Defeatism in the novel: urged to capitulate in all friendship

When the time comes, then they shouldn't think about history, said the old general to the members of a people gathered around the radios who were almost the last to defend themselves against the dictator who, without right or reason, was destroying all of Europe with his war overtaken.

History, according to the General, is thankless.

They needed the advice of an experienced man - so the Frenchman saw the English, who had offered him asylum after the last futile counter-attack he commanded against the German advance, and as their own Prime Minister was a drunkard, Georges Pinard, their sub-Prussian Crew grown up brothers-in-arms from the western front of the last war, who pour pure wine with a bitter finish.

He was speaking as a friend, said the old gentleman with the silver mustache, who couldn't be seen on the radio but whom all Englishmen knew from the newspapers, into the BBC microphones, and that's why he didn't want to flatter the audience.

“I have seen my nation lose hope, and I tell you now that there is no hope for you either.

They lost their war.”

The general goes on talking undisturbed

Representatives of the British Foreign and War Offices were present during the live broadcast from Broadcasting House on 14 June 1940, and while these officials whispered about the incalculable diplomatic consequences of aborting the transmission, the speech of the renegade envoy of the defeated Paris government controlled toward the speaker's final appeal.

Out of sympathy, Pinard said, he let England know what France had only learned at the price of terrible sacrifices.

The English should not think of resistance, and not of history, but of themselves, their houses and gardens so carefully tended, and their children, who would see it all and know in the end that all governments were bad, and Hitler's government perhaps no worse than any other.

"Give up

when the boche comes.

Give up.” This final word was only followed by a terrible fit of coughing from Pinard.

The English writer Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, invented the antipode of General de Gaulle in her novel about the BBC during the war, which was published in 1980 and was based on her own biographical experience and unfortunately has not yet been translated into German.

The punchline: the English people didn't hear a single one of Pinard's defeatist words, but only got a ten-minute break from the air, which didn't worry them, because it was war and that's what they had been counting on since the war began.

The program planner in charge had switched off the transmitter before the start of the transmission, because he had been a little suspicious that the general had said to him in the hallway of the studio:

He had the feeling, noted Fitzgerald's hero in anti-heroic national style, that that would not be helpful to the nation at the given moment.

This strange concomitant of the French Republic's strange defeat in London is handled with discretion: the cough proves fatal, the general dies a day before de Gaulle's arrival, and the BBC sends a wreath with the ribbon 'À Georges Pinard: mort pour la civilization".

"Human Voices" is the title of Fitzgerald's novel, and one has to hope that when Alice Schwarzer was asked on the radio whether the open letter she had published denied Ukrainians the right to self-defense, she answered that is by no means the case, as 140,000 Germans have already signed the letter - one has to hope that the "Emma" founder and her co-authors will be treated with Fitzgerald's philanthropy if this episode from the current war becomes material for the great period novel after the War will have become, which someone else will then have to write than Martin Walser, Edgar Selge and Juli Zeh.