How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation Frederic Spotts Yale University Press, 283pp, 25 What happens when artists, writers and intellectuals are looking down the barrel of a gun?
How should the members of what Frederic Spotts calls the “artistic community” behave if and when they find themselves under occupation by a hostile enemy conqueror? The question is no doubt being asked now in Baghdad, but it was last posed most directly in western Europe in Paris in 1940, when an entire generation of artists and intellectuals who, until then, had prided themselves on leading the intellectual capital of the world found themselves under Nazi occupation. So, what to do? Publish what you think and possibly be shot? Stay silent and be accused of passive collaboration? Or collaborate and simply be damned? It is somewhat reassuring to discover, as The Shameful Peace shows, that there were no easy answers to this dilemma. Part of the problem at the time was that no one quite understood what the consequences of the occupation would be. Many of the hardcore avant-gardists, such as the surrealists, fled at the German advance, fearing immediate execution for their communist sympat
Related Questions
- How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation Frederic Spotts Yale University Press, 283pp, 25 What happens when artists, writers and intellectuals are looking down the barrel of a gun?
- What contributions did the French military make towards the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II?
- How Czech resistance to Nazi occupation ?
