Suite française
Suite française is the title of a novel by Irène Némirovsky , a French writer with Ukrainian-Jewish roots, which was planned to consist of five parts, but has remained unfinished . After completing only two parts of the novel ("Sturm im Juni" and "Dolce"), she was arrested as a Jew in Pithiviers in July 1942 and then deported to Auschwitz , where she died on August 17, 1942 of typhus.
The manuscript of the first two parts of the novel was kept in a suitcase by her daughters, but they only recognized it as a novel manuscript in 1998. It was published in French in a volume in 2004 under the name Suite française , was an instant success and has since led to the rediscovery of her work, which since the late 1920s had made her a well-known writer who was then forgotten. In 2005 the German translation by Eva Moldenhauer was published by Knaus Verlag . The first part of the book describes the hasty flight of Parisian intellectuals and members of the bourgeoisie in the face of the threatened conquest of the city by the Germans in June 1940 . The second part deals with the billeting of a German regiment in the small town of Bussy in 1941 and the relationship between the occupiers and the local population.
content
Storm in June
The action begins at dawn on June 4, 1940 in Paris, after bombs fell on the city for the first time the day before and the townspeople are preparing to leave the city to escape the German enemy advancing from the north. Némirovsky depicts selected groups of people and loners from different social classes who, after the defeat and the disorderly flight of the French troops in the rapid dissolution of all social order and the disintegration of the institutions, strive to get away and head south. The 31 chapters are mainly connected to one another through this framework and only in places through people who have to do with people from other storylines and also extend into the second part.
The upper middle class Péricand family is run by their mother Charlotte. Her husband, who works as a curator in the state museum administration, still has to take care of the preservation of art treasures and remains behind for the time being. Ms. Péricand looks after her wealthy old father-in-law and four of her five children between the ages of 2 and 17. The eldest son is a pastor in the Auvergne , is currently in Paris and is supposed to bring a 30-strong group of orphaned welfare children between the ages of 14 and 18 to safety near his parish. They are housed in a foundation set up by the old Péricand. Charlotte wants to come to her family in Nîmes with her father-in-law, children and servants . During a stop and the hasty departure from a village caught on fire, the wheelchair-dependent father-in-law - accidentally? (P. 139) - left behind after the 17-year-old Hubert secretly left the family to join forces that were still fighting. Taken to a hospital, the dying Péricand has a notary called, to whom he dictates his will. Philippe Péricand, the pastor, is put to the test of his Christian charity by the boys' group near the Loire . He has no access to the closed-looking boys and wants to get rid of them quickly. But he loses control of the boys, who otherwise respond docile to the sounds of the whistle when they camp near an abandoned castle. Two of the 18-year-olds who want to loot the castle at night and whom he follows knock him down while the others come over and throw him out of a castle window, drag him to the pond and throw stones at him. There he gets stuck in the mud and dies. When Charlotte Péricand arrived in Nîmes in July, she found out that her father-in-law had died and that her sons Philippe had died in an accident and Hubert in a fight against the Germans at Moulins (Allier) . But before the requiem scheduled for the dead takes place, Hubert shows up unharmed.
Gabriel Corte, a recognized writer who is writing a new work, would prefer to ignore the unfortunate news and stay in Paris, where he is trying to get a seat in the Académie française so that he can be one of the 40 "immortals" like theirs Lifetime elected members are named. His lover Florence has to prepare for departure and above all must not forget the manuscript of the novel. The flight forces him to be close to people with whom he would otherwise have nothing to do and who make him disgust. He has to experience that his financial means are insufficient to find suitable accommodation for him in Orléans , for example . He contemplates leaving France via Bordeaux , but experiences so much inconvenience that he ends up being grateful for the simplest things, renouncing all privileges, simply because he is hungry and thirsty (Chapter 17). With Florence he arrives in Vichy , where the Vichy regime for the “unoccupied zone”, tolerated by the Germans, is formed in June . Because five of the top French writers have already arrived there. However, he wonders whether the novel he has begun still fits in with the times (p. 191).
The middle-class couple Maurice and Jeanne Michaud work in the bank of Corbin, who is associated with Count Furière, and are supposed to travel with them in the car from Corbin to Tours , where the continuation of the banking activities from a branch is planned. Maurice Michaud has been an accountant for 15 years, Jeanne has been Corbin's secretary since the beginning of the war. Her only son, Jean-Marie, was drafted into the war. But since Corbin is urged by his lover, the dancer Arlette Corail, to take her to Tours in the car, the two have to try to get to Tours by train. The train station is overcrowded, so that they try in vain to gain access and have to use the street to get to Tours on foot in the trek of the poorer people who are fleeing. They get caught in air raids, as there are also troops among the refugees, get on a military truck and experience how a train station, where a train to Tours is to be assembled, is bombed and a medical convoy is hit. In this convoy is the injured Jean-Marie, who is transported on a truck to a remote farmhouse. There he is looked after by three women from the Labarie family and is recovering mainly thanks to Madeleine's affection, which the son of the house has promised.
Jean-Marie's parents get stuck because the train tracks have been destroyed and after 14 days they return to Paris, where they try to contact the bank by letter. Not a single employee made his way to Tours. Corbin has also found no accommodation in the overcrowded and destroyed city and has lost Arlette Corail. She flees to the country with Corbin's car, where she finds accommodation in an inn and takes care of Hubert Péricand, who has fled the Germans, and whom she introduces into love.
Corbin returned to Paris, where he and Furière brought together the banking affairs that were scattered all over France and began to engage in business with the Germans. He knows his wife in the free zone and Arlette in Bordeaux . He accuses the Michauds of having reported too late and sends them the dismissal without notice, which is only softened by the fact that Jeanne manages to get 6 months' salary from Furière as severance payment.
After his recovery, Jean-Marie Michaud leaves the farm to which his son Benoît returns after he and a friend escaped from German captivity. He finds his parents again in Paris.
Charlie Langelet is a well-off 60-year-old bachelor who is passionate about his porcelain collection and who avoids being too close to his fellow men. He is one of the " happy few " (p. 141), one of the lucky few, a term that found its way into literature in Shakespeare ("Henry V") and was taken up as a leitmotif by Lord Byron and Stendhal . Selected specimens from his collection accompany him on his escape, which he is planning to Spain. In Lisbon he wants to leave " the hideous, blood-drenched Europe " (p. 51). Near Gien , who travels alone without servants, runs out of gas. There are no longer any at the petrol stations. During a rest, he succeeds in duping a young couple and getting their reserve canister. After a six-month absence he returns to Paris, without any mention of his other stations, where, after hiring new service personnel, he falls from Arlette Corail's car while walking to a meeting with friends while carelessly crossing a street has just returned from Bordeaux, is captured and dies with a shattered skull.
Dolce
The second part with the title borrowed from the music (dolce = gentle, soft, lovely) comprises 22 chapters and takes place in southern Burgundy in the center of France, not far from Moulins and Vichy still in German-occupied France on the edge of the unoccupied zone in the fictional village Bussy.
Bussy is occupied by German troops on Easter Sunday 1941. A German officer, the 24-year-old Bruno von Frank, is quartered in the large estate of the widowed Mrs. Angellier and her daughter-in-law Lucile, where he lives in the study of the captive husband, Gaston. Lucile was married by her father and moved to the Angelliers from her remote home. Gaston mistakenly hoped for an increase in his fortune through marriage and soon preferred Lucile to his former student love, for whom he bought a house in Dijon , where he spends half of his life. For Lucile, “ life in these provinces in central France [...] remains lush and unsociable; everyone lives for himself, on his estate, brings in his wheat and counts his money. Extended feasts and hunting fill up the leisure time. The market town with its brittle houses protected by large prison doors, its living rooms crammed with furniture, which were always closed and freezing to save fuel, was the epitome of civilization for Lucile ”(p. 265). While the widow Angellier shows her aversion to the German occupier, Lucile feels drawn to him and soon questions all national affiliations for herself (p. 388 f.). Bruno von Frank plays the piano and would like to become a composer, pick up Lucile after the war and go on trips with her. Lucile's mother-in-law guesses her daughter-in-law's inclinations, withdraws to her room in protest and resolves not to leave it. Meanwhile, there are further relationships between the occupiers and French women. The local seamstress confesses to Lucile that she has dealings with a German; he seems more well-groomed and sociable to her than the fellows from the area (p. 334). (See horizontal collaboration .)
As early as June 1940, the house of the Angelliers was a refuge for the Michauds, who remembered and thanked Lucile in a letter. They tell of their son's return from the war and want to know whether Gaston is home again (p. 338).
On the farm near Bussy, Jean-Marie had made the returned Benoît Labarie (from chapter 18 the name Sabarie) jealous. As a likable person from the big city, he had won Madeleine's affection and reciprocated. Madeleine is now married to Benoît, who in turn has haunted her with his jealousy since a young German officer was quartered in her house and slept in the bed in which Jean-Marie had recovered. Benoît has to cover up his escape from captivity by pretending to have returned from the unoccupied zone. He did not respond to the Germans' request to surrender all weapons under threat of the death penalty and kept his rifle. Benoît steals from the noble Montmort family based in Bussy - large landowners like the Angelliers, the man is mayor, his wife looks after welfare children and organizes parcels to be sent to French prisoners in Germany with the peasant women she despises because they are from the large landowners dependent farmers feel the shortage caused by the war situation. The Viscountess catches him and wants her husband to let the Germans prosecute him. When the Germans are looking for the rifle in his house, he kills the young officer who bears the name of a French Huguenot family . His wife Madeleine asks Lucile Angellier to hide Benoît in their house, since Frank is least suspected of being there because of the presence of officer Bruno. The widow Angellier hides it in her living room. With false information, Lucile can send papers to B. v. Get Frank with whom she can take Benoît to Paris, where he will stay with the Michauds until he has found his communist friends again (p. 435).
The German occupiers celebrate the anniversary of the victory over France in the castle gardens of the Montmorts. They are surprised by the news of the German invasion of Russia and prepare to leave Bussy for July 1, 1941. You are posted to Russia. Lucile says goodbye to Bruno from Frank and asks him to "spare your life as much as possible in memory of me" (p. 442).
Planned continuation
The third part should be called "Captivity". Némirovsky outlined the course of the plot that led to the beginnings of the Resistance movement through the meeting of people familiar from the previous novel and held captive by the Germans in Paris - Benoît, Jean-Marie, Hubert . Gabriel Corte was assigned the role of a propagandist for the Vichy regime. Bruno von Frank's death on the Eastern Front was planned. The fourth and fifth parts should have the titles "Battles" and "Peace" still provided with a question mark. Changes were also planned for “Sturm im Juni” and “Dolce”. The author found the death of Philippe Péricand too melodramatic and would have let the officer killed by Benoît live because she wanted to continue to use him as a character (see Appendix I; pp. 455–462).
people
Already in Némirovsky's last completed novel Feuer im Herbst , the beginning of the Second World War forms the background for the end of the novel, which is derived from an ominous chain of events and the behavior of the people involved in the First World War . This is exclusively about the period between June 1941 and June 1942, which in the memories of all those involved remains tied to the experiences of the First World War.
The author clearly shows who her anti-sympathies and sympathies are directed at, which she distributes in about half of the people she portrays.
Gabriel Corte, the bank director Corbin and Charlie Langelet do very badly. What she blames them for is that they make no secret of their complacency and the contempt of the great mass of their fellow human beings, including their servants or even their wives and loved ones, and above all that they are interested in the preservation of property rights, the maintenance of traditional social hierarchies and their male privileges demonstrate. In doing so, they show openly in the crisis and freed from all civilizational fetters and rules of propriety their power instinct and egoism, which are always conveyed through the handling of money. Charlie Langelet as the most useless member of society can most easily be sacrificed by the author. Joris-Karl Huysmans , next to Oscar Wilde an important point of reference in Némirovsky's literary education, had erected a monument to the figure of the decadent esthete in Against the Grain in 1894 . Corte and Corbin, on the other hand, let them survive the crisis unlearned and strengthened in the contempt of their fellow human beings and find quick get along with the new powerful, namely the Vichy regime and the German occupiers.
The noble Montfort landowning family, also ready to make quick arrangements with the occupiers, but not of as far-reaching influence as Corte or Corbin, are portrayed no less harshly, so that even in the benevolent engagement of the Viscountess only a twisted form of unsuccessful Christian charity emerges can come.
The Péricands occupy an intermediate position, with Charlotte trying to control the family's fortunes. She does it in the sense of the conservative bourgeois spirit she has acquired , which she sees not in the skeptically observed Third French Republic , but anchored in Catholic traditions, to which she submits without resistance, because " everyone has to carry his cross down " (p. 13) . On the run, family egoism quickly brings her to the limit of her neighborly love, which " like vain ornament " falls away from her and reveals " her parched, bare soul " (p. 67). Philippe is also not a convincing priest for the author. The widowed Ms. Angellier, who Némirovsky counts as part of the “ greedy, materialistic bourgeoisie ” (p. 332) , also has strong reservations . But out of aversion to the Germans, she hides Benoît Labarie, who is suspected of communism, from the Germans. Because of his jealousy and his rough manners, he is not one of Némirovsky's popular figures.
Hubert Péricand, on the other hand, is gaining more and more sympathy because he is not so committed because of his youth and can gather a wealth of experience during his absence from his family that allows him to relentlessly settle accounts with his relatives (p. 189 f.). The author's unreserved affection goes to the three Michauds, Madeleine Labarie and Lucile Angellier. They are all only superficially adapted to the constraints of the society around them and are those to which the author grants the most humane freedom. Jeanne and Marcel Michaud married against their parents' will in 1914 and found their petty-bourgeois realization possibilities in Paris in comparatively poor circumstances, but thanks to the reliability of their relationship. Maurice, above all, is characterized by a relaxed tolerance to all the adversities of the flight (“Storm in June”, Chapter 11, especially p. 69).
Madeleine Labarie and Lucile Angellier are similar in their loyalty to the circumstances in which they are forced to live, but at the same time, through their willingness to openly engage with strangers and strangers, they place a question mark behind the shackles caused by their circumstances. They have not yet encountered the corresponding possibilities for self-realization, which is why Lucile, with all her love for Bruno von Frank, insists on her distance from him. Bruno von Frank also feels destined to be a soldier for others, which is why the author, who is married like Lucile, does not let him get into an uncomfortable situation in which he, as an occupier, would have to enforce the brutal power embodied in him.
Albert the cat
Chapter 20 in “Storm in June” deserves special mention. It is night in the village where the Péricands rest and which will burn the next morning. All acting persons sleep. It is time for Albert the cat, who accompanies the family and has his bed in daughter Jacqueline's bed. So far he only knew the city. He manages to jump outside through the open window. For the author an opportunity to depict the nocturnal nature from the cat's perspective and to evoke seductive olfactory qualities. The distant sounds of war of the explosions become natural sounds that tremble the windows and briefly let fearful words whiz out of the windows. The tomcat follows his hunting instinct, catches a bird, with delight and closed lids, drinks its warm blood and eats it. At dawn he crawls back into Jacqueline's bed, while shortly thereafter the powder factory blows up and the village is set on fire. - Here Maurice Michaud's considerations seem to find their continuation from a different perspective, when he tried to figure out the people fleeing with him: “ The people around him believed that fate had it especially on them, on theirs poor generation apart; however, he remembered that there had been movements of flight at all times. [...] Nobody had ever thought sympathetically of these countless dead. For their offspring they were no more important than slaughtered chickens ”(p. 69).
reception
The fragment of the novel, which shows the first year of the war in the seemingly completed two parts, has posthumously earned the author recognition in the international literary world, which now extends to the rediscovered and reissued and almost completely translated into German as well. When the novel was published, the German feature pages agreed with French and Anglo-American literary critics that they should encounter the talent of a great writer.
The success of the book can also be explained against the background that it has been in France since the 1990s and increasingly in recent years, after decades of tabooing, which primarily affects the illegitimate children of German soldiers ( Wehrmacht child ) and their mothers living in shame (see also Horizontal collaboration ), a comprehensive investigation of the handling of so-called sentimental or horizontal collaboration, i.e. the love affairs between German occupiers and French women (cf. Commission d'Épuration ). The is in French film with Alain Resnais with 1959 Hiroshima mon amour even without consequences lasting debate preceded the zufälliger- or, significantly, by the screenwriter Marguerite Duras was moved exactly in the area, plays in the well "Dolce", namely to Nevers on the Loire.
literature
- Angela Kershaw (2012), “Fictions of testimony: Irène Némirovsky and Suite française ”, in Margaret Atack and Christopher Lloyd (eds.), Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France 1939–2009. New readings , table of contents Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp. 128-137.
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ The page numbers refer to: Irène Némirovsky, Suite française, Albrecht Knaus: München 2005. - The paperback edition published by btb in 2007 is on the same page as the hardcover, except for the afterword by Myriam Anissimov.
- ↑ Némirovsky and her family had also found refuge in Issy-l'Évêque in southern Burgundy, where they began to work on the novel.
- ↑ A name for a place with an old castle of the same name near Issy-l'Évèque.
- ↑ In the course of the novel, he is remembered more than twenty times, for example on pp. 63, 96, 109, 210, 335, 403, 422.
- ↑ See also David Golder , Feuer im Herbst , Der Fall Kurilow , The Dogs and the Wolves .
- ↑ See voices on “Suite française”. ( Memento of the original from November 6, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Also German reviews on 'Perlentaucher'.
- ↑ Cf. on this horizontal collaboration
