After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky's Suite française

Chapter 6. Portraits of the Nazis as Young Men

164 Chapter 6 Portraits of the Nazis as Young Men Unwelcome Visitors France’s stinging defeat brought into full public view the Wehrmacht soldiers marching down the Champs-Élysées, relaxing in countless provincial Cafés de Commerce, and camping in farms and châteaux, in each case profoundly changing the visible texture of everyday life. Philippe Burrin points out that the presence of German troops in the most venerated sites in France’s urban and rural landscapes also crept into the innermost nooks and crannies of the French mind, even into their dreams.1 The extended stay of these uninvited guests who had overrun the French army, thrown the nation into chaos , and taken prisoner some two million of its men constituted the most tangible sign of France’s humiliating defeat, its now precarious status, and its highly uncertain future. Having suffered the ravages of war in their proverbial own backyard, the French now found Hitler ’s soldiers taking quarter in their homes, even pulling up a chair at their dinner table. For the early phases of the German occupation of France as well as for our own times, one can hardly overemphasize the impact of the omnipresent German soldiers on the French imagi1 Burrin, La France à l’heure allemande, 198. Portraits of the Nazis as Young Men   165 nation. It is no coincidence that Vercors uses the figure of the uninvited guest as the premise of Le Silence de la mer and as a metonymy for the Occupation in general. The image of the Germans in the eyes of the French proved to be psychologically unsettling and politically crucial for everyone, including Vichy, the occupying forces, the early Resistance movements, the Allies, and the French populace itself. Némirovsky’s depiction of the Germans accordingly constitutes a critical component of her narrative and carries powerful political implications . Once again, however, we must take care to avoid the hasty judgments and premature conclusions too often brought on by Manichaean approaches seeking to divide everyone into two absolutely opposite , mutually exclusive camps of resisters and collaborators, heroes and villains. In the historical context of the early Dark Years, as in the aesthetics of Némirovsky’s novel, the issues prove on the contrary to be multiple while reality remains opaque and somewhat ambiguous . The value of Suite française as a literary text offering powerful and disturbing representations of the French experience of World War II up until June 22, 1941, comes precisely from a rich and at times problematical complexity. In order to appreciate Némirovsky’s specific contribution to our current understanding of the war years in France, we must here again adumbrate methodically and in some detail the historical and discursive background for her novel while at the same time examining the specific textual contours of her representation of the Germans. Némirovsky formulates the question of German identity with much more ambivalence than we are now accustomed to. On the one hand, a relatively high degree of ideological indeterminacy brings us back to the quandary we face in reading and deciphering Némirovsky’s Suite française in general, particularly in view of the momentous and problematical nature of national identity for Némirovsky as a Russian Jewish émigré who was denied French citizenship, arrested by French gendarmes, and finally murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Our now largely unequivocal perception of the Holocaust and of Vichy’s criminal complicity with the Nazis makes it difficult to perceive the considerable measure of historical uncertainty and moral confusion that 166   Portraits of the Nazis as Young Men characterized French public opinion during the first half of the Occupation . Burrin points out that before the massive roundups of Jews and brutal repressions of the Resistance in 1942—in other words, before the events that, while foremost in our own minds, were unknown to Némirovsky as she wrote her novel—the French tended to waver in their attitudes and hesitate in their conduct.2 While most strongly opposed collaboration with the Germans and fervently hoped for an English victory, they did not always favor armed resistance. The numerous material hardships of everyday life and the highly uncertain prospects for an Allied victory gave pause to the vast majority of people in France. Only a tiny minority actively resisted, and many early resisters continued to look favorably on Pétain.3 What we thus might describe as...