Paris Unter Der Besatzung. Artikel, Aufsätze Und Reportagen 1944 - 1945

by Jean-Paul Sartre, Hanns Grössel

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, France, Paris, War, World War II

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture.

Reviews

[Classic reverie]

I have not read anything by Jean Paul Sartre before reading this short essay but look forward to reading his novels. I decided reading "Paris Under the Occupation" after listening to one of his novels being presented on OTR (old time radio) and finding unfortunately that book not available on Kindle yet but this work of his caught my eye.
The novel of his I heard and want to read is "The Chips Are Down" (1947). I had heard it on OTR before but hearing it again yesterday, I wanted to see if it was on Kindle yet.
Below is the link for the show I heard; NBC University Theater July 2, 1950.

https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com...

"Paris Under the Occupation" was published in November 1944. After reading the introduction by the translator, I was thinking this essay was going to be different in sentiment from what comments she had stated. I thought Sartre would be more complacent and quite critical of the freedom fighters. What I read is of a Frenchman not too proud of the way his country had gone but trying to explain to us in his way why it happened that way.


We from the modern age and those of the future look back knowing the history of the time, it is easy to put our own thoughts about all that happened but not living then we can only imagine. That is why this essay and others including books written during those times are very significant because it comes close to the reality of the situation. I can see how this would happen to ANY country given the right circumstances.
This is one famous man's account to somethings that happened around and to him and trying to explain to us. I am not an expert on world war 1 & 2 but through my reading novels about those times and other non fiction accounts, I come away each time understanding something more than when I started. I am not really into reading modern history of these times; maybe a book here or there will attract my attention. I look to learn about the past through these little gems of books that tell us something.
In my reading of these times the exodus of Parisian when the Germans are thought to be coming is briefly described here but hearing here reminded me of other books I have read where this is mentioned.

I came away understanding what Sartre was saying and I did not see him saying that the resistance was pointless. I would have liked to think if I had lived those times I would be part of that group or at least do something that it would not be easy for the occupiers but that just me not living those times but just imaging.

As the saying goes "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." So Sartre gives us a piece of history for us to know.

[Christine]

Sartre and I have a history. On the one hand, I have read No Exit in French, and quite frankly, you have never experienced life until you have seen a French Professor who is a nun search for the French word for nymphomaniac and then finish the sentence with like Blanche from the Golden Girls. On the other read, my boring college philosophy teacher talked about The Flies / Les Mouches every darn day. So it's a complicated relationship.

Like many of the Occupied French Sartre's relationship with the Germans was confused as well (I think all of Sartre's relationships are confused but that is just me). Yet, I think if you are trying to understand or to reach an understanding about France during WW II, you must read this essay. In particular with An Eye for an Eye.

[Numidica]

In this short essay, Sartre attempts to explain the situation faced by the French in the Occupation. Sartre points out that joining the Resistance was not a realistic option for large numbers of people, at least not in Paris, and the facts bear this out: the Germans stationed 30,000 Gestapo agents in Paris, and the average lifespan of a Resistance member in Paris was less than six months (see M.R.D. Foot's book, Resistance or The White Rabbit by Yeo-Thomas). Sartre acknowledges the bravery of the Resistance, but as he put it, "If the Allies were going to win the war, they could do so without the Resistance, and if they were going to lose, the actions of the Resistance would not prevent their defeat." So, short of a desire to seek death rather than dishonor, most people just tried to survive, but this left everyone who just tried to get along, and not be a traitor, with impossible choices. As Sartre said, "Every choice was wrong", because in some way every choice ultimately helped the occupying Germans. Every farmer who brought in a crop was compelled to give half to the Germans, but not harvesting meant starvation, and the railwaymen who stealthily kept the trains from running on time, nonetheless maintained rolling stock used by the Germans.

I can quibble with Sartre on one point, that being the contribution of Resistance fighters to the success of D-Day. No less a figure than George Patton pointed out how the demolition of railways and guerrilla attacks on German divisions trying to move to the Normandy beachheads slowed the German response and gave the Allies time to establish themselves on shore. But Sartre was writing immediately after the liberation of Paris, so he did not necessarily have access to all the facts. That said, there is a slight self-serving tone in Sartre's minimization of the activities of the Resistance, since he himself did not participate.

Overall, this short piece goes far to explain the morally compromised position the French found themselves in; the Germans were notably less harsh toward the "Western Europeans" like the French, the Dutch, the Danish, et al., than they were toward the Poles, Czechs, and other easterners, and the French felt the shame of such favoritism. The argument has been put forward that the Polish Resistance fought harder than any other in Europe because the German treatment of the Poles was so harsh. Sartre tries to make his reader understand the situation of the 95% of the French who were not collaborators but were also not in the Resistance. A good analogy is to imagine being a Czech or Pole or East German under Soviet domination in the 50's and 60's. This was well worth the reading.

[Gerhard]

"Niemals waren wir freier als in den 4 Jahren" schrieb Sartre 1944. Paris unter deutscher Besatzung aus dem Erleben des Autors. Thema zu weiteren Büchern über Länder, deren Einwohner unter deutscher Besatzung leben mussten.

[Janet Brown]

As an Anglo-Norwegian who grew up on a diet of stories about what it was like living under German occupation in Bergen, I was especially interested in this account. It confirmed everything I'd heard: that occupation amounted to a rather depressed drudgery of semi-normality and soul-searching punctuated by moments of high drama or acute misery. What made this book so interesting and useful, was Liebermann's introductory essay; I might have let Sartre off more lightly had it not been for this intelligent commentary. The translation is fluent but retains a Gallic flavour. I knew I'd find this book interesting; I didn't expect to find it so readable and human.

[Siddharth]

Paris was occupied for 4 years, starting 1940. German soldiers entered France and cut-off Paris from the rest of the country. They moved the government to Vichy and turned Paris into a ghost town which was not the symbolic capital of the divided country anymore. The German soldiers in Paris roamed about and were polite in all their interactions with Parisians. Whatever ill-will was felt for the Germans, it was hard to project that onto these quite soldiers walking around a city that was ostensibly under siege. As time went on, people can get used to nearly anything; so did Parisians: they got _used_ to the occupation, even as they silently wondered what would become of them. They had been reduced to symbols: A city, stripped of it's place in the world; The occupation did not serve any purpose for the Germans; it was a _symbol_ of German dominance in Europe. Parisians were stuck between a rock and a hard place: They had lost a war, but they had lost it so quickly that there was nothing to learn from the loss; They couldn't _say_ the occupation was undeserved; They couldn't claim that their actions during the occupation redeemed them of the loss either. When a _lost German soldier_ would ask them for directions, they remembered being told as children to help a man in need. Even as they helped the soldier, they felt tainted and as a traitor with a conscience does. Irrespective of what they did, they would end up unhappy. As the occupation went on, they accepted this unhappiness and simplified their life and conversations.

I already encountered this trouble once before. I had come back from captivity and people questioned me about the life of the prisoners of war. How could I make those who had not lived in them experience the atmosphere of the camps?

First we must get rid of certain naive misconceptions: no, the Germans didn't march through the streets, weapons in hand; no, they didn't force civilians to step aside and get off the sidewalks; in the subway, they offered their seats to old ladies, they gushed eagerly over babies and stroked their cheeks; they had been told to behave and they did so timidly and diligently out of discipline.

What rendered them [the German soldiers occupying Paris] inoffensive was their ignorance of our language. Many a time I heard Parisians in cafes express themselves freely about politics a few steps away from a solitary German who was sitting down and staring vaguely at a glass of lemonade.

The notion of an enemy is altogether firm and clear only if the enemy is separated from us by a line of fire.

A symbol: this hardworking and irascible city was no more a symbol. We looked in each others' eyes and wondered if we too hadn't become symbols. It is because they stole our future for four years. We had to count on others. And for the others we were only an object. ... Before the war, if we happened to look sympathetically at a child, a young man or woman, it was because we sensed their future and foresaw it vaguely in the gestures and in the creases of their faces because a living person is first of all a project, an enterprise. But the occupation had stripped people of their future.

Those who congratulate us ironically because we escaped the war can't imagine with what eagerness the French would have liked to have taken up arms again. Day after day, we saw our cities destroyed, our riches obliterated; our youth waste away. 3 million men were rotting away in Germany and France's birthrate dropped. What battle could have been more destructive? But these sacrifices, which we could have made gladly if they had hastened our victory, were meaningless and served no purpose or served the Germans. And that is perhaps something that everyone will understand: what is terrible is not to suffer nor to die, but to suffer and die in vain.

It is not true that tragedy brings people closer.

Our requirements diminished with our memories and since one gets used to everything we were ashamed that we were getting used to our misery, the rutabagas that were served as meals, the minuscule freedoms that we still enjoyed, our psychological emptiness. We steadily simplified our lives and we ended up talking only of food.

But we are asking you [the readers of this essay] first of all to understand that often the occupation was more terrible than the war. Because in war everybody performs his allotted task while in our ambiguous situation we were unable to really act or even to think.

[Thomas Kinservik]

Certainly an essay that has real resonance considering the current situation of the world. Sartre's struggle to reconcile the suffering Paris endured with the shame of France's quick defeat makes for an emotional read.

[John Jr.]

This is how we often ask questions nowadays: "What's it like [to do physics, to be Lady Gaga]?" We put questions about the past the same way: what was it like to live near the World Trade Center after the collapse, or to have been in it but escaped?

I'm not sure how far back that goes, but its modern usage appears at the same time as a belief in the isolating qualities of many experiences. Following some expression of sympathy for a loved one lost in war or disaster, for instance, we're apt to hear or to find ourselves saying, "You can't possibly understand what I'm going through [without having lived it]," or "You can't know what it's like." Apparently these situations are not like anything; they resemble only themselves.

This may not be a very meaningful observation. Philosopher Thomas Nagel had no qualms about the expression when he gathered his thoughts about other forms of life under the title "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (Incidentally, his answer was essentially that we can't know.) On the other hand, I'm not alone in noticing that nowadays we often believe we can't convey what something is/was like. French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky remarked on it, in a book that by coincidence I recently wrote about here. Surveying the current state of Western individualism, he notes that many people find it difficult to express themselves and to feel understood.

Whether or not you catch my drift on that point or agree with it, it's noticeable that Jean-Paul Sartre mentions the difficulty more than once in this essay, which he wrote and published in November 1944. The challenge, he says early on, is "how to convey what the occupation was to those who lived in countries that remained free." His immediate next thought: "There is an abyss between us that cannot be overcome by words." Later, he remarks, "It would be difficult to convey the impression that this deserted city made upon us." And a little later still, after describing a "horror" peculiar to the Occupation, in which the Gestapo would make someone disappear at night, while during the day the only Germans they could see appeared to be ordinary people like themselves (note the opening words): "Who would understand me if I said that at the time it was intolerable and that we accommodated ourselves to it quite well?"

Yet despite the declared difficulties, Sartre succeeds remarkably well in conveying the Occupation. He does it not through any abstract analytical means but by accumulation, piling up one concrete report after another. The great city had lost many of its occupants, so the boulevards appeared too big for those who remain. The Louvre lacked its paintings. The former capital now ruled nothing. He touches on the experience of non-Parisians as well. Farmers had to keep growing food so Frenchmen could eat, knowing that some of the food was feeding the Germans. The railways were kept running to serve the French, but they served the Germans as well. Everywhere, the French struggled to remind themselves that the Germans who lived and worked practically alongside them were the enemy, while the British, who for a time were bombing some of their cities, were allies. "We kept quiet when Lorient was razed to the ground, when the center of Nantes was destroyed, when the heart of Rouen was attacked. Perhaps this was what needed to be done."

I'll leave it to historians such as Lisa Lieberman the task of assessing Sartre's purposes, declared and otherwise, and his success in achieving them. Lieberman translated this essay--into conversational but entirely lucid English--and discusses such issues in her introduction. My view is simply that it works: Sartre's essay renders the experiences understandable, tangible, in part by proposing the strangeness of it all--the double uses of food and transport, the apparently friendly enemy, the many ways in which they sensed that things were the same but changed. The country was, at the same time, theirs and not theirs; that also was true of their very lives.

If one lives in a big city, one can easily look around and, having read Sartre's text, wonder "What if…?" One can also get a new grasp on Iraq during the American-led occupation. Sartre has made the situation clear enough that it can be "translated" in these ways. But one need do no more than take "Paris During the Occupation" at face value: this is what it was like. It is possible to share such experiences, if one is a good enough writer.

[Geoffrey Gudgion]

My French isn't good enough to read Sartre in the original French, but this translation has made this intellectual work a pleasure to read. Paris Under the Occupation is a finely drawn study of the French, and the French character, during the dark years of 1940-45. It leaves the reader with a powerful insight, for example: 'A living human being is first and foremost a project, a work in progress ... {the occupation} robbed human beings of their future. ...we had no more destiny than a nail or a door latch.' Great work, outstanding translation.

[❀ Hana]

Percubaan pertama membaca tulisan Jean Paul Sartre. (kesian kan)

[l a r a s n o w w h i t e]

3.7

[Adam]

At times overly Nationalistic, nazi sympathetic and biased.

Was clearly written more as a piece of propaganda to make him, his people, his city and his country look good and respectable rather than to be a nuanced piece of philosophy and inward reflection. Sartre even admits his agenda, rather than writing for that human desire to see things more clearly, and see beyond the surface and witness the nuances, subjectivity and reality of situations that at first seem confusing and nonsensical.

I am not interested in propaganda, and although there were a few pages of beautiful philosophical insight, where Sartre stopped trying to convince and instead reflected and challenged his own assumptions, it was not enough to save the book from essentially being a nationalist attempt to convince people that Paris and France deserved respect.

It is disappointing that such a famous and talented philosopher and writer fell to this level of bias and blindness to introspection.

I am not arguing that Paris or France does not deserve respect. I am instead arguing that this is irrelevant, and that there are far more real and interesting discussions about humanity, social criticism and philosophy that could be written rather than a piece of propaganda for a national cause and agenda.

Overall, I don’t like that it was written to inspire pride in a nation. I am much more attracted to works written by outcasts who sit beyond, as much as possible, the bias and constrictions of nationality. I believe that this is how we get closer to truth.

[Billye Roberts]

Depressing

Not the essay so much as what it talks about. The French Sartre writes about are not today's French who seem so self assured and appear to think themselves better than everyone else. These people are confused, disillusioned, uncertain and self loathing; and as presented here with cause. According to the editor, even given all that, Sartre was being an apologist for his people. If you are interested in this period of French history, this is worth a read. At least it's short. But be prepared to need a drink afterwards.

[Simon Worrall]

Sartre is a valuable witness to the Occupation of Paris by the Nazis in WW2 I used it extensively for my new book, Starcrossed: A Romeo and Juliet Story in Hitler’s Paris, coming in October 22

[Seth Lynch]

After reading this, any Anglo-American troops that came across Sartre will have wanted to flush his head down the toilet. I like Sartre but this came across as a particularly whiny piece.

[Mary Ess]

Read this for the excellent introduction.
Hogwash Sartre!