Ursula’s uncle, Baron Kurt Rüdt von Collenberg, a Luftwaffe general, was living at Neuilly at the time in the requisitioned villa of a Mme Mandel (no relation), where ‘he gave fantastic dinner parties … with all the right French guests, Marquis so-and-so and Comte tra-la-la. We had good French friends like Daniel-Rops [the Catholic historian who wrote books of religious history] who translated Rilke … there was lovely material to be bought for clothes and I found a little White Russian dressmaker. Fantastic deals were being transacted all around on the sly, for wines, food, shoes what have you. We could buy what we wanted, much more than the French.’
As Ursula was well aware, the spring of 1942 offered plenty of opportunity for Germans in Paris to appreciate not just French food and couture but also culture. Jeanne Bucher ignored the prevailing caution and held a show in May for artists including Lur?at, Braque, Léger, Klee and Laurens, even though she could not actively promote the exhibition, which was attended mostly by French. But the major event that month was a massive retrospective show of the work of Arno Breker at the Orangerie, exhibiting giant figures of supermen representing a Nazi fantasy of Aryan power in Paris. Breker, trained in France but deeply sympathetic to the ideals of the Third Reich, was considered an ideal choice to promote Franco-German loyalty. The young Ambassador Otto Abetz, still only thirty-nine, arranged for Breker to stay in Helena Rubinstein’s magnificent and newly expropriated apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis.
Simone de Beauvoir commented in her memoirs that ‘almost the entire French intelligentsia’ had snubbed the exhibition, but this was far from being the case. The opening events were supported by artists such as Arletty, Sacha Guitry, Serge Lifar and of course Cocteau, who considered himself a personal friend of the great Breker and published a long article detailing why he admired the man so much, a step too far even for many of his artistic circle. As the Vichy Education Minister, Abel Bonnard, delivered some welcoming remarks followed by equally warm words from Pierre Laval, brought back as Prime Minister in April 1942,* no one seemed aware that the bronze for some of the enormous statues on show had been created from the melted-down monuments of Paris itself, or that they had been cast using the forced labour of French prisoners of war. To underline how significant this show was, concerts were arranged beneath the statuary. At the opening celebrations, Germaine Lubin, fresh from performing Schubert lieder as requested at a special farewell concert for her friend and admirer Hans Speidel, was once again the star. In August, the pianists Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff were chosen to give a magnificent four-handed recital to mark the closing of the exhibition.
Where cultural relations led, personal relationships between German men and French women followed. The actress Gisèle Casadesus was well aware of the Germans in her audience even though most wore civilian clothes and did not frequent the Comédie-Fran?aise as much as the opera. ‘In the theatre it was normal to be friendly to Germans because they were the audience,’ explained Jean-Claude Grumberg, ‘but if you wanted to perform you had to swear you were not Jewish.’*
Pretty young actresses were regularly asked out for a drink after a performance even if they were married. Casadesus decided that the best way to avoid having to say no was to make sure she always dashed off with the audience in order to catch the last Métro before the curfew. ‘If anyone asked for me, I told my dresser to tell them that I had to hurry home to my children,’ she explained; after all, missing the last Métro invariably meant being out after the curfew – a serious crime.
Micheline Bood wrote in 1941, with all the fiery injustice of a teenager, that she had reached the point where she found the French ‘no longer men. I am renouncing my country, I no longer want to be French! When you see how one and all have become collaborationist and are licking the boots of the Germans out of fear and cowardice even in my own country.’ She described with disgust how one of her friends, fifteen-year-old Monique, ‘let herself be kissed by this Boche, who is an enemy in a conquered country’.