When the Nazi army rolled over Paris in late spring, 1940, and occupied the city on June 14, 1940, one might say the lights went out in the world’s greatest cultural beacon.
But the truth is more complex, morally and aesthetically, as artists, performers, writers and others in the Paris culture industry either co-existed or outright collaborated with the occupiers. Artists and intellectuals “survived” the war in a fashion, and others, particularly in cinema, enjoyed a “good war.” Sartre famously burnished his war credentials after the Occupation; Picasso was largely selfish and unpolitical; painters Derain and Vlaminck traveled as visiting artists to Germany during the war years; Céline embraced the new destruction along with other French artists who were inspired by the anti-Semitic Nazi occupiers.
French culture, seen as fragile under the Occupation, was more of a strange political brew, but there is no doubt that Parisian theaters, music halls and cinemas continued to entertain, and Paris became the premiere vacation destination for the Nazi empire.
Paris during the Nazi Occupation is the vast subject Alan Riding takes on with a minesweeper’s verve. The former European cultural editor for The New York Times recounts in vivid detail the rich history of this errant half decade in And The Show Went On, (Knopf, 2010) laying out how the Nazis rolled over France and how France’s cultural institutions literally played on, staging shows and singing songs and painting pictures.
The author argues in this 400-page history that the pre-war French art industry managed the morally impossible middle ground surprisingly well, and that the artists of the Occupation and their murky history of existence and collaboration during wartime is as we might expect: Conflicted. Following is an interview with Alan Riding that took place in Paris via e-mail over the last week of 2010.
READ THE INTERVIEW ON THE ARTBLOG.ORG
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