Free And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding Page B

Was the absence of occupation
And we complained we had none
Well, now I believe we have one. 1
    Another instructed listeners to read between the lines:
So in what we say, it’s up to you
To look for what we mean
And think: “If he has not said it
I understand … what he meant to say.”
    All stage texts and lyrics had to be approved by the Propaganda Staffel, but German officials were surprisingly flexible where Germany was not involved. They allowed the comedian Jacques Grello to mock the mudslinging of collaborationist newspapers when he observed that surely one of them must be telling the truth, but which? And Jean Rigaux was authorized to make fun of the Italians, who were occupying part of southeastern France. The story is also told of two comedians, Raymond Souplex and Jean Rieux, who were summoned by the Propaganda Staffel and asked for the text of a prewar sketch ridiculing Hitler. They claimed they had no text and were therefore ordered to act it out. When they did so without cuts, theGerman officer congratulated them on being honest. 2 Less fortunate was Rieux’s colleague Georges Merry, with whom in November 1940 he wrote a revue for the Théâtre des Nouveautés called Occupons-Nous (another pun on the occupation, this time meaning “Let’s keep busy”). Later in the war, Merry was arrested for using a radio variety show to send coded messages to a resistance group; deported first to Buchenwald, he died at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, in Germany.
    In practice, much of the comic material written for the stage simply satirized the daily lives of Parisians as they went about juggling ration cards and the black market, riding bicycles after years behind the wheel or trying to make old clothes look presentable. Little wonder that middle-class Parisians felt at home in music halls. They knew many of the songs, they knew some of the jokes, they could have a night out—even a warm night out in the winter—and forget their troubles. Michel Francini, a music-hall actor who was back in Paris by mid-July, recalled performing mainly for French audiences, starting with his first job after the occupation, the revue 1900 , which opened at the Théâtre de l’Étoile on September 10, 1940. “Crowds of people came,” he said. “Why? To go out. There hadn’t been deaths in Paris. It was a French revue. And the public was almost entirely French. It lasted five or six months. Then I did a cabaret show in Reims for two weeks, where there were three French and two hundred Germans. They didn’t find me funny, but they liked the girls.” 3
    Certainly, for many German soldiers, to see half-naked dancing girls was the best reason for going out at night. And to do so in Paris was one of the unspoken rewards for soldiers who were allowed to spend a few days of R & R in the jewel of the occupied cities. For tips on where to go, soldiers could turn to the German-language newspaper Pariser Zeitung , which noted that Tabarin offered the most erotic show. And if by the end of an evening they wound up in a brothel, this, too, fitted into the Paris of their dreams. The city’s best-known brothels, Le One Two Two, at 122 rue de Provence, on the Right Bank, and Sphinx, on the Left Bank, were probably out of their price range. There German officers, French collaborators, clandestine resistance agents, black market operators and artists of all kinds, including women, met for drinks, gossip, spying and entertainment (with no requirement that visitors use the sexual services on offer). Ordinary German soldiers, on the other hand, could choose among ascore of less upmarket brothels where Wehrmacht doctors monitored the health of the prostitutes.
    It was also possible to meet women more casually, as the celebrated German novelist Ernst Jünger noted in his journal. On May 1, 1941, just three weeks after being assigned to Paris by the Wehrmacht, he recorded meeting Renée, a shopgirl in a department store: “Paris offers