Le silence de la mer

"The third book is a book which in French is called Le Silence de la mer (1942). In English, it is translated as The Silence of the Sea . It was written by a French journalist, essay-writer and illustrator who had joined the Résistance during the Second World War , and who, in fact, co-founded the publishing house, Les Éditions de Minuit , the Midnight Publishers. That publishing house operated within the Résistance in a clandestine way throughout the war. This particular book was its very first publication. This publisher still exists: it is one of the best known and most prestigious in France. The book describes the ways in which the narrator, who is an elderly man, and his niece, are affected by the presence in the house, for six months, of a German officer who has been billeted there. I’ll say a bit more about the novel, but there is an interesting fact about it. It was translated into English and turned into a television play; that television play was actually shown by the BBC on the 7th June 1946, the day the BBC television resumed its broadcasts after the Second World War; they had stopped in 1939. I managed to find the original schedule for that day, and I can tell you that it was shown at ten past nine in the evening. I would love to find the footage, and in fact I will write to the BBC to ask whether it’s possible. “Britain…has not known an occupation for many, many centuries….whereas France was occupied, by the Germans, on three different occasions” The book is not very well known in Britain, but it’s extremely well known in France . The reason why it’s not very well known in Britain is the obvious one that Britain, apart from the Channel Islands, has not known an occupation for many, many centuries, not since the Normans; whereas France was occupied, by the Germans, on three different occasions: 1870, northern France during the First World War, and most of the country during the Second World War (with Italian forces occupying the South East). The experience of occupation is absolutely central to contemporary French culture. I also think, as a French person residing in Britain—I’ve lived in Britain for most of my adult life—that there are very important differences between the ways the French perceive the Second World War, and the ways the British perceive it. To my mind, the single most important factor that explains those differences is the occupation. As you can see, I have semi-autobiographical reasons for choosing the book, in that broad narrative of being French and living in Britain. I have an even closer, more local autobiographical reason, which is that my maternal grandmother and her family, for four years, between 1940 and 1944, had to share their house with five German soldiers at any one time, two of whom stayed for about two and a half years. Now that house, my family’s house, had only one kitchen, one staircase, one entrance door. The soldiers were billeted on the top floor, but they had no choice but to go in through the main door to go up to their bedrooms. So, when I first read the book, that spoke to me. “The facts of the occupation in the Channel Islands are not very well known in Britain, which is regrettable” But I also think that the book should have profound interest for anyone who is thinking about war—above and beyond those not particularly interesting autobiographical details—which is that we think of war as a theatre where the actors of the war are constantly confronted with moral dilemmas. But occupation, particularly this kind of occupation where the enemy lives in such close proximity with the occupied population, is one of the worst dilemmatic ways in which a war can be conducted. The novel shows that very well. It’s dilemmatic at the level of very simple, but very concrete, daily decisions. So, we have this narrator, who lives with his niece, we don’t know why they live together, it doesn’t really matter. One day, there’s a knock on the door and this very good-looking, extremely polite, French-speaking, very cultured German officer presents himself. He’s been billeted in the house. The first decision that they have to make is whether to allow him to use the main entrance as a way into the house – or whether to ask him to use the kitchen entrance. He actually offers to use the kitchen entrance, he’s sensitive enough to the difficulty to make that offer. The narrator decides, without saying it explicitly, that he’s not going to lock the main entrance. This is where it gets interesting. There are two reasons behind his decision: first, he says that he doesn’t want the presence of that officer to change anything at all of their daily life and the organisation of their household. But he also says, explicitly, that he could never bear to give offence to another human being, even if that other human being happens to be an enemy. Already they have to make that decision, knowing that by allowing the officer to come in through the main door, which is the door that they use, they might be described by him and by other people in the neighbourhood, as being very friendly to the soldier. That might be problematic. The second decision they have to make is whether to talk to him. They never do, until the very, very end. Only at the very end do they talk to him, and then only very briefly. For six months, almost every night, he comes into the living room, he warms himself by the fire, he shares details about his life, he shares his views of a dream of an alliance between Nazi Germany and cultured France. They never respond, not a single time. They don’t look at him, they don’t show him that they are aware of his presence in any way. That, too, is very interesting. They had to decide, in fact in the same way as my family had to decide, whether to say ‘hello,’ whether to say ‘come in,’ whether to say ‘goodbye,’ whether to engage in conversation. They decide not to. I was always very struck by this. That’s why the book is called Le Silence de la mer : you remain silent, but, underneath, the sea is bubbling with suppressed feelings of anger, of sympathy, of compassion, of love. We learn that the niece, despite herself, falls in love with the German officer, and he falls in love with her. That’s never acknowledged explicitly. I’ve always found this novel very powerful because it shows how important, and difficult, morally speaking, those decisions are, which we all have to make under those circumstances: whether or not we should treat the enemy—and in this instance it’s an enemy who lives with you—mostly as an enemy, mostly as a human being, or as a mixture of both, where we can’t separate out anymore that strand in him which is the enemy, and that strand in him which is the human being. That’s why I chose the book. No, no there isn’t. What you might have detected is the fact that I don’t know anyone who’s ever heard of it in English. I think the reason why that is, is that the British and the Americans have not really been subjected to military occupation in living memory. They have occupied, but they’ve not been occupied, except of course, for the Channel Islands – but the facts of the occupation in the Channel Islands are not very well known in Britain either, which I think is regrettable."