Abstract
This chapter focuses on Le Sursis (1945) by Jean-Paul Sartre and Pompes funèbres (1947) by Jean Genet, which are the only two French novels published in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to include Adolf Hitler as a character. The former was well received while the latter went unnoticed at the time. Their differing receptions underscore the collective consciousness of the French in the immediate aftermath of the war: Sartre’s seemingly Manichean perspectives made sense, unlike Genet’s novel which undermines the good/evil dichotomy by shifting its value-system from ethics to aesthetics.
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- 1.
This remains true today, even though the Cold War and the partition of Germany partly blurred this line in the West. Later, the ‘Revolutions of 1989’ and the collapse of the Communist bloc would have a similar effect in Eastern Europe (Judt 2005).
- 2.
The Goncourt Prize was, and still is, the most prestigious literary prize awarded in France.
- 3.
Most novels published in the aftermath contain clear autobiographical elements (Bragança 2012).
- 4.
The Munich (or Sudetenland) crisis started with Hitler’s claim on the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans.
- 5.
Indeed, one cannot fail to notice that youth is a theme which straddles Sartre’s oeuvre. It is at the heart of all his biographical writings (on Baudelaire, Genet, Flaubert) and of his own autobiography, Les Mots (1960, Words). For Sartre, childhood, including his own childhood, was indeed a period of psychological and physical violence, and all his biographers rightly insist on his early years when Sartre was bullied at school and when he had to live with his father-in-law whom he hated (Cohen-Solal 1985, 75, and Burgelin 2005, for example).
- 6.
‘There is something wrong’, writes Konrad Heiden in 1936, speaking about Hitler’s sexual life, in Hitler: A Biography (1936), quoted by W. H. D. Vernon, ‘Hitler the Man’ (1943). The same Vernon, drawing on printed sources widely available at the time (which does not mean reliable)—texts by Strasser, Rauschning and Hanisch among others—, also suggests that Hitler’s sexual behaviour is pathological even though he concludes that, despite his effeminate gestures and features, nothing proves that he is homosexual (1943, 60–66). Such speculations nonetheless re-emerge regularly, as in the recent work by Lothar Machtan (2001). There is no doubt that the suicide of Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubal, in 1931, and the deliberate secrecy surrounding Eva Braun to reinforce Hitler’s image of a Führer entirely committed to his historical task contributed to fuel such rumours. On the alleged links between Hitler’s troubled sexuality and evil, see Duval (2017).
- 7.
Hitler only met the film propagandist in 1932, when he was over forty.
- 8.
Sartre’s reference to Hitler’s favourite filmmaker—famous at the time for the propaganda masterpiece Triumph des Willens (1935, The Triumph of the Will)—seems indeed most ironical since Hitler shows absolutely no will in this passage.
- 9.
Sartre was reading Goethe’s oeuvre in February 1940 as indicated in a letter sent to Simone de Beauvoir on 21 February 1940. On 25 February 1940, he even asked her to send him Ludwig’s biography of Goethe (1983, 85, 95). Moreover, Goethe’s black dog is used as epigraph by Marcel Ray in his foreword to Rauschning’s Hitler m’a dit (1939, 5), which Sartre was also reading in February 1940—see the diary entry of 17 February 1940, in Sartre’s Carnets de la drôle de guerre (1995, 427).
- 10.
Sartre’s expression ‘se démener dans sa boîte’ is reminiscent of the French sayings ‘se démener comme un beau diable’ (literally, ‘to struggle like a devil’, meaning ‘to fight fiercely’) and ‘jaillir comme un diable de sa boîte’ (literally, ‘to spring up like a devil out of his box’, meaning ‘to appear suddenly’), which obviously reinforces Hitler’s demonic nature for Ella, but only for her.
- 11.
The vulnerability of the person who is seen is a well-known theme in Sartre’s philosophy, developed at length in L’Être et le Néant (1943b, Being and Nothingness, 266–268, for example) which Sartre was writing at the same time as Le Sursis.
- 12.
‘Le néant hante l’être’ (nothingness haunts being), writes Sartre in L’Être et le Néant (1943b, 46).
- 13.
This is, for example, the case of Zézette (LS 20) and of a man, unnamed, in a café (LS 256–257). Paradoxically, it is Hitler’s moderation that the character Neu fears because, he claims, it could legitimise French Fascist movements in France. Referring to Jacques Doriot, the founder of the fascistic Parti Populaire Français in 1936 and future Nazi collaborator, Neu says: ‘J’ai peur de la modération d’Hitler. ... S’il acceptait le plan franco-anglais, dans trois mois, Doriot serait au pouvoir’ (LS 336–337; I fear Hitler’s moderation. ... If he were to accept the Franco-British plan, Doriot would come into power within three months).
- 14.
If Hitler is no better than Stalin, why should France go to war against Germany, wonders Jacques, Mathieu’s brother (LS 237). More down-to-earth, Madame Bonnetain simply tells her butcher that she would ‘give’ the Sudetenland to Hitler to avoid another war (LS 235).
- 15.
In the 1960s and 1970s, this would notoriously lead him to side with the Black Panthers in the USA and with the Palestinians in the Middle East.
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Bragança, M. (2019). Hitler, in the Margins: On Jean-Paul Sartre’s Le Sursis (1945) and Jean Genet’s Pompes funèbres (1947). In: Hitler’s French Literary Afterlives, 1945-2017. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21617-7_2
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