Jacques Decour

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Jacques Decour (ca.1937)
Grave on the Cimetière Montmartre
Daniel Decourdemanche: Farewell Letter (1942)
Collège-lycée Jacques-Decour in Paris

Jacques Decour (actually Daniel Decourdemanche ; born February 21, 1910 in Paris ; died May 30, 1942 in Fort Mont-Valérien ) was a French teacher, author, translator and resistance fighter.

Youth and education

Daniel Decourdemanche attended the Lycée Carnot in Paris and the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine . His father was a stockbroker and would have liked to see his son in his job. However, Decour broke off his law studies and studied literature and German at the Sorbonne . He saw his literary role models in Stendhal and Valery Larbaud , and found the role models for his Germanophilia in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine .

Professional activity and political commitment

In 1930 his story Le Sage et le Caporal appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française . After his studies and before the Agrégation he went in October 1930 for half a year as an exchange teacher ("assistant de français") at the cathedral high school in Magdeburg . He processed his diary entries in the book Philisterburg , which appeared in France in 1932, they show him disaffected, but still obliged to a second, “better”, Germany: “Philisterburg is not Germany”. He relocated the city of Philisterburg to the Silesian border without further ado, otherwise the book is authentic and describes everyday life at the end of the Weimar Republic, so a student talk: Heine is not German - why? - He's a Jew .

From 1932 he worked as a teacher in Reims , in Tours and from 1937 at the Lycée Rollin in Paris. In addition, he pursued political projects and diverse literary interests as a translator from German and as an editor and wrote his second novel. Decourdemanche became a member of the Parti communiste français (PCF). In 1938 he organized a signature campaign to propose Karel Čapek for the Nobel Prize for Literature , repeatedly in vain . In 1939 he was chief editor of the journal Commune a special issue on the "German humanism" out of it against the spirit, in the name of anti-humanist racial principle, appoints Hitler's crusade and the German refugees Heinrich and Thomas Mann , Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht to Word lets come. In his foreword to the magazine, Dirk Weissmann 2005, Decour was fully aware that Nazism and its ideology were also part of German history, so he understood the danger that lurked in German culture. After the German occupation of France in 1940, he joined the Resistance and was given the code name Jacques Decour. He founded the underground magazines L'université libre (November 1940) and together with Georges Politzer and Jacques Solomon La Pensée libre (February 1941). In 1941 Decour became the head of the resistance organization Comité national des écrivains , for which he prepared the underground magazine Les Lettres françaises in January 1942 with Jean Paulhan . In December 1941, he attacked the collaborative French writers who had gone to the European Poets' Meeting in Weimar , calling them traitors to the (French) nation: the greatest shame for a writer is that he was involved in the murder of the national Culture whose defender he should be .

Arrest and death

Decour was arrested on February 17, 1942, along with Politzer and Solomon as well as Danielle Casanova and Georges Dudach by the French police , who collaborated with the occupying forces , and transferred to the Germans on March 5. Letters from prison have been received from him, including the farewell letter to his wife and daughter. Decour was executed by the Germans , according to a statement in the anthology des écrivains morts à la guerre , he died with an attitude de calme ironie . The shooting took place in a phase of reorganization of the German occupation organs, still under the responsibility of the French military commander Otto von Stülpnagel . In his farewell letter from death row to his Lyceums students, he quoted Egmont's classically pathetic final sentence from the Goethe drama he valued : Protect your goods! And to save your loved one, fall joyfully as I give you an example. When on November 16, 1942 in Bibliothèque de la Pléiade the band Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Théâtre complet appeared with a contribution from him, he had already been executed.

Obituary and honors

In October 1943 Jean Lescure published an obituary for its founder Decour in the Lettres françaises , which was necessarily kept anonymous. The Lycée Rollin was renamed the Collège-lycée Jacques-Decour after the war , it is the only grammar school in France to be named after a teacher from the Resistance. Decourdemanches' translation of the play The Triumph of Sensibility by Goethe was staged by Jorge Lavelli at the Avignon Festival in 1967 . In 2003, an exhibition entitled "Nos jeunes morts sont secrets": Jacques Decour, Littérature & Resistance took place in Tours at a time when his writings were being rediscovered.

In 2014 a German translation of his notes from Magdeburg appeared, which Louis Aragon had characterized in 1945 as follows:

“Determined to observe everything he encounters objectively, he avoids the prejudices that are usually mixed up when looking at German life. He is careful not to just want to find what he imagined before leaving, like a tourist on his way. "

A quote from his farewell letter with a plaque in several languages ​​in the Monumento alla Resistenza europea in Como.

Fonts (selection)

  • Philistine Castle . Paris: Gallimard, 1932. New edition of Philisterburg suivi de Goethe et la jeunesse allemande . Foreword by Jérôme Garcin . Scheer, Tours / Farrago / Paris 2003. German translation:
Philistine Castle . Translated from the French by Stefan Ripplinger . The other library , Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-8477-3005-7 .
  • Louis Aragon (ed.): Comme je vous en donne l'exemple ... . Texts présentés par Aragon; suivi de Philister Castle. Paris: Éditeurs français réunis, 1974 (1945)
  • Le Sage et le Caporal . Paris: Gallimard, 1932
  • La révolte . Paris: Gallimard, 1934
  • Les Pères . Paris: Gallimard, 1936
  • Pages choisies . Paris: Publié pour le Comité national des écrivains. Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1944
  • Le sage et le caporal; suivi de les pères; et de sept nouvelles inédites . Tours: Farrago; Paris: L. Scheer, 2002
  • Pierre Favre: Jacques Decour, l'oublié des lettres françaises: 1910-1942 . Tours: Farrago; Paris: Scheer, 2002
  • Pierre Favre; Emmanuel Bluteau (Ed.): La faune de la collaboration: articles 1932-1942 . Le Raincy: Thébaïde, 2012
As a translator under the name Decourdemanche

literature

  • Association des écrivains combattants (France): Anthologie des écrivains morts à la guerre, 1939-1945 . Paris: A. Michel, 1960, pp. 186-190
  • Dirk Weissmann: anti-Nazism, patriotism, humanistic ideal. On the image of Germany of the French resistance fighter and Germanist Jacques Decour (1910-1942) , in: German Studies in the Conflict of Cultures, Files of the 11th International Germanist Congress, Paris: Lang, 2007, vol. VIII, pp. 97-102
  • Jean Paulhan : Jacques Decour . Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1943
  • Pierre Favre: Jacques Decour, l'oublié des lettres françaises . Tours: Farrago, 2002 ISBN 2-84490-099-2
  • Bertrand Matot: La guerre des cancres: un lycée au coeur de la Resistance et de la collaboration . Paris: Perrin, 2010 [i. e. Lycée Rollin]
  • Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français (reference in: Index biographique français. 2. Brass - Decye. Munich: Sauer 1998, p. 940)
  • Konrad F. Bieber: L'Allemagne vue par les écrivains de la résistance française . Foreword by Albert Camus . Genève: Droz 1954 (Zugl .: New Haven, Conn., Yale Univ., Diss., 1953)
  • Pierre Seghers : La Résistance et ses poètes: France, 1940-1945 . Paris: Seghers, 1974

Web links

Commons : Jacques Decour  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Dirk Weissmann: Antinazismus, Patriotismus, humanistisches Ideal , 2007, pp. 97-102
  2. ^ A b c d Association des écrivains combattants: Anthologie des écrivains morts , 1960, p. 186
  3. ↑ Lothar Müller : What do you think of Heine? , Review, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 10, 2014, p. 17
  4. ↑ Hans Christoph Buch : It's provincial everywhere . Review, in: Die Zeit , May 28, 2014, p. 51
  5. ↑ Jacques Decour: [ Les Ecrivains français ont demandé le prix Nobel pour Karel Čapek ], in: Commune , 1938, pp. 1844-1850, reference at WorldCat.
  6. ^ Pierre Seghers: La Résistance et ses poètes , 1974, pp. 103ff
  7. ↑ a b c Jacques Decour , near Mont Valerien
  8. ^ Pierre Seghers: La Résistance et ses poètes , 1974, p. 208
  9. ^ Pierre Daix : Aragon une vie à changer . Seuil, Paris 1975, p. 320
  10. ^ Ahlrich Meyer : The German occupation in France 1940-1944. Fight against resistance and persecution of Jews , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2000, pp. 83–98
  11. ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Théâtre complet , in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade at Éditions Gallimard
  12. ^ Pierre Seghers: La Résistance et ses poètes , 1974, p. 296
  13. ↑ Le triomphe de la sensibilité , at WorldCat
  14. ↑ Louis Aragon (ed.): Comme je vous en donne l'exemple ... . Texts présentés par Aragon; suivi de Philister Castle. 1945, quoted from Decour, Jacques: Philisterburg , publisher's announcement at “The Other Library”.
personal data
SURNAME Decour, Jacques
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Decourdemanche, Daniel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH May 30, 1942
Place of death Fort Mont-Valérien