Helgoland – Heligoland in Vintage Postcards

The small North Sea archipelago of Helgoland is a place of great fascination – it is remote, historically contested and serially despoiled. Forty miles from the German port of Cuxhaven, it has been successively Danish, British and German. The indigenous population is Frisian by language and tradition and for centuries subsisted on its local herring fishery while outsiders squabbled endlessly over its ownership.

Since these postcards were published in the early 1900s the islanders have twice been evacuated (1914 and 1945) while the topography has been irreversibly transformed by militarisation in two world wars and finally barely survived a series of RAF post-war bombing raids culminating in April 1947 when British bombs only just failed to utterly destroy the islands. Their role as a theatre for Anglo-German conflict is explored in Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea by the German academic, Jan Rüger and reviewed by Neal Ascherson in the current London Review of Books (17 August 2017).

Prior to 1714 when Denmark took possession, the island had switched control between the Danes and the Duchy of Schleswig. Danish rule ended in 1807 (formalised in 1814) when Britain swagged it for its strategic value. During the 19th. century the island developed as an upper-class spa-resort attracting visitors from all over Europe, especially Germany and England. In the era of German unification and nationalism, a view formed that the bracing climate, rugged geography and sturdy self-sufficiency of the islanders represented the essential Germanic virtues and a political campaign for the islands to be part of Germany floated on this wave of popular sentiment.

In the same casual manner that the British would separate territories by the action of drawing a line across a map of the Arabian desert it was decided there was no great advantage in retaining Heligoland and it was agreed to swap it for the German interest in the East African archipelago of Zanzibar. After Germany took charge in 1890 the tourist industry continued to flourish alongside a massive programme of public works designed to transform the island into a defensive structure for the protection of the German Bight and the Kiel Canal. This is the period during which these postcards were produced – they show nothing of the militarisation that was taking place. Instead they show some modest vernacular buildings, fishing boats drawn up on the beach, a church spire and lighthouse and an electric lift connecting the ‘high town’ with the ‘low town’. By the time that British bombing had rendered the island uninhabitable in April 1945, it’s safe to say that not a single one of these buildings would still be standing.

Vélodrome d'hiver

In Eric Hazan’s fascinating book, The Invention of Paris, he observes that the Vélodrome d'hiver is a classic example of a place that was very good, in the sense that as an indoor venue for cycle racing it provided entertainment for millions of Parisians, that later became very bad, as the site of immense human suffering and a staging post along the road to mass murder and genocide. In an era when unremarkable human beings, some of them otherwise decent, were induced to develop a capacity for callous brutality, the events at the Vélodrome d'hiver were exceptional. More than 13,000 Jewish arrests were made by the Paris police on July 16th. 1942 following detailed plans prepared with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Vichy regime, prominent among them the grotesque figure of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix who featured here in an earlier post. Up to 7,500 Jewish men, women and children were interned in stifling summer heat in a covered arena that allowed for little more than standing room and deliberately denied access to any toilet facilities with a single tap to provide water. After 8 days the survivors were transferred to Drancy in the outer north-eastern suburbs before being conveyed by train to concentration camps. This inglorious episode was the ultimate achievement of the cagoulard tendency, ensuring that henceforth their reputation for inhuman cruelty would stand comparison with any Nazi war criminal.


On the perimeter of the former site on boulevard de Grenelle there is a memorial in the form of a small garden and a wall mounted plaque. It is wedged between the entrance to an underground car park and a barrier-controlled vehicle entrance to the Ministry of the Interior building (that replaced the Vélodrome d'hiver after its demolition in 1959), the implacable façades of which form an unforgiving backdrop to the memorial. Some municipal bedding plants and a ragged sward of grass have a depressing perfunctory air and undermine the good intentions that inspired it. Understatement in these features can be a positive but in this instance the installation is catastrophically overwhelmed by its unsightly surroundings. It was a long journey for the French to recognise the enormity of this event and the extent of their complicity, making it all the more disappointing that this monument seems so inadequate. If the intention was to provide a single point of calm amid the clamour of city life for quiet reflection it was doomed to fail in the absence of any tangible or dramatic representation of the tragedy being commemorated that would hold an audience. There is a more substantial memorial featuring a sculpted group of internees at Quai de Grenelle, commissioned by the Mitterand administration in 1993. The figures, carved by Walter Spitzer (himself a survivor of deportation) are naturalistic, deliberately non-rhetorical, and in a quiet way, emotionally convincing. Yet another memorial, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation (photographs below) can be seen at the eastern tip of Île de la Cité. It dates back to 1962 and was designed in what might be called a considered Brutalist idiom by Georges-Henri Pingusson – the harsh geometry and unyielding surfaces are surprisingly effective in conveying a sense of the enormity of the crime.

Distillers of Venom

France in the inter-war years had more than its share of vociferous extremists of the right fanatically dedicated to the destruction of the Third Republic and to violent anti-Semitism. Many of them were collaborators in waiting whose day finally dawned in July 1940 when France was occupied by the Wehrmacht. Industrial unrest in the Thirties led to obsessive anti-Communism in the French business community and many of them gave generous financial support to fascist groups. Carmen Callil, in her book, Bad Faith, names three in particular who went further than others in their devotion to the cause. All remain active today as global brands and it’s the brand that most assiduously promotes itself to the public that has the most to answer for. It is little comfort to know that we can continue to enjoy all these wonderful products despite the deep stain that saturates their hidden history.

What unites these three businesses, other than politics, is a shared dependence on the process of distillation. One was a producer of alcoholic drinks (Taittinger champagne) and two were producers of perfume and cosmetics (Coty and l’Oréal). Their political vision was one of distilled hatred and each contributed to the legacy of murder and betrayal that post-war France has had to painfully come to terms with.

Eugène Schueller (1881-1957) was the founder of the l’Oréal empire and sponsored the activities of a thuggish offshoot from Action Francaise by the name of La Cagoule. This notoriously violent group carried out political assassinations, bombing campaigns and sabotage. Former cagoulards were to find employment with l’Oréal after the war. This tale of infamy is well researched and told in detail in the book, Bitter Scent written by Michael Bar-Zohar. The name of l’Oréal is paraded before the consumer with insulting regularity. The plan is to persuade us to choose from their extensive range of products designed to conceal blemishes and imperfections. The misfortune of l’Oréal is that none of their products could in a million years remove the shame and misery that followed from the activities of their founder.

François Coty (1874-1934) was a pioneering creator of mass-market fragrances and by nature, reclusive. His passion for right wing politics and anti-Semitism had a less pleasant odour and in 1933 he founded a paramilitary organisation, Solidarité Francaise. The group looked to the Nazis and Hitler for its inspiration and was an active participant in the attempted overthrow of the Third Republic in February 1934. Coty Inc. is today a German owned business and the world’s largest fragrance company.

Champagne Taittinger is one of France’s most exclusive brands and the founder of the business, Pierre Taittinger (1887-1965), was yet another extremist of the right. He created his own group of fascist street fighters in 1924, Jeunesses Patriotes, and became an elected politician. During the Occupation he exploited his political power to extract for himself a generous slice of the proceeds of Aryanisation of Jewish owned property. Amazingly as Paris fell to the Allies in 1944, Taittinger successfully reinvented himself as a member of the resistance and was never held to account for his sordid past.

Three contaminated brands, three hidden histories, three reasons to think before you buy.

Darquier de Bellenoix

The adjective egregious is extremely useful when describing something surpassingly unpleasant but it’s pitifully inadequate when it comes to describing Louis Darquier, fascist rabble-rouser, professional anti-Semite and enthusiastic deporter of Jews from Vichy France. Carmen Callil, in her grimly fascinating book, Bad Faith (2007) paints a portrait of a man in possession of every known defect of character and totally devoid of human decency. Darquier’s progress from drunken, lecherous, homeless scrounger to a senior position in the bureaucratic machine for the elimination of French Jewry, in the pay of both the Nazis and the Vichy government is set out in great detail by Callil. The misadventures of his Australian wife and the damage they collectively inflicted on their abandoned daughter form another strand in the book. One of Darquier’s distinguishing characteristics was his absurd personal vanity and self regard. This inspired him to add the suffix, de Pellepoix, to his name to elevate himself into the nobility and by doing so provided his critics in the Left wing press with a wonderful opportunity to remix his name for comic effect. Carmen Callil listed a selection of them for our enjoyment. Even to an English ear they have a splendid ring to them.

Darquier de CarQuoi
Barbier de Pellepoix
Darquier de Pelleharicots
Darquier de Pellepouah
Darquier von Pellepoix
Darquoi de Quel Pied
Carquoi de Quelpied
Cartier de Petitpois
Darquoy de Pelletier
Darquier de Montcuq

It would have been a fine thing if the combatants in France’s culture wars could have confined their activities to the exchange of inventive insults, but sadly this was not to be the case.

Gare d’Orsay, a Secret History

These are some things that I know about the Gare d’Orsay. It was built on a large scale in the Grand Manner and opened for business just in time for the Universal Exhibition of 1900. It was used by exclusively electrically powered trains. The station closed in 1935 and in 1962 Orson Welles filmed much of The Trial in the deserted building. Something I didn’t know, until I read Paris After the Liberation: 1944-1949 (Antony Beevor & Artemis Cooper), was that the Gare d’Orsay was employed in 1945 as a reception centre for processing les déportés, French citizens repatriated from Nazi Germany’s work camps, detention centres, prisons and concentration camps. Parisians were stunned by the utter wretchedness of les déportés whose suffering was written so unambiguously across their faces, putting the privations of life under the Occupation into perspective.

There are eye-witness accounts that describe the dark and cavernous interior of the former station within which circulated the naked and emaciated déportés, liberally dusted with de-lousing powder and sprayed with DDT, a hideous spectacle in which further humiliation was visited upon those whose nightmare seemed never to end. Like a Sebald moment, an image is created in the mind that will haunt this space for ever. Since 1985 the Gare d’Orsay has been home to France’s greatest art treasures of the Nineteenth Century among which is Courbet’s vast and crepuscular masterpiece, Un enterrement à Ornans, a painting that directly confronts death and extinction and cuts directly to the darkness at the heart of human consciousness. Courbet’s painting would be my candidate for an artistic companion piece to the demonic vision of bleached déportés, condemned forever in a vortex of disinfectant.