Marriageable Secret Agents and Mid-Century Porn
by Susan Daitch
Cardinal Mazarin had enemies who saw him as a man of contradictory attributes: a Neapolitan intruder, a man who collected paintings by Correggio and Giorgione, drawings by Raphael, diamonds and emeralds kept in gold chests. According to rumours set in motion by those who schemed for his undoing, he had Jewish ancestors, bankrupt milliners from a village too small and too remote, unmappable if not unnameable. He had bought his way into the church yet kept a secret wife in the heart of Paris. It was true the virtual king of France, as Mazarin was called, owned no paintings of ancestors, and boasted of no genealogies that were worth anything, but this ancestor-less condition left him free to invent himself. He was a cardinal in a red suit with a pointed hat; he was a prime minister issuing edicts through the voice box of a boy king. The jumble of dukes and counts surrounding the boy felt powerless in the face of the southern usurper, but Mazarin underestimated their sting when he stepped barefoot on their tentacles.
If he couldn’t buy off the men who wanted to eat him alive, he would use his relations, five beautiful nieces, who could be brought out of Rome, to act as bait. If they happened to marry for love or money that was an unexpected dividend, but not a goal. The first order of business was to marry them into the families of those who paid the informants and phantom assassins. Once he was related by marriage to these cats, they would be belled.
The Cardinal summoned his nieces to be his future ambassadors, marriageable spies, and agents, and they agreed to oblige him. Fifteen-year-old Olympe was particularly enthusiastic. Disembarking from her ship in Marseilles, she and her sisters were met by hecklers, employed by the same invisible dukes and duchesses who thought her uncle should pack up his paintings and diamonds and take himself back to the slums that hatched him. From dukes to tradesmen, the girls were heralded as presumptuous snips imported to meddle in their affairs. Once in Paris, Olympe turned the Soissons Palace, fortress and former home of Catherine de Medici, into a playground, and though her uncle married her off to the Duc de Soissons, she began a long affair with Louis XIV, who sometimes returned her affections, though he was married to Maria Theresa of Spain. He was also known to ignore her, and when she wasn’t in his favour, she engaged in intrigues and other seductions in order to regain his attention. Olympe often misjudged the king and his court, following what she thought was fashionable, even if it meant her undoing. Her blundering forgeries, consorting with poisoners and messy affairs led to her expulsion from court and finally from France.
Her reputation as a sorceress followed her even in exile, and she was denied entrance to Antwerp and Namur. Street urchins were paid to sing insults to her, and Belgians in one town were so afraid of her, they strung a rope hung with dead cats in front of a cathedral as she rode past. The former countess was forced to sleep outside under trees and in barns. Eventually Olympe outlived the rumours that chased her, found some acceptance in Brussels, and resumed her gambling parties where she would make and lose fortunes the way others lost umbrellas.
La Vie Galante de Olympe Mancini et Ses Soeurs was a version of Olympe’s story written in 1955 by Betrand de Gélannes, pseudonym of Georges Marty, who wrote many biographies of women with steamy covers, all published by Editions de l’Arabesque. He was married to Ginette Marty, and together they wrote Chansons de la Revolution, so there was an affinity for revolution – or the idea of revolution on the one hand and these covers on the other. Olympe wasn’t the only one to get this treatment. Gélannes/Marty also wrote biographies of Marie Guimard, Anne d’Etampes, Jiss-Day (Daughter of Surinam) and more, and on each book the heads are different, but they all have the same bodies.
At first, I imagined the cover artist was a woman who maybe went to art school but could not, in her own way, embrace the conceptualism of Marcel Duchamp, art brut of Jean Dubuffet, surrealism of Jean Tinguely, minimalism of Yves Klein. She painted an approximation of what she saw, and galleries hardly ever exhibited the work of women anyway, so she got employment illustrating covers for paperbacks: crime novels, speculative fiction and fantasies of seventeenth century women depicted as sirens – jobs that paid the rent. The year Editions de l’Arabesque commissioned her cover drawing, Lolita was published by Olympia Press in Paris. In 1955 Algeria was still a colony, though not for much longer, the War for Independence had begun. France was pulling out of Vietnam, bit by bit, transitioning military and economic interests over to the Americans. By May of that year, the United States had been handed the reins of Vietnam. France was pretty much done with the former colony, focusing more on the war directly across the Mediterranean.
But the book covers were not the work of an anonymous woman, artist for hire. They were drawn and painted by pin-up artist, Jef de Wulf, who also did covers for policiers, science fiction, erotic books from Collection Tropiques, L’Aristo series about a top-hatted criminal sporting distinctive red lapels whose motto was bien mal acquis. Then there was La Belle Negrière, whose cover showed an elfin blonde with a turned up nose, slaves in the background chained to the masts; East Berlin, a woman with Barbie doll proportions poses in front of ruins; Jouet Pour Guerriers, smiling woman, skin tight strapless why-bother-with-a-dress kind of dress, behind her looms a large Nazi head complete with a monocle, it looks like. From pornography, some of which was censored, to books on scouting, comics, map drawing, de Wulf worked constantly, it seems, until his death in 1994.
Among these titles was The Women of Warsaw by Natan Mendelson, written in 1954, nine years after someone with a double-barrelled Jewish name like Natan Mendelson had either emerged from hiding or returned from Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau. The woman in the foreground is blonde, turned up nose, looking not so different from the apparent heroine of La Belle Negrière, complete with torn white shirt. A safe bet to say the women of Warsaw depicted on the cover in no way look like relatives of Natan Mendelson. Also, their bodies in no way appear to be anywhere on the spectrum of what starvation looks like.
Why was Mendelson writing Nazi porn? Perhaps Natan Mendelson is not the author’s real name any more than Georges Marty was Bertrand de Gélannes. If yes, that was his real name, was writing this book a reaction to trauma? Were the fictionalised events based in any way on what he’d witnessed in the Warsaw Ghetto or in one of the camps when women from that city arrived? Was he so traumatised, he needed to give perversity an arena? One version: Natan M. did not know how to be a citizen again, to have a job, had no money, homeless, would do anything, had so entirely lost his moorings that, like someone with dementia, could no longer separate actual experiences and invention into acceptable categories. Georges Méliès’ divided his films into two categories: actualitiés and preconstructions. Documentaries or docu-dramas, like his banned film about Dreyfus, occupied the former; his fantasies, most famously, Voyage to the Moon, occupied the latter, of which there were hundreds, while of the actualitiés, only three are known to exist. For this version of Natan M., family and friends disappeared and murdered, these categories were insupportable if he was to continue putting one foot in front of another. Lunar creatures and Dreyfus, imaginings were the stage of the former, and facts the necessities of the latter, for someone like Méliès; but for Mendelson, cruelty was everywhere: flirtatious Selenites danced on Devil’s Island. He smokes, getting ash on his portable Olivetti as he taps keys in Montmartre, Lyon, Marseilles, describing scenes of degradation, rape, torture. Perhaps his brain is so full of these scenes that he identifies with the aggressor as a way of turning passive to active, the state of being a victim is so overwhelming and suffocating. Others, readers, may also have the need to sexualise the experience of victimhood, and for Natan M., not only is writing a defence against intolerable helplessness, it’s a way to turn a buck. To enter his brain, I think, is like being alone in a space capsule, barely enough room to stand up and turn around, running out of oxygen, trying to remember earth, what it was like to stand on ground, not trusting your memory as you rocket into what? The idea of a black hole.
There is also the possibility that Natan Mendelson, was not his real name. If The Women of Warsaw was written by Christine de Saint Antoine, for example, there would be no margin of believability. With Natan M.’s name on the cover, the reader might assume this was someone, in 1955, who had had direct experience of the things he was writing about. Ironically, if the real writer wasn’t Natan M., the theoretical de Saint Antoine was drawing on well-worn anti-Semitic apparitions of the Jew as pornographer, symbol of rapacious perverse sexuality, that go back to the Dreyfus era, if not earlier.
Israel was a big consumer and producer of Nazi porn, especially in the 1950s. [1] This is a door behind which several other doors creak on their hinges, while others remain locked. Years later, books with covers like The Women of Warsaw might be found in a deceased relative’s storage locker or in a suitcase shoved in the back of a closet, in a plastic bag under the sink. The pages, before they disintegrate in your hands, seem to have more in common with doughboy comics from World War I than the pop culture of the present, though Nazi porn still exists. Some of these books were fake or fake-ish memoirs written by those, and there were many in Israel, who had been in the camps: squashing, pummelling, refashioning horror to fit the pulp format, vectors for an experience few could talk about, that’s one theory. One of the most well-known of these writers was Ka-Tzetnik whose books about Joy Divisions, like many of the stalags, have been questioned as historically and personally inaccurate. (There was no Block 24 filled with a rotating roster of Jewish prostitutes, replaced as they were murdered, for example.) But Ka-Tzetnik really was a survivor of Auschwitz, which he called a planet of ashes, and in an often played clip of the Eichmann trial, he passes out during his testimony, though Hannah Arendt, unfairly, believed he was faking it, and treated him with contempt. [2] As perhaps with Natan M., if you spent time on the planet of ashes, one worked out strategies to put one foot in front of another, and the boundaries between actualities and preconstructions may dissolve. Where do you put that memory as you sit in a café in Dizengoff Street, when it taps you on the shoulder and asks if this seat is taken? If this kind of pornography is akin to horror movies, mixing an idea of seduction with fear and loathing, there were many in Israel, in the post war years, who had these nightmares.
The book covers of stalag fiction, as it was known in Israel, like those of Jef de Wulf, are lurid. During the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the news magazine, HaOlam HaZe, would run stark black and white photographs of Eichmann on the front cover, and on its back editor Uri Avnery positioned full-page ads for stalags, reproducing imagery of whips and naked women branded with swastikas, screaming, fleeing something unseen. Flattened out to one continuous image, your eye goes back and forth: Eichmann in the glass box, screaming naked women, as if part of one picture printed in red, black and white. On the book covers, reproduced on the back of HaOlam HaZe, the victims and abusers look like potential sexual partners, nothing more or less.. In Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag described how the iconography of sexual violence became linked to Nazi imagery, and the illustrations support that idea. It seems almost logical – monsters do monstrous things. In the name of eating, they consume the unconsumable in grotesque ways. They commit atrocities, and sometimes the victim, in a perverse way, identifies with the victimiser. [3]
Many of the stories end in revenge, the victims able to turn the tables, and somehow, though outgunned, they murder their sadistic captors. The satisfaction of revenge narratives through pornography read in secret had its devotees. It fed some craving, however unattainable revenge was for the vast majority of victims and their families. Books were advertised as having been written by Americans and translated into Hebrew, though this itself was a complete mirage. The fake translations were allegedly written in English, but in fact they had been written in Hebrew by Israelis using fictitious names like Mike Baden, Dave Smith, Rex Turnfield. The authors wrote in the style of translated literature, highly artificial, mimicking sentence structure similar to English, or what they thought the cadences of GI English might be like. Among these was one book, I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch, whose contents were so perverse, that every copy was traced and destroyed.
One of the most disturbing elements of Nazi porn was the dramatisation of the medical experiments of Josef Mengele and the alliance of medicine, experimentation and torture. Those experimented on and killed were dispensable lives, genetic mistakes that needed to be eliminated for the future of an enhanced race. Eugenicists of the era said: our intentions aren’t so bad, maybe not bad at all, what’s wrong with eliminating debilitating genetic disease, those for whom life is no life at all, crippled bodies that do not function, minds that spin and grind to a halt? For those whose lives are hell, who are we to say they should continue if they themselves would have wanted out? But then the definition of disease began to encompass attributes, inclinations, personalities, races, genders, spreading out pool-like with ever expanding borders. Theories of eugenics in the pre-War years provided the map that led to a sinkhole.
But Natan M. was writing in French for an audience depleted of live witnesses to the gas chambers because most of them were dead. Jews from Warsaw, from the east, who had fled to Paris, were the first to be rounded up, and statistically very few survived to return. Most likely, they weren’t his readers. Perhaps the audience for Mendelson’s book may have been those who informed, who sent their neighbours to the Vel d’Hiver, to Drancy, who may have wanted to believe it wasn’t so bad, look, they had sex. In 1955, in France, the informers, collaborators, and onlooking citizens, that’s who, for the most part, were still alive and able to buy and hoard books. During the Vichy era, it is estimated that between three and five million denunciation letters were sent, so there were a lot of them. [4]
For Jef de Wulf, Nazi porn was one assignment among many. It’s possible he didn’t even read The Women of Warsaw or La Vie Galante de Olympe Mancini, and if he had, it made no difference to him. The files of the publisher, Collection Tropique 5, so many years later: Do they even still exist with file cabinets containing records of correspondences, invoices, royalty statements? Somewhere in the files were addresses for Natan Mendelson and for Betrand de Gélannes, along with editorial notes whose contents might include: how to turn both death camp survivors and the mistress of a king, a desperate gambler, a known intrigante into sex bombs for the atomic age.
Olympe’s most famous son, a queer dwarfish hunchback, was rumoured to be fathered by Louis who rejected him, as he did all his less than perfect-looking offspring. Prince Eugene most certainly would have been eliminated by the eugenicists of Mengele’s circle; even if he could mask his sexuality, the deformed were speedily dispatched to the gas.
Prince Eugene, called Mars without Venus, shunned by Olympe and the French court while still a boy, disguised himself in discarded dresses and escaped east. He became a general in the Austrian army, a military strategist known for keeping the Turks from the gates of Vienna and routing them from Austria. One of his greatest military victories against the French occurred on the day of his mother’s death. Two hundred and fifty years later, a division of the Waffen SS Mountain Division would be named after him.
Notes
[1] Stalags, directed by Ari Libsker (Heymann Brothers Films, 2008) 1:03. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2htNs9d_6q8&ab_channel=heymannbrothersfilms.
[2] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), 105.
[3] David Mikics, ‘Holocaust Pulp Fiction’ Tablet Magazine, 2012.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/ka-tzetnik.
[4] Shannon L. Fogg, ‘Denunciations, Community Outsiders, and Material Shortages in Vichy France’ Journal of the Western Society for French History, 2003 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wsfh/0642292.0031.017/–denunciations-community-outsiders-and-material-shortages?rgn=main;view=fulltext.
Henry Georges Clouzot’s movie, Le Corbeau, was meant to cast a critical lens on the frenzy of neighbors informing on neighbors, though it was made under the auspices of The Continental Film Company in France in 1943.
About the Author
Susan Daitch is the author of six novels and a collection of short stories. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Guernica, Tablet, Tin House, The New England Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, and elsewhere. Her work was the subject of a Review of Contemporary Fiction, along with that of David Foster Wallace, and William Vollman. Her recent novel, Siege of Comedians was listed as one of the best books of 2021 in The Wall Street Journal.
