Adolf Hitler in Paris, June 23, Claiming he wanted to be accompanied by artists, he posed in front of the Eiffel Tower with the. Just after the war, when it was safe again to speak and write freely, Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that the French, especially French writers and artists, had only two choices under Nazi occupation: to collaborate or to resist. Alan Riding, whose judgment of the French intelligentsia under occupation is neither moralistic nor indulgent, places Sartre very much on the periphery of the resistance.
But they were passed without problem by the German censors, and German officers were happy to attend first nights, as well as the postperformance parties. Sartre was surely being more truthful, about himself at any rate, in an interview given more than thirty years later. That is, for a disgusting France, corrupt, inefficient, racist, anti-Semite, run by the rich for the richβno one wanted to die for that, until, well, until we understood that the Nazis were worse.
When I grew up in postwar Holland, painful memories of the German occupation were still fresh. It took a few decades for us to find out that this image was false, that these categories of good and wrong had been far from straightforward, that most people had been neither especially good nor egregiously wrong, and that heroes and villains had been relatively few.
The situation in France was, if anything, more complicated. Unlike the more placid Netherlands, France had been torn since the nineteenth century between liberal republicans and radically anti-Semitic, antidemocratic movements.
Having remained neutral in , the Dutch did not lose more than a million lives in the carnage of World War I either. Nor had the Germans ever made a similar attempt, during the occupation, to seduce the Dutch cultural elite by flattery, social promotion, or even particularly good parties.
