One Hundred Twenty-One Days (9 page)

The mathematicians Christian Morstauf (1893-1996) and Heinrich Kürz had maintained a relationship as both scientists and friends ever since Morstauf’s trip to N. in 1932. They wrote each other many letters, which are held in Kürz’s Nachlass (collection) at the University of N. archives. From the start of the war, Kürz went to Paris several times, which means that he and Morstauf must have seen each other quite regularly.

La Gerbe
(
The Sheaf
) and
Jesuis partout
(
I Am Everywhere
) were French collaborationist newspapers.

May 31, 1942

Sunday morning. Thought of Otto Zach again. Where is he exactly, and in what condition? This is a time when many brave men will go through the gates of hell—and many will have seen it even before their own deaths.

Walked across Paris to the Abwehr headquarters at the Hotel
Lutetia, where Blank,
⁹
one of my friends from Gymnasium, is assigned, and where they even work on Sundays. Had a drink with him. Then, on Boulevard Saint-Michel, I contemplated the fountain’s archangel while thinking of it as a symbol of our victory and the peace that will follow.

This friend also appears in Kürz’s letters, sometimes under the name of Leutnant Blank, sometimes under that of Doktor Blank.

Had dinner with Wallerant at a rather popular restaurant, Le Mahieu.
¹⁰
We traded news with each other, in particular of Sir Michael Vendall, who was evacuated from London to Bangor, Wales, with his students, so he gets to keep on phlegmatically playing bridge while our compatriots are killed by the bombs dropped by his.
¹¹
Wallerant spoke to me about a conference at Cambridge, just before the war, in which Xanten had taken part, and how he had seemed so happy to finally be back in front of a chalkboard. “It was almost pathetic. A man so lively, so brilliant, how could you have kept him from teaching his classes?” he asked me; but Xanten is dead and that question has become useless. At least he died of an illness, and before the war.

Le Mahieu occupied the southernmost corner of Rue Soufflot and Boulevard Saint-Michel.

Fernand Wallerant (1890-1953) and (Sir) Michael Vendall (1889-1960) were both specialists in number theory like Kürz and Morstauf, one a professor at the Sorbonne and the other at University College London.

Fortunately, Wallerant doesn’t seem to know that Ulrich and his wife committed suicide, or in any case, he didn’t mention it. It’s a cruel but essential battle we’re fighting, and casualties are inevitable.
¹²

The German mathematicians Edmund Xanten (1880-1938) and Friedrich Ulrich (1870-1942) were both victims of the Nazi anti-Semitic laws. Xanten was not dismissed from his post immediately in 1933 (because he had fought in World War I), but Nazi students (among whom was the young Otto Zach) organized a boycott of his courses and he was forced to stop teaching. Ulrich and his wife committed suicide at the beginning of 1942 to avoid being deported.

Told him about my trip to Padua, spring in Italy. It pleased me to say I received the doctoral degree
honoris causa
. Wallerant is probably going to agree to help us: he needs a
laissez-passer
document for his wife, and I advised him to go see Blank.

June 1, 1942

Each morning, I have a café crème and three croissants brought up to my room, along with the
Pariser Zeitung
, in order to immerse myself in the Parisian atmosphere. I listen to Radio Paris in order to improve my French. I also read
Jesuis partout
, the newspaper Morstauf brought me. The book reviews are quite spirited. There’s also information about the enemies of Germany and the false names they’re using.

Yesterday, I tried to get news about Gorenstein, a Jewish mathematician who has long been shut away in a lunatic asylum, but Wallerant didn’t know anything. I never forget the fact that there are people in this world more unfortunate than I.
¹³

The mention of “more unfortunate” people, which seems a little artificial here, may have been copied from Jünger. On the French mathematician Robert Gorenstein (1893-1949), see
note 42
.

Spent the day working in my room while waiting for news from Morstauf. Tried once more to understand how Silberberg could really prove that lemma he sent me three years ago, after our discussion in Strasbourg. I can prove it up to dimension 41, but no more. I’m sure he doesn’t know how to do it either. Typical Jewish
behavior. But I might have found something else, with the help of a theorem that was just published by another French mathematician.

Received a short note from Yersin’s father, who thanks me for the tickets. Nothing more.
¹⁴

Kürz saved this short note from Yersin (University of N. archives).

June 2, 1942

Morstauf came by to look for me at the Raphael after lunch. Still doing very well and rather good-looking, in spite of the leather mask, especially with that elegant red lock of hair.

He couldn’t come yesterday, which was Monday, because of the meeting at the Academy of Sciences. We walked while he told me about the Academy. He apologized for not being able to invite me this time; he said the meetings have become more secret. According to him, there’s still a lot to do in order to return the Academy to the true friends of science. He started getting agitated as he told me about a note published by Nadault. This physicist is under house arrest in a place where he cannot perform experiments, so he’s started working in mathematics, specifically in probability theory. What shocks Morstauf is that the Academy has agreed to publish his notes.
¹⁵
At least, he says, as of last fall nothing Jewish has been published. He added that Nadault isn’t Jewish, but his daughter married a Jewish physicist, who had to be executed by firing squad not too long ago. He also told me that he himself tried
to have a Jewish member of the French Academy, who has settled quite peacefully in the United States, expelled from the group, arguing that he doesn’t come to meetings, but no one followed up, under the pretext that it’s not the Academy’s custom. It’s a venerable institution; they need a little time to adapt to new ideas. “And you know,” he said, “at the end of this academic year, at the CNRS,
^a
the Jewish question will be resolved: there won’t be a single Jew left.”

The physicist Émile Nadault (1870-1947) had been a public supporter of the Popular Front. He was arrested by the Germans in October 1940, then released. At the time of Kürz’s visit to Paris, he had been put on house arrest in Chartres.

Centre national de la recherche scientifique (French National Center for Scientific Research) (Trans.)

They do have a bit more difficulty here with the so-called international institutions. For example, Morstauf told me about the International Time Bureau at the Paris Observatory, where they haven’t been able to expel undesirables, and he mentioned the name of a Jewish astronomer who is still peacefully presiding there.
¹⁶

This is probably Maurice Fried (1895-1943). He was arrested in July 1942 and deported to Auschwitz where he disappeared in December 1943.

I proposed we go to the library of the Henri Poincaré Institute, on Rue Pierre-Curie, but as soon as we got there, someone at the door told us that the librarian had just left and we couldn’t go in. This probably wasn’t true. It seems to me this kind of thing needs to be made more rational.

After leaving Morstauf, I walked down Rue Saint-Jacques, with the length of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on my right and the Sorbonne on my left. I bought an unpaired volume from the complete works of Lagrange at a used bookstore, then I lost myself in a sort of labyrinth of little streets; one of them happened to be named after Lagrange, and another after Dante, with no street running parallel or perpendicular to any of the others. This, too, could be
made more rational. But that is our role here, and I have no doubt that we will succeed.

The lemma I came up with seems to work.

June 3, 1942

Today, Morstauf organized a meeting in a café on Rue Claude-Bernard. He teaches everywhere: at the Sorbonne, the École Polytechnique, the École Normale Supérieure.
¹⁷
He was supposed to bring students from the École Normale Supérieure so that we could convince them to work for us, but he arrived on his own. “The students are coming,” he told me.

In fact, Morstauf held several teaching positions concurrently. This practice has become rare, but was still rather common at the time. For example, during the 1930s, Paul de Saint-Bonnet had concurrent positions at the Sorbonne, the École Normale Supérieure, the École Centrale, and the École des Mines.

He launched into one of his usual lengthy monologues, mixed with his recollections from the ceremony for my university’s two hundred fiftieth anniversary, which he attended five years ago,
¹⁸
his childhood memories, and his political opinions. He also mentioned, as he did three years ago in the Jardin des Tuileries, the cemetery of N., his love of peace, Germany and its power—because France’s future rests in that power—the memory of all the colleagues he had met there, and even a dog (Tiedemann’s, if I understood correctly) that had reminded him of his childhood in the heart of Africa. He told me about a river, the Saloum, and its delta, and of course from there he arrived at the war, the great war, along with the military cemetery where his brother is buried,
in Brittany, I believe, and of course his injury, which he refers to as a second birth. Then he told me about Saint-Bonnet, “his master” who had given him a lot of support ever since the time his injury, but who died last winter, at a very old age.
¹⁹

The University of N. celebrated this anniversary in 1937 with grand Nazi pomp. Morstauf was among the foreigners invited to the ceremony.

On the mathematician Paul de Saint-Bonnet, see
notes 17
and
32
.

For all that, the students never came; Morstauf flew into a terrible rage against the school’s assistant director, a physicist and enemy of Germany, who he claims pits the students against us.
²⁰
His fits of rage are well known among mathematicians. As for me, I lost my whole day.

Student testimonials from the period mention Morstauf’s collaborationist proselytism during his courses at the École Normale Supérieure.

In the evening, my friend from the Lutetia took me to a brothel near the Palais-Royal. There’s another advantage to the war! The establishment is reserved for officers. The girls are clean and friendly, and they understand German well enough to do what’s asked of them. They had a piano there; one of the girls was plinking out
Für Elise
on it. At first I thought of taking her place, but I felt a Beethoven sonata would be poorly suited to the locale, so I didn’t do anything.
²¹

Heinrich Kürz was a professional-grade pianist.

June 4, 1942

Morstauf again today. He took me to the German Institute, on Rue Saint-Dominique near Les Invalides, one of the nicer walks. On the way, he tried to say a few words to me in German, but he’s made hardly any progress since my last trip in December 1940. Still, he managed to say:

Wie weh wird mir

Wie brennt meine alte Wunde!

I pretended not to recognize that it was a quotation, especially because it came from a Jewish writer.
²²
At the Institute, I went over to greet the director, Doktor Epting. There were lots of people there, mainly lots of French people: writers, musicians, and actors; pretty women, starlets, and songstresses. The discussion, an animated one, was about a very interesting trip the actors took to Berlin a few months ago,
²³
then about the Arno Breker exposition at the Orangerie. “Have you read Cocteau’s article?” someone asked.
²⁴
“Ah, those Aryan athletes are so handsome,” a woman said. “But that’s the true German spirit!” a man exclaimed. Morstauf introduced him to me; he’s a chemist by the name of Ollier, a handsome man with a long, serious face.
²⁵
There was also an inventor, Georges C., who thinks he’s the greatest living French savant (Morstauf warned me we would meet him, and said Georges C. is very sensitive on this point). Georges C. recognized me despite my uniform; he said he remembered my
trip to the Academy of Sciences right before the war. Morstauf congratulated him on a speech he made that was broadcast on Radio Paris a few days ago.

The writer and poet of the verses quoted by Morstauf is Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), whose books were burned in the public squares of German cities in 1933. The two verses can be translated literally as “How I suffer / How my old injury burns me.”

A group of French actors were invited to Berlin in March 1942. See also
note 35
.

A grand exhibition was showing the works of Arno Breker (1900-1991), the official sculptor of the Third Reich, at the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries. Kürz doesn’t seem to have gone to it during this trip. The article “Salut à Breker” (Salute to Breker), by the writer Jean Cocteau, had appeared in the weekly collaborationist magazine
Comœdia
on May 23. Like Morstauf, Ollier was a member of the Groupe Collaboration.