Unnatural Bedfellows: Sexuality and Otherness in Representations

French Cultural Studies
Unnatural Bedfellows: Sexuality
and Otherness in Representations
of Germans
French Cultural Studies
22(3) 251–261
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
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DOI: 10.1177/0957155811408817
frc.sagepub.com
Margaret Atack
University of Leeds
Abstract
The aim of this article is to address a number of texts where the ‘otherness’ of the German is in
part constructed through sexuality. The mobilisation of sexuality in narratives about Fascism and
the Holocaust such as in the film The Night Porter, to underline and intensify oppressive, perverse
power relations at the frontiers of life and death, has long been noted, and often deplored. This
article will focus rather on representations within French literature. Various studies have identified
features in traditional representations of the German which construct this figure as different
from and opposed to France and the French: barbarism, militarism and stress on group rather
than individual identity describe both a Prussian heritage and its Fascist renewal; a ponderous,
organised and bureaucratic psychology is contrasted to French wit, energy and resourcefulness;
one could extend the list. However, the importance of intense, often ‘deviant’, sexualities and
sexual relationships in representations of Germans has received less attention. Sequestration,
incest, homosexuality and ambiguous sexual doubles of various kinds are to be found in texts
from the 1940s to the twenty-first century − sexual encounters which are frequently locked into
psychosexual dramas with strange or monstrous parental relationships.
Keywords
French, German, literature, otherness, sexuality
In 1957 Bertolt Brecht brought his Berliner Ensemble to Paris for a season that would have a tremendous impact on the practitioners of theatre and the cultural theorists who saw it. Jean-Paul
Sartre was one of them. His interest in the theory of theatre, literature, culture and the arts long
predated that visit, and he wrote enthusiastically about Brecht and his ideas. He considered Brecht
incarnated what he saw as the project of all philosophy: to make the familiar appear unfamiliar
(Sartre, 1973: 101). This was the context for a particularly illuminating anecdote he used to
Corresponding author:
Margaret Atack, Department of French, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Email: [email protected]
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illustrate the nature and power of theatre: ‘L’idéal du théâtre brechtien, ce serait que le public fût
comme un groupe d’ethnographes rencontrant tout à coup une peuplade sauvage. S’approchant et
se disant soudain, dans la stupeur: ces sauvages, c’est nous’ (Sartre, 1973: 101). This is what theatre should do for us − enable us to see ourselves from the outside, to judge ourselves as others judge
us. It is a question of boundaries and frontiers: the sense of self depends on a recognition of the
other; the self is founded and grounded in and through the other. Theatre offers the possibility of
transcending this, because theatre operates in the realm of art, the imagination and representation;
the spectators participate in the creation of the imaginary object which is the theatrical spectacle;
we both identify with what we are creating − from the inside as it were − and see it from the outside, objectively, as we see others. To see these foreigners, these strangers, alien because different,
at centre stage, is to see oneself. This double structure of inside/outside, of self and other which is
underpinning the recognition of the other as self relies on Sartre’s theories of imagination and representation: an imaginary object is not, by definition, a real object, but a representation which
exists in so far as it is imagined.
Sartre applied this most clearly in his 1959 play Les Séquestrés d’Altona (1959), which is ostensibly about a German family but is unmistakeably about the Algerian war. The son of the family
has locked himself in his room, choosing madness as a way of avoiding self-acceptance: he had
tortured Russian peasants on the Eastern Front. His name, Frantz, is a virtual homonym for France
and as the French audience watch they should see not German torturers but French torturers. The
audience is to slowly recognise that ‘this is us’, these Germans are us.
While the play’s structure is that of the anecdote I have just mentioned, there is an important
shift in content: the anecdote uses anthropology and the kind of difference which critiques of
Eurocentrism have made familiar. The so-called civilised West constructs its others as different,
thereby reinforcing its centrality. The centre needs the outsiders it generates in order to sustain its
self-belief in its own centrality. In Les Séquestrés d’Altona, however, it is a European neighbour
which serves as the revealing mechanism. It is perhaps the case that critiques of Eurocentrism have
tended to overlook Europe’s civil wars, and placed Europe as a rather unproblematic and unproblematised centre. Linda Colley’s important book, Britons: Forging the Nation (1994), was an
immensely helpful corrective to that view. She starts her study of patriotism and the creation of
Britishness by stressing that the invention of Britishness was closely bound up with Protestantism,
with war with France and with the acquisition of Empire (Colley, 1994: 8). ‘Time and again, war
with France brought Britons ... into confrontation with an obviously hostile Other and encouraged
them to define themselves collectively against it’ (Colley, 1994: 5). Nations are nation states, geopolitical realities. But they are also imaginary objects. As Colley’s insistence on the invention or
the forging of a national consciousness reveals, they involve mental and psychological processes
of identification and belief in national identity relying on well-defined mechanisms for sustaining
and reinforcing a sense of belonging – mechanisms that operate through linguistic, ideological and
cultural processes. In the important use of French national history in the continual reinvention of
Frenchness, the representation of the ‘hereditary enemy’ is a constant figure, in which case Sartre’s
theatrical conundrum is of use to us. For who is this other that is the centre of this attention: object
of fascination, attraction, repulsion, identification or projection?
Three times in the space of 70 years, France and Germany were at war; three times, in 1870, 1914
and 1940, the north of the country was invaded and occupied in wars that lasted for several years
and entailed profound losses: 1.6 million French deaths, and 2.4 million German deaths in the First
World War alone, with a large section of eastern France, Alsace-Lorraine, changing nationality in
1871 and again in 1918. One would expect representations of the Germans to be forged in reaction
to the profound scars of these conflicts fought on French soil. The insistent anxiety about
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under-population in the inter-war period was fuelled by the presence of the much greater population of the former enemy on the eastern border. It is not surprising that differences between the
nations were so well demarcated, as they have received detailed critical attention in two contexts.
The first is the creation and functioning of national stereotypes, drawing on well-established differences dating back to the nineteenth century – the Germany of culture, the Prussian or Nazi
Germany of militarism and brutality, the Germanic characteristics of irrationality, emotional
instability and passion, and French reason and clarity, that have been closely studied in a range of
texts (see, for example, Carré, 1947; Cobb, 1983; Atack, 1989; Vacher, 2008; Bragança, 2010a,
2010b). Inherent in the oppositional structure is an apparent clarity of difference, as in Le Silence
de la mer (Vercors, 1951) where the negative markers of Germanness in the text – militarism,
Nazism, brutality – claim or reclaim the German officer von Ebrennac at the end; such national
stereotypes can be found across Occupation literature and film. Clément’s film La Bataille du rail
(1946) provides excellent examples of Germans who are ponderous and slow on the uptake compared to the quick-witted French, Germans who are choleric and emotional compared to the
analytical French, and who are not individualised but defined by their uniform, their uniformity
and their foreign language. Later comedies such as La Grande Vadrouille and Papy fait de la
résistance work within similar structures (Oury, 1966; Poiré, 1983).
The second area is the sexualised portrayal of Fascism and Nazism as mobilised in, for example,
Genet’s Pompes funèbres (1951) or Tournier’s Le Roi des aulnes (1970). ‘Fascinating Fascism’ is
the title of Susan Sontag’s influential essay (1996) on the sexualisation of Nazism, in which she
explores the erotics of Leni Riefenstahl’s (1935) film about the Nuremberg rally, Liliana Cavani’s
Night Porter (1974), the story of the renewal long after the war of a sado-masochistic relationship
between a concentration camp guard and an inmate, and Visconti’s The Damned (1969). Klaus
Thewelheit’s Male Fantasies (1987) has been equally influential: a study of the Fascist imagination through the writings of officers of the Freikorps, it demonstrates the profound hostility to
women deployed in the representations of men and women, and the various tropes such as floods
and armour through which their vision of the world was realised. More recently, the extraordinary
success of Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes has relaunched the debate in detail, with his
extremely detailed depiction of scenes of mass slaughter as witnessed by the SS officer Maximilien
Aue, who also goes into great detail concerning his own sexuality, sexual experiences and sexual
fantasies.1 Les Bienveillantes has triggered extensive critical debate about the figure of the perpetrator in particular, also bringing similar previous texts such as Le Bonheur nazi (Rachline, 1972)
into focus (Hutton, 2010; Rasson, 2011).
The aim of this article is to elucidate aspects of the role played by sexuality in the construction
of the German as other than the French in Occupation stories, and to explore the tropes and
motifs associated with this which recur across a range of very different texts. If the ‘otherness’ of
Germanness in traditional representations is inseparable from the characteristics depicting
Frenchness, the same will be true of those where sexuality plays a central role in the opposition.
Focusing on the double structure of German and French allows us to explore the interconnectedness of portrayals of the French and German in these texts, as well as their instability and
ambiguity.
Reading for the FRAME database has revealed how extensive the corpus of fiction with significant portrayals of German characters is, featuring as thematically significant in 177 novels to date,
as well as the fact that Germans and Germany have been presented as sexualised in a range of what
one might call quite ordinary novels that have not retained any significant critical attention. JeanPierre Chabrol’s Les Innocents de mars would be one example. Set in Germany in spring 1945, it
relates the experiences of a French tank crew, and particularly one of them dubbed ‘Poète’, because
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he is a student and rather otherworldly compared to his fellow soldiers (‘Il ne s’emballait guère sur
le Bouffer, le Boire, et le Baiser’ (Chabrol, 1959: 11). In a town full of children, they come across
former Hitlerjugend who are completely brutalised: violent and out of control. Poète forms a relationship with a young woman, and together they take Helmut, a nine-year-old, under their wing.
But when Helmut is killed as a collaborator, Poète beats and rapes the girl responsible. Germany is
presented as a space of sexualised excess and violence, and the Frenchman Poète has been drawn
into displaying the same brutalised behaviour.
In Pierre-Jean Remy’s Un grand homme (2005) the narrator tells the story of Victor Lange, an
infamous collaborator who, he discovers after the death of his father, was a major figure in his
father’s life. We follow Lange’s story from his childhood, through the excesses of his youth and his
early publications − which, we are told, anticipate Bataille − to his position as a major intellectual
in the inter-war years, participating in the Décades de Pontigny, and, from 1934 onwards, the major
anti-Fascist intellectual organisations of the left. Until his unexplained volte-face and public
endorsement of collaboration culminating in his trial at the épuration, he is very involved in the
intellectual resistance: one of those publishing in the clandestine Éditions de Minuit. This story of
intellectual commitment is also a story of passion, excess and abjection in Lange’s dealings with a
young German woman, Mine Vanghen. His close relations with Germany start in the 1920s, when
he travels there and meets Mine, spending time in the eroticised space of Berlin, in the lesbian night
clubs, and watching a Louise Brooks lookalike seemingly enjoying a relationship with Mine. The
focus of the novel is on Victor, who appears as a kind of ‘riff’ on Gide – he is very drawn to the
male camaraderie of homosexuality of Gide’s circles, he too marries a cousin and has a daughter,
and he dies the day after Gide in 1951, albeit half naked on the stairs of a Parisian brothel, sexualised to the last. Victor is significantly of Alsatian descent, placing him on a French/German border
in terms of his own lineage. Mine, whose youthfulness and childlike innocence are repeatedly
stressed, is raped and violently abused by Victor during a stay in his family home (which is associated with his mother). Under the Occupation, Victor is emotionally blackmailed into a very public
collaboration by a Colonel Kurtz who brings Mine, now a broken, middle-aged, physically heavy
drug addict, to him; to rescue her he agrees to this pact with the devil. He is also sexually drawn to
her daughter Nina, whom he knows to be his own daughter. The narrator discovers that his father,
André Spiel, considered the abominable Victor a spiritual father, and that Victor bequeathed his
illegitimate daughter to this spiritual son: Nina had been André’s mistress for 30 years. Victor’s
legitimate daughter, Marianne, is fully aware of the whole story, having been left a detailed written
confession of his abject treatment of Mine, and in fact not only identifies with him, but takes a
troubling pleasure in his detailed descriptions of the abuse.
This is a text that is pointing to its own fictionality in a variety of ways, and not only the reproduction of the markers of Gide’s biography. Victor is a ‘Forrest Gump’ in the front seat of twentiethcentury intellectual and cultural history, interacting with dozens of the major and minor writers of
the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, in its configuration of the closed space of the villa where they
are ‘enfermés’, its stress on incest, sexual violence, homosexuality and strong undertones of paedophilia, in its intersection of violent sexual encounters and family relationships, it displays many
of the motifs and tropes associated with this structure of otherness. Other variants appear in Victor’s
visit to the Institut des sciences sexuelles in Berlin, where he meets a range of brutalised young
people: one who describes his hateful stepfather who beats him, his monstrous elderly mother, and
his repulsion for homosexuality; another, who seduced her father into sleeping with her regularly,
has a repulsion for young men, and has attempted to castrate a fiancé imposed on her (Remy, 2005:
47). However, as in Les Innocents de mars, while Germany and Germans are sexualised, governed
by excess, deviancy and desire, it is the Frenchman who is the perpetrator.
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Que va-t-il naître de mes amours avec le bourreau? Qu’en peut-il
naître?2
In Qu’est-ce que un Français? (2005) a historical analysis of different regimes governing nationality
and the debates and legal judgements about them in France, François Weil offers interesting material
relating to France and Germany. They appear divided by a simple binary: in France, nationality has
traditionally been based on the ‘droit du sol’, the place of birth, and in Germany on the ‘droit du
sang’, transmitted through the family line, although in reality the picture is much more complicated.
He details the history of French/German relations over questions of immigration and identity, and
the anxieties resulting from the fact that Germans no longer living in Germany still retained their
nationality. The First World War was a time of particular anxiety for France: are individuals (naturalised) French or (hereditary) Germans? Alsace-Lorraine posed particular problems, as enemy
aliens were rounded up in order to protect the ‘vrais Français’ behind the ‘faux Allemands’ (Weil,
2005: 103). The pressure to increase the French population after the war led not only to the need to
promote immigration, but to rethink the national status of married women and their children, so that
they were not lost to the French nation if they married a foreigner. The Right, traditionally favourable to the ‘droit du sang’ over the ‘droit du sol’, vehemently denounced these initiatives, as in these
words from an editorial in Le Figaro in 1927, written by François Coty: ‘Le gouvernement ... a
décidé de remplacer la race française en France par une autre race; elle a réglé d’abord la destruction
des vrais Français; elle règle ensuite l’introduction des néos Français’ (quoted in Weil, 2005: 116).
While for some experts the French can never be a ‘race’, for others immigration was described as a
transplant (‘L’immigration est comme une greffe – le terme est emprunté à l’arboriculture; il est du
même effet sur un peuple que du sang transfusé à un individu’: Weil, 2005: 126), and sought to
establish a hierarchy of ethnic groups depending on their ‘compatibilité biochimique’ (2005: 126),
underpinned by an obviously racist agenda. In 1939 the government decreed that the most important
means of assimilating foreigners were ‘la naissance en France et le mariage’ (2005: 137). Vichy’s
attempt to reframe the ‘code de la nationalité’ to restrict naturalisations failed to meet with German
approval (‘le projet “ne satisfait pas les exigences d’un droit moderne de la nationalité conforme à
l’idéologie du peuple [völkisch]”’, 2005: 165), since it was still considered to be too much the prisoner of a Republican past and the importance of the ‘droit du sol’.
Marriage, children, and national identity in immigration and naturalisation are thus major themes
of French−German relations in wartime and peacetime as well as under the Occupation; territorial
invasion, territorial integrity and the nature of the relations within that space are discursive values
that are powerfully at play in the construction of the German as other in stories of the Occupation.
As its title suggests, Aragon’s short story, ‘Le Droit romain n’est plus’ (Aragon, 1980), weaves an
opposition between French law and ‘Germanic law’ into its plot. It is polyphonic in structure,
developed through a range of monologues, from a female German military secretary, Lotte Muller,
a military judge Commandant von Luttwitz-Randau, and an anonymous narrator − a polyphony
which is internally repeated in the structuring of a final passage through music.3 The narrative
deploys classic received representations of the German: the Germany of culture and the aristocracy
contrasted to, though in the service of, the barbaric Nazi Germany. Luttwitz-Randau has been converted to Hitler’s brilliant conception of law as the expression of German national interests, but is
a reluctant and tardy member of the Nazi Party, which he joins after the massacre of Roehm. The
SS officer Willy is typically more direct, but Luttwitz-Randau is shown the evidence of the brutality that his own orders have indirectly led to, and hears the story of a child nailed to the barn door
in front of its mother that recalls First World War stories of German atrocities.
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The German characters are sexualised in various ways. Like Mine in Un grand homme, Lotte is
little more than a sexually desiring subject, promiscuous and possibly bisexual, naively prattling
on about her experiences with Luttwitz-Randau and with her boyfriend, now at the front. She
expects men to be a little rough, is disappointed with those (like Luttwitz-Randau) who are not, and
avoids those who are defined by violence, like ‘les Silésiens’ (Silesia was annexed to Germany in
1939). Luttwitz-Randau proudly refers to German culture as founded upon incest (the race being
descended from Sieglinde and Siegmund), and is possibly feminised by the constant reference to
his old-fashioned spectacles and monocle, to his inadequate eyes (compared to a resister having
eyes like bullets), and by the way he meets his end: ‘comme une poule, ils l’abattirent’ (Aragon,
1980: 122). In other words, the tropes of sexualisation are integral to the development of the plot,
giving further evidence of the use of uncontrollable desire and deviancy to underpin not just the
eroticised Nazi aesthetic but the portrayal of ordinary Germans. What ‘Le Droit romain’ also adds
at this point is the topos of the land of France itself.
The counterpoint to the judge’s obsession with Germanic law as opposed to ‘le droit romain’
and the Napoleonic code is the land and its lived history of freedom and rebellion. The landscape
is an actant, in Greimas’s terminology, protecting resisters of all centuries. This is the ‘jus soli’, the
land that fathers identity. Aragon bring in Mandrin, an eighteenth-century bandit who was publicly
tortured and killed in Valence, as another child of the land (‘sorti de la terre’). Here, as elsewhere,
the land of France is a space that functions metonymically as a body integrated to the parental and
sexual paradigms governing the interactions of individuals: juxtaposition and proximity, attraction
and repulsion, murderous invasion, violation and expulsion − these are the dramas hosted by all the
bodily topoi of the French/German encounters. In Louis Parrot’s resistance stories, the maternal
land protects the réfractaires, but is penetrated by a foreign army (Parrot, 2006: 70, 91, 93). ‘Je
sens les Allemands comme des corps étrangers’, says Jumainville, the village given a voice in Mon
village à l’heure allemande. ‘Je ne les assimile pas; avec de la patience, j’arriverai bien à les éliminer, comme on élimine une épingle par les ongles. À la rigueur, on m’opérera; je passerai sur le
billard. Mais ce tas de scories, c’est du vrai poison’ (Bory, 1972: 335−6). Ironically this time the
foreign body is the Milice. A similar metaphor of a body invaded is central to the symbolic structures of La Peste, as fever and ganglions torture the infected bodies (Camus, [1947] 1970: 171). In
La Peste France as imprisoned country is connoted by the closure of the town of Oran.
Bodies in closed spaces, bodies as closed spaces, the metonymic and symbolic functions of the
nation as sexualised and/or parental body are enmeshed with the metonymic and symbolic functions of other bodies, other spaces bearing the connotations of the nation. The topos of closure
(imprisonment, entrapment, sequestration) intensifies the psychosexual dramas of sexual and
physical violence associated with representations of Germans. In Les Déserteurs (Bayle, 1958), at
the end of the Occupation four German soldiers take refuge in an isolated farmhouse in the south
of France which is the site of the ensuing conflict between them as they have nowhere else to go.
Le Blockhaus (Clébert, 1955) is set on the Normandy coast: six Frenchmen, workers for the
German Organisation Todt, take refuge in a blockhouse during an Allied bombing raid. The
Germanised space creates an ‘other’ realm within France for this embodied drama of sex, suicide
and murder that unfurls in an apocalyptic environment of darkness, rotting and liquefying substances: excrement, food and corpses, which constantly transforms itself around the survivors.
After six years, two are rescued, one of them insane.4
Less melodramatic and more common is the closed space of the room or house where the billeted German soldier(s) cohabit and interact with their involuntary French hosts, of which the Le
Silence de la mer (Vercors, 1951) must be the most famous example.5 While referring to von
Ebrennac as a Nazi tends to evacuate much of the ideological and cultural complexity of the tale,
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Laura Frost (2002) nonetheless offers an interesting reading of the sexual dynamic of the plot.
Drawing on the work both of Sontag and Thewelheit, she argues that the importance of the erotic
attraction of the French woman for the Nazi is in fact unsettling. She analyses the use of the fable
of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in the context of First World War iconography and the rape of France by
the Beast of Germany, and underlines Vercors’ powerful use of the romance story and the attractive
portrayal of the officer to achieve his effects. She highlights the psychosexual importance of the
uniform in the initial presentation of the character and, in stark contrast to the restrained yet charged
atmosphere of the encounters in the house of the French uncle and niece, the expression of sexual
violence from the Parisian Nazis towards France: ‘nous en ferons une chienne rampante’ (Vercors,
1951: 68 ), reproducing the erect (phallic) male and supine female as one of the tropes of French
propaganda and German otherness (Frost, 2002: 81−7).6
Sartre’s comment on the collaborator presenting the relations between France and Germany as
a sexual union, with France in the woman’s role, is often quoted (Sartre, 1949: 58), though it is not
so much a comment on sexual identity as on power and sexual positioning. His argument is that the
collaborator is a realist, accepting the status quo and the power of the Germans. His choice of submission to the master, a ‘soumission féodale’, and his ambition of sharing power means he can only
use the weapon of the powerless: seduction. The fable of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in Le Silence de
la mer is doing many things: it is a mise en abyme of the ‘two Germanys’ which is fundamental to
the plot line, and, as Frost demonstrates, to First World War propaganda; it is von Ebrennac’s fantasy, the fantasy of the romance story, and a political fantasy (the prisoner/France/woman is more
powerful than the jailor/Germany/man). It is also a denegation of a rather different fantasy being
worked out through the plotline and which van Ebrennac’s trip to Paris will destroy: a beautiful
German/potential son/lover will seduce a beautiful Frenchwoman/potential mother/lover.
Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s (1994: 4) analysis of the power of silence helps illuminate this plot
of seduction, with her anecdote of a Reagan−Mitterrand meeting held in English because Reagan
cannot speak French. The conversation thus takes place on his terms. The silence of the woman –
whose upright stance matches von Ebrennac at his entrance – imposes speech upon him if he
wishes to establish a connection. He is placed in the powerless, feminised position of using seduction.7 He is as pretty as a picture: ‘Ses hanches et ses épaules étaient impressionnantes. Le visage
était beau. Viril et marqué de deux grandes dépressions le long des joues … Les cheveux étaient
blonds et souples, jetés en arrière, brillant soyeusement sous la lumière du lustre’ (Vercors, 1951:
27). The removal of his uniform completes this rather feminised objectification of his body: ‘La
veste de tweed ... était large et ample, et tombait avec un négligé plein d’élégance. Sous la veste,
un chandail de grosse laine écrue moulait le torse mince et musclé’ (1951: 32). His desire is that
France and Germany should marry, but also that he can become a son of France: ‘Il faudra que je
vive ici, longtemps. Dans une maison pareille à celle-ci. Comme le fils d’un village pareil à ce
village’ (1951: 41). It is worth noting at this point the unusual uncle/niece generational line facing
him: there is no bodily connection between these two, no fantasmic mother and father figures as
points of identification or repulsion; and the niece, as the embodiment of France and putative
mother, continues to confront him with an implacable silence, ‘le silence de la mer/mère’. Von
Ebrennac’s defeat and choice of suicide places him in the position of (feminised) submission to the
masterful Nazis in Paris: ‘Ainsi il se soumet’ (1951: 71). There are therefore multiple distributions
of power and powerlessness across the tropes of masculinity and femininity in this tale. In a ‘huis
clos’ of France and Frenchness, with no obvious bloodline to insert himself in, and a silent France/
niece/mother rejecting him, death is, as usual, the only exit.
Bodies, rooms, towns, country: the closed space is the matrix of the France/Germany sexual
encounter, the point of juncture with the vertical bloodlines of mother- and fatherhood: the matrix
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of the multiple dramas of unnatural or monstrous generation that produce neither true French nor
false Germans.8
Un et un font un
Sartre attributes the collaborator’s realism to a historical sleight of hand:
Le collaborateur quoique vivant dans notre siècle, le jugeait du point de vue des siècles futurs … Cette
façon de juger l’événement à la lumière de l’avenir a été, je crois, pour tous les Français une des tentations
de la défaite: elle représentait une forme subtile d’évasion. En sautant quelques siècles et en se retournant
sur le présent pour le contempler de loin et le replacer dans l’histoire, on le changeait en passé et on
masquait son caractère insoutenable. (Sartre, 1949: 54)
Both Frantz von Gerlach in Les Séquestrés d’Altona and Maximilien Aue in Les Bienveillantes turn
their attention to their monstrous behaviour as German officers from the vantage point of later
centuries.9 Any reader of Les Bienveillantes would recognise Aue in the following: a main character in the German army whose punning name places Frenchness at its heart, who has carried out
unbearable actions of death and torture on the Eastern Front which continue to haunt him, who has
an incestuous relation with his sister, a murdered mother and a ‘bourreau’ of a father, and who is
pursued for his past crimes by two strangely named individuals. But in fact all this relates to Frantz
too: the former soldier confined voluntarily to his room, in the house which is the site of incest,
rape and murder. The absent mother was, it is implied, the first victim of the father. The two pursuers are Ferist and Scheidemann, two witnesses who turned up in March 1956 to inform the father
of Frantz’s crimes and get him to buy their silence − but who, Frantz is told, are themselves now
silent (‘muets’) (Sartre, 1959: 359).
Incestuous and homosexual doubles have been a feature of many of the texts discussed so far, and
are central to these representations of German ‘bourreaux’. Sedgwick’s strictures (1994) on the
reduction of sexuality to a single binary with homosexuality marked by and marking heterosexuality, and the reduction of homosexuality to ‘sameness’, are well made, but it is that binary operating
in these texts, albeit with many fluctuations across the gendered/sexual structures, as in Le Silence
de la mer.10 Doubles offer mirror images: reflected and refracted multiples of self and other. Like
Drieu la Rochelle’s ‘agent double’, we are invited into a process of recognition and repulsion: ‘Je me
demande pourquoi vous m’écoutez. Seriez-vous curieux par hasard? Ou bien vous reconnaîtriezvous pour la première fois tout entiers dans ce double miroir que je vous tends?’ (Drieu la Rochelle,
1963: 118). The psychosexual dynamic of these narratives is to proliferate connections and reversibilities through mirrored images, couples and doubles: brothers, sisters, same-sex relations, twins. In
the narration of the French nation, the Germans have been the closest of companions: sites of entrapment, murderousness and the most intimate of power struggles. In these two narratives of the
German nation we meet the same tropes. These French representations of Germany constitute it as
both other than and constitutive of Frenchness.11 Through the figure of Frantz/France, France is
inscribed as the imagined country of the play. This is Aue’s function too, though more obliquely,
thematising in the French homonyms (Aue/Eau/[histoire d’]O) the floods and sexualised bodies of
fascism, and thematising France/Germany through his dual – and doubly monstrous – parentage.
It is because Germany functions as cultural other, founding a France of reason, justice and moral
rectitude that the rug can be pulled so effectively from under the reader’s feet (‘Ces sauvages, c’est
nous’) and the impulse behind both texts is to frustrate any attempt to mark the beast of inhumanity
as other and different:
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259
Un et un font un, voilà notre mystère. La bête se cachait, nous surprenions son regard, tout à coup, dans les
yeux intimes de nos prochains; alors nous frappions: légitime défense préventive. J’ai surpris la bête, j’ai
frappé, un homme est tombé, dans ses yeux mourants j’ai vu la bête, toujours vivante, moi. Un et un font
un: quel malentendu! De qui, de quoi ce goût rance et fade dans ma gorge? De l’homme? De la bête? De
moi-même? (Sartre, 1959: 382)
There has been a great deal of comment on the opening words of Les Bienveillantes: ‘Frères
humains’, the interpellation of the reader as conjoined in yet another fraternal couple with the narrator. The reader is invited to judge and reject the narrator by his appallingly detailed descriptions
of murder, slaughter, rape and torture, and also to be complicit, to accept the fraternal appeal. But
to judge and reject is equally grist to the mill in the narrator’s sadomasochistic dynamic, since it is
he who has invited us onto the terrain of shock and horror. Either way it is difficult for us to avoid
being accomplices in his story.12
Frantz tried to throw his guilt onto the whole of Germany, frozen in an atemporal stasis of
defeat. Aue places himself on the terrain of universal evil and guilt. Littell (Littell and Nora, 2007:
42, 44) has discussed the importance of using the European dimension of his novel to counter the
possibility that such behaviour could be explained in terms of Germany alone; for Sartre, France’s
actions in Algeria offer a similar motivation. Frantz’s final speech ties together the emotional and
geo-political drives of these abject actions, also capturing the tragedy of the bloodline and the
inheritance of abjection:
Siècles heureux, vous ignorez nos haines, comment comprendriez-vous l’atroce pouvoir de nos mortelles
amours. L’amour, la haine, un et un … Acquittez-nous ! … Beaux enfants, vous sortez de nous, nos
douleurs vous auront faits. Ce siècle est une femme, il accouche, condamnerez-vous votre mère? … Le
trentième siècle ne répond plus. Peut-être n’y aura-t-il plus de siècles après le nôtre. (Sartre, 1959: 382)
But Frantz is dead at this point, in the murderous suicide pact with his father. For Frantz there is an
end; Aue with his Eumenides13 is like Frankenstein chased by the monster on the ice, forever running. By accepting individual/national responsibility, by his death, Frantz enters history in a way
that Aue may never do.
Notes
1 In Les Bienveillantes (2006) Littell has drawn extensively on Thewelheit, and the two have been in dialogue in relation to Littell’s Le Sec et l’humide on the Belgian fascist Degrelle, and Les Bienveillantes
(Littell, 2008; Thewelheit, 2009).
2 See Genet (1987: 36).
3 It is interesting to contrast this to Littell’s deployment of music to structure Les Bienveillantes. Both
Littell and Aragon partake of the stereotypical association of Germany with music; Aragon’s story, with
its invocation of lamento in its final section, is more clearly establishing an emotional connection to the
content of this section and the German atrocities described.
4 One could also point to Gilles Rozier, Un amour sans résistance (2003), involving the sequestration in
a basement of a German soldier by a teacher of German whose gender is never specified, or Christine
Arnothy’s Le Jardin noir (1966), much of it set in Deauville and involving a relationship between a
Frenchman and a strange German woman with traumatic familial links to Nazism, in an empty house
belonging to him. Across the decades, this has proved to be a powerful topos.
5 See also Morgan (1946), Chardonne (1941), Labro (1990), Poiré (1983).
6 Cf. ‘Traite-le comme un chien, fais-le ramper’ (Sartre, 1959: 305).
7 Cf. ‘Il faudrait que sa tentative de séduction se montrât efficace presque au point d’aboutir’ (Vercors,
1967: 201).
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French Cultural Studies 22(3)
8 One can also place here the abortion Yvette undergoes in Triolet’s ‘Yvette’ (1947), after the violation of the
family home and her rape by a German, and the ending of the bloodline in Nancy Huston’s L’Empreinte de
l’ange (2000), in this connection.
9 Dating the moment of narration in Les Bienveillantes is not straightforward but ‘la fabrique de l’inhumain
au XXe siècle’ (Nivat, 2007: 56) is being viewed from the implicit if not explicit vantage point of the
twenty-first century, or ‘3e millénaire’ as Kristeva puts it (2007: 22) with a kind of echo of Sartre’s
‘XXXe siècle’ (Frantz addresses his imaginary judges of the thirtieth century throughout Les Séquestrés
d’Altona).
10 Cf. Kristeva’s discussion of the complex feminisation of Aue, ‘cet homme−femme’, in Kristeva
(2007: 30).
11 Cf. Ricœur’s analysis of the structures of self-sameness (mêmeté and ipséité) in Ricœur (1990).
12 Cf. Defontaine’s analysis of a transferential dynamic of judgement and complicity (Defontaine,
2003: 849).
13 ‘Les Bienveillantes’ is the French term for the Greek deities the Eumenides; hence the English translation The Kindly Ones. The final words of the novel are: ‘Les Bienveillantes avaient retrouvé ma trace’
(Littell 2006: 894).
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Margaret Atack is Professor of French at the University of Leeds and author of Literature and the French
Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms 1940-1950 (1989) and May 68 in French Fiction and Film
(1999). She was the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Narratives of the Second World War
and Occupation in France, 1939 to the Present’ (2006−10). With Christopher Lloyd, she is preparing Framing
Narratives of War and Occupation in France 1939−2009: New Readings (co-edited, 2011) and War and
Occupation in French Narrative: Remapping the Landscape, 1939−2009 (co-authored, forthcoming).