14th June 1940 – Paris fell, the Nazis marched in – it was a dark time.
Except Alan Riding says it wasn’t quite as dark as often think in his fascinating new book And the Show Went on: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied France. Perhaps uncomfortable reading for the French and problematic for all of us who have traditionally assumed Nazism simply meant philistinism reigned supreme given that, Riding believes, some quite good material did emerge – Camus’s reputation, some films and plays.
Though of course we can’t forget that the Jews were purged from French culture and the Left, if it revealed itself, similarly purged. No golden age then, but certainly interesting and little written about. Also for those of us working in China perhaps the most interesting aspect is that the Nazis, aside from direct repression of the Resistance and the Jewish population, by and large did not need to censor heavy handedly but rather let the French self-censor themselves. The Nazis had their censors for sure but it seems it was that most pernicious of censors, the self, that did most of the work. And all those fascinating double edged characters annoyed the official censors no end – Joan of Arc got a plus for driving the English into the sea but a minus for being a figure of French nationalism. Bargains were made for good or ill between the Nazi occupiers and the Paris cultural classes. It’s a thought provoking read and perhaps another nail in the coffin of the post war French elevation of the resistance to unreal heights that continues as the occupation remains a non-topic largely in France.
There’s an interesting audio interview with Riding about the book here
As ever blurb below
Riding, a former European cultural correspondent for the New York Times, recounts Parisian life under the Nazi swastika and the forced compromises of French writers, artists, and performers under Hitler’s rule. Riding’s clear-eyed account lifts the veil on the moral and artistic choices for those who stayed and were forced to decide whether to resist, collaborate, or compromise somewhere in between. Publisher Gaston Gallimard let a German-selected editor run his prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française; in turn, he was able to publish books by authors unsympathetic to the Nazis. While the American government lobbied for emergency visas for gifted refugees who didn’t flee to Switzerland or North Africa, some artists and performers hid or performed in cabarets or clubs with non-Aryan restrictions. Maurice Chevalier traveled to Germany to perform for French POWs and was seen by some as a collaborator worthy of death. Among the best examinations of occupied life under the Third Reich, Riding’s (Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans) eloquent book speaks of the swift executions of traitors and the women disgraced by having their heads shaved, but admits that the French embraced the myth of national resistance and pushed the Occupation out of their minds. 16 pages of photos.
Nobody who fancies the opportunity for a bit of time travel can have missed the whole woman on a mobile phone and Charlie Chaplin furore of the last couple of weeks. If you did then you can click here to read the story and link to the video that seems to show a woman on the set of a Chaplin movie in 1928 talking on her mobile! A great idea but bugger the prospective roaming charges.
Still a timely boost to time travel and a perfect opportunity to plug one of the most fun books I’ve read in ages that I stumbled across by chance in a bookstore in America recently – Connie Willis’s Blackout. Now I know Willis is well known to the sci-fi fraternity but I’m not usually a paid up member of that literary clique. However, Willis’s tale of Oxford historians from 2060 journeying back to WW2 Britain and the Blitz, Dunkirk and VE Day is brilliantly detailed and really well researched (with the exception of British people using ‘blocks’ as directions which is of course nonsense – but don’t let the one or two slips put you of). This is the best time travel book I’ve ever read (and did indeed skip work for a day to read it) and I’m eager now to grab a copy of the second instalment that’s just out – All Clear.
I always enjoy Lapham’s Quarterly. It’s a great concept pulling together great pieces of writing, verse, commentary etc on selected topics. Their autumn (or fall as they would have it) issue this year is dedicated to the city and, basically, if it doesn’t happen in a city then I’m not that interested in it personally. So an edition to be snapped up and devoured.
It’s packed full of great articles but, as far as China goes, you’ve got Leslie Chang on Dongguan, Du Fu on China c.750, Marco Polo on Kinsai, Ballard on Shanghai and an anonymous writer on Hangzhou c.1230
For the Asia keenies there’s also William Gibson on Singapore, Pico Iyer on Bangkok and Marguerite Duras on Saigon.
I’ll post more details next weekend when it’s closer but the poster is cool (and I’m biased!) so I’m posting it now. My contribution to the Penguin Classics Lunches series in Shanghai and Peking is an attempt to get people reading Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate once more – it’s a scandal how ignored and almost forgotten it’s become by people who otherwise are very well read on Shanghai. It’s a scary thought, but I suspect the reason nobody seems to know Man’s Fate but everyone seems to know JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun is that a movie got a made of the latter and never of the former!! i.e. when people tell you they know Empire of the Sun what they mean is that they’ve seen Spielberg’s film with all his politically correct insertions.
And so on November 19th it’s Malraux resurrection time at M on the Bund and then again on December 3rd at the Bookworm in Peking.
…and you have to admit, for a literary event, the poster is pretty wicked!
This November (sometime later this month), and in plenty of time for Christmas (hint, hint), a new book by me entitled The Old Shanghai A-Z is finally out. The blurb’s below and you can pre-order here with a 10% discount. It’s basically a guide to all the road names in Shanghai pre-1949 across the International Settlement, Frenchtown and the External Roads Area (the Badlands). It’s pretty comprehensive, fact filled with a lot of old Shanghai anecdotes and illustrated with a ton of old ads, postcards and Shanghailander emphemera. It also comes with some old maps of the city too and does, even if I say so myself, make for the perfect Christmas and/or Chinese New Year present for the Shanghailander in your life!!
You can click to read part of the intro and get an idea of just how lavish the design is! – French_046-071-1_sample text
This richly anecdotal guide to every street in Shanghai details many landmarks and stories associated with its best known avenues. A definitive index to the street names of Shanghai, some of which have disappeared or been removed, allows historians, researchers, tourists and the just plain curious to navigate the city in its pre-1949 incarnation, through the former International Settlement, French Concession, and External Roads Area with a detailed map and alphabetical entry for every road.
The book is lavishly illustrated with old advertising, images and postcards of the streets and businesses, the bars and nightclubs, the people and characters of old Shanghai bringing alive the city in its previous heyday as the Pearl of the Orient. The Old Shanghai A-Z should become the standard reference work as well as being an easy-to-use guide for researchers and visitors looking to recapture the glamour and uniqueness of old Shanghai.
A postcard I came across recently of a crowded Soochow Creek from, I think, the Bund end looking up river with the current Suzhou Road (formerly Soochow Road) on the left of the picture. Looks early twentieth century which means several things – firstly, the Creek was a major waterway back then as we all know; 2) it stunk; and 3) take a left off Soochow Road and you hit Kiangse Road (now Jiangxi Road) and The Line,already the premier street of white girl (mostly American) brothels in the Settlement. A sampan home sir?
Wang Genying (also known as Wang Shuxin) -1906-1939 – was an ewarly female hero of the Communist Party of China. That she died in1939, killed by the Japanese in Southern Hebei, means that she is one of those Communist heroes without the taint of the corruption and horrors that the Party would later inflict on China and its people (and continues to obviously) as it degenerated into just another dictatorial clique.
Wang joined the Socialist Youth League in 1924. She worked and organised in the Jardine’s owned EWO Cotton Mills, mostly in Yangtszepoo District (now Yangpu) during the May 30th tumult and indeed that is where her memorial is (though any trace of her former home or anything much in that area is long gone and the area is mostly the Shanghai Tobacco Factory). The monument that lies rather obscurely behind fences and in a car park to a hotel is on the corner of Zhoujiazui Road and Liaoyang Road (formerly Point Road and Liayong Road).
A follow up post after my previous comments on the strangely named (Lady From Shanghai) film version of Sherwood King’s noir novel If I Die Before I Wake. Why did Orson Welles introduce the Shanghai/China angle to the movie and have Rita Hayworth as a kind of returned home Shanghai Lil?
Robin Lung, a documentary film maker from Hawaii who is currently working on a project to restore KUKAN, a colour documentary on China that was filmed from 1939-1940 and was the first American feature length documentary to win an Academy Award in 1941, enlightens me somewhat as to Welles’s China interests (you can find more on Robin’s fascinating project at Facebook – click here).
“Orson Welles wrote a blurb for KUKAN when it came out in 1941 (see poster below), so I’ve had an eye out for his name in connection with China. Actually he does seem to have had a particular interest in China – He traveled with his father to China and Japan in 1930, was a big fan of Chinese magicians and Chinese theater and helped to entertain Madame Chiang Kai Shek when she visited Hollywood in 1943. Also, here is a link to an early 1939 radio broadcast of Orson Welles performing Pearl Buck’s THE PATRIOT.”
