Jean Giraudoux

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean Hyppolyte Giraudoux (born October 29, 1882 in Bellac , Haute-Vienne , † January 31, 1944 in Paris ) was a French professional diplomat , playwright and writer . As such, it was particularly important for the development of French theater in the interwar period.

Life

Until the end of the First World War (1882-1919)

Giraudoux grew up as the son of a simple civil servant in small towns in southwestern France. Thanks to a scholarship for gifted students, he was able to attend grammar school in Châteauroux , then the preparatory classes of the renowned Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux near Paris (where the well-known Germanist Charles Andler sparked his interest in Germany) and finally the elite school for teaching subjects, the École normal supérieure , which he completed in 1905 in German as the best of his year. In the summer of 1905 he enrolled at the University of Munich on a scholarship . There he also worked as a tutor for a wealthy French family and met Frank Wedekind , among others . Giraudoux then traveled to Serbia , Austria-Hungary (including Trieste ) and Venice . In 1906 he went to Germany for another language stay. After he had not received admission as a grammar school professor ( agrégation ) for the subject German, he went on a scholarship from September 1907 to March 1908 as a French lecturer at Harvard University in the USA.

After his return he gave up the originally planned high school career and lived poorly and rightly on his pen in Paris. In particular, he wrote short stories that were collected as Provinciales in 1909 and brought him first recognition. In 1910 he became the under-burdened private secretary of the newspaper magnate Bruneau-Varilla and published stories and literary reviews in his newspaper Le Matin . After taking an interest in politics thanks to his closeness to journalism, he applied for the diplomatic service in 1911 and was accepted into training. In 1914 he was drafted into the army when the First World War broke out . He took part in the Battle of the Marne and the Battle of Gallipoli , was wounded several times and was awarded for bravery in the face of the enemy. In 1917 he published his war diary as Lettres pour une ombre (letters for / to a shadow). He spent the last months of the war as a military instructor in Portugal, which had quickly declared war on Germany and modernized its army. He married in 1918 and the following interwar period was his most creative period.

Interwar period (1919-1940)

Jean Giraudoux, ca.1927

Returning from Portugal, Giraudoux finished and published his first novel, Simon le pathétique . For the next 20 years he led a double life as a diplomat (although he was mostly able to work on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris, in the Foreign Ministry) and as an author. As such, he initially wrote mostly novels, but these were only moderately successful and are rarely read today.

In 1928 he processed his 1922 novel Siegfried et le Limousin, set in Germany, into a play that was staged as Siegfried by the well-known director Louis Jouvet and was a great success as a signal for reconciliation between the Germans and the French. Jouvet now animated Giraudoux to do more pieces, which actually followed in series: 1929 Amphitryon 38 , a cheerful play about the procreation of Hercules by Jupiter masked as Amphitryon ; 1931 Judith ; 1933 Intermezzo ; 1935 La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu ( The Trojan War does not take place ), a comedy-like, but increasingly gloomy piece that deals with the war fears of many French in the face of Hitler's armament and the growing destabilization of Europe (and that after it should originally end up optimistically, end up pessimistically); 1937 Électre , a play in which the political polarization of France is reflected after the election victory of the Popular Front in summer 1936 (and in which the unyielding Électre incarnates the dogmatic, uncompromising communists who - as the author fears - continue to practice obstruction, even if that Fatherland is attacked from outside); 1939 Ondine , a magical, sad piece that seems to reflect the fears of many French people shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War and - like many of his works - covertly takes the tragic amalgamation of closeness and distance in the relationship between France and Germany as its theme.

In view of the impending war, Giraudoux published a political essay , a collection of articles and lectures under the title Pleins pouvoirs , in which he referred primarily to the example of the USA . In the chapter "La France peuplée" (The populous France) he called for France to adopt an immigration policy based on the American model in order to develop the French population morally and culturally with the help of immigrants. He had in mind immigration from Scandinavia, while z. B. Arab immigrants should be excluded because of their cultural and personal characteristics.

Second World War and Death (1940–1944)

After the war began, Giraudoux was appointed Commissaire général à l'Information , a kind of propaganda minister, by the Daladier government . Among his collaborators were the German scholar Robert Minder and the German exiles Alfred Döblin and Ernst Erich Noth . Before the approaching German troops Giraudoux fled with the government to Bordeaux . When the Reynaud government took office , he was relieved of his post and retired to live with his mother in Vichy . After he had been appointed director of the Monuments historiques by the Pétain government in the autumn of 1940 , he retired in January 1941 and, under the impression of the French defeat, began to write two writings that only appeared after his death in Monaco : Armistice à Bordeaux (1945) and Sans Pouvoirs (1946). In the relative normality that prevailed in France from autumn 1940 to around the end of 1943 despite the German occupation, he published a collection of lectures and essays and wrote other pieces: Sodome et Gomorrhe , L ' Apollon de Bellac , La Folle de Chaillot (Die Mad from Chaillot) and Pour Lucrèce (For Lucretia). The latter was even performed in 1943, while La Folle de Chaillot , a bitterly melancholy satire on the goings-on of speculators and businessmen in occupied Paris, did not take place until posthumously in 1945. As Directeur littéraire of the film production company Gaumont , Giraudoux was involved in the editing of literary film sources, e. B. La Duchesse de Langeais by Balzac for the film of the same name by Jacques de Baroncelli or Angels of Sin by Robert Bresson .

Grave in the Cimetière de Passy cemetery in Paris

The living conditions in occupied France were difficult for the former information minister in the Daladier government and his behavior was often contradictory:

  • His long-standing enthusiasm for German culture had already waned considerably in the 1930s and his Ondine (1939) finally marked his final departure from the idea of ​​a "âme franco-allemande" (Franco-German soul).
  • In Armistice à Bordeaux (Armistice in Bordeaux) he contradicted sentence by sentence the second address of the new head of state Philippe Pétain and rejected the national atonement called for in it.
  • He turned down the post of French ambassador to Athens, which the Vichy regime had offered him after the armistice , but continued to have personal relationships with several members of the new government.
  • His son Jean-Pierre fled to London in July 1940 and served in the Free French Navy (FNFL) .
  • Gerhard Heller reported in 1981 about a meeting with Giraudoux in July 1941 “At the time I was quite astonished to hear that he considered rapprochement with Germany to be desirable, while he had to be very critical about Great Britain and the USA”, but also “Giraudoux actually lost trust in the good intentions of Marshal Pétain very quickly ”and“ as I learned later, he had provided information about the secret activities of French intellectuals to London early on ”.
Memorial plaque on the house where he died 89, Quai d'Orsay in Paris
  • Returning to Paris, Giraudoux emphasized to Heller in 1942 “the impossibility of a real encounter between the two cultures while the war lasts”.
  • In the same year he was accused in the anti-Semitic weekly newspaper Au pilori (Am Pillory) of employing too many Jews during his time as Commissaire général à l'information and thereby helping them in “their” war,
  • Giraudoux refused the offer to leave France on the grounds that "a struggle for influence with Germany must be waged" in France.

However, whether Giraudoux actively participated in the resistance of the Resistance against the German occupation forces remains controversial. On January 31, 1944, the writer died, according to official information, of food poisoning, but probably of pancreatitis . A few days after his funeral arrived in Paris literary circles the rumor that Giraudoux by the Gestapo had been poisoned, which then after the withdrawal of German troops on 20 September 1944 in an article in the new edition of the Communist daily newspaper Ce Soir by Louis Aragon seized has been.

The work

While Jean Giraudoux's novels achieved only moderate recognition during his lifetime, his theater was extremely successful for two to three decades. Like other French playwrights of the 1930s and 1940s (e.g. Jean Cocteau , Jean-Paul Sartre , Albert Camus ), Giraudoux often took up ancient myths and rewrote them in a contemporary mindset. He knew how to combine the tragic and the light and bring them to the stage in elegant and witty, sometimes even poetic language, such as in Intermezzo or Ondine . It was above all this art of language that worked in an unmistakable mixture of wit and profundity, banality and poetry and later dramatists, e. B. Jean Anouilh .

In March 2008 the last manuscript still completed by Giraudoux, poetic-laconic memories, was published in German for the first time under the title Doppelmemoiren .

literature

  • Christian Marker, Max Hölzer, Paul Raabe: Jean Giraudoux in self-testimonies and image documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1962
  • Gert Pinkernell : Old fabrics, new meaning. Giraudoux's "La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu" and "Électre" , Sartre's "Les Mouches" and Anouilh's " Antigone " . In GP: interpretations. Winter, Heidelberg 1997, ISBN 3-8253-0608-9 (Studia Romanica, 90)
  • Wolf Albes: Jean Giraudoux " La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu" (1935) and Jean Anouilh "Antigone" (1942). In: French literature, 20th century: theater. Edited by Konrad Schoell. Publishing house & series: Stauffenburg Interpretation, Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-86057-911-8
  • Jochen Trebesch: Jean Giraudoux 1882–1944 (series: Servants of two masters - diplomatic authors of the 20th century). Nora, Berlin 2007. ISBN 978-3-86557-121-2
  • Wolfgang Schwarzer: Jean Giraudoux 1882–1944. In: Jan-Pieter Barbian (Red.): Vive la littérature! French literature in German translation . Ed. And publisher: Stadtbibliothek Duisburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-89279-656-5 , p. 15, photo

Web links

Wikiquote: Jean Giraudoux  - Quotes

proof

  1. ^ Hervé Duchêne: Jean Giraudoux - Électre . Éditions Bréal, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-84291-019-2 , p. 13
  2. ↑ Jean Giraudoux, Pleins pouvoirs , Gallimard, Paris 1939. pp. 36, 76 and 160. See also Jacques Body: Jean Giraudoux, la légende et le secret . Presse universitaire de france, Paris 1986. ISBN 2-13-039478-7 , p. 36 and Ralph Schor: Français et immigrés en temps de crise (1930-1980) . L'Harmattan, Paris 2004. ISBN 2-7475-6798-2 , p. 83.
  3. ↑ The above and other passages as well as individual statements by the figure of Holopherne in his play Judith (1931) have repeatedly led to accusations of racism and anti-Semitism in France since the early 1990s . The corresponding text passages and the public discussion about them are documented in detail in the article Jean Giraudoux on French Wikipedia (last checked on January 17, 2011).
  4. ↑ Albrecht Betz: Giraudoux, Minder and the emigrants. Propaganda during the "Drole-de-guerre" 1939/40 . In: Albrecht Betz / Richard Faber (eds.): Culture, literature and science in Germany and France. On the 100th birthday of Robert Minder . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2004, ISBN 3-8260-2925-9 , pp. 207-216.
  5. ^ Jacques Body: Jean Giraudoux, la légende et le secret . Presse universitaire de france, Paris 1986, p. 153.
  6. ↑ Denis Rolland, Louis Jouvet et le théâtre de l'Athénée Promeneurs de rêves en guerre de la France au Brésil. L'Harmattan, Paris 2000. ISBN 2-7384-9492-7 , pp. 127-131.
  7. ^ Cahiers Jean Giraudoux , Société des Amis de Jean Giraudoux, B. Grasset, Paris 1972. p. 109
  8. ^ Jacques Body: Giraudoux et l'Allemagne . Didier, Paris 1975. p. 405
  9. ↑ Guillaume Zorgbibe: Littérature et politique en France au XXe siècle . Éditions Ellipses, Paris 2004. ISBN 2-7298-1839-1 , p. 108.
  10. ↑ Denis Rolland: Louis Jouvet et le théâtre de l'Athénée Promeneurs de rêves en guerre de la France au Brésil , p. 128
  11. ↑ Pierre Viansson-Ponté: Les gaullistes, rituel et annuaire . Le Seuil, Paris 1963. p. 128 and biography of Jean-Pierre Giraudoux on the homepage of the French National Assembly . Under the pseudonym «Montaigne», Jean-Pierre Giraudoux served in the Pacific on board the Chevreuil speedboat (André Bouchi-Lamontagne: Historique des Forces navales françaises libres . Service historique de la Défense, Château de Vincennes 2006, ISBN 2-11-096321-2 . Vol. 5, p. 434)
  12. ^ Gerhard Heller: In an occupied country. Nazi cultural policy in France. Memories 1940-1944 . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1982, ISBN 3-462-01521-4 . P. 172.
  13. ^ Gerhard Heller: In an occupied country. Nazi cultural policy in France. Memories 1940-1944 . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1982, p. 173.
  14. ^ Jean Théroigne, "Giraudoux parafumier", Au pilori n ° 104 July 9, 1942 (quoted from Gisèle Sapiro ): "Antisémitisme et antiféminisme dans le champ intellectuel". In: Temps, espaces, langages - La Hongrie à la croisée des disciplines (Cahiers d'Études Hongroises 14), L'Harmattan, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-296-05566-7 . Vol. 2, p. 55.
  15. ↑ André Beucler: Les instants de Giraudoux et autres souvenirs . Éditions Milieu du monde, Genève (Geneva) 1948, p. 171 and Jacques Body: Jean Giraudoux, la légende et le secret . Presse universitaire de france, Paris 198, p. 713
  16. ↑ Jean Blanzat, an active member of the Resistance, confirmed that Giraudoux was on the side of the Resistance at their last meeting in December 1943 ( Cahiers Jean Giraudoux , Société des Amis de Jean Giraudoux, Bernard Grasset, Paris 1992. Vol. 21-22, P. 36). Agnès G. Raymond writes about it: "autant que nous sachions, Giraudoux ne se comptait pas parmi les écrivains de la Resistance, et pourtant il partageait leurs sympathies" (meaning: as far as we know, Giraudoux was not one of the writers of the Resistance and yet he shared their ideas) (in: Giraudoux devant la victoire et la défaite: une interprétation politique de sa pensée après les deux guerres . A.-G. Nizet, Paris 1963, p. 134)
  17. ^ Jean Giraudoux: Double Memoirs . Berenberg, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-937834-25-2 . Also: Deutschlandradio Kultur : “Memories of an Air Spirit” , March 6, 2008
personal data
SURNAME Giraudoux, Jean
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Giraudoux, Jean Hyppolyte (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French professional diplomat and writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Bellac
DATE OF DEATH January 31, 1944
Place of death Paris