Vile times: Belgian interwar literature and the German occupation of 19141918 by Sophie DE SCHAEPDRIJVER Penn State University (USA) scd10@psu.edu Introduction The Great War was a tall order for the professional historiography of the interwar era. Academic historians, even those who had been mobilized, treated the war from a distance, “as a political conflict on a grand scale, best viewed from above.” 1 Privileging the diplomatic and narrowly military aspects of the past conflict, they steered clear of the hecatomb. But the war’s impact on historiography went further in that it broke the confident liberal narrative of progress. This loss left the historical imagination “sorely challenged”. 2 (As it did that of social scientists and anthropologists. 3 ) Literature, by contrast, rendered the catastrophe legible by proffering a forceful metanarrative, that of the sacrificed front generation. The canonical status today of so much World War One poetry and fiction attests to the continued dominance of this metanarrative. In spite of one huge popular success and one succès d’estime during the post-Armistice years, Belgium’s front literature has found no enduring place in the international Great War canon. This in spite of the status of “Brave Little Belgium” as an emblem of the war’s issues in 1914, or, rather, precisely because of it, as I have explained elsewhere. 4 It 1 Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, The Great War in history: debates and controversies, 1914 to the present, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 15. 2 Modris Eksteins, Rites of spring: the Great War and the birth of the modern age, London - New York, Bantam, 1989, p. 291. 3 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Combattre. Une anthropologie historique de la guerre moderne (XIXe-XXe siècles), Paris, Seuil, 2008, chapters 1 and 2; Annette Becker, Maurice Halbwachs: un intellectuel en guerres mondiales 1914-1945, Paris, Agnès Viénot, 2003, especially p. 156. 4 “Death Is Elsewhere: The Shifting Locus of Tragedy in Belgian First World War Literature”, Yale French Studies, No. 102, Belgian Memories, Catherine Labio ed., 2002, 558 should also be noted that the Belgian experience of war was, overwhelmingly, not a front experience, but a civilian one. Because of the German invasion and subsequent occupation, most Belgians experienced the war as civilians, including Belgians of military age. The mobilization rate in Belgium was 20%, as against 54% in the United Kingdom, 86% in Germany, and 89% in France; in other words, four out of five Belgian men of military age did not serve during the war. 5 Belgium’s war experience prefigured that of much of continental Europe during the Second World War; but in the context of the Great War, it remained marginal. 6 To interwar Belgian historiography, however, the military occupation, far from marginal, was a critical experience speaking to central issues of modern history. In fact, it was much less baffling than the massive losses on the military fronts. Interwar scholars confidently interpreted the past occupation as an ideological confrontation between an authoritarian, militarist empire and a flawed but valiant parliamentary democracy. La Belgique et la guerre mondiale, the 1928 Carnegie Series monograph by the medievalist Henri Pirenne, is the most forceful and systematic exposition of this point of view, but it was more widely held, and not just by historians who were francophone Liberals like Pirenne. 7 94-114. The commercial success was Martial Lekeux’ Mes cloîtres dans la tempête; the critical success was Max Deauville’s Jusqu’à l’Yser. 5 R. Olbrechts, “La population”, in Ernest Mahaim, La Belgique restaurée: étude sociologique, Brussels, Maurice Lamertin, 1926, pp. 3-66, specifically pp. 14-15. 6 I have elaborated this point in my contribution to John Horne, ed., A Companion to the First World War, London, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 7 The Flemish Catholic medievalist Alfons Fierens (1880-1921) defined the occupation in precisely the same manner. Significantly, he did so in the underground press during the occupation. These essays were reprinted after the war under the title Het Belgisch vaderland. Bijdrage tot de wijsbegeerte van de Vlaamse Beweging [The Belgian Fatherland. Contribution to the Philosophy of the Flemish Movement], Grimbergen, Katholikos, 1919, posthumous reprint 1922. Pirenne’s book appeared in 1928 under the title La Belgique et la guerre mondiale [Belgium and the world war], Paris-New Haven, 1928. Other examples are works by the sociologist Ernest Mahaim, the jurist Fernand Passelecq, the agronomist Albert Henry, the economist Charles de Kerchove de Denterghem, and others, all contributing volumes to the Carnegie Endownment For International Peace series on “The Economic and Social History of the War”. Pirenne oversaw the Belgian volumes in this series. (On this series, published in the 1920s and 1930s, see Prost and Winter, The Great War, op. cit., pp. 110-113.) Another example of this view is a wartime study of the fears in the German army that had caused the civilian massacres of 1914, written by the young sociologist Fernand Van Langenhove: 559 Scholars who still more or less subscribed to a grand narrative of progress saw, in the experience of occupation, cause for cautious optimism. This is not to depict interwar studies of the occupation as blithely selfcongratulatory; scholars did offer nuance, voiced misgivings, and mentioned long-term damages – physical debilitation, political alienation, social resentment, economic strain. Still, histories of the occupation were essentially confident. The military hecatomb gave pause to all who tried to interpret their age; but the occupation, for all the misery it had engendered, did not fundamentally perturb meliorist views of history, since it had ended with the restoration of a parliamentary democracy, and the occupation regime had not been able to acquire much legitimacy . The historiography of the occupation addressed economic, social, and political issues in the aggregate. Dealing with structures, institutions, tendencies, and clearly defined general principles, it imposed order and legibility on the collective occupation experience. Almost by definition, the far less decipherable multitude of individual experiences fell outside its scope. Yet, at the same time, there grew an urge to tell the subjective story, stemming from the era’s intensified concepts of the self and of the individual life-path. It is this heightened sense of the irreducibility of the individual experience that explains the proliferation of copy during and after the Great War, in all belligerent societies. 8 In Belgium, the subject of individual lives and of concrete life caught in the occupation moved many to write, resulting in a multitude of published and unpublished work by professional and occasional authors - diaries, memoirs, local chronicles, institutional histories, poems, secular hagiographies, plays, sermons, plaquettes, collections of jokes or popular songs in dialect, underground journalism, and various other types of text. It is not always Comment naît un cycle de légendes. Francs-tireurs et atrocités en Belgique, LausanneParis, Payot, 1916; translated into English as The Growth of A Legend: A Study Based upon the German accounts of Francs-Tireurs and “Atrocities” in Belgium, New York – London, G.P. Putnam’s Sons – The Knickerbocker Press, 1916. On this remarkable study, see Marc Bloch, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre” [1921], reprint in Annette Becker et Étienne Bloch, eds., Marc Bloch: L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance, Paris, Gallimard, 2006, pp. 293-316, especially pp. 306-310. 8 Christophe Prochasson, “La littérature de guerre”, in Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker, eds., Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre 1914-1918: Histoire et culture, Paris, Bayard, 2004, pp. 1189-1201, especially p. 1189; Sophie De Schaepdrijver, “We who are so Cosmopolitan”: The War Diary of Constance Graeffe, 1914-1915, Brussels, Archives Générales du Royaume, 2008 (Studies on World War One, 14), pp. 15-16. 560 easy to distinguish “pure” prose fiction within this extremely varied collection: there are more or less fictionalized memoirs, chronicles, diaries, and biographies. When it comes to testimonies on the war experience, the distinction between account and story is arbitrary and artificial. In addition, prose fiction proper (to the extent that there is such a category) also assumes many forms: novels, novellas, short stories, variations on folk-tales, allegorical tales written for children, and so on. Only two literary works of the interwar years remain in print today. Perhaps not coincidentally, both are childhood memoirs: Les enfants bombardés [Shelled Children] (1936) by the Walloon schoolteacher and poet Georges Linze (1900-1993), and Kinderjaren [Childhood] (1938) by another schoolteacher, the Flemish writer NorbertEdgard Fonteyne (1904-1938). No Belgian novel of the occupation acquired the enduring visibility and success of Invasion 14, Maxence Van der Meersch’s great 1935 novel of the occupation of northern France. 9 I will not dwell on the possible reasons for this, apart from pointing to the relatively inchoate nature of novelistic endeavors in Belgium. The more or less realistic novel, firmly anchored in place and time, was not a genre in which Belgian writers – of either language – excelled throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 10 Suffice it to say that the prose fiction on the occupation of Belgium in 1914-1918 constitutes an unsung corpus of forgotten, out-of-print, and unstudied books, written by authors so minor that in some cases even the most basic biographical information is lacking. 11 There is no inventory. 12 Nor is there much in the way of 9 The work of Van der Meersch (1907-1951) was a critical and commercial success in the interwar years. He obtained the Goncourt in 1936 and is still considered relevant today. See, a.o., the articles by Christian Morzewski and Mary Barbier in the journal Roman 20-50, Vol. 43, 2007. 10 Cfr Marc Quaghebeur, Lettres belges entre absence et magie, Bruxelles, Labor, 1990, Archives du Futur series; and Michel Biron, La Modernité belge: littérature et société, Bruxelles-Montréal, Labor – Presses Universitaires de Montréal, 1994. 11 I sincerely thank colleagues for helping me to fill in biographic blanks:.Dr Thierry Delplancq on Rodolphe Parmentier, and Dr Paul Aron on Alex Pasquier. 12 In compiling my own overview, I have used thematic bibliographies (which list works on the front and on the occupation together), viz., Patrick Lefèvre and Jean Lorette, eds., La Belgique et la première Guerre Mondiale. Bibliographie Brussels, Royal Army Museum, 1987; Pierre-Alain Tallier and Sven Soupart, eds., La Belgique et la première Guerre Mondiale. Bibliographie. t.2 : Ouvrages édités de 1985 à 2000, Brussels, Royal Army Museum, 2001. I have used literary histories, most prominently Gustave Charlier and Joseph Hanse, Histoire illustrée des lettres françaises de Belgique, Brussels, La 561 systematic analysis, though I would like to make an exception for the pioneering work by Frederik Deflo about Flemish World War One literature (front, occupation, and exile literature), and for the enlightening essay on Georges Linze by the stylistician Madeleine Frédéric. 13 On an earlier occasion, I have been able to take a closer look at the francophone literature of the occupation. 14 The present essay is a first attempt to analyze francophone and Flemish works on the occupation together. It is based on a corpus of thirty-six novels, novellas, short stories and shortstory collections, and fictionalized memoirs – half of them Flemish, half francophone. 15 These works all deal with occupation themes, not with the front experience or with Belgians in exile. For purposes of surveyability, Renaissance du Livre, 1958; Henri Liebrecht and Georges Rency, Histoire illustrée de la littérature belge de langue française (des origines à 1925) Brussels, Vanderlinden, 1926; and especially the exhaustive and didactic two-volume work by the priest Camille Hanlet, Les écrivains belges contemporains de langue française 1800-1946, Liège, H. Dessain, 1946. For Flemish literature, I have studied B.F. Van Vlierden, Van “In ‘t Wonderjaer” tot “De Verwondering”: een poëtica van de Vlaamse roman, Antwerpen, De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1974; M. Rutten and Jean Weisgerber, eds., Van “Arm Vlaanderen” tot “De Voorstad Groeit”: de opbloei van de Vlaamse literatuur van Teirlinck-Stijns tot L.P. Boon (1888-1946), Antwerp, Standaard, 1988. I have also used bio-bibliographical dictionaries such as the very useful Dictionnaire des littérateurs, compiled by François Closset et al., Brussels, Vauthier, s.d. [1946], and Eugène De Seyn, Dictionnaire des écrivains belges. Bio-bibliographie, Bruges, Excelsior, 19301931, 2 volumes. For literature in Dutch, I have perused the massive three-volume Lectuur-Repertorium compiled by Joris Baers for the association of Catholic Flemish libraries (Antwerp, Vlaamsche Boekcentrale, 1952). Finally, I have relied on the thematic index-card holder of the Royal Library in Brussels (offering serendipitous finds unavailable to the user of the electronic catalog), and I have come across occupation works in second-hand bookstores absent from all bibliographies. 13 Frederik Deflo, De literaire oorlog. De Vlaamse prozaliteratuur over de Eerste Wereldoorlog [The literary war. Flemish prose literature on the First World War], Aartrijke, Decock, 1991; reprint as theme issue of the journal Kreatief, 1998, Vol. 3 / 4. Madeleine Frédéric, “Lecture”, in Georges Linze, Les enfants bombardés [1936], Brussels, Labor, 2002, pp. 145-180. On Flemish literature, H. Van Hoecke, De Eerste Wereldoorlog als thema in het Vlaams verhalend proza [The First World War in Flemish narrative prose], Brussels, Royal Army Museum, 1969, though dated and abstract, remains of some interest. 14 Sophie De Schaepdrijver, “Grands coeurs et rancoeurs: les fictions d’occupation en Belgique” [Idealism and Rancor: Novels on the Occupation in Belgium], in Pierre Schoentjes, ed., La Grande Guerre, un siècle de fictions romanesques [The Great War: A Century of Novelistic Fiction], Genève, Droz, 2008, pp. 183-204. 15 See the list at the end of this chapter. 562 the list excludes local chronicles and published war diaries, even those written by recognized authors. It is difficult to generalize on this corpus: it contains both works of a symbolic bent and realist narratives, both four-page sketches and romans-fleuve, both detached, ironic “slices of life” and fiercely militant romans à thèse. It ranges in style from the ostensibly unaffected to the high modernist, and in intended audience from the readers of popular feuilletons to the literary-magazine set. For all that, give or take a few exceptions, three common characteristics seem to run through this literature. First of all, unsurprisingly, it addresses individual or smallgroup experiences in wartime, as is the province of literature; by and large, these works deal with the intersection between the individual’s path and the “historic” event. Second, literature looked for heroes and heroism; professional historiography, by and large, did not. To the extent that there are “heroes” in Pirenne et al., they tend to be symbols of civic values expressing clear political principles, such as Adolphe Max, burgomaster of Brussels, or Cardinal Mercier. There is no space in these histories for the self-immolating subaltern of unexpressed beliefs - for the likes of, for instance, Gabrielle Petit, a nameless sales-girl executed in 1916 for spying. Exhumed, in more senses than one, after the Armistice, Petit in 1918-1923 was the object of a fervent patriotic cult; she became an emblem of the “spirit of sacrifice” of the humble. 16 By contrast, she barely appears in scholarly historiography; nor do other fusillé(e)s. This is not because historians were unacquainted with the tragic face of the past war. Rather, the absence of self-immolating heroes in historiography is due to a certain detachment from what recent First World War historiography has called “war culture,” viz., a set of beliefs in which death is transvalued into a choice and a destiny, and sacrifice is the supreme virtue. Anther reason for the absence of heroes, saints, and martyrs is that the story told by historiography did not need them; the cause of Progress was its own justification. Whether or not individual Belgians behaved in an exemplary manner scarcely mattered. Nor did the behavior of the community of Belgians matter. This relates to another specificity about war literature. Much of the prose 16 Sophie De Schaepdrijver, “Brussel: het monument voor Gabrielle Petit. Sterven voor het vaderland,” [The Gabrielle Petit Monument in Brussels: to die for the fatherland] in Jo Tollebeek et al., eds., België: een parcours van herinnering [Belgium: An Itinerary of Memory], Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008, vol. I., pp. 220-233. 563 fiction studied here tends to dwell, at considerable length, on rancor among the occupied. Historiography by no means obscures how the occupation had soured relations between urban dwellers and country people, between the refugees and those who had stayed behind, between war profiteers and the impoverished majority, and, of course, between Flemish participants in German policies (“activists”) and their fellow citizens, Flemish and francophone. But ultimately, in historiography, rancor is an epiphenomenon; the significant pattern is the occupation regime’s inability to gain legitimacy among the mass of the population. In many novels and stories, by contrast, rancor is the pattern , the lesson to be drawn, the real legacy of the occupation. In what follows, I will explain the three characteristics of the “occupation corpus” at greater length, starting with the subjective gaze, then assessing the theme of rancor, and ending with a look at the theme of heroism. “In Darkness”: the subjective gaze Literature’s gaze on the occupation is almost by definition subjective. Interwar historiography trains a structural gaze on the past occupation, defining it as an episode in national history. A long, hard episode to be sure – but still a clearly-delineated episode with a beginning and an end, lending itself to interpretation as a kind of test, victoriously sustained by the nation, and by the liberal principles represented by the nation. 17 In fictional narratives, by contrast, the occupation of 1914-1918 represents lost time; time out of time as far as concrete individual lives are concerned. “One doesn’t live in times like these,” wrote a woman in occupied Brussels 18 – and that sentiment would be echoed by many a fiction writer. Van een verloren zomer [A Lost Summer] is the expressive title of a series of impressions of daily life during the first weeks of the 17 A confident finalism that would endure into the second postwar era: in 1958, the Dutch historian Jan Romein defined the two German occupations as a test which “Belgium, has a nation, as brilliantly stood”. Jan Romein, “Inleiding tot het Twaalfde Deel,” Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden deel XII, In de schaduw van twee wereldoorlogen 1914-1945, Zeist-Antwerp, De Haan-De Standaard, 1958, pp. IXXXVII, p. X. 18 Caroline Graeffe Ellis, letter to her sister Constance, October 27, 1915. Cited in Sophie De Schaepdrijver, ed., “We who are so cosmopolitan,” op. cit., p. 466. 564 war, written by the famous Flemish naturalist novelist and playwright Cyriel Buysse (1859-1932). 19 Equally telling is Dans les ténèbres [In Darkness], the title of a postwar novel of the occupation years by the lawyer Alex Pasquier (1888-1963). 20 The protagonist of this book is Julienne Restier, a beautiful young officer’s wife whose husband is at the front. Lonely and depressed in occupied Brussels, she cannot even find solace in novels: “the plots were too ingeniously constructed and always ended well, whereas her story had no shape at all, and no ending either, 21 and was oppressed by an excessively long ordeal…” (p. 191) Her story is no story, it lacks all cohesion, all is randomness, bafflement, groping in the dark and helplessness, while time goes by and she loses her beauty for no reason whatever. Men, too, are condemned to passivity. Thus the schoolteacher Jean Clarambaux, protagonist of La Rafale [The Squall], a voluminous 1933 novel by Jean Tousseul (1890-1944; pseudonym of Olivier Degée), a former stone-cutter who had risen to the post of drama critic of the Socialist daily Le Peuple. 22 The Squall paints the life of a village in the Meuse valley during the occupation. Clarambaux, like Julienne Restier, has been separated from his beloved by the war. His fiancée has fled the occupied country and lives in the unoccupied corner of Belgium behind the front – where she betrays him with a soldier in the Belgian Army. The humiliated masculinity of the civilian vis-à-vis the soldier is unmistakeable, though it must not be forgotten that the cheating woman is a trope in front literature as well. Though the civilian living under occupation does not face death on a daily basis, he is, like the front soldier, exiled from life. Clarambaux’ war years are a time of mere existence, in which he does not live; years in which “the days go by, desperately empty,” and he finds himself occasionally startled to find that entire months have passed him by. (pp. 106-107) The entire village feels this way. “One drifted. Would one still be alive in six months’ time? In 19 Cyriel Buysse, Van een verloren zomer, Bussum, C.A.J. Van Dishoeck, 1917. This book was published in the neutral Netherlands. 20 Alex Pasquier, Dans les ténèbres, Paris, Eugène Figuière & Cie, 1921. The book was published under the rather transparent pseudonym Alix Pasquier. 21 N.B. all translations are done by the author of this chapter. 22 Jean Tousseul, La Rafale, Brussels, Les éditions de Belgique, 1933 (This is the fourth volume in Tousseul’s novel cyclus Jean Clarambaux.) 565 two months’ time?” (p. 108) The village lies in the zone of the great civilian massacres of the namurois region of August 1914. The opening chapter explains that the trauma of the invasion has prematurely aged most of the adults, and sapped their life-force irremediably (pp. 35-45). Daily life still offers routine consolations: the vegetables grow, people pass evenings together. Still, the village seems to have slid outside of time, drifting like an island (pp. 127, 193). “People lived like automatons. Those days had ceased to count; they had been offered up.” (pp. 171, 185) In September 1918, after four years, the school-teacher muses: “Had we really lived since [the beginning of the war]? No. We had let ourselves be shunted about by events. (…) It seemed to him that the country would never again emerge from darkness”… (pp. 228-229) It should be noted that Tousseul’s novel does restore a sense of order and of modest movement; like Invasion 14, if in a much more subdued vein, the book transcends the war years’ bafflement even as it narrates it – because it narrates it. This creation of order in the novelistic universe is made possible by distance over time: earlier works of fiction on the occupation offer a much more confusing and confused chronology. It could also be due to Tousseul’s confidence as a writer. The works of his confrère the Antwerp novelist Lode Zielens (1901-1944), who like Tousseul had moved up from the working class, offer a shakier grasp of time and place. Still, many accents are similar. Zielens’ 1930 Het Duistere Bloed [Dark Blood], which touches on both war and postwar themes, has its protagonist, Karel, a dockworker (as Zielens himself had been) claim that he does not mind being deported to Germany as a forced laborer: “it answered my most secret desire: to go away from here – to go anywhere – it did not matter where, as long as I could be active”. 23 (Given the harsh treatment of forced laborers, this may be more of a postwar definition of occupation ennui than a representative reflection on a deportee’s feelings; Zielens himself, born in 1901, would have been too young to have known forced labor.) The West Flemish drama Polder by Norbert-Edgard Fonteyne (the author of the aforementioned Childhood) offers another example of hopeless waiting: the protagonist, Elza, misses her husband and rues the passing of time. “God only knew how many summers and winters she would still have to wait for her husband.” Alone, struggling, and yearning for a man, she ends up, like Julienne Restier, by becoming the mistress of 23 Lode Zielens, Het Duistere Bloed, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1930, p. 67. 566 a German, and somber drama ensues. 24 A young boy in Het Wrede Spel [The Cruel Game], another fictionalized childhood memoir, set like Polder in occupied West Flanders, does all he can to keep his mother from having relations with men while his father is away, trying to “approach Father’s heroism through sacrifices” – but in the process committing “irreparable cruelties” towards the mother. 25 Under the occupation, all action, even the best-intentioned, is problematic. “Certain Social Facts”: Rancor Among the Occupied “As a historian of everyday life,” wrote Pierre Broodcoorens (1885-1924) in the introduction to his occupation novel Boule-Carcasse, “I have had to mention certain social facts that happened in front of me.” By “certain social facts,” he meant war profiteering, of which he drew an incensed picture: “Next to the aristocracy of thought and feeling, next to so many victims, there is the abject rabble of traffic and profit - farmers, traitors, and hoarders complacently building up their appalling fortune behind the infamous wall of German baionets. They are the accomplices of the invader; they help him martyrize and pressurize the honest mass of workers, petits bourgeois and intellectuals.” These injustices among the occupied were, Broodcoorens argued, the novelist’s true subject. The occupation regime was not. Stressing his hatred of the regime’s oppression and extortion, Broodcoorens yet declared that dwelling on these matters would detract from the novelist’s duty to be impartial: “Like the scientist, the novelist must divest himself of patriotism as he enters his study.” 26 24 Norbert-Edgard Fonteyne, Polder, Antwerp, De Sikkel, 1937, p. 42. Gaston Duribreux, Het Wrede Spel, Leuven, Davidsfonds, 1960, p. 187. Duribreux (1903-1986) wrote another fictionalized memoir of childhood in 1914-1918: De Grote Hemme [The Big Hemme, the name of a large farm near Nieuwpoort close to the frontlines], Leuven, De Clauwaert, [1950] 1952. 26 “Avant-propos,” Boule-Carcasse, Brussels, L’Églantine, 1928, Vol. I, quotations pp. IV, II. This two-volume novel about a Flemish village under the occupation (written in French) was not published until four years after Broodcoorens’ death, by a Socialist cooperative. The book was started and possibly finished during the war; Broodcoorens had dated his introduction August 7, 1918, which may or may not be apocryphal. 25 567 Broodcoorens stood at some remove from the patriotic “home front”. So did Tousseul and Pasquier. 27 But their emphasis on tensions among the occupied, not on hostility between occupied and occupier, was shared by most authors, even those whose patriotic credentials had never been questioned. Throughout the corpus, with rare exceptions, 28 the occupied community is portrayed as anything but a community. It is, instead, a hobbesian dog-eat-dog universe, where compassion and solidarity are rare, and all manner of social pathologies – cheating, lying, grabbing, stealing, denouncing – flourish. Belgian wheelers and dealers and the compatriots they victimize are described with a wealth of detail. The Germans, by contrast, remain sketchily-drawn archetypes: the boorish, sausage-chewing soldier, the supercilious monocled Prussian officer, the Goethe-quoting, war-deploring Good German. This lack of descriptive depth is partly due to the fact that, to a large extent, occupier and occupied really did live in different worlds; the alienated quality of German occupation memoirs testifies to this.29 Novelists’ predilection for chronicling greed, tensions, and hypocrisies within a community, of course, was in line with the long tradition of the nineteenth-century realistic novel. As a result of this choice of tropes, literature and historiography were at odds. While economic and social histories of the occupation did not conceal the problem of war profiteering, they emphasized the crushing weight of the occupation regime: the taxes and fines on individuals and communities, the dismantling of industries and stocks, the pillaging and destruction. In literature, these were defined as, so to speak, par for the course; the real dynamics were those of greed among Belgians. Likewise, postwar studies highlighted collective food relief efforts, while these hardly appeared in prose fiction; and those few works that did mention them, did so in a tone of scathing contempt, defining relief organizations as war profiteers’ transparent attempts to appear civicminded. 27 Sophie De Schaepdrijver, “Rancoeurs et grands coeurs”, op. cit. Such as the Flemish playwright Maurits Sabbe’s In ‘t Gedrang. Vertellingen uit den oorlog. Verhalen [In the Scramble. Tales From the War. Stories], Bussum, C.A.J. Van Dishoeck, 1915, a collection of five short stories. 29 Hubert Roland, La “colonie” littéraire allemande en Belgique 1914-1918, Brussels, Labor, 2003. 28 568 The war profiteer was, then, a key figure of scorn, allowing novelists to join a fundamental pessimism towards the market (another continuity with the nineteenth-century novel) to the wartime execration of war profit. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the war profiteer loomed large in the postwar era; angry communities exhorted the judiciary and taxation systems to rise to the challenge. 30 Novelists, then, were in tune with the public’s loathing of those who had distorted – or who were believed to have distorted - the moral economy. Significantly, novelists’ indictments of the occupation’s social upheaval were also in tune with widespread feelings of bitterness over the loss of social distinction of the salaried petite bourgeoisie and of what Broodcoorens had called “the aristocracy of thought”. In his diary, the Brussels novelist Georges Eekhoud ranted against the vulgarity of war profiteers and the loss of prestige of intellectuals. 31 His feelings found an echo in works like De vulgaire geschiedenis van Charelke Dop [The Unedifying Tale of Charley Dop], a 1923 novella by the popular Flemish writer Ernest Claes (1885-1968). 32 Charley Dop is the story of a canny war profiteer from a small town, who does business with all and especially with the Germans, and even denounces resistance agents for gain. Charley Dop does spectacularly well out of his deals. After the war, he escapes retribution and even taxation. Not only does he prosper, but he is covered in honor, being awarded the Order of Leopold. To emphasize his new gentlemanly status, Charley insists on a ceremony in French, disdaining lowly Flemish for such a solemn occasion. All around him, wartime crooks garner medals and honors, and great rolling patriotic phrases cover unspeakable corruption. Likewise, in Pasquier’s Darkness, Julienne Restier’s father-inlaw profits handsomely from the sale of adulterated goods, such as chickory mixed with sawdust. These lucrative deals at the detriment of his compatriots do not stop him from loudly voicing patriotic pieties. Thus, 30 Xavier Rousseaux and Laurence Van Ypersele, “Leaving the war: popular violence and judicial repression of “unpatriotic” behaviour in Belgium (1918-1921)”, European Review of History, 12:1 (March, 2005), pp. 3-22; ids. (eds.), La Patrie crie vengeance ! La répression des « inciviques » belges au sortir de la Guerre 1914-1918, Brussels, Le Cri/CHDJ, 2008. 31 Sophie De Schaepdrijver, “An outsider inside: the occupation diary of Georges Eekhoud”, in Serge Jaumain et al., eds., Une guerre totale ? La Belgique dans la Première Guerre mondiale. Nouvelles tendances de la recherche historique, Brussels, Archives Générales du Royaume, 2005 (Studies on World War One, 11), pp. 79-95. 32 Ernest Claes, De vulgaire geschiedenis van Charelke Dop, Blaricum, De Waelburgh, 1923, 1924. 569 one afternoon, in a Brussels café, Restier père sits summing up the month’s profits, until a conversation at the next table rouses him from his pleasurable calculations. A clean-shaven, slickly coiffed young man flirts with a woman of quite “irritating” beauty. Annoyed, Restier berates his neighbour for his ostentatious enjoyment. “Are you forgetting, young man, that the Fatherland is in mourning?” Told to mind his own business, Restier admonishes the youngster that he ought to be serving at the front. The young man promptly denounces Restier at the local Kommandantur. He is arrested for the punishable offense of “attempted recruitment”, only to be released soon after. (pp. 232-233) The scene is suffused with sarcasm; no-one escapes contempt. It reflects several of the corpus’ major themes: war profiteering, patriotic cant, the impossible situation of young men in the occupied country (automatically considered to be shirkers), and sexual desire as a generator of huge tension. There seems to be no escaping the endemic moral corrosion of the occupation. Or is there? “That Noble Soul”: Heroes The prose fiction of the occupation does have a place for the hero (the heroine is rare). But the hero does not form a sort of vanguard of the occupied, oppressed community; he does not belong to it, but stands alone, and his virtues throw an unflattering light upon society. Again, this choice of emphasis is deliberate. Recent scholarship has abundantly shown that resistance in occupied Belgium during the First World War was organized in networks. 33 Spies, publishers of underground papers, and agents of escape networks could rely on sets of connections – acquaintances of acquaintances offering lodging, storage, transmission, funds, tips, guides, disguises, fake papers, and so on: a universe of minor and major services. Published post-Armistice accounts gave lists of names. But of these networks, little trace is found in interwar novels. As always, there are exceptions to the pattern, in this case an enormously popular exception: Passeurs d’Hommes [Smugglers of Men], a 1931 novel depicting the daredevil exploits of an escape network that spirited 33 Laurence Van Ypersele, Emmanuel Debruyne and Stéphanie Claisse, De la guerre de l’ombre aux ombres de la guerre: l’espionnage en Belgique durant la guerre 14-18. Histoire et mémoire, Brussels, Labor, 2004; Emmanuel Debruyne and Jehanne Paternostre, La résistance au quotidien 1914-1918, témoignages inédits, Brussels, Racine, 2009; Jan Van der Fraenen, Voor den kop geschoten. Executies van Belgische spionnen door de Duitse bezetter (1914-1918), Roeselare, Roularta, 2009. 570 young men out of occupied Belgium to the Yser army in the first two years of the war. It was written by the successful war author Martial Lekeux (1884-1962), a Franciscan monk who had served as artillery officer during the war. In Passeurs, even the poachers operating on the Belgian-Dutch border, enlisted to help the escape operation, prove to be scrupulously honest folk. But even Lekeux, in his introduction, posited a counterpoint: the postwar era, in its pursuit of pleasure (“bars and sports”), compared unfavourably with the past “four years of idealism”. 34 Other authors located the contrast between pleasure-seeking egotism and idealistic self-sacrifice within occupied society. Darkness portrays a young resister named René. The nature of his activities remains unclear, but there is no doubt that they can cost him his life; and he is quite alone in the face of this chilling certainty. One evening, followed by the police, René realizes he is trapped: “Death! Horrible death lay in wait for him. To fall on the battlefield, in joy’s intoxicating embrace, was nothing. But to coldly await death in a barracks courtyard, the execution at a set hour… He went frightfully pale…” (p. 177) (We might observe in passing that Pasquier still represented the military front as a locus of energy, even of elation. In 1920, such a point could still be made, as other works attest. 35 This image will disappear: in The Squall, written in 1930, the front had become, and would remain, a “slaughterhouse”.) Thinking sinister thoughts, René walks through the city. It is evening; Brussels is enjoying itself. The young man reflects on the ultimate sacrifice, while all around him the outdoor terraces of cafés shine brightly, bands play, couples embrace: the contrast between lonely heroism and callous gratification is jarring. The abyss deepens in the next chapter. Somewhere in downtown Brussels, a music-hall performance has just ended; the audience floods out of the theatre, pleasurably reminiscing about the show. Suddenly, they come upon a German poster in ominous red - the color used to announce executions. The poster proclaims that the execution of René has taken 34 Martial Lekeux, Passeurs d’hommes: le drame de la frontière 1914-1915 [1931], new edition with an additional epilogue, Paris, Plon, 1932, 5. Passeurs was adapted for the cinema; see the pioneering work by Leen Engelen, De verbeelding van de Eerste Wereldoorlog in de Belgische speelfilm (1913-1939). Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2005. 35 For instance, the short stories by Cécile Gilson, Celles qui sont restées [The Women Who Stayed], Brussels, Lamberty, 1920 [printed in September 1919]. This is all the more surprising given that Gilson spent the war as a nurse on the front. On Gilson, see Sophie De Schaepdrijver, “Rancoeurs et grands coeurs”, op. cit. 571 place that very morning. “That noble soul had ceased to suffer and hope for his country! People passed before the poster, glanced at it distractedly, then went on their way. Another execution! It was becoming routine.” And they talk on about the show. “I almost died laughing.” (p. 193) The image may have been familiar to Pasquier’s readers. Brussels nightlife more or less continued during the occupation; and many a reveler may have come upon the shocking sight of a red German poster. In fact, one occupation diary paints exactly such a scene. In April 1916, the journalist Paul Max noted that he had gone out in order to give himself some courage, only to come across a scarlet affiche announcing the execution of three intelligence agents. At such moments, “your heart beats faster… and what little pleasure you might have had that evening (…) vanishes immediately.” 36 It is Pasquier’s scene – but, and this is significant, minus the indifference of the onlookers. The jarring contrast between, on the one hand, sacrifice on behalf of the community, and, on the othere hand, that same community’s indifference, is almost a literary device. It is also, implicitly, a trope of social pessimism. It questions the possibility of meaningful action on behalf of the community. The subjacent question could be: if this is the community, why sacrifice oneself for it? In Ernest Claes’ work, the dichotomy between the rare idealist and the cynical multitude against the backdrop of the occupation is emplotted very effectively. In Charley Dop, the only ones to escape the postwar moral decay are precisely those whom postwar society pilloried in the harshest manner: to wit, the Flemish “activists”. That is to say, those Flemings who, during the war, had taken positions in the occupation regime’s separatist administration, for instance at the “Flemishized” University of Ghent. Many of these men lost their civil-service and teaching jobs after the Armistice; some served prison sentences. In Claes’ telling, “activism” had been an idealist stance. He has Charley Dop make this point: “now, there was one kind of people that I have never done any deals with and those were the activists. What those people really wanted I couldn’t say. I met quite a few of them while I did my business and I don’t think any of them ever made any 36 Benoît Majerus and Sven Soupart eds, Journal de guerre de Paul Max: notes d’un Bruxellois 1914-1918, Brussels, Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles, 2006, <Fontes Bruxellæ 3>, 96 [April 20, 1916]; on this execution, see Charles Gheude, Nos années terribles, Vol. II: La domination, Brussels, Oscar Lamberty, s.d., pp. 287-293. 572 money off what they did. And after the war it turned out I was right to have had nothing to do with that sort. Not one of them made any profit from the war, and it was a good thing they put those chaps in jail.” (p. 121) Dop makes the point a contrario, and it is therefore made very effectively: the war profiteer’s contempt for activists is an implicit homage to them. For Claes, this was a reversal of position compared to the war years. In the summer of 1917, he still described Flemish activism as “an ignoble bout of position-grabbing [which] disgusts me, disgusts me more than I can say”. 37 By 1923, however, activism had been coopted into the Flemish Catholic mainstream (a crucial and very interesting development in its own right) 38 and Claes, a writer whose popularity kept rising, was a part of this culture. In Charley Dop, tellingly, resistance agents too are portrayed as so much rabble. They are not, like Pasquier’s René, examples of civic courage and saintly self-abnegation; on the contrary, they are shady figures, who undertake underground activities strictly for pay. Activists alone stand out as unsullied heroes. After the Second World War, Claes deepened the theme of activist idealism in the 1950 novella Daar is een mensch verdronken [A Man Has Drowned], which pits an idealist school-teacher sympathizing with activism against a cynical war profiteer. 39 Claes had emerged somewhat compromised from the occupation of ’40-’45; highlighting the disinterestedness of ’14-’18 activism implicitly broached the issue of collaborationist idealism. The shift in moral judgment is especially significant given Claes’ wide popularity. Other well-known Flemish novelists steered clear of the occupation as a theme altogether. The playwright Herman Teirlinck (1879-1967) did channel the folk-tale of Tyl Ulenspieghel into a picaresque-heroic account of resistance under the occupation, but this remained a symbolist endeavor, in which no recognizable modern figures 37 Quoted in Lode Wils, Lode Wils, Honderd jaar Vlaamse Beweging, Vol. 2: Geschiedenis van het Davidsfonds 1914 tot 1936, Leuven, Davidsfonds, 1985, p. 55. 38 The only in-depth study of which remains, as yet, unpublished: Christine Van Everbroeck, L’activisme entre condamnation et réhabilitation. Influence de l’activisme et des activistes sur le développement du nationalisme flamand dans l’entre-deuxguerres. Contribution à l’histoire du nationalisme flamand, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1998, 2 vols. See also Sophie De Schaepdrijver, “Les dangers de l'idéalisme: souvenirs contestés de l'occupation allemande en Belgique,” in John Horne, ed., Démobilisations culturelles après la Grande Guerre, Péronne, Historial de la Grande Guerre, 2002, pp. 114-127. 39 Ernest Claes, Daar is een mensch verdronken, Antwerp, De Clauwaert, 1950. 573 were painted; and Teirlinck was not a household name with the Flemish reading public. 40 Three former activists (two of them in Dutch exile) wrote novels on the occupation. 41 All presented activism, unsurprisingly, as honorable. At the same time, the contours of the Flemish community, in the name of which the activist “sacrifice” had been conceded, remained hazy; sacrifice had to be its own justification. In the least Agitprop of these three works, Arthur Broekaert’s (1894-1977) 500-page Roomdale’s jongelieden in de Verzoeking en in de Beproeving [The Youth of Roomdale [a Flemish village] in Temptation and Tribulation], published in 1930, action on behalf of the community remains problematic. The most melancholy, least active of the protagonists has the author’s sympathy; and the novel ends with the gloomy statement that “Flanders is still troubled and its young men still struggle and this will never End.” (vol. 2, p. 213) The possibility, then, of meaningful action on behalf of the community meets with a skeptical reception in much of the corpus, whether Flemish or francophone. In this, Belgian occupation literature stood hardly alone. Modris Ekstein’s Rites of Spring pointed out, two decades ago, that ’14-’18 represented a massive crisis in the very concept of heroism. A hero’s action on behalf of a community vanished before his conquest of empty space, of the a-social realm of air and speed; the cult dedicated to the aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh exemplifies this shift. 42 Comparable tropes surface in Belgian occupation literature. The poet Georges Linze’s 1936 childhood memoir Shelled Children stated that the war had put an end to commonly held beliefs, with technology filling the void. The text sums up a certain sensibilité quite strikingly: “All of those values we held in such contempt are being rejuvenated by the motor. Glory, fortune, audacity adjust themselves. The old attractions of 40 Herman Teirlinck, De Nieuwe Uilenspiegel in Tien Boeken of de jongste incarnatie van den Scharlaken Thijl [The New Ulenspieghel in Ten Books, or the Latest Incarnation of Scarlet Thyl] Amsterdam, Vlaamsche Bibliotheek, 1920. See Marnix Beyen, Held voor alle werk. De vele gedaanten van Tijl Uilenspiegel, Antwerp, Houtekiet, 1998. Teirlinck’s book was negatively reviewed: Deflo, Literaire oorlog, op. cit. 41 Arthur Broekaert, Roomdale’s jongelieden in de Verzoeking en in de Beproeving [The Youth of Roomdale [a Flemish village] in Temptation and Tribulation] Bruges, Excelsior, n.d. [1930], 2 vols.; Leo Meert, De Nood van ‘t Land [The Fatherland’s Distress], Amsterdam, Maatschappij voor goede en goedkope lectuur, 1924; Antoon Thiry, De Hoorn Schalt [The Bell Tolls], Amsterdam, Querido, 1932. 42 Eksteins, Rites of Spring, op. cit. 574 victory and force revive.” (p. 112) Twenty pages on, Linze picked up the theme again: “We were such sweet children. (…) They have wrecked us. All that we were ready to believe was spoiled, all that talked, was lying, all that sustained, betrayed, and all of our victories were soiled (…). Hence our sadness – and then our joy upon discovering the beauty of matter, the perfection of the wheel, the helix’ pathos.” (p. 132) No such consolation of the modern obtains in that other memoir, Fonteyne’s Childhood, posthumously published in 1938. Fonteyne, though a Flemish nationalist, held jaundiced views of his Flemish fellow citizens and how they had emerged from the occupation. Activism had been a rampart “against the waste that is materialism” (p. 87), but the juggernaut of modernity moved inexorably forward: “We are children of a time before the machine, a time before mechanization, before banalization (…). We are the last happy generation. Our ancestors had everything to look forward to, our children face nothing but an impoverished and trivialized world. We sit astride the most gigantic fault in a thousand-year-old tradition. We grew up on that frontier and gathered broken shards.” (191) Fonteyne’s lament does match Linze’s perspective on one point, viz., that the war was an era of accelerated modernity with concomitant anomie, confusion, brutality, and technology. And, for all that Linze discovered some kind of ironic comfort in fast motorcycle rides, his vision, too, at the end of the day was predominantly one of cultural pessimism. Brief conclusion Belgium’s interwar historiography and prose fiction on the German occupation of 1914-1918 have not been compared before. Nor is there any other systematic study of the Belgian “occupation corpus”, let alone a study comparing works in both national languages. The present chapter, which offers a closer look at a corpus of thirty-six works of prose fiction in both languages, cannot pretend to offer more than a start, and cannot hazard more than suggestions. The main finding is that the corpus shows a fairly consistent pattern of cultural pessimism. Both the Flemish and francophone works tend to emphasize a contrast between individual heroism and a collective moral degeneration wrought by the occupation. 575 Fiction writers’ collective verdict on the military occupation as a social experience was deeply distrustful, at odds with the metanarrative offered by postwar professional historians writing on the occupation. For the era’s historians, the occupation was a hard but ultimately well-sustained test for democracy and progress – a collective experience that allowed a certain measure of cautious optimism. For the bellettrie of the interwar years, by contrast, the occupation had been no such thing; it had been a shameful experience in the margin of the Great War, a collective event that had brought forth no collective, and had engendered – or, to be more precise, revealed - a multitude of tears in the social fabric. SAMMENVATTING Helden en gepeupel: de bezetting van ‘14-‘18 in de Belgische fictieliteratuur van het interbellum Tijdens het interbellum verschenen er in België tientallen romans (plus novellen, geromanceerde biografieën en toneelstukken) over de bezetting van ’14-’18. Dit corpus (in beide landstalen) is bijna volledig in de vergetelheid verzonken. Een studie ervan is echter de moeite waard, want deze werken leggen heel andere accenten dan de professionele historiografie van het interbellum. Hun nadruk op individuele heroïek aan de ene, collectieve morele achteruitgang aan de andere kant, verraadt een wezenlijk pessimistisch oordeel over de bezetting als nationale ervaring. ABSTRACT The hero and the mob: the occupation of 1914-1918 in Belgian interwar fiction literature Interwar Belgium saw the publication of dozens of novels (plus novellas, fictional biographies, and plays) on the occupation of 1914-1918. Presently, this corpus (in Dutch and French) is almost completely forgotten. Yet it merits a closer look, because these works present a vision of the occupation at odds with the interwar years’ professional historiography. Fiction’s emphasis on individual bravery on the one hand, 576 collective moral decay on the other, betrays a profoundly pessimistic judgment on the occupation as a national experience. 577