Let’s throw open the windows on an island, land mass of a small county, a lost kind of place between the Channel and Saint-Malo in Brittany, far from the strife of the world. One sometimes dreams of places like that, a slow life full of rituals in the port towns, watching the fisherman sail out in the morning and return in the evening, as they still do. A great tranquility descends.
May, 1938. Worn out by feverish life of Paris, two artists left for Jersey, largest of what the French call the Anglo-Normand islands. Once settled in the parish of St.-Brélade, population well under 10,000 at that time, the two pursue photography, gardening and promenades in company of their cat, Kid. They stand out in this fishing village which transforms into a beach resort in the summer months.
Claude Cahun is the assumed name of Lucy Schwob, born in Nantes in 1894. The daughter of Maurice Schwob, director of the Nantes liberal paper le Phare de la Loire, you could say she has writing (or printer’s ink) in her blood: writers Marcel Schwob and Léon Cahun are her uncle and grand-uncle respectively. Her mother’s slow descent into insanity casts a shadow over her childhood.
Moore was Suzanne Malherbe, also born in Nantes, in 1892, the quieter, less outrageous of the two. Falling in love as adolescents, the two women were together for the rest of their lives.
Cahun is a gender-bender, an elusive artist of raw self-portraits and disguises. In Paris, the two women gravitated to the avant-garde, friendly with poets and writers such as Robert Desnos and Henri Michaux. Cahun wrote, posed, took photos and participated in theatre.
July 1940. Cahun and Moore’s idyll lasts all of two years. German troops take possession of the island for use as an aerial base. The Resistance was far away; residents submitted, except, as the story goes, for two. Cahun wrote, “Here at that moment, any attempt at resistance seemed vain : organized groups were far away, gathering in England or fighting on the continent; the islanders and the new arrivals fleeing France lost themselves in inertia or collaboration.”
Both island and its inhabitants seemed to give up. Stunned as she watched the Germans take over, Claude Cahun found herself asking, “Could there be anti-fascists among them ?” The officer class was solidly German but the soldiers a mix of Germans, Czechs, Italians, anyone unlucky enough to be conscripted for the Nazi’s westward advance.
Cahun and Moore felt they had to do something. In her scrapbook, Cahun wrote, “I address myself to the unbelievers of all nations who refuse to submit to the Occupation or refuse its petty rules. The loss of direction, of feelings, of mental facilities, of conscience and will, can precede the destruction of life. The normal unfolding of things is resistance to this destruction, until finally it is defeated.” Both Cahun and Moore felt they had to do something.
They started by tearing the ubiquitous German propaganda off the walls of the town. Out for a walk in mid-July, Cahun comes across a few pages from Le Crapouillot (The Cannon) thrown on the ground. A back number, it warned of the dangers of Hitler coming to power.
Nazi slogans plastered on town walls gave her an idea: could propaganda be turned inside out, reproduced in altered form, spread wherever possible ? Counter-propaganda, producing the illusion of a mutiny in the heart of the Occupier, turning, as Cahun put it, a phantom into an organized band. The effort resonates with Cahun’s Paris work, which played with masks and identity.
In a letter to Gaston Ferdière, she described how it started: “The next morning, I went out for my walk with Suzanne. I collected empty cartons of cigarettes, wrote No End (ohne ende) in German on them in ink, crayon or a ordinary pen. Suzanne mocked me but refused to let me go out alone. She told me I was out of my mind. Once we were outside, she went further than I did.”
The two women created a phantom character, ‘the soldier with no name,’ a moniker they signed to more than six thousand pamphlets, papers, sculptures, all placed anonymously as they travelled around the island.
The pamphlets, written in the languages spoken by the occupier and those forcefully enlisted, gave the impression that mutiny was imminent. German officers began searching for anonymous dissidents among their ranks.
And so was born ‘two people’s private struggle’ that Cahun collected in her correspondence and three never-finished texts. Cahun and Moore began by leaving papers and cigarette cartons near the airport towers and runways where there were Germans in significant numbers; they cut out images from illustrated magazines, altered them and left them behind on library shelves and in window frames; they carved wooden crosses with the inscription, ‘For them the war is over,’ leaving them on Nazi grave sites; produced short pamphlets by the thousands, using carbon copies, in Czech, German, Russian, Italian, all of them signed, ‘The soldier with no name,’ sometimes sending military officials to imaginary clandestine meetings; they left bottles on the beach with rolled-up messages announcing the imminent Allied victory.
July 25, 1944. The two women are denounced and arrested. Cahun wrote: ‘We were arrested not during one of our sorties but after returning. Based on the denunciation, police showed up with a warrant. Surprised in the course of dinner, despite five experienced cops following our every move, watching our hands and our faces, we were nonetheless able to swallow all twenty of the ten centigrammes pills.’
In another account she says they knew the police were on their trail and her first words when they entered the house was, ‘Too late. Germany’s already lost.’
Suicide by phenobarbital was planned long before. After days of suffering, Cahun and Moore came around. Malherbe survived a second suicide attempt during her time in prison.
During the trial, occupying forces tried desperately to get to the truth about the Soldier with No Name. The Germans simply could not understand their confession, incapable of admitting that they had been fooled by two women, one of them Jewish. They were sentenced to a term of six years forced labor, nine months prison, and to be shot.
When the verdict was read outloud, Cahun asked the magistrate, ‘Are we to serve the nine months and six years before or after being shot?’
May 8, 1945. Cahun and Moore were freed. On Jersey, they encountered a world that carried on wearing the mask. Their house was ransacked in their absence, their work destroyed and Cahun had the disorienting experience of crossing paths with a woman wearing her clothes.
Moore and Cahun stayed. They planted flowers and vines that slowly concealed the Nazi’s fortified wall, which blocked the view of the sea from their house.
Prison time locked in a tiny cell had been hard on Cahun, who never fully recovered from the experience; she died on December 8, 1954, on Jersey. Marcel Moore committed suicide on February 19, 1972.
Their courageous revolt à deux gave the soldiers something to think about and bedeviled their superiors. Maybe the small army of conscripts bivouacked on remote Jersey only needed encouragement. It destabilized the situation, isolating the officers and sending them on pointless errands across a remote island. (Meanwhile the Valkyrie conspirators used Jersey as a preferred rendezvous, meeting right under their noses.) Given the docility of their fellow Bréladais, and their inability to go anywhere else, Cahun and Moore’s invention made a creative space for two isolated dissidents. The women were, as the English say, taking the piss out of the Nazis. All resistance begins in the imagination.
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This post began as a translation of @Loutxch’s thread, based on his article in Blast. Chapeau and thanks for permission.
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