their way to help others and be kind, Flanner does the same. The formerly cold and indifferent Ritz staff began to “show their beating hearts” (Flanner 58). One of the French room waiters, with permission, rolled up his trousers to show a woman his battle wounds from Verdun, and wondered out loud if his son was facing a similar or experience, or worse, if he had been killed. Another chambermaid showed photos of her poor sisters who had to flee from the Ardennes family farm as refugees and had not been heard from since, “she also asked Madame’s permission to consume the second brioche and Rasmussen 41 the part of the café-au-lait which Madame always left” (Flanner 58). It was thought to be bad form for loyal French to socialize with the Germans while at the Ritz, and they were criticized for dwelling amongst the enemy. However, their proximity to the Germans exposed them to news and information they could then report back to friends. “As if taking the mantle of Genêt for the last time, she mentioned what was being served at the Ritz—but she was no longer footnoting the life of the smart set” (Wineapple 172). The incorporation of the Ritz is symbolic in documenting the change in Paris before and after the war broke out, as well the change in herself.

Flanner’s next New Yorker piece, “Soldats de France, Debout!” was about the French

Resistance, examining Charles de Gaulle and his army of Free French. She signed this article with her own name, and the “Genêt” penname disappeared for four years, signaling a change

(Wineapple 173). Flanner could not continue the detached and comical persona of Genêt amid the tragedies of war. She continued to write about the Occupation in France, drawing attention to the everyday existence: “How one eats, washes, makes soap, how many hours one waits in line, what radio broadcasts one listens to, what one sells, and what one smuggles—all of this provided an impressive human document of struggle, adaptation, resistance, and collaboration”

(Wineapple 174). She also became very interested in the stories of those who were able to flee from the Nazis. She chronicled the escape of her friend Mary Reynolds (former partner of

Marcel Duchamp), who left Paris just before Noel Murphy and other Americans were arrested and traveled secretly through France, across the Pyrenees to Spain, through Lisbon, and made passage home through Liberia, Brazil, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda, taking seven months in total. The story was published in The New Yorker for three consecutive weeks, titled “The

Escape of Mrs. Jeffries”. Her continuous coverage of the war pushed The New Yorker into a Rasmussen 42 more political direction, and her choice in covering those displaced by Nazi atrocities with great empathy shows whose side she chose. She was crushed being away from France and hearing about the devastation. Her biographer Brenda Wineapple describes the stress of the war on

Flanner. She felt depressed and anxious in America and it wore on her physically. She suffered from severe kidney stones, sciatica, and exhaustion. When a friend asked her to write the introduction for his collection of photographs from the 1930s, she refused on the basis that many people featured had become collaborationists and she wanted no part of that “nauseating fashionable Fascism” (Wineapple 181). She was able to return to Paris in 1944 after five years away to continue her position as War Correspondent for The New Yorker, but seeing the destruction and demoralization depressed her further. She signed on to do a broadcast for the

Blue Network (forerunner of the American Broadcasting Company) in addition to her work for

The New Yorker, which gave her a better sense of purpose. In the broadcast she interjected more of her personal feelings and opinions—decrying the poverty of the Allied aid, the inefficiency handling of returning prisoners of war, and itemizing what the French were doing without (being stolen by the Nazis). She made the desperate mood of France clear, hoping to “do some good” and influence the American effort (Wineapple 191). In 1946, she travelled to Nuremberg to cover the Nazi war trials for The New Yorker. She had to stay in a villa that housed 40 women of the press in inefficient squalor. Her letters made clear her loathing for the Germans and their

“lack of conscience, racial bigotry, illogic, and brutal disregard for human life—except, as she pointed out, that the Nazis on trial did not want to die for the cause that had killed millions”. Her letters were highly praised, and Alfred Knopf said they were the best reports he had seen on the trial (Wineapple 198). Rasmussen 43

Journalism provided an avenue for many women in the twentieth century to write (and be paid for it), and Duras, Colette, and Flanner were all journalists. In September 1944, Duras contributed to the newspaper Libres (free), founded by the Resistance movement MNPGD, where she passed on any relevant information about deportees, returnees, and anyone still in the camps, attempting to reach their loved ones with this news. The War: A Memoir details her days spent in the Gare d’Orsay, set up by the Gaullist Mission de Rapatriement to receive returning soldiers and deportees. Within the chaos, she searches for news of her husband Robert Antelme and compiles the names and recounts of the fate of others. Beyond the war effort, Duras was a prolific journalist and public intellectual, contributing to many French and foreign publications.

She belonged to the L’Autre Journal, a monthly French publication that printed new literature, articles on politics, poetry, photography and graphic art. Her journalistic writings have been hailed and compiled in a collection entitled Outside. Colette was also a productive journalist for the duration of her life, contributing to various newspapers, magazines, dailies, and periodicals, while also balancing her literary and theatre career. As she lived through two world wars, she chronicled both in newspaper articles and writings that were later edited into volume form.

During World War I, she reported on trips to the Front, to Italy, and life in Paris during wartime for Le Matin, the second largest French newspaper (Holmes, 53). She had her own weekly column in Le Matin—“‘Le journal de Colette,” emphasizing the personal nature of the stories.

She traveled to Verdun in 1914 to be with her second husband who was fighting in the French army where she witnessed much of the devastation and poverty resulting from war, informing her reports (Dubbelboer 38). These articles were later published in the collection Les Heures longues (The Long Hours, 1917). Her work here, as in Looking Backwards and The Evening Star, does not speculate on the causes or strategies of war, but rather focuses on the implications for Rasmussen 44 civilians. Though Colette is not typically remembered for her journalism, the work she produced provides a captivating historical document of the first half of the twentieth century. While journalism offered authors an avenue to make money and engage with the contemporary cultural and political climate, it was often more difficult for women to break into the field. Women were often limited to specialist or lowbrow periodicals, as well as women’s magazines, which Colette often contributed to as well. “Ideology, politics and ‘serious’ journalism were considered the domain of men,” (Dubbledoer 37) and women taking any political stance, be it in journalism or their literary work received critical backlash. Though Colette did not consider her journalistic contributions overtly political, they can certainly be read that way, and her presence in major publications broke barriers and paved the way for other women journalists.

Duras, Colette, and Flanner offer a perspective of the German occupation of France that privileges women’s experiences and their narratives. Their writing is concerned with the experience of civilians as opposed to soldiers or military strategy. In the case of Duras and

Colette, it is a divulgence of personal history, worked through by the process of writing.

Biographical events inform the position of the three nonetheless, and their stake in the war, as they all experienced the pain of having a partner interned by the Nazis. Their works are concerned with the rippling trauma of the war. By recording the experiences of themselves and those around them, they encapsulate them within history, and provide the opportunity for their stories to be remembered. Memory is constructed socially, and the production of these texts allows for their narratives to be a part of the collected memory of WWII and the Occupation.

Reading, writing about, and teaching the stories of women allows for their experience to be included on discourses of war, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of WWII.

Rasmussen 45

Works Cited

Cixous, Hélène, et al. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875-

893. JSTOR.

Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle. Evening Star. Translated by David Le Vay, Bobbs-Merrill Company,

Inc., 1973.

Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle. Looking Backwards. Translated by David Le Vay, Indiana University

Press, 1975.

Comfort, Kathy. “Relieving Pain in Marguerite Duras’s ‘La Douleur’ and ‘Albert Des

Capitales.’” Neohelicon, vol. 42, no. 2, 2015, pp. 551–569.

Crowley, Martin. Robert Antelme: Humanity, Community, Testimony. Routledge, 2003.

Dubbelboer, Marieke. “‘Nothing Ruins Writers like Journalism’: Colette, the Press and Belle

Époque Literary Life.” French Cultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, Feb. 2015, pp. 32–44.

Duras, Marguerite. The War: A Memoir. Translated by Barbara Bray, The New Press, 1986.

Flanner, Janet. Janet Flanner's World: Uncollected Writings, 1932-1975. Ed. Irving Drutman.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Print.

Hiroshima mon amour. Dir. Alain Resnais. Screenplay by Marguerite Duras. Argos Films, 1959

Hofmann, Carol. Forgetting and Marguerite Duras. University Press of Colorado, 1991.

Holmes, Diana. Colette. St. Martin's Press, 1991.

Portuges, Catherine, and Nicole Ward Jouve. “Colette.” French Women Writers, edited by Eva

Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman, University of Nebraska Press, 1994, pp.

78–89.

Wineapple, Brenda. Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner. University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Print. Rasmussen 46

Zox-Weaver, Annalisa. “At Home with Hitler: Janet Flanner's Führer Profiles for the ‘New

Yorker.’” New German Critique, no. 102, 2007, pp. 101–125. JSTOR.