A dinner in Paris in September 1949. The hosts are a psychiatrist and his partner: Jacques Lacan and Sylvia Bataille.
Among the guests, in addition to the painter Balthus, is an ethnologist who, after years of emigration in New York, is about to gain a foothold in the French academic world, and a young woman of twenty-three who, due to her family history, speaks French as well as English and German.
Lacan had already made use of the language skills of this Monique Roman for translations, the ethnologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, will do it too - and they will become a couple.
Helmut Mayer
Editor in the features section, responsible for “New Non-Fiction Books”.
Follow I follow
Monique Lévi-Strauss reports on this dinner over seventy years ago on the last page of her slim book.
The meeting with her future husband, who should bring it to world fame, is his final point.
Anyone who would like to find out something about her life afterwards would have to resort to Emmanuelle Loyer's excellent biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which tells a little about the domestic routines of a long marriage.
Vienna links with Sigmund Freud
Monique Lévi-Strauss, born in 1926, wrote this review of her childhood and youth late, for her grandchildren, as she writes, in order to close a gap in family memories. Also to explain a biographical peculiarity that is hardly believable at first glance: that she, the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Belgian father, lived in National Socialist Germany between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, from 1939 to 1945. In the lion's den, then, as the closer translation of the French "dans la gueule du loup" is (which, by the way, is also chosen by the translator once this phrase appears in the text).
The memories set in with the life paths of the parents.
The father, who came from a rather cramped situation, falsified his age in 1914 in order to join the army, survived the war, took advantage of the opportunity to study that was given to soldiers and in 1923 spent a year at Harvard.
There he meets his future wife, who has come to America from Paris to study and is the daughter of a family of secular Viennese Judaism, in whose immediate relatives many paths lead to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis - her maternal uncle is Oscar Rie, one of Freud's oldest friends, whose daughters, one of them a psychoanalyst, married prominent analysts.
Move to Germany
Monique Roman spent her childhood in Paris, where grandfather Rie ran his mother-of-pearl import business. The parents' apartment is in the sixteenth arrondissement, servants are part of the dignified middle-class household, especially in the property of the regularly visited grandparents in Saint-Cloud. In the mid-1930s, the family bought a small country estate in Berry. Speaking several languages well, which is a matter of course in the maternal family anyway, is a learning goal set by the father. In addition to English, also German, and that is why the twelve-year-old was quartered with a German family for the first time in 1938, Knall had to cope with the lessons in the grammar school in the still foreign language.
The fact that his daughter was only barely able to leave the country in the days before the Munich Agreement, which then postpones the war again, does not particularly impress the father.
He got his family to accompany him to Germany, where he accepted a position as a consulting engineer in an ironworks.
At the end of March 1939, a few days after the German troops marched into Czechoslovakia, a long journey through war Germany began.
At first, as planned by the father, in Wesel am Rhein, but after his arrest and release as an enemy foreigner in spring 1940 in different places under increasingly precarious conditions.
Paris - Boston - Paris
In February 1944, Monique Roman graduated from high school in Prüm near Gerolstein, and began studying medicine in Bonn, which she took to Weimar in the summer for an internship, where she provided first aid to the victims of an air raid on the Buchenwald concentration camp. And then, after fire bombs on Bonn, she experienced the liberation by American troops in a Hessian village on the Rhine. Her language skills and her mother's American citizenship are now paving the way. After a few weeks as an interpreter in a camp for displaced persons in Mainz, I returned to Paris in May 1945. Less than a year later, she and her mother were repatriated to the United States, where she studied in Boston, before finally returning to France.
The course that Monique Lévi-Strauss talks about is unusual enough.
But what makes this book so engaging is the no-frills, concise, memorable way in which it does it.
Whether the aunts in Saint-Cloud, an old-style skiing holiday in Austria that was still independent, the teachers at the German grammar school, life under food shortages and air raids or the appearance of the American officers in the Mainz camp - a few traces of precisely remembered scenes are always enough to make the To give readers a vivid impression.
It is understandable that the historian Étienne François praises these memories in his epilogue.
And it is very gratifying that the original was published seven years ago, but is still being published in a German edition.
Monique Lévi-Strauss: “In the jaws of the wolf”. My youth in Nazi Germany
. Translated from the French by Annette Jucknat. WBG / Theiss Verlag, Darmstadt 2021. 126 pp., Hardcover, € 20.