Hubertine Auclert: “the first French feminist” (Flora Tristan on April 7 might disagree with that descriptor!), born today in 1848. She founded the militant "Société le droit des femmes" in 1876, and in 1881 the feminist newspaper "La cito-yenne", later known as "Société le suffrage des femmes", advocating for women’s voting rights through civil disobedience.
Bio here and here; there is also a Center named for her, under the aegis of the Council of Europe, so clearly she is now recognised and respected: click here
All
the world has heard of Annelies Marie (Anne)
Frank, the teenage diarist from Amsterdam who died, alongside her
younger sister Margot,
in an outbreak of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in late
February or early March 1945. In the same camp, at the same time, there was a
young French woman eight years older than Anne,
likewise a committed diarist before her deportation, likiewise a victim of the
typhus outbreak; her name was Hélène Berr, born March 27 1921, died today
in 1945, just five days before Liberation.
"The Journal of
Hélène Berr"
was begun during her time at the Sorbonne, trying be a serious student of
English Literature even while the Nazi occupation was making life itself
unthinkable. Getting hold of a copy to read has proven very
difficult; Lib
of Cong has it, but you have to order it, and read it in situ, so that ain’t
gonna happen. Its website summarises it:
The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking
journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris, now published for the first
time, 63 years after her death. In 1942, Hélène Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish
student at the Sorbonne, started to keep a journal, writing with verve and
style about her everyday life in Paris - about her studies, her friends, her
growing affection for the "boy with the grey eyes," about the sun in
the dewdrops, and about the effect of the growing restrictions imposed by
France's Nazi occupiers. Humiliations were to follow, which she records, now
with a view to posterity. She wants the journal to go to her fiancé, who has
enrolled with the Free French Forces, as she knows she may not live much
longer. She was right. The final entry is dated February 15, 1944, and we now
know she died in Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, within a month of Anne Frank and
just days before the liberation of the camp.
But then I did find a copy, online at the Yad Vashem website, not in French though, in translation by one Jackie Metzger - though with books of this sort you really have to hear the author's voice in her own language. The Yad Vashem website made that very clear, without even saying so. This, for example:
If ever the humanity streaming off the pages of a memoir collided with the human capacity for cruelty, Helene Berr’s Journal would be the embodiment of such a collision.
Intellectually, as chronologically, years ahead of Anne Frank - imagine young Anne being able to quote Shelley and Keats and Shakespeare, and then juxtappose them with descriptions of the German deportations of French Jewry from Paris; precise quotes, deliberately, fastidiously chosen. And I am absolutely certain that she was consciously quoting Conrad's Mistah Kurtz when she closed the journal for the last time with the same word, "Horreur", repeated three times.
But the journal also has her "normal" life, listening to Chopin with her soon-to-be-fiancé Jean Morawiecki, and then doing their own version, him at the piano, her on the violin; and immediately the contrast with her own life's dark side as she opens a letter from her father, Raymond Berr, imprisoned in Drancy, the German transit camp where Jews were held before deportation from Paris.
Somehow he
evaded deportation at that time, but Hélène's certainty that it would happen
eventually recurs throughout the journal. And then it did. To Auschwitz, in
March 1944. No need to state what happened to her parents, though hard to
explain why she was not gassed with them, but sent on instead, to Bergen
Belsen.
And how did the journal survive? Saved as loose pages, she gave them, a few at a time, to the family's chef, Andrée Bardiau, asking her to keep them safe, and then find a way to get them to her fiancé. When the war ended, Bardiau tracked down Hélène's brother Jacques, who had survived the typhus epidemic and been liberated; he fulfilled the probate-vow, giving the file of pages, simply as a memento, thinking it had no other value, to Jean Morawiecki, who kept them as precisely that for the next several decades.
Then, aware of the extraordinary response to the publication of Anne Frank's diary, Jacques' niece Mariette Job tracked Jean down. He gave them to her, understanding that it was her intention to donate them to the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris for preservation, which she did in 2002. Publication followed shortly afterwards.
And in the same way, when the scientists at last complete their voyages in space, millennia from now, I suspect that they will find that the absolute beginning was just a whimper, or at the most a very small bang, issuing from the nostrils of whoever, or whatever, by that epoch, they have decided to rename the great trinity of father-God, mother-Psyche, and the human Babel-song of E that doesn't quite, or only relatively in some corners of the cosmos, equal MC squared.
At his best, Magris is the precursor of Sebald: a historian who exploits the investigation of history for the purposes of philosophy and literature; a voyager whose outward journeys are intended to reveal the inner landscape; a novelist who never ceases to be a poet manqué working in the wrong, but still the more comfortable form, of prose. As all great literature is always great despite and not because of its plot and characters, so the writing of meaningful history rests in tone and ambiance and rhythm, in its drawing of paradoxes or its challenging of conventional conclusions, in its drawing the reader into a mirror-realm where the real subject of the book becomes the reader's own perspective of his life; every great book is thus the book of the reader's soul, transformed into allegory through the process of starting out as the book of the writer's soul: a different sort of tap, drilled into a different sort of geology. And this too may be a large bang or a mere whimper.
Elsewhere in "Danube", Magris points out that a desire to change the world is as contextual as any other human phenomenon. Had he been born into it, he observes, rather than creating it himself - had he, that is to say, been a plebeian and not a patrician of the new world order - Stalin would have detested and resisted what was taking place in Communist Russia, just as Hitler would have hated and rebelled against the atmosphere in Nazi Germany (Leonard Cohen says exactly the same thing, in exactly the same words, in the 1966 CBC documentary "Ladies and Gentlemen, Leonard Cohen" - I cannot help but wonder which of the two was quoting the other, though it may simply be coincidence).
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