Kathrin Engel. Deutsche Kulturpolitik im besetzten Paris 1940-1944: Film und Theater. München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2003. 464 S. EUR 49.80 (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-486-56739-7.

Reviewed by Bertram M. Gordon (Department of History, Mills College)
Published on H-German (October, 2005)

Kathrin Engel's Deutsche Kulturpolitik im besetzten Paris: Film und Theater is a revised version of a dissertation submitted to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt. With a well-chosen title that offers a clear definition of the geographic area and chronological sequence covered, Deutsche Kulturpolitik is a thoroughly researched and closely proofed study in standard scholarly historical style and a mine of information on the rivalries of Germany's cultural services in occupied Paris. It is to be welcomed by those interested in the internal workings of the German cultural services in occupied Paris during World War II. Given that this book is about theater and film, however, the absence of justifying pictorial display is unfortunate.

The book's narrow focus, perhaps to be expected in a revised doctoral dissertation, raises several questions about the nature of German cultural policy in occupied Paris. Engel discusses cinema and theater without fully addressing their significance in the larger world of culture, except to say that both were public, that both could be used to transmit propaganda messages, and that the Germans worked more assiduously to export their message through film than theater (p. 24). The Germans, she shows, were less successful in exporting their theatrical work, where language played a key role, than film, which could be subtitled or dubbed. Although German theater did less well than film in France, German music was relatively well received during the 1930s. By theater, Engel means the production of playwrights such as Gerhart Hauptmann, but theater may be seen as more than the stage in a building designated for plays. It could be argued that the Nazi Party used theater on a far more extensive basis, for example, in staging the Nuremberg party rallies, whose filming, in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," was well received in France where it was awarded the Grand Prix de l'Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques at the 1937 Paris International Exposition (p. 70).

Although the book is subdivided to deal with theater and film, much of it focuses more on a general discussion of standard German operational propaganda. A more contextual consideration of the role of film, theater, and music in culture and the role of culture in a regime that occupied France and produced events such as the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944 would help ground the reader more firmly in the realities of Nazism.

Left largely unaddressed is the longer-term historical context of French-German cultural interactions. Engel sets German policy in occupied France in the context of German cultural politics dating to Paul Rohrbach's "Propaganda for the German Idea" in 1912 (p. 36). She notes with irony that early-twentieth-century German protagonists of a more intentional policy of national cultural promotion cited the French mission civilisatrice as a model for promoting French national culture in the Empire, to be emulated by the Germans. In reality, however, there was a continuing struggle between French and German cultural perspectives dating back to the emergence of the secularized Lutheran world that followed the Treaty of Westphalia and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Political suspicion was exacerbated in the course of nineteenth-century conflict and it is pointedly so in the sparse cultural record. Madame Germaine de Stael's De l'Allemagne, which viewed Germans as Romantic and Christian, in contrast to the Classical French who were descended from the Pagan Romans, was published in 1810 and banned in France as anti-French.[1] Max Schneckenburger's "Die Wacht am Rhein" expressed the German anti-France stance of 1840. The tension between French and German culture is visible in Richard Wagner's unsuccessful stay in Paris from 1839 to 1842 and his even more dramatically unsuccessful return in 1860, when performances of his opera "Tannhäuser" were shouted down.[2]

The nineteenth-century gulf between the German and French cultures was characterized more by mutual disparities than outright antagonism. They were different cultures with different focal points and these disparities would continue into the 1930s and 40s, as German and French cultural figures largely ignored one another. Marc Augier, an activist in the French youth movement prior to World War II, and a volunteer for the French Anti-Bolshevik Legion in 1941 and the Waffen-SS in 1944, later recalled how little the French, even those sympathetic to Germany, had known of Germany in the 1930s.[3] During World War I, when Engel begins her contextual account, an anti-French and anti-German propaganda war emerged in Germany and France, respectively. In the 1930s, the French Left pushed this antagonism further. Groups such as LICA (Ligue internationale contre l'antisémitisme) organized boycotts of German films following the Nazi rise to power, but Engel holds that not much changed in theater and cinema relations after 1933 (p. 45). French film-makers collaborated with UFA (Universum-Film AG) in Germany, but few, if any, French films idealized the Germans. German films, especially those that might have shown the French in a bad light, were made primarily for domestic consumption. Those shown in France during the mid-1930s were mainly light comedies and musicals (p. 68).

Nazi cultural policies were essentially those of Wilhelmine First World War Germany, expressing a minority view within Western culture itself, namely, the belief in a culturally--if not racially superior--affect of Germany's later medieval characteristics blended with those of the Wilhelmine industrial, musical, and literary model, in contrast to both the ancient Greek liberal model and Christian pietistic traditions of southern Europe, with which were associated the minority groups of Jews, Gypsies, and gay theatrics. Engel emphasizes that German cultural policy in occupied France was based on hegemony and never looked upon the French as equal partners (p. 431).

Unlike Henry Rousso's studies of the memory of the occupation years in postwar France, Engel focuses on the occupation years themselves (p. 11). Because she examines German policy, the plays and films discussed are those that appeared publicly and, therefore, were known to the occupying authorities, rather than any produced clandestinely. Prewar Nazi preoccupation with film, in contrast to live theater, within Germany was extended into France after 1940. Engel defines her subject as limited to Paris, the center of French cultural life (p. 25), but occasionally ventures into cultural events elsewhere in the country. She makes extensive use of the records of the German occupation services in the Archives Nationales in Paris, together with source material in Germany. Accessibility, however, of French materials was "not unproblematic" (pp. 33-34 and n. 118), a frustration Engel shares with others who have studied World War II in French archives. Nonetheless, her use of a broad range of French and German sources is one of the strengths of the book.

In addition to her argument for hegemony, Engel holds that German cultural policy toward defeated France was never clearly defined in 1940. "It is difficult," she writes, "to speak of a coherent German policy toward France after the lightning victory of June 1940" (p. 106). A leitmotif in her work is the term "ambiguity," which she cites in relation to Jacques Siclier's 1993 discussion of Henri-Georges Clouzot's film "Le Corbeau," released in 1943. "Le Corbeau," based on a true story of false denunciations by letter in Tulle in 1922, was criticized after the Liberation as anti-French. By 1987, however, it had come to be seen as one of France's best films (p. 18, n. 71). In one of the more dramatic scenes in the film, the letter-writer asks a colleague: "You believe that light is good and darkness is evil. But where is the darkness, where is the light?" While the conversation takes place a lamp slowly swings back and forth, alternately placing each speaker in light and darkness. This ambiguity, according to Engel, also characterized German cultural policy in occupied Paris, "which paradoxically followed two contradictory main goals" (p. 19): a short-term German interest in maintaining normalcy and keeping France quiet, and a longer-term interest in destroying French cultural life (p. 23).

German ambiguities in cultural policy toward occupied Paris reflected policy in general toward occupied France. The military victory of 1940 had come so quickly that little, if any, preparation had been made to fashion a consistent policy toward the defeated French. The lack of consistency was intensified by the competing German bureaucracies established in Paris by the army, foreign ministry, and police agencies, all addressed by Engel who assesses the cultural consequences of these bureaucratic rivalries in great detail. Evolving networks of German officials and their often shifting alliances with French film-makers and theater personnel, all crossing a broad matrix of collaboration-resistance modalities, are the stuff of Engel's book. Rivalries among the Wehrmacht Command, Joachim von Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry and Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry were felt in occupied Paris, where, for example, the authority over film censorship went back and forth between offices of the Propaganda and Foreign Ministries (pp. 132-133). Lower-ranking German officials posted in Paris were often more sympathetic than their superiors in Berlin, especially so in the case of Goebbels, who wanted to see the cultural primacy of Paris replaced by Berlin (pp. 321, 432). Local German officials in Paris worked assiduously to stage plays by Hauptmann, to honor his eightieth birthday, as representative of the "New Germany," in contrast to the sentiments of higher ranking officials, such as Goebbels, who found Hauptmann's work to be too depressing (p. 325).

In addition to German interference in the film and theater world of occupied Paris, Vichy's corporatist policies marked a departure from a more laissez-faire French state policy prior to the war (p. 154). The more dirigiste Vichy policy was also used in the "Aryanizing" of film and theater in occupied Paris and, as Engel notes, the Vichy authorities played an active role in eliminating Jews and Freemasons from French cultural life, as they did in other areas of the French public sphere. "Aryanization" allowed Alfred Greven and Continental Films to enlarge their control of the French cinema industry in an example of racial politics and economic interests working together (pp. 196, 445). The Germans did not wish to Nazify French film and theater in Paris (p. 235). Once Jews and Freemasons had been eliminated, German censors focused mainly on eliminating anti-German propaganda. Censorship, "Aryanization," and the increasing German control of French cultural life were parts of a Kampf der Kulturen (battle of cultures) in which German culture, together with German arms, would reign supreme in Europe (p. 237). Interestingly, Engel suggests that by publicly essentializing the national quality of their own culture in occupied Paris, German policy makers produced the unintended consequence of making the French more aware of their own "national" culture. Engel does not say whether there were any anti-German Resistance implications in this enhanced sense of French culture.

German cultural policy-makers in Paris also had to take into account how to provide for their own troops and civilian officials stationed there. Occupied Paris was a backwater from the war, a zone of leisure for German soldiers for whom guide books and tours were provided. Certain movie theaters (Soldatenkino) were reserved for German military personnel. The preservation of the city's cultural identity served specific German military needs for rest and rehabilitation for soldiers on leave from the war zones, especially those stationed in the Soviet Unionafter 1941.[4]

Theater and opera directors often used the opportunity provided by the occupation to travel to Paris, whose cultural life they valued, sometimes to the dismay of German officials there (p. 325). Comparison of German cultural policy in occupied France with that in occupied Poland, for example, might help explain some of the ambiguities in Nazi policies in Paris, which reflected a racial hierarchy that ranked the French somewhere in the middle, in contrast to the Poles, whose nation was earmarked for extinction during the Second World War.[5] German soldiers stationed in France were encouraged to learn French, whereas those on duty in Poland were said to have less need to know the local language.[6]

A meaningful cultural rapprochement between Germany and France, defending in common a pacifist world view would await the post-1990 German reunification and the reordering of the Franco-German alliance during the current Gulf War, although evidence for this rethinking may be seen with the development of the joint television station ARTE (Association Relative à la Télévision Européene) in 1998. Also noteworthy is how the French themselves responded to the German cultural policies. Engel comments on the failure of German cultural messages, despite the efforts of the multiple services in Paris, to resonate with the French population (p. 378). Although how cultural messages are received can be difficult to assess, as she writes (p. 291), German failures during the occupation should be considered in the broader context of long-term Anglo-American influences that included Hollywood, jazz and Josephine Baker, and American cigarettes, all of which, even if no longer available to Parisians after 1940, continued to influence their mentalités. Paris was the city of Picasso and, as the war turned against Germany, images of General de Gaulle and the French exile community also affected cultural life there. As Engel notes, many of France's cultural spokespersons were on the political Center or Left and were either silenced or in flight. It was also widely known in France that Hitler had complained in Mein Kampf of French "negrification" and decadence (p. 240).[7] Many Parisians must have wondered whether Hitler had a secret plan to destroy them, a not unrealistic thought in view of his order in 1944 to destroy the city.

Vichy had its own pro-German cultural policies encoded in the values of "Travail, Famille, Patrie" enunciated in the summer of 1940 and articulated often by Marshal Philippe Pétain, among others. These were mixed with efforts in the first year and a half to conform to what they imagined the Germans wanted, without having any idea what this really was. Parisian, and more generally French, responses to the German cultural policies Engel analyzes are an important part of the story, though much of the French literature on the subject focuses more on domestic perspectives than the subtleties of French attempts to please the Germans.[8]

Ending with an Orwellian vision of propaganda itself in the context of an increasingly antagonistic war with its corresponding set of war-driven necessities in an essentially passive theater of operations, Engel concludes: "German cultural policy in occupied Paris must be seen in the context of the fluctuations of the different interest positions of the occupying power, which shifted according to the changing world war situation in the course of the occupation period. In its development, culture policy followed the hardening German occupation policy in France. The short-term goal of maintaining French cultural life fell into the background. The cultural policy-makers in Berlin and Paris pursued differing priorities from time to time, but in the end, the goal of the establishment of a so-called German cultural hegemony came to the fore" (pp. 445-446). Any efforts to maintain French cultural identity receded, at least in the minds of the German senior planners, before the chaos that the Second World War is known to have created in Germany itself. Finally, the full realization of the German Überkultur asserted itself as the Vichy government became increasingly Nazified and France more intensely enmeshed in civil war in 1944, all as a prelude to the Götterdämmerung of 1945. As a proper thesis, Deutsche Kulturpolitik is a welcome addition to our knowledge of the workings of the German cultural bureaucracy in occupied Paris. The author is to be commended and encouraged to pursue her studies into some of the larger questions implicit in her work and at issue in twentieth-century French-German cultural interactions.

Notes

[1]. John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Stael's De l'Allemagne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

[2]. Sites connected with Wagner's life in France were invested by German occupation-era authorities with touristic symbolism. German tourist literature in occupied France focused on the difficulties Wagner had encountered there and emphasized the alien qualities of French culture. See Bertram M. Gordon, "Warfare and Tourism: Paris in World War II," Annals of Tourism Research, 25 (1998), p. 625.

[3]. Reviewer's interview with Marc Augier, Paris, July 4, 1974. Augier tells his story in his book, Les Partisans (Paris: Dens<caron>el, 943).

[4]. See Ernst Jünger, Journal de guerre et d'occupation 1939-1948, translated from the German by Henri Plard (Paris: René Julliard, 1965), entry of February 19, 1943, p. 206.

[5]. Bertram M. Gordon, "Ist Gott Französisch? Germans, Tourism, and Occupied France, 1940-1944," Modern and Contemporary France, NS 4 (1996), p. 288.

[6]. H. O. H., 'Deutsch und Französisch,' Der deutsche Wegleiter, 45 (23 May-6 June 1942), pp. 4-5.

[7]. Philippe Burin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, trans. by Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 1996), p. 85.

[8]. See, for example, Serge Added, Le Théâtre dans les années Vichy (Paris: Ramsay, 1992); Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Le Cinéma français sous Vichy, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Albatross, 1980), and Le Cinéma sous l'Occupation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Series Que sais-je? 1994); and Christian Faure, Le Projet culturel de Vichy, Folklore et revolution nationale 1940-1944 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989). All are referenced by Engel.

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Citation: Bertram M. Gordon. Review of Engel, Kathrin, Deutsche Kulturpolitik im besetzten Paris 1940-1944: Film und Theater. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11159

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