Paul de Man - Wartime Journalism and Anti-Semitic Writing

Wartime Journalism and Anti-Semitic Writing

After de Man's death, some two hundred articles he wrote during World War II for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le Soir were discovered by Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian student researching de Man's early life and work. de Graef contacted Samuel Weber who, in turn, consulted Derrida. Derrida would later arrange for the collection and publication of de Man's war time journalism. In one piece, titled “Jews in Contemporary Literature,” de Man examined the way "ulgar anti-semitism willingly takes pleasure in considering post-war cultural phenomenon (after the war of 14-18) as degenerate and decadent because they are ." He notes that "Literature does not escape this lapidary judgement: it is sufficient to discover a few Jewish writers under Latinized pseudonyms for all contemporary production to be considered polluted and evil. This conception entails rather dangerous consequences... it would be a rather unflattering appreciation of western writers to reduce them to being mere imitators of a Jewish culture which is foreign to them." The article continued to claim that contemporary literature had not broken from tradition as a result of the First World War and that "the Jews cannot claim to have been its creators, nor even to have exercised a preponderant influence over its development. On any closer examination, this influence appears to have extraordinarily little importance since one might have expected that, given the specific characteristics of the Jewish Spirit, the later would have played a more brilliant role in this artistic production." The article concluded that “our civilization... y keeping, in spite of semitic interference in all aspects of European life, an intact originality and character... has shown that its basic character is healthy." It concluded that "the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe" as “a solution to the Jewish problem” (probably referring to a suggested Jewish colony in Madagascar, but not to Hitler's Final Solution, which was not widely known at this early period) would not entail any "deplorable consequences" for "the literary life of the west."

This is the only known article in which de Man pronounced such views so starkly, though two or three other articles also accept without demurral the disenfranchisement and ostracization of Jews, as some contributors to Responses have noted. At the time de Man published this article, March 1941, Belgium had passed anti-Jewish legislation that expelled Jews from the professions of law, teaching, government service, and journalism. On August 4, 1942, the first trainload of Belgian Jews left Mechelen for Auschwitz. De Man continued to write for the (during the war) Nazi-controlled newspaper Le Soir until November 1942, although it is unlikely he was aware of what was happening to the Jews in Auschwitz. Subsequently, several facts that have come to light rendered any sweeping Anti-semitic allegations questionable: "...in 1942 or 1943, about a year after the journalistic publication of his compromising statement, he and his wife sheltered for several days in their apartment the Jewish pianist Esther Sluszny and her husband, who were then illegal citizens in hiding from the Nazis. During this same period, de Man was meeting regularly with Georges Goriely, a member of the Belgian Resistance. According to Goriely's own testimony, he never for one minute feared denunciation of his underground activities by Paul de Man." Many commentators have noticed that de Man praises the Jewish Kafka as one of the writers who demonstrates the essential healthiness of contemporary European literature, though de Man does not note that he was Jewish.