364
PARTISAN R EVIEW
name these things were done. They fill the columns of their dailies (for–
mat: one half of one page) with stories and pictures of the camps; and
each story is another turn of the screw for the millions of anguished
French who have not yet heard from their sons and huspands in Ger–
many. (Something like two million French men and women are still
wandering about in the overturned anthills of the Reich.) As for the
rest, the dangerously endearing humanity of the enemy, they have not
yet discovered how to discuss it seriously in a general attitude of grim
exultation at
la guerre chez eux,
finally
chez eux.
Yet there are many
talented and honest writers among them, Pierre Jarry, Peyronnet, Claude
Roy, Pierre Courtade, men who realize that abstractions are useful but
that the reporter's job is to sharpen or alter concepts in accordance with
what he sees. Talking to them, one comes to feel that, intellectually at
least, the Frenchmen who were well-treated in Germany constitute
for
them
an even more difficuit problem than the typhic phantoms they
found in Buchenwald. Pierre Jarry, for example, whose passion, honesty
and culture· make him a
witness
rather than a reporter in the American
sense (most of our agency hacks and headline fabricators would consider
it a dishonor to write m well), is much concerned with the French
peasants and nco-peasants who have "colonized" Germany, i.e., settled
down on the land and in the bed of the farmer's wife. The land is rich
and beautiful, the patronne is buxom and pleasant (her husband is buried
in Russia, Italy, France or Tunisia) . These men, says Jarry, are peasants,
they can't simply leave the land, there's a crop to get in. But after?
In short, the French, who have been telling us for the past few years
that we were eternally incapable of understanding the Teuton, have
discovered on the roads and in the villages of Germany that the
guerre
chez eux
is no solution, but only the beginning of a desperately compli–
cated mess. The collapse of Germany is not simply military: it is the
dissolution of all structures, the reduction of this artificially galvanized
people to the lowest possible social unit (e.g. the frequent stories of
neighbors pillaging each other) : the family. Where there was a menace,
there is a vast milling emptiness. Where there was indignation and "re–
sistance," there is the abiding political problem: what is to be done?
One hears much talk in Paris, these days, of the general lassitude
of the country: the French have surely had enough of physical terror,
material difficulty and moral ambiguity to last them forever. Yet the
Parisians came out in large numbers to vote, last Sunday, despite the
confusion of the electoral lists (which the minuscule press did nothing
to clear up, of course) and the general feeling that these, municipal,
elections-held before the return of the vast majority of the prisoners–
could not materially affect the situation. The results surprised everyone
and not least the Communists, who were the principal victors of the day.
The new party of "Christian Democrats" (Schumann, Bidault, Teitgen
etc.) made a triumphal debut, and the Communists promptly announced
