And the Show Went on: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris

Zusatztext 40573135 Informationen zum Autor Alan Riding Klappentext On June 14, 1940, German tanks rolled into a silent and deserted Paris. Eight days later, a humbled France accepted defeat along with foreign occupation. While the swastika now flew over Paris, the City of Light was undamaged, and soon a peculiar kind of normalcy returned as theaters, opera houses, movie theaters, and nightclubs reopened for business. Shedding light on this critical moment of twentieth-century European cultural history, And the Show Went On focuses anew on whether artists and writers have a special duty to show moral leadership in moments of national trauma. Leseprobe · c h a p t e r 1 · Everyone on Stage ON JUNE 14, 1940, the German army drove into Paris unopposed. Within weeks, the remnants of French democracy were quietly buried and the Third Reich settled in for an indefinite occupation of France. Who was to blame? With the country on its knees, many in France now saw this as a defeat foretold, a debacle that had been in the making since France emerged from World War I, victorious in name but shattered in spirit. In the bloody and muddy trenches of theWestern Front, 1.4 million Frenchmen died, representing 3.5 percent of the population and almost 10 percent of working-age men. Further, the 1 million Frenchmen who were left badly maimed, those ever-present mutilés de guerre , made it impossible to forget the past. With France already alarmed by its low prewar birthrate, this slaughter ofmen and future fathers meant that it was not until 1931 that the country exceeded its 1911 population of 41.4 millionand, even then, this was in large part thanks to immigration. At the same time, the country was being let down by its political class. The Third Republic, founded in 1870 after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, was plagued by instability and consumed by political bickering. Although the economy fared relatively well in the 1920s, postwar reconstruction lagged far behind. Then, in the 1930s, confronted by the twin threats of the Great Depression and the spread of extremist ideologies across Europe, France's rulers chose to ignore both. In a country that had long boasted the originality of its political ideas, a string of dysfunctional governments eroded public faith in democracy and boosted the appeal of the Nazi, Fascist and Communist alternatives. Most critically, with the Great War spawning a nation of pacifists, the French preferred to ignore mounting evidence that the country would soon again be at war with Germany. And when war became inevitable, they chose to believe official propaganda boasting that their army was invincible. This monumental self-delusion only compounded the shock at what followed. When Hitler's army swept across western Europe in the spring of 1940, French defenses crumbled in a matter of weeks. Neither 1870 nor 1914 had been this bad. Yet even in the deepening gloom of the interwar years, as artistic and intellectual freedoms were being extinguished across Europe, Paris continued to shine as a cultural beacon. The majority of Parisians were poor, but they had long since been evicted from the elegant heart of Paris by Baron Haussmann's drastic urban redesign a half century earlier. This new Paris was the favored arena of elitist divertimento, drawing minor royalty, aristocrats and millionaires to buy art, to race their horses in the Bois de Boulogne, to hear Richard Strauss conduct Der Rosenkavalier at the Paris Opera, to party in the latest Chanel and Schiaparelli designs. Painters, writers, musicians and dancers also flocked there from across Europe and the Americas, in some cases seeking sexual freedom, in others fleeing dictatorships, in many hoping for inspiration and recognition. Embracing everything from the literary solemnity of the Académie Française through the avant-garde of Surrealism to...

“Gripping. . . . We’ll always have Paris, but we may not feel quite the same about it after reading And the Show Went On.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Riding paints a riveting portrait of how Paris’s glittering, politically diverse cultural elite . . . worked and played during the dark days of the Nazis’ occupation.”
—Vanity Fair

“Meticulously researched. . . . Riding’s book is an impressively comprehensive survey of the occupation years.”
—The Economist
 
“An arresting and detailed account. . . . A big story and insidiously troubling.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“Evocative. . . . A carefully constructed and sympathetic account. . . . Riding is very good at pointing to the complexities and ambiguities of the situation.”
—The Wall Street Journal
 
“Fascinating.”
—The New York Review of Books

“Certainly one of the finest works of serious popular history since the heyday of Barbara Tuchman. . . . Riding’s triumph lies in refusing to affirm any simplistic answers. Instead, he plunges the reader into the French cultural scene of the 1930s and ‘40s and shows us how real men and real women dealt with the devil.”
—The Washington Post
 
“Lively. . . . Compelling and complex. . . . Most interesting are the complicated stories of artists who were neither heroes nor traitors, who made decisions about how to live and work during the occupation.”
—The Boston Globe
 
“The world of the arts in Nazi-occupied Paris is brought to life in this meticulous chronicle. . . . [Riding] provides vivid character sketches and narratives.”
—The New Yorker
 
“Broad-ranging. . . . Riding’s detailed and well-researched account is sure to appeal to Francophiles, admirers of French culture and readers seeking to heighten their understanding of an emotionally charged and morally complex aspect of World War II. More than that, it offers insights into the ethical dilemma that many of France’s luminaries faced during a critical time in their nation’s history and the different ways in which they chose to respond.”
—The Associated Press
 
“A book of transcendent relevance. . . . Splendidly informed.”
—Fritz Stern, author of Gold and Iron
 
“[A] monumentally researched, vividly written and troubling account of how the cultured citizens of Paris behaved while the Nazi swastika fluttered above the Eiffel Tower.”
—Newark Star-Ledger
 
“Full-blooded and meticulously researched.”
—Financial Times
 
“In this highly readable book, Alan Riding presents a thorough, balanced account of the ways French artists and writers responded to Nazi occupation, ranging from active resistance to enthusiastic collaboration. . . . Riding marshals details with the verve and care of a great reporter.”
—Susan Suleiman, C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
 
“Riveting. . . . This fine book reminds the reader of the many shades of collaboration in an occupied country.”
—The Washington Times
 
“A tale of betrayal and resistance, patriotism, and bold opportunism—and in the end, vengeance and forgetfulness.”
—The Jewish Exponent
 
“A superb account of intellectuals under pressure. . . . Alan Riding, deeply versed in French politics and culture, is the ideal guide to Parisian life under the Nazis. He has written a wonderful book.”
—Ward Just, author of An Unfinished Season and Echo House
 
“A remarkable cultural history of the City of Lights at its darkest hour. . . . A work of intellectual history in its p…