Françoise Frenkel

Françoise Frenkel (14 July 1889 - 18 January 1975) was a lifelong book lover,[1] bookstore owner and author. With her husband, in 1921 she opened the "Maison du Livre français", Berlin's first specialist French book store, which she ran till 1939.[2][3]

Frenkel was Jewish. On 27 August 1939[4] she belatedly escaped from Berlin as a passenger on a special train to Paris which had been organised by the French embassy. Shortly before June 1940, which was when the invading German army reached Paris, she joined the thousands of Parisians fleeing to the south of the country. As the Nazi invaders tightened their grip on southern France she was forced to flee again, crossing into Switzerland near Annecy, on her third attempt, in June 1943.[5] She survived.[6]

She wrote an account of her adventures which was published (in French) in September 1945 by Verlag Jehebe, a Geneva publishing house that has long ago disappeared. Very few copies were produced and the book was quickly forgotten. However, 35 years after the author's death it was rediscovered in a car boot sale in southern France. "Rien où poser sa tête" ("No place to rest her head") was republished in 2015, also being translated into German for the first time.[7] It now found a wider resonance, commended by the respected political journalist Robert Fisk both for its messages and for its "abrupt, shocking yet delicate prose, cruelty and beauty combined in just over 250 pages".[8]

Life

Family provenance and early years

Frymeta Idesa Frenkel, who later changed her first name to Françoise, was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Piotrków Trybunalski, a midsized prosperous industrial town in Congress Poland, at that time a partially digested western province of the Russian Empire.[6] She had a musical education, and on completing her schooling she moved to Leipzig to study with the composer Xaver Scharwenka, which also gave her an opportunity to improve her German.[1] She then moved on to the Sorbonne in Paris where the focus of her study - later also her life's defining passion - was French literature.[8] When not studying, she spent her time engrossed by the second hand book stalls along the quais by the river near Notre Dame, and in the second hand-book shops in the city's left-bank quarter.[1] In 1918, at the end of the war, she returned home. Her family were well, but the house had been emptied by invading armies. The piano had disappeared from the living room, and in her childhood bedroom the wall hangings had been stripped, the otherwise uncovered plaster being coated with newspaper. Worst of all, the little book collection that she had started to assemble as a child had been taken, although the homemade cabinet that had accommodated it, now emptied, retained pride of place, on the floor in the centre of her room.[1]

The dedicated entrepreneuse

She returned to Paris to complete her studies, after which she took a traineeship/job in a second hand bookshop in the Rue Gay-Lussac. She loved the work and absorbed the commercial lessons provided, deciding to set up a bookshop specialising in French books back home in Poland, where Russian attempts to restore pre-war partitions had been defeated, and an independent Polish state was re-emerging for the first time since 1795. French culture and literature were respected and widely studied in Poland, especially in the south of the country, and she selected Krakow as an ideal location for a specialist French bookshop. Visiting the city to research the market forced a change of plan, however, when she discovered an abundance of well stocked book shops, many of which already offered an excellent selection of French literature, old and new. Travelling back to Paris, she interrupted her journey for an overnight stop at Berlin to visit friends. That evening she walked with her friends along the city centre streets: lingering in front of the book shop windows she noticed a total absence of French books. Her friends did not share her conviction that the absence of French books in Berlin shop windows represented a commercial opportunity, and the French Consul General also appeared determined to dampen her enthusiasm. The commercial attaché at the French embassy was no more encouraging. Four years of appalling war, accompanied by government propaganda campaigns and followed by the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles, had done nothing to encourage a love of foreign - especially French - culture.[1] Frenkel was not to be dissuaded, however. By this time she had acquired a husband, Simon Raichenstein,[6] and the two began selling French books, working from the landing between floors in a private apartment in the Kleist Street.[3] In 1921, two years after Sylvia Beach had opened "Shakespeare and Company", the first bookstore dedicated to English language literature in Paris[7] and now receiving support from the French diplomatic mission, Frenkel and Raichenstein opened the "Maison du Livre français" (literally: "House of the French Book") along the Passauer Street in a district of west-central Berlin with an above average number of Jewish residents.[3]

At least in the early years, Berlin's intellectual elite approached this new haven of francophone literature only with extreme caution, but at this time, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, there were also around 100,000 Russian refugees living in Berlin, many of whom were well educated and welcomed the chance to read French classics in the original language rather than in translation.[7] As the 1920s progressed the German customers became more numerous, notably philologists. teachers and professors, students along with a few aristocrats left over from an age when the education of young Prussian noblemen was powerfully infiltrated by French culture.[9] Diplomats and other workers from the French embassy and consulate were also frequent visitors.[7] The enterprise acquired a certain cachet, becoming a cultural focus, described by one source as "one of the top addresses for all francophiles" in the city.[3] Frenkel organised presentations and receptions for French literary stars and any other fashionable French writers when they visited Berlin. Claude Anet, Henri Barbusse, André Gide, Julien Benda, Aristide Briand and Colette herself were just a few among the notable guests welcomed at the Passauer Street bookshop during these years.[7]

Régime change

A new government at the start of 1933 changed the political context brutally. The Nazis lost little time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. The shrill populism that the NSDAP had preached in opposition now became a core underpinning of government strategy. At the heart of this was antisemitism, applied in ways that few at the time would have believed possible. During the next couple of years many of Germany's Jews - especially those who had been politically active or for some other reason had high political or commercial profiles - fled abroad or were arrested.

Frenkel's husband was, like her, Jewish.[1] He had been born in Mogilev, and belonged to a community of Jewish Russian exiles among whom memories of Anti-Jewish pogroms were still very much alive. Simon Raichenstein barely hesitated. By November 1933[8] he had fled to Paris with a Nansen passport.[1] The French authorities refused to issue him with an identity card, but they nevertheless seem to have given him some sort of residence permit.[1] In any event, he remained in France till July 1942 when he was arrested and, a few weeks later, transported to Auschwitz and murdered on 19 August.[1]

Françoise Frenkel remained in Berlin. It is not clear how much contact she retained with her husband, but she continued to run the "Maison du Livre français". The shop was already facing an officially mandated boycott in 1933, but it remained open.[6] After 1935 practical problems increased, notably in respect of obtaining necessary French currency. There was intervention from the censors and there were other political pressures.[6] Sources refer to an absence of practical backing from the French embassy.[6] On the other hand, as a Polish Jewess running a high-profile business in Berlin, apparently without influential contacts in the political establishment, it is remarkable that the book store was able to operate at all right through till 1939. There are indications that the passionate bibliophile was able to remain in business for so long precisely because her activities enjoyed the support of powerful French publishing houses and French politicians, not all of whom were at this stage committed enemies of Nazi Germany.[7]

She was still in Berlin in November 1938 to experience National Crystal Night ("Reichskristallnacht") when synagogues and the premises of surviving Jewish businesses were attacked, smashed, and ransacked. She experienced the officially sanctioned pogrom from the streets, then from her apartment, in a Jewish quarter of Berlin, and then from the front step of her book store which, miraculously, was spared.[6] As war loomed she finally accepted that there was no future left for her in Germany, and August[5] 1939 she finally gave way to the ever more urgent entreaties of the French consul in Berlin[9] and escaped from Berlin as a passenger on a special train to Paris which had been organised by the French embassy.[6] She placed her personal belongings in a heavy suitcase which a friend sent on after her in the direction of France, where they were later seized by the Nazis.[5] Back in Berlin, the remaining stock of the "Maison du Livre français" was also seized, on account of Frenkel's "racial affiliations" ("Rassenzugehörigkeit").[7]

France

Françoise Frenkel spent the next nine months in Paris where Simon Raichenstein was already living. Sources speculate that wife and husband must have met up during this time, but Frenkel's own written record is completely silent on that question.[2] With horror, Frenkel followed the news from Poland during the Autumn/Fall of 1939, desperately hoping for some sign of life from her widowed mother there.[5] On 10 May 1940 German forces invaded France and on 22 June 1940 an armistice was agreed between the French and German governments. Northern France was to be directly occupied by Germany while a Free zone in the south of the country was to be administered by a semi-autonomous puppet government (which during the next four years became progressively less autonomous).

In May/June 1940, hundreds of thousands fled from Paris in order to avoid the rapidly advancing German army, hurrying to get across the new internal frontier into the Free zone. Having failed to find anywhere to spend the night, many of the more faint-hearted would-be refugees turned round and headed back to Paris, and the roads became hopelessly blocked. Françoise Frenkel also drove south, reaching Vichy, but she found the health resort so overcrowded that she set off again, this time along the road towards Clermont-Ferrand, a little further to the south. However, this road had been blocked by a unit of the French military. Then low flying fighter aircraft from the German army started to attack the lines of cars and everyone had to leap from the cars and take cover in the ditches by the roadside.[5]

Initially French Jews enjoyed a certain level of protection under the so-called "Vichy-Régime" in the Free zone, but as the Germans tightened their grip all Jews - whether French or foreign - faced the constant threat of arrest and deportation to the death camps in Germany. Frenkel's first weeks in Vichy France were spent living in Avignon, after which she moved on to Nice. Her book described a Kafkaesque succession of encounters with demoralised and confused bureaucrats: each day she was called upon to obtain a new identity document or temporary residence permit. Information provided by officials was never complete, regulatory requirements changed every day, and the overall experience was characterised by a constantly changing mixture of acute anxieties, hopes and disappointments. Eventually a friend arranged for a Frenchman to marry her in order to provide her with entitlement to permanent residence, but the scheme dissolved into tragi-comic farce when it turned out that the selected husband wanted not just the payment agreed, but also the woman.[5]

Françoise Frenkel's memoire, 'Rien où poser ma tête', offers two things: an exciting journey of discovery of Berlin between the wars, including insights into largely unknown areas - commercial processes, court actions and the media of cultural exchange, and a report from a woman's perspective of flight and persecution in occupied France during the dark years. ... the re-emergence of Frenkel's book indicates that the years of Nazi occupation, although in the past, continue to resonate in the French present - and that we should probably expect more "literary discoveries" of this nature to emerge.

Françoise Frenkels Erinnerungen Rien où poser ma tête bieten zweierlei: eine aufregende Entdeckungsreise in das Berlin der Zwischenkriegszeit, mit Einblicken in bislang weitgehend unbekannte Räume, Agenten, Prozesse und Medien des Kulturtransfers, und: einen Bericht aus weiblicher Perspektive von Flucht und Verfolgung im besetzten Frankreich der années noires. ... die ‚Wiederkehr' von Frenkels Buch, dass die Okkupationszeit nicht aufhört, in die französische Gegenwart hineinzuwirken – und dass es vermutlich noch viele ‚Wiedergänger' dieser Art geben wird.[6]
Margarete Zimmermann 2015

It appears from at least one source that Françoise Frenkel had applied for and obtained a visa for Switzerland soon after her arrival in France in 1939, but having set her mind on living in France she did not attempt to make her way to Switzerland for another couple of years.[6] By that time, making her way to Switzerland while living in hiding and trying to avoid discovery and deportation by the Gestapo and their Vichy régime collaborators was no easy undertaking. It may have been events in August 1942, when she narrowly avoided capture and deportation, that persuaded her that attempting to enter Switzerland was nevertheless a less life-threatening option than remaining in Vichy France. On 26 August 1942 the police carried out a raid on the little "Hotel Arche de Noe" ("Noah's Ark Hotel") where she was living. However, by the time they arrived she was out shopping in the town. As she walked back towards the hotel she looked up to wave to her Viennese neighbour at her fourth floor window, but the neighbour was not there.[8] On a third floor balcony, however, her Polish neighbour, a Mr. Sigismund, was gesticulating along the street towards the hotel. Following the direction in which he was indicating, in the distance she spotted all the hotel's other Jewish guests being escorted into police trucks.[8] It was only with extreme difficulty that she resisted a mad urge to show solidarity with the other Jews and deliver herself to the policemen escorting the group, but resist it she did. After this, as she spells out in some detail in her book, she lived "underground" and was dependent for survival on those French citizens who had not been infected by the antisemitic propaganda of the Vichy government. As she later recalled, she met good French people and she met bad French people. And quite a lot of each.[5] There were those who put their bourgeois existence on the line in order to protect Jews from the clutches of the gendarmes. Others revealed themselves as opportunists or even as fanatical Jew hunters. Frenkel offers the conclusion that "a sadistic core may well be hiding inside every person" ("Ein sadistischer Kern muss wohl in jedem Menschen stecken").[1] National defeat in the summer of 1940 profoundly traumatised the national psyche, and she permits herself the speculation that the manifestation of national weakness caused some of the young men to react by taking out their mental hurt on people demonstrably weaker than themselves.[1] On the administrative front, Frenkel's final months in occupied France were further complicated by a change whereby the eastern strip of the Free zone (including Nice/Nizza) was transferred to Italian control, as the Vichy based puppet régime had its powers ever more diminished. Under the Italian officials Frenkel's presence even, at one stage, was granted a level of legal status. Friends organised a Swiss visa for her. However, she was still Jewish, which meant that from the perspective of the authorities in occupied France, she was not permitted to cross the French frontier[5] Her first attempt led to capture while she sat on the local bus waiting at the border crossing, and a brief prison sentence served in Annecy,[1] followed by a probationary period at conditional liberty. She nevertheless made a second attempt to cross the frontier but was thwarted by an Italian border soldier, who then let her go. She made her third attempt to cross the frontier into Switzerland in June 1943, just a few days before the expiry of her Swiss visa. This time she succeeded.[5] Rolling down a high snow covered hillside slope in the mountains by Annecy, her black dress[5] by now bloodied and torn,[6] she was grabbed by a soldier who delivered a reassuring message: "Stehen Sie auf, Madame, Sie sind nicht verletzt."[5] ("Get up, Madame, you're not wounded. See, you are in Switzerland."[8]).

Later years

Françoise Frenkel was 53 when she crossed the frontier to safety near Annecy. She lived for more than another thirty years, dying at Nice on 18 January 1975. Very little is known about her final decades, but it appears that she settled in France. She was in Berlin in 1959, however, visiting the divided city to apply for compensation in respect of the robust travel suitcase which the Nazis had arranged to have confiscated when she escaped from Berlin back in the late summer of 1939. In West Berlin a notary insisted that she provide a list of every single item of clothing that she had packed in the hastily stuffed suitcase. She managed, in the end, to list 24 items, from tailored outfits to cheap night shirts, along with two small type writers. The list was valued at a rate deemed equivalent to 25 Reichsmarks per item. In 1960 the West German government paid her DM 3,500 as a "reparation". In the words of an unimpressed commentator, "for the Germans, the matter was thereby dealt with. However, Françoise Frenkel had lost more than just one [hastily stuffed] suitcase".[5][10]


References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Françoise Frenkel; Elisabeth Edl (translation from the French language original text) (2016). "Nichts, um sein Haupt zu betten" (PDF). "Leseprobe ..." (Extract from the German translation of the book as placed online by its most recent publisher. But do not expect to find the complete text online here.). Carl Hanser Verlag München. ISBN 978-3-446-25271-4. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  2. 1 2 Florence Bouchy (29 October 2015). "Contre l'oubli de Françoise Frenkel ... Histoire d'un livre. Paru en 1945, « Rien où poser sa tête », récit de la fuite d'une libraire juive de Berlin à la Suisse, via la France, a été retrouvé dans un vide-greniers en 2010". This source, if accessed online, is partially blocked by a paywall. Le Monde (online), Paris. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Martin Oehlen (29 July 2016). ""Es war grotesk und zugleich erbärmlich" ... "Nichts um sein Haupt zu betten": Die französisch-polnische Jüdin Françoise Frenkel erzählte unmittelbar nach dem Krieg von ihren Jahren in Nazi-Deutschland und ihrer Flucht-Odyssee. Eine einzigartige Flaschenpost, die uns erst jetzt erreicht". Frankfurter Rundschau. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  4. ↑ Tilman Krause (4 September 2016). "Es ist ein Skandal, dass diese Frau vergessen ist". WeltN24 GmbH, Berlin. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Martin Doerry (30 July 2016). "Eine unbekannte Heldin". Der Spiegel (online). Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Margarete Zimmermann; Sandra van Lente (compiler) (18 April 2016). "Die erste französische Buchhandlung in Berlin: Françoise Frenkel, Rien où poser sa tête". Prof Dr Gesa Stedman i.A. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Carsten Hueck (28 July 2016). "Eine Existenz am dünnen Faden". Deutschlandradio, Köln. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Robert Fisk (29 December 2015). "Françoise Frenkel's escape from the Nazis and Vichy France: A bitter, beautiful and important book". The Independent, London, England. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  9. 1 2 Patrick Modiano (from the preface he contributed to the 2015 edition of Françoise Frenkel's book) (10 October 2015). "Patrick Modiano fait redécouvrir l'unique livre de Françoise Frenkel". Retrieved 28 February 2017.
  10. ↑ "Für die Deutschen war der Fall damit erledigt. Doch Françoise Frenkel hatte mehr als nur einen Koffer verloren."
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