And the Show Went On

Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris

By: Alan Riding

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

In the weeks after the Germans captured Paris, theaters, opera houses, and nightclubs reopened to occupiers and French citizens alike, and they remained open for the duration of the war. Alan Riding introduces a pageant of 20th-century artists who lived and worked under the Nazis and explores the decisions each made about whether to stay or flee, collaborate or resist.

We see Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf singing before French and German audiences; Picasso painting and occasionally selling his work from his Left Bank apartment; and Marcel Carné and Henri-Georges Clouzot, among others, directing movies in Paris studios (more than 200 were produced during this time).

We see that pro-Fascist writers, such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Robert Brasillach, flourished, but also that Camus's The Stranger was published and Sartre's play No Exit was first performed - 10 days before the Normandy landings.

Based on exhaustive research and extensive interviews, And the Show Went On sheds a clarifying light on a protean and problematic era in 20th-century European cultural history.

©2010 Alan Riding (P)2010 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A stark account of how we act when evil enters our door." ( Kirkus)

In Defeat, Shame, Sacrifice, and Subversion

The story of how a great nation with a superlative life in art, writing, theater, cinema, and salons succumbed to collaboration with a ruthless occupier. You will find many world-famous names here, from Picasso to Sartre, Camus to Gide, Piaf to Chevalier. All in some fashion gave aid and comfort to the enemy, and in the worst cases openly called for France to fall in line with the Germans, who looted the art museums and heavily censored entertainments even while keeping cultural life alive, albeit in semi-consciousness. While the four years and two months of Nazi control over Paris spawned a resistance movement that played a major role in the liberation of the City in August 1944, the French cultural elites still had much to answer for. So many played along with German persecution of Jews and Communists that many French men and women were left to face harsh justice when the Allies drove the Germans out.

This is an explanation of the toxic undercurrents that swept away the Third Republic and installed "Petainism", or collaboration in its place. Under Marshall Petain, many French artists and writers tried to recast the country as a loyal supplicant to the harsh, vicious overlords who occupied Paris and two-thirds of Metropolitan France. The gambit failed. Millions of French soldiers remained prisoners of war in Germany. A million French citizens perished in Nazi death camps. French men and women with Jewish ancestry were hunted down and rounded up, sent to the camps or slaughtered by the Nazi SS and Fascist Milice, a wholly French terror organization.

A half century ago. Marcel Ophuls' documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity, portrayed the real story of France under Nazi occupation. This book is like an expanded footnote to that epic work.

So well researched

I am grateful to the author Alan riding for his book and the show went on. I think of the book as the description of the cross roads for western civilization in the 20th century.

I couldn't finish it

There is some good info here and I wanted to like it but it is so detailed that it even exhausted a history geek like me.
Too bad there's not an abridged version.