The Name on the Wall

By Hervé Le Tellier (Translator Adriana Hunter) 

‎ Other Press. 167 pages. £15.99  ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1635425468

Reviewed by Tony Roberts

According to the French historian, Henry Rousso, the Occupation during World War 11, ‘left a profound mark on the whole of French society, with the result that it survives as an essential point of reference in the collective imagination, in political debates, and on the cultural and intellectual scene’. The ‘dark years’ have been the abrasive subject of many French movies and novels (‘Army of Shadows’, ‘Lacombe Lucien’, ‘Lucy Aubrac’ , ‘The Army of Crime’, among them) and, most uncomfortably, ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ (Le Chagrin et la Pitié ) Max Ophuls’ 1969 documentary of collaboration under Vichy. From 2009 the Occupation reran as tv drama in Un village français and in 2014 the French novelist Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, for novels that explore the seamy side of what one of his characters calls that ‘murky chapter’ of history. Most recently the acclaimed The Name on the Wall has joined this number.

The Name on the Wall is several things at once: a moving document of remembrance, an exercise in creative identification, a fast-paced historical narrative —fiction and non-fiction – rendered vivid with documents and photographs — and a warning to our times. It is part biography, part history, part psychology lesson and part autobiography. Its cover proclaims it a novel.

Perhaps the author lets us closer to the heart of this mystery when he writes in his novel, ‘True I occasionally allowed my imagination to talk, but I would have found it obscene to invent, and I felt more comfortable traveling around this era that I didn’t know but that was formative for me. I wanted to take you there and share with you the things I learned while I was writing. I also wanted the book to include images, photographs, so that André, his girlfriend, Simone, and a few others could have faces and bodies in your mind because they do in mine.’

At any rate, what holds the book together is the short life of André Chaix, a resistance fighter (a ‘maquisard’), killed at the age of twenty in a heroic but hopeless engagement with a better armed enemy in Southeastern France (the Drôme department). A plaque in the commune of Grignan reads ‘On August 22, 1944, in the Pommier neighbourhood near Grignan, German tanks ambushed a file of maquisards from the “Morvan” maquis that was heading to Montélimar, and they killed six Resistance fighters,’ of which André Chaix was one. His small convoy of two cars and two trucks was confronted by a light tank from the 11^th Panzer Division. We learn that the badly wounded André was taken to the hospital in Valréas, where his parents witnessed his death.

What prompts the retelling of the young man’s story is the narrator’s interest in the name, carved on the wall of a house he purchased. He had been looking for a ‘childhood home’ in which to put down roots, to become part of a community —as his subject had once been. At an August 2023 exhibition about the resistance in the Drôme, he was shown ‘a small cardboard box, about the size of a postcard and one centimeter deep’ which contained documents, photographs and envelopes: André’s effects. And these, in addition to historical research and local interviews have been the basis of his book, his gathering — as the author later described it —of ‘fragments of a collective memory’.

The evidence of André Chaix’s short life is necessarily meagre then, but the author has plenty to say in this short book given the contents of the box, plus his interest in the military and moral context of the war, his wariness at the rise of extremism and his speculations regarding free will and fate.

The chapters which deal with André and those with his relationship with Simone Reynier are poignant. Others deal with pragmatic but morally questionable issues. The French, for instance, proved generally acquiescent with official amnesia after the war. Too many had lived under Petain; too many had collaborated in the little moments of their day; too many had publicly supported the Nazi invasion. (Although he does not mention this, Sartre set the bar very low for resistance. In September 1944’s ‘The Republic of Silence’ he honoured the power of all Frenchmen, each resisting in his or her own way, if only in not betraying others.) In France, ‘after the amnesty law of August 6, 1953, regarding crimes or actions involving collaboration, French prisons no longer held a single person sentenced for offences relating to the occupation.’ 

The allies also preferred a quiet peace. With bitter irony the author tells us, ‘The United States, preoccupied with its Cold War against the Soviets, was setting up Operation Paperclip, which involved exfiltrating and recycling former Nazis who, it’s true, were a bit excessive with their antisemitism but were also top-notch anti-communists.’ As bureaucrats they also had useful experience of running the country.

Digging a little into the Nazi psyche, Le Tellier cites chemist Primo Levi’s description of the look in the eyes of a Nazi who was speaking to him. To Levi the look ‘came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds’. Le Tellier explains that from a Nazi warped perspective the murder of Jews was a duty (Aufgabe) to racial purity and that the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels were prompted not by fear or shame, but ‘because the Germanic race would now be extinguished’. His narrator concludes ‘clemency isn’t my forte’. Considering his own appalled fascination with such evil he admits that even returning to the novelist Céline’s writings or those of the fascist journalist Lucien Rebatet, ‘It’s a reliable way to debase yourself, spending time with these people’s worst writings and marveling at the audacity of the criminal excesses —and I am guilty of succumbing to this.’

What he believes is that ‘democracy is a conversation between civilized people; tolerance comes to an end with intolerance. Whoever sows hatred for another doesn’t deserve the hospitality of discussion.’ And yet he does extend concern to all the fallen (‘Pity too for many of the young men swallowed up by the black spiral of the swastika’), even to the point of naming and reproducing a photograph of one German soldier who died shortly after André’s death.

In his own words Le Tellier wanted the book to examine ‘our deepest nature — this desire to belong to something greater than ourselves, which can lead us to the best and the worst’. The contemporary heart of the book is its lessons on fascism and on human weakness. He discusses the founding of the Front National in 1972, naming some former Nazis who were part of the upper echelon in Le Pen’s extreme right wing party.

He points to studies and situations which illustrate that ‘submitting to authority, peer pressure, and “a sense of duty” can churn out killers with no qualms’. He cites Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, a book about war avoiders who eventually became enthusiastic killers (of thirty-eight thousand Jews). In his chapter (‘De Natura Humanitatis’) Le Tellier explores studies that suggest we are all capable of conforming to atrocious behaviour. His first is an account of the Californian teacher who made the point by intentionally mimicking Nazi behaviour in his classroom, with disturbing results among the participating students. He concludes that, ‘Everyone, or nearly, can become a torturer if there’s a higher authority to relieve them of all responsibility’ (The ‘or nearly’ surely leaves room for a little hope). ‘We are conformist and mimetic primates,’ he observes.

To capture the cultural context of the war, Le Tellier turns to theatres and films of the period and the actors who did or did not perform for the Nazis. He writes of films like the failed Goebbels project, Titanic, and the celebrated, subversive Children of Paradise. There is a tenuous connection here to André and Simone at the cinema and the likelihood they would have known Henri Roché, local author of Jules et Jim (1953). A subsequent chapter deals with Andrés joining a small maquis unit, perhaps as a result of the Germans forcibly recruiting workers of occupied countries for labour in Germany. This leads on to the narrator’s early interest in military engagements, then the 11^th Panzer Division against which André met his death, followed by the death itself.

In the last chapter the author returns to the beginning of this journey. He wonders if André’s brother carved the name in the wall and describes it as his own ‘plumb line’: ‘ I wouldn’t have known how to explore an age when generosity and courage lived so unusually side by side with selfishness and despicable behaviour.’ What he wanted, he says, was Andre’s name not to be a complete stranger’s name to him. He even addresses the dead young man: ‘I hope I haven’t burglarized your memory, and I thank everyone who trusted me and described a young man who most of them didn’t even know but had heard of.’ The book has been an education for its author.

It has been an education for the reader, too. My only uneasiness in reading The Name on the Wall  comes when the narrator leans in a little too closely to the lives he recounts, moments such as this: ‘I so wish they could have discovered Children of Paradise, and Simone could have mimicked Arletty, whispering in her lover’s ear, “Dieulefit is so small for people like us who love each other with such great love.” Or this, ‘If you’ve heard [this joke] before, ‘then just imagine I’m telling it to André: “Hey, André, have you heard the one about the two Resistance fighters who wanted to assassinate Hitler?”’ That is a matter of taste, of course.

I finished the book and the next day watched again Jean-Pierre Melville’s film L'Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), that viscerally affecting movie about La Résistance. As always I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the sadism and the sacrifice. The Name on the Wall quietly focuses on one sacrifice in the context of all that barbarity and its implications. A compelling and timely book.