But then, in May 1942, she changed her mind and she too started socializing with Germans. She described how on one occasion she and some friends went out with a young officer, not much older than them, who was wearing a white linen jacket ‘like Lohengrin’ with a shining eagle emblem, and although the other soldiers saluted him, ‘the women, the Blitzweiben or little Grey Mice, scowled at us’. It was exciting to be taken to smart restaurants and fancy bars and to experience Paris nightlife accompanied by handsome men. She now studied German in order to get a job with the authorities and scrunched up all the letters of denunciation she received before throwing them in the bin. These girls did not see themselves as collaborating any more than Colette did when she recommended turnip juice (which was all one could buy) as a remedy for wrinkles. In different ways, both were ensuring that the population remained quiescent and made the best of the situation.
But was sexual collaboration, if genuine attachment was involved, in a different category from that which endangered security by passing on secrets? The question was never adequately addressed in the post-war world and was to cause French women the greatest trouble in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation. By the middle of 1943 almost 80,000 women from the occupied zone were claiming support from the Germans for the children resulting from these liaisons. The French author Patrick Buisson argued that the Occupation encouraged the sexual liberation of women (often lonely wives or abandoned girlfriends) and that the presence of good-looking German soldiers encouraged the development of libido. German military superiority left the French humiliated and in a state of ‘erotic shock’, he wrote.
Johann and Lisette, the married German Wehrmacht officer and chic French secretary, had continued with their affair for two years in spite of periods when he was sent away on missions and, according to their letters, were more in love with each other than ever. But by 1942 the tense atmosphere of arrests, shootings, deprivation and reprisals had left Lisette full of doubts, which Johann tried to assuage. Her parents may have believed, as she approached thirty still unmarried, that she was bettering herself. But her working-class cousins deeply disapproved of the relationship with un boche and wanted nothing to do with her. ‘Collaboration?’ wrote Johann in one of his letters to her. ‘I think it is an illusion. You have to love deeply to understand. Love alone is stronger than patriotism, a love like this one. I love France in you, and you will cherish Germany through me.’
Hélène Berr was also a teenager when war broke out, but with fewer options to make the best of things, as she documented in the elegiac diary which she kept from 1942 onwards. Hélène was dreamy and non-political but the situation was ‘obliging’ her to take a stance. Her maturity and intelligence are in stark contrast to Micheline Bood’s childlike enjoyment of the moment, yet both were young French women from middle-class homes eager to sample life. Berr was born in Paris in March 1921, the fourth child of Raymond and Antoinette Berr, French Jews of enormous culture, sensitivity and intellect who lived in the affluent 7th arrondissement on the Avenue Elisée Reclus. The family’s Judaism was secular and low key, never denied but not the most central part of their lives. M. Berr was a scientist, a successful industrialist and a decorated soldier of the Guerre de Quatorze, Hélène herself an English student at the Sorbonne and a gifted violinist in love with music, literature and a young Frenchman of Polish Catholic origins, Jean Morawiecki. Brought up like most of the haute bourgeoisie by an English nanny, she was a fierce Anglophile and filled her diary with almost as much about English literature as about the Occupation. It’s the juxtaposition of her quartet, playing sublime music, with the horrors she increasingly witnesses around her which gives the diary a particular poignancy. How can a world of Schubert and his ‘Trout Quintet’ coexist with a world where women have to give birth in the gutter and Jews are forbidden to walk across the Champs-Elysées or to enter theatres and restaurants?
At the Berrs’ country home in Aubergenville on the Seine, summer 1942. From left: Hélène, her mother Antoinette, sister Denise, boyfriend Jean Morawiecki and brother-in-law’s sister, Jacqueline Job
In June 1942 she wrote: ‘When I review the week just passed I see a dark sky looming over it, it has been a week of tragedy, a chaotic jumble of a week. At the same time there is something uplifting in thinking of all the wonderful understanding I have encountered … there is beauty in the midst of the tragic. As if beauty were condensing in the heart of ugliness. It’s very strange.’