CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN

In appearance, it resembled a cheap mimeographed syllabus from a university course in the 1950s or 1960s. But it was anything but.

In September 1940, close to six months after Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht troops marched in triumph through the Arch de Triomphe in Paris, German authorities drew up a list of books considered to be anti-Nazi and anti-German. Many Jewish authors, and later Communist authors, found their works on the lists – eventually, there were three lists in all as the war continued and the Germans’ political fortunes changed.

The German ambassador to Vichy France, Otto Abetz, acted as the chief puppeteer in the creation of the Liste Otto, named after him. Over 1,060 books ended up on the first list. By 1943, with two more versions, the list included American and British authors as well as French and many Russian authors, for close to 2,000 more books.

To continue publishing, many French publishers – including Henri Filipacchi of Hachette – agreed to stop printing and/or selling certain books. SS officers constantly monitored libraries and bookstores, searching for forbidden works. This prompted many booksellers, such as Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Co., to close down their bookshops all together.

A partial list – in French, with blurbs and cover photos – gives readers an idea of what the Germans banned. Another French site – La liste Otto : les livres prohibés en France par l’occupant nazi – points fingers at French publishers who went along with the banning of literature. Few faced punishment after the war for their collaborative actions.

Otto Abetz, on the other hand, paid for his crimes. He’d played a large role in France besides overseeing the banning of books. He aided greatly in the persecution and deportation of French Jews. At Nuremburg, he stood trial and walked out with a sentence of twenty years. In 1954, for poor health reasons, he petitioned for release and later died in a car crash in 1958.

Although many French publishers toed the line with the Nazis, several writers turned to clandestine publishers such as Les Éditions de Minuit, which published Jean-Marcel Bruller’s Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea), concerning French resistance to the German occupiers. It’s a small book, a novella actually, with a bilingual edition reissued in 1991 by Berg. At the time of publication in 1942, the only information known about the author was their pseudonym, Vercors.* Twenty-six pages long, its message resonated with many French people for whom the only form of resistance they could take was silence in the presence of the invaders; by their continued silence with the polite Nazi officer billeted with them, the two main characters represented resistance. Les Éditions de Minuit published a total of 360 copies, which daring people shared with each other on pain of capture and/or death.

Les Éditions de Minuit went on to publish twenty more books clandestinely.

Le Silence de la Mer represents, for me, the attempts of artists and writers to awaken people to the dangerous characteristics of totalitarian rule.

Although silence plays a large role in the book – and in fact, might as well be thought of as a ghostly character – silence here represents an unwillingness to pretend that all is well with the world.

And, yes, the Nazis put Le Silence de la Mer on the Liste Otto in 1943.

There are still writers in France who do not know the antechambers and reject the slogans. They feel strongly that thought must be expressed. To act on other thoughts, certainly, but above all because, if it is not expressed, the spirit dies.
That is the goal of Les Éditions de Minuit. Propaganda is not our domain. We mean to preserve our inner lives and to freely serve our art. Names are of little importance. It is no longer a question of personal reputations. It may be a difficult path, but no matter. It is a question of man’s spiritual purity.

~ General foreword for Les Éditions de Minuit by Pierre de Lescure, inserted in the first edition of Le Silence de la Mer.

The underlying message in Le Silence de la Mer seems very, very appropriate for today’s world, where people latch onto the words and ideas of certain unsavory and demagogic individuals. Writers, journalists, artists, and other creative people must use their voices to fight against the lies and untruths circulating the globe.

*Be sure to go to this link; in great detail, it tells the story behind the publication of Le Silence de la Mer.

Note: There’s also a film version made in 1949.