When Paris Went Dark
Subtitle: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York, USA; Boston, USA; London, UK
Language: eng
Format: EBook
ISBN-13: 9780316217453
Description: From the Preface...

I do not claim the mantle of historian but rather of storyteller and guide; I have perused with care what others have written and have teased out stories that have always been there but had settled under the dust of memory and history. I have plumbed the extraordinary archival work done by others and done some of my own, always looking for fissures in texts that allow for a richer reading of a traumatic period in European history. Here are the famous and unknown voices of adolescents and adults, Germans and French, men and women, Jews and non-Jews, visitors and residents, collaborators and patriots, novelists and historians, journalists and diarists, the still living and the gone. Some appear repeatedly, some occasionally, and some only once. I have interviewed men and women who lived in Paris at the time. They offered anecdotes that became bright tiles in a vibrant mosaic that reveals more clearly how a familiar and beloved city became, even temporarily, threatening and uncanny. As one person raised in Paris during this period answered when I asked if her parents ever discussed the Occupation: “It [the memory of the Occupation] was like a secret garden whose gates were always closed to us.” When Paris Went Dark makes an effort to look over that garden’s walls.
Table of contents: label: Chronology of the Occupation of Paris; label: Major Personalities; label: Preface; title: Faux Paris Sequestering Medusa Paris Was Different
label: Introduction; title: A Nation Disintegrates Preludes Three Traumas
label: Chapter One; title: Waiting for Hitler “They” Arrive, and Are Surprised One Who Stayed, One Who Left “They” Settle In Hitler’s Own Tour The Führer’s Urbanophobia
label: Chapter Two; title: Minuet (1940–1941) How Do You Occupy a City? For Some, Paris Was a Bubble Dancing the Minuet Correct, but Still Nazis “To Bed, to Bed!” An Execution in Paris
label: Chapter Three; title: City Without a Face—The Occupier’s Lament Paris Had Already Welcomed the Nazis—Before the Occupation The Occupiers Are Surprised, Too A Dreamer in Exile Sexually Occupied A “Better” German Recollected Solitude
label: Chapter Four; title: Narrowed Lives Narrowing and Boredom The Apartment A Crowded Métro The Informer The Queue
label: Chapter Five; title: The Dilemmas of Resistance Quoi faire? Resistant Paris Bébés Terroristes The Red Poster A Female Resistance Who Got the Credit?
label: Chapter Six; title: The Most Narrowed Lives—The Hunt for Jews Being Jewish in Paris Three Girls on the Move A Gold Star The Big Roundup
label: Chapter Seven; title: How Much Longer? (1942–1944) “You Can Come Over Now!” The Plague Observers from the Palace Signs of Defeat
label: Chapter Eight; title: Liberation—A Whodunit Is Paris Worth a Detour? The Beast of Sevastopol Arrives “Tous aux barricades!” Why Do Americans Smile So Much? Whodunit?
label: Chapter Nine; title: Angry Aftermath—Back on Paris Time Rediscovering Purity “Kill All the Bastards!” The Return of Lost Souls
label: Chapter Ten; title: Is Paris Still Occupied? De Gaulle Creates a Script Stumbling Through Memory Should We Blame Paris? “The Landscape of Our Confusions”
label: Chapter Eleven; title: De Gaulle’s Speech on the Liberation of Paris
label: Appendix; label: Acknowledgments; title: A Conversation with Ronald Rosbottom A Luxurious Hotel and Its Sad Past Questions and Topics for Discussion
label: Reading Group Guide; label: About the Author; label: Notes; label: Selected Bibliography